Web Design Galway – Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing

Archive for September, 2011

The success of your email marketing campaign is often based on a set of complex factors. However, a number of these issues can be proactively managed to ensure an optimized response. When developing your next email campaign, consider the following guidelines.

1. Your list.
Certainly one of the most important aspects of any email marketing campaign, your list is directly correlated to your success. Are your names recent? Have they agreed to be marketed to? Have they shown an interest in products or services similar to your own? Make sure that you are using a house list (names you collected on your own) or have been purchases from a reputable broker.

2. Your subject line.
Getting a user to open your message is paramount any email marketing campaign. The best way to determine the subject line that works best is to break your emails into three random yet equal groups. Measure the response to each email and use the highest producing one as your control. In follow up emails, try to beat the response rate of your control email.

3. Your sender information.
What information appears on the sender line of your email? Will your prospects recognize it? Do they want to hear from you? Often times, emails are deleted without ever being opened due to an indiscernible sender name. Your sender name should be brief and easily understood.

4. Track your results.
Tracking allows you to determine who opened your message and clicked on a link or multiple links within your email. By determining what worked and what didn’t, you can replicate success on your next email. As described above, tracking is particularly important when testing subject lines, imbedded links, and other direct response vehicles.

5. Make sure your unsubscribe method is in place and working.
The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 requires that all email messages contain clear directions on how to opt-out from subsequent mailings. Provide an unsubscribe mechanism that allows those receiving your email to send you and email and indicate their desire to opt-out from receiving further emails from you or your business. If recipients no longer want to hear from you, it’s in your best interest to remove them from your list.

6. Your images are correctly referenced and you’ve used alt tags in each image.
Improperly referencing your images can cause them to appear broken when you send your message – the dreaded red x. To insure the image is referenced correctly it must appear as, img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com….” rather than, img src=”/images/picture.jpg”. Alt tags are another important part of your images. The new security features on almost every email client these days disables images automatically. Having alt tags in place allow your reader to identify the image and determine if it is safe to enable.

7. Test, Test, Test!
No matter what your involvement with email marketing happens to be, it is essential that you follow the guidelines above for successful results. In addition, the key is to test, test, test! After each email campaign, measure your opens, click-throughs, and purchases. Document the specific date, time, list, subject line, and content used to produce your results. Refer back to your documentation prior to your next campaign.

Email doesn’t have to be a complex form of marketing. There are many best practices you can follow and some simple rules that ensure effectively delivery, open and conversion. By following the simple rules presented in this article, you’ll not only deliver and effective email campaign, you’ll discover a consistent method for generation revenue for your business.

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of yourbrowser. This is particularly useful when your browser based bookmarks have become unwieldy. It’s also help since you can access your bookmarks from any computer where you have an internet connection.

I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites from a number of sources. You can find it here: http://www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html

Once you have bookmarked them, you can view them, sort them by category/keyword as well as see links from others that have been categorized like yours.

You also establish RSS feeds for each category (tag) that you ‘subscribe’ to. This alerts you to new links in your areas of interest. Your bookmark collection/RSS Feed becomes viewable to others who can also copy your bookmarks to their own collection. So now you can aggressively promote your RSS feed to the RSS Directories and Search engines, syndicate them and make them available to a much wider audience.

Social bookmarking sites also help you to meet other people who are interested in the same topics you are and who may also have knowledge of web resources that you don’t.

On Social Bookmarking sites, you first create an account. Then you bookmark interesting and useful things in the area of your interest or expertise. By doing so you create a useful Feed. Once you’ve done that you intermittently, (or aggressively), add useful and interesting items, (that could use additional exposure), from your own content. Make an honest effort to contribute USEFUL information and links. This is all about sharing and exposure. Done properly, you can be as aggressive as you want to be about sharing information. You can share your blog(s), links to your informational/resource sites etc. Think about the fact that when you share links to other’s resources, you’re also effectively promoting their content as well.

This is a way you can aggressively and ethically promote your content and the content of others. I personally have hundreds of gigabytes of my own information and information of others, connected to my notebook. In the final analysis, it’s doing me no good what-so-ever just sitting there. But by organizing it, online, I can help myself, (getting organized, getting my content exposed, etc.) and help others at the same time.

If you spice up your feed with too much sales and marketing related or self promotional stuff, people can and will easily drop their subscription to your feed. And instead of gaining good will and doing a service to the internet community you could get labeled as a spammer and suffer the consequences.

So while being aggressive is possible and acceptable, being careful to consider the best interest of the community is certainly warranted.

Balancing being ethical and providing a useful service to others with promoting your own content enables you to be as aggressive as you like. But remember, in the final analysis, others will make the decision on whether it’s ethical and useful or spam.

VRE — better known as “Virtual Real Estate” is literally everywhere online.

That’s right. Everytime you do a search on whatever it is your searching for via the Internet you get a list of results. Within that list of results lye’s thousands, if not, millions of pages of Virtual Real Estate that is making someone out there on the WWW some handsome profits.

The question is… “what have you done in order to stake your Internet “VRE” claim so you too can enjoy some of that profit as well?”

If you haven’t started anything yet, that’s okay because I did a little research for you and came up with these “6 POWERFUL VRE(Virtual Real Estate) Business Models You Can Start Building In 2011 Using Google Adsense” so you too can benefit like the many others out there online.

The first VRE business model I’d like to talk about are — Article Directories.

VRE Model #1. Article Directories.

Article Directories are in my mind are probably one of the best VRE business models on the web simply because they offer your audience and publishers Multiple Channels of information on any topic.

And the facts are, people come online for information.

So, what do Article Directories contain?

That’s right… Information! … and lots of it.

The other great benefit to Article Directories is that you don’t have to write a single word if you don’t want to because the whole purpose of starting your Article Directory in the first place is to get other people(we also call them authors) to submit their content for your readers and/or publishers to read and use.

Now, the Rule Of Thumb is simple when it comes to growing your Article Directory and that is… the more authors you recruit, the more your Article Directory will grow, filling it full of targeted information for your readers to digest and for publishers to use on their websites.

It gets better, so keep reading.

Did you know that the more pages you have within your Article Directory means… the more search engine food you’ll have for the search engines to come and index into their database which will then be displayed within the search engines search results.

Remember in the beginning of this article when I was talking about the search engine results being full of Virtual Real Estate. This is where your Article Directories webpages(or your Virtual Real Estate) will be listed for web surfers find.

This also means that you’ll receive a lot of FREE targeted search engine traffic to your Article Directory as it grows giving your authors FREE targeted traffic to their sites and keeping them happy, and at the same time, will be building your VRE nest egg on the WWW.

Are you starting to see the benefits to starting your own Article Directory on the Internet?

I hope so.

But don’t go anywhere just yet, I’m not finished.

There’s two more things I want to talk to you about before this part of the article series ends.

The first is RSS — better known as “Real Simple Syndication” and what RSS does is it allows you to syndicate your Article Directories content or just content in general through an RSS feed so that any reader and/or publisher who subscribes to a particular RSS feed within your Article Directory will receive ANY new updated content that is published… INSTANTLY!

The other benefit to a RSS feed is… lets say you have 1000 publishers subscribed to one of your RSS feeds and one of your authors submits a new article at your Article Directory, all those publishers who subscribed to that RSS feed will receive it once that RSS feed updates and when someone clicks on the link within that RSS feed to read the new article, guess where the visitor is sent to?

You guessed it, your Article Directory, with your Google Adsense ads(I’ll talk about that in a second) and whatever other related affiliate links you have on that webpage.

Now… for the BEST part, how-to make a $Profit$ with your Article directory.

I’m telling you, this is the easiest money you’ll ever make for simply supplying your viewers and the Internet(A.K.A. The Information Super Highway) with what it needs the most, Information!

How do you do it?

Heard of Google Adsense(as I mentioned just a minute ago), because if you haven’t, now you have.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is Googles affiliate program for publishers and how it works is it displays ads targeted towards the content on that particular webpage being viewed.

How do you get paid? Simple. Your reader just has to click on one of the ads within the Google Adsense ad box on that webpage and depending on what the topic is and keyword could pay some handsome commissions(usually between 35% to 50%).

And, guess what? You didn’t even have to do any selling OR follow-up.

Not bad and believe me those clicks add up Fast and by having the search engines returning frequently for regular indexing and having RSS feeds(remember, when someone clicks on the RSS feed link on someone elses website they get redirected back to yours with your Google Adsense ads on it and other affiliate links) for other publishers to use on their websites you’ll soon see your Google Adsense profits get Bigger and BIGGER!

Well, that’s it for now. So be sure to be on the look out for my next installment of the “6 POWERFUL VRE(Virtual Real Estate) Business Models You Can Start Building In 2011 Using Google Adsense”.