How to Plan an Email Campaign In 6 Simple Steps

Planning an email campaign is not quite as tough as eating an elephant, but the process is very similar. So how exactly does one eat an elephant? (A huge ELEPHANT?!?) The answer will be, "Ya eat it one bite at a time!"

The way to complete any large task has essentially the same answer, "One step at a time." Taken all-at-once it may be overwhelming. Break it down into its elements, into small bite-sized pieces, and those really don't look formidable in any way. The individual steps can each be relatively simple, something that's no big problem, that you can do. And when you've completed all the steps, you suddenly realize that you've come all the way from the beginning to the end of completing the project! It is exactly the same with how to plan an email campaign.. Here then is the way you approach the elephantine task of planning an email campaign, in 6 simple steps.

Step 1.
Determine how long you want the email to be.

With this you need to decide if you want to include full articles in the email or just teaser paragraphs and links to your web site.. If shorter is better, then linking to your web site is the best way to go. Keep in mind what your readers prefer. Some may want to have the whole article in the email. This is something you may want to test.

Step 2.
Decide how often you want to send email.

This step will be important because if you send email too frequently, your subscribers may decide to opt out of your list. However, if you send email too infrequently you run the risk of subscribers forgetting they ever signed up. In general it is better to send too few email than send too many. The answer really lies with the quality of the content of the email. If the content is valued by the subscriber, then they will not complain about frequent email.

Step 3.
Determine the best time to send email.

This will depend upon your subscribers and will require some testing and time to determine. Generally, email for business seem to get the best open rates on Tuesday through Thursday, between 10 am and 2 pm. But, this can vary with different types of subscribers.

Step 4.
Generating an email list.

This involves setting up opt in forms on your web site and/or if you are a retail type establishment you can have customers sign up for your list at your place of business. To get the best results you need to offer an incentive in exchange for the customers email. This can take the form of free reports, white papers or coupons and discounts.

Step 5.
Avoid email being filtered.

A key point you will want to remember here will be there is no way to guarantee that all of your email can avoid being filtered. The best approach is to avoid using common spam words such as "free" and avoid using "ALL CAPS". Many of the email services offer email testing services were you can determine if your content has a problem. then you can make changes before sending out the email.

Step 6.
Writing quality content.

This is a very important step. You always want to be giving your readers something of quality. That is why they subscribed to your list. If readers do not find value with the content of your email they may not opt out, but they will stop opening it. Either way you are not communicating with your customers.

Email marketing is an art. You need to keep providing enough quality content to keep your subscribers opening your email. Then along the way you can put in a sales pitch and they will be more likely to respond.

3 Simple Steps To Find The Best Affiliate Online Program

One of the most difficult aspects of affiliate marketing for most people is how to find the best affiliate online program. The problem is that most people pick products or affiliate online programs to promote that are no good. It's just as important to pick the right products to promote as it is to drive traffic to those products.

The first step is to look at the market the product is in. Competition is important, but not as much as most people think. What is a market? A market is the people who are actually buying the products you wish to promote. You may pick a product like wedding dresses, for example, to promote. What you will find is that a very large portion of women looking for wedding dresses online are not buying these online. They are looking for information related to dresses, not the actual dresses. If your product is the dresses themselves, you will be terribly disappointed. If you are promoting a product that teaches women how to find the best wedding dress, you might make more sales and therefore make more money.

The second thing to look at when talking about the best affiliate online program is how hungry the market is for that type of product. A recipe book isn't going to make much money online. Why? Because there is way too much information related to recipes people can get online for free, so why would they pay for it? A product such as help with anxiety and panic attacks, on the other hand, is different. People will pay very well for a product like that, and they usually do. This is what is referred to as a desperate niche. So make sure you do your research and find what products people are buying, and buying big time. Don't waste your time promoting products with information that people can find for free, or simply won't pay for, online.

The third, and final important aspect of finding great programs is to look at the income potential for that kind of product. Can you build a business around it or is it just a fly by night kind of product? Internet marketing, for example, makes a huge amount of money online, however, today's hot products can very quickly become tomorrows old news. Find a product that will allow you to turn it into a long term income stream.

These are the basics for choosing the best affiliate online programs, but there is more to learn. Keep going with your education, and keep working. It does pay off eventually, if you do the work and invest the time to learn all you can about the affiliate marketing business model.

How To Make Use Of Videos To Maximize Your Online Profits

Using videos to promote an online business has become an integral part of Internet marketing over the last few years. But the way you present your videos to your website visitors will make a big difference as to how they respond to them, so it is important to get some of the simple things right.

There are three points that are worth bearing in mind when preparing a video for publication on your website. They are:

1. Make it pleasant to watch.

No, you don't have to spend a fortune on setting up a studio. All you need to do is to pay attention to the small variables that can make a big difference to the quality of the video.

For example, make sure that there is no background noise - or as little noise as possible. Shut your windows, turn off your television, shut the door of your room and turn off any noisy appliances while making the video.

Think about the lighting. If you are indoors, avoid glaring lights, and minimize shadows. Take some trial shots and check them out first. Then, adjust the lighting to suit your environment.

For outdoor shots, don't have the sun either shining straight in your face (unless you are playing a cool dude and wearing eye shades). Also, don't have the sun shining into the camera. A shady spot on a bright day makes good sense.

2. Provide your viewers with a script.

This is something most people neglect to do, but providing a script of the video has several advantages. Firstly, if you use a script it will help you to make a smoother presentation even if you don't stick to it word for word. No one wants to have to sit through a 5 minute video that consists mostly of humming and hawing.

A script will also prevent you from forgetting key details and having to do a retake.

You can also publish your script alongside your video, or offer it as part of an upgrade package.

3. Don't force people to watch your video.

You might be tempted by the auto-play feature when you upload your videos. Try to avoid this temptation because not everybody who visits your website will want to watch your video. If they click on your link and hear a video start to play automatically, they will probably disappear very fast and not come back!

Offer people the choice of watching the video or not. Add some text that introduces what the video is about. Again, if you have published a script, people will then be able to choose whether to watch or read in order to get the information you are providing. You might also want to think about offering an audio-only version of your recording for those people who prefer to listen without watching.

There are numerous ways that you can make online video much more effective (and profitable); but offering a comfortable viewing experience, with text and audio alternatives, without trying to force visitors to view your video will make the overall experience more attractive to your website visitors.

Golden Rules for Effective Web Site Navigation

Golden rules are very special rules that a person should always keep in mind and review frequently. They are very important and useful guideposts to keeping us on course and headed in the right direction.

As soon as you define your goals, begin looking for the Golden Rules that connect with it. Chart your course by these Golden Rules and permit them to steer you to achievement and success.

Listed below are 5 of the very best Golden Rules for designing Web Site Navigation.

Golden Rule # 1
Design the web site navigation with the end users in mind.

The rationale behind this is that they are the ones who are going to be using your web site. You need to picture what is in the mind of the end user as they explore your web site. One of the first steps in web site design is to create profiles of your web site users. With these profiles in hand you can determine what is most important to your end users.

Golden Rule # 2
The navigation system should consider the many ways that visitors will want to find your content and applications on your site.

It is important to have an understanding of how users will use your web site. The user profiles help determine what each type of user will want to accomplish. Take into account that you will have many types of end users, with varying levels of web browsing skills and interests..

Golden Rule # 3
Provide multiple ways for users to access content.

This is important because some visitors know exactly what they are looking for, while others may just want to browse through your site. You should consider a global navigation that provides links to the site's main sections. You may also need sectional navigation. Other things to consider would be a site search function and a section index.

Golden Rule # 4
Create a consistent navigation system throughout your web site.

Once you have decided on the global, sectional, and supplemental navigation methods, these systems need to be consistent throughout your web site. This will help the end user go back to areas they have already visited.

Golden Rule # 5
Use navigation labels that are consistent and easy to understand.

The best site structure can be undermined by poor navigation labels. Use words that your visitors will understand. If you use graphics in your navigation, be sure to include text link navigation as well.

Carefully follow these golden rules to create effective web site navigation and you will find greater success with your web site and your end users will have a better experience as well.

Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing (part 10)

This is the final part of the series, 'Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing'. This article will focus on one very important part of off-page SEO namely linking.

The previous article was all about backlinking. The more backlinks coming from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website the higher will be your site's search engine ranking. The coveted target is to get your website listed on the first page of Google, preferably in the number 1 spot (it is said the number 1 spot on Google for any keyword receives on average 41% of all the traffic).

Steady backlink building will gradually push your website up the rankings. But there is a way to speed the process up.

Do more than just build backlinks from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website. Make these reputable sites and blogs point to each other also. Suppose you wish to target the keyword, 'Betta fish diseases'. You can build web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress and Weebly sites with articles containing the anchor text 'Betta fish diseases' hyperlinked to point back to your website.

To increase the 'link juice' of these links, have articles within each web 2.0 property point to another web 2.0 property also. For instance, the Squidoo lens could have a link pointing to the Weebly site (besides pointing back to your site). The Weebly site (which also points back to your site) has a link pointing to the Hubpages hub. Then the hub points to your website as well as back to the Squidoo lens. This is called a link wheel.

Each keyword you target should have its own link wheel with links pointing back to the web page on your website where you have an article with the targeted keyword as the title. Each web 2.0 property is like a spoke in the link wheel. And the more spokes you have the more 'link juice' goes back to your website.

The most powerful effect of the link wheel is that it connects each of your web 2.0 properties with each other and each one back to your website. Then when the search engine spider finds one of these web 2.0 properties, it will be led to the next one and the one after that and so on. Building link wheels is a powerful way to boost your search engine rankings because the spiders find your site easily with all the links leading it from one site to another and eventually back to yours.

That concludes the 10-part series on 'Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing'. Now all that is left is for you to take action by applying each of the ten parts one by one.

Do You Want To Profit From Your Blogging?

If you have a blog and are looking to make a profit from it then it is imperative that you get it to the point where it is attracting lots of traffic. You can have the most attractive offers in the world to monetize your blog, but if you don't get the right volume of traffic, you are not going to make significant money.

With the above in mind, if you are intending to make money from your blog, your first priority has to be to make your blog as popular as you can by taking every opportunity you can to grow your readership.

How do you go about this? Well, as a first step, it is vitally important that you know the demographic of your target readership - if you don't know this, you won't be able to consistently write in the correct way to capture and keep your target audience.

Ideally, you should be writing on a subject that is of interest to you - always supposing, of course, that you have interests in areas that are popular and where people are proven to spend money.

If you hope to make money blogging then you are going to have to update your blog with fresh content on a regular basis - this will certainly be a lot easier if you are writing on a subject that you know and love.

You don't have to be the greatest writer in the world to make money from blogging, but you do need to be writing in a style that attracts and keeps the attention of your readership - popular blogs are never boring - if you don't entertain the people who come to your blog, you'll not develop a fanbase of the size needed to sustain a decent blogging income.

So, just how do you drive traffic to your blog? Getting links back to your blog from other Websites is what you need to focus on. You can do this in various ways such as finding forums about the topic of your blog, joining in with the conversations and putting a link back to your blog in your forum signature. Writing articles and submitting them to a few of the top article directories putting a link back to your blog in your resource box is another good way to drive traffic.

You can monetize your blog with affiliate programs related to the subject matter and contextual advertising programs.

If you have a blog where you regularly post interesting and topical content in a popular subject area, where you promote attractive, related products and services and spend time building traffic on a regular basis, there's absolutely no reason why you cannot earn money from your blogging.

Solid-State Drives the Hard Drive Replacement of the Future

Solid state drives, known as SSDs are amazingly fast, and silent. In fact they are good in so many ways that it is inconceivable that one day they will not eventually replace hard drives in everyone's computer.

At present there is only one thing which is preventing their widespread use, and that is the price, which is still too high for most people.

However, an SSD revolution is coming, and just about all the hard drive manufacturers are producing their own models.

For conventional hard drives there are limitations on improving their performance. They have still been improving, but not as rapidly as the other components in the average PC. That is because a real technical limit is being reached in how fast metal disks can be spun and read from, and still operate reliably for many years, in all temperatures and after being mishandled, dropped and bashed.

To read and write your data on one of several reading and writing heads in the hard drive, the heads must be able to very rapidly move (seek) a pre-selected position over the spinning disk, and hover over the surface for a split second while the information moves past the head, for the head to read it.

The technology that moves the head so accurately is amazing, but not only that, the heads have been getting smaller and seek times have been getting faster. In addition the rotational speed of the disk (or platter) has been increased numerous times over many years, so that now spinning a metal disk cannot be speeded up much further.

Size of storage/amount of data which a hard disk can hold has also increased massively. However, in this respect as well the developers have now reached a point where it is getting harder to squeeze more data onto the disks.

The hard disk has been around for a long while, and now the dominance of this technology is being challenged by the SSD.

As its name suggests, the technology used in an SSD is, entirely solid and without any moving parts. In fact, it is very much like the much smaller storage capacity USB flash or "pen" sticks which have been around for some years now. However, SSDs are much bigger in storage capacity, and faster.

Also, SSDs have the ability to transfer data much more quickly than hard drives, and they start up quicker too. They don't need to spin up in the way a hard drive must, before it can respond to queries for information.

A hard drive head has to move from one position to another to read a large file, as only a small amount of data can be read from any one platter position. It is this that normally slows down sustained large file transfers, and over time this gets worse as things get fragmented. Fragmentation means that the file storage areas on the hard drive become increasingly smaller as files are written and re-written to the hard drive.

By contrast, and due to the solid-state nature of SSDs, the sustained data transfer rate does not slow down after the first burst, so the impression, and reality, is one of lightning fast drive performance.

Other improvements which can be found in SSDs lie with the reduced energy consumption of an SSD when compared with a similar sized hard drive. They also have a longer long life in use, and run cooler. The manufacturers of SSDs are, in fact, so confident in the durability of their products that they are offering them with a longer guarantee than they would normally give for a hard drive.

Gradually reducing discount prices mean that before long SSDs will replace existing aging hard drive technology. In fact many enthusiasts have already started using the smaller SSD versions to speed up their PC's performance. They have not been slow to notice that it is only necessary to move the PC's operating system to an SSD, leaving all the rest of a computer's files on the old hard drive, to see a big improvement.

Choosing a Good Domain Name

When planning a website, one of the main concerns will always be the domain name. A domain name is what your website is known by. The internet identifies websites by numbers, but this is not a very human-friendly way to go about it. Words or letters are then used, and these commonly end in ".com", ".biz", ".net" and many more.

Although there are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, and many ways of combining them to give new meaning, picking out a good domain name can still be difficult. But having a good domain name is important, especially as this will often be the determining factor in the success or failure of your website and your business.

A good domain name ensures that your website will be visible. It gets included in searches more often. It becomes more popular, and gives you credibility. It attracts more visitors, which help in increasing profits.

A domain name, therefore, should always be properly planned and thought out. Below are some tips to making the right choice for a domain name:

1. Pick a domain name that says something about your website, or the services and products you sell. It can start with one word up to a whole sentence.
2. Make it catchy and easy to recall. So while it is okay to have a whole sentence as a website, you still have to make sure it's short enough for anyone to remember.
3. If you feel like creating a new label, go ahead and make up your own words - even if they don't make sense. It will still work as long as it can be pronounced. If the domain name can be uttered vocally, the brain will have an easier time assimilating the new term, as compared to a random combination of consonants.
4. Don't stop with just one choice - generate a list of all names that you can possibly come up with. Be creative! That list will prove its usefulness later on when ticking off domain names that you have already checked, but are presently taken.

When you're ready to register, pick a good domain hosting provider. Some web hosts offer free domain name registration as part of their services, which gives you a great deal. Just remember to read the terms carefully, so that you still get to take your domain name with you in case you intend to switch providers in the future.

Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing (part 9)

The previous article in this series was about on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This article will focus on the other aspect of SEO, namely off-page SEO. Combining these two aspects of SEO will almost guarantee a high ranking in the search engines for your web page.

Off-page SEO is highly dependent upon one thing - links from other websites to your web page. Generally, the more links you get, the higher your search engine ranking. But there are several conditions to that. These conditions mostly revolve around one main characteristic - the natural appearance of these links.

What do the search engines consider naturally appearing links?

Here are three criteria:

1. They must be from different IP addresses
2. They must have varied anchor texts
3. They must appear gradually over time.

So the most important thing to do to increase the ranking of a web page would be to create links back to it that fulfill these three criteria. Here's how to do it.

To make backlinks come from various IP addresses, post links to different websites that are of the same topic or niche as your web page. One good way to do that would be to search on Google for the main keyword of your niche + blogs or + forums or + news etc. For example, if your web page is on keeping betta fish, search for Betta fish keeping blog or Betta fish keeping forum. Then visit the websites that are listed in the first and second results page and look for places you could leave a comment, ask a question or post an entry. Usually blogs, forums and news portals allow you to leave your name, email and website with your comment. By inserting your website URL, you will gain a backlink from that blog or forum to your web page or website.

Another thing to do is to create these websites yourself. Search engines have high regard for certain web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages Wetpaint, Weebly, LiveJournal etc. Likewise, they also rank certain social bookmarking sites very highly, like Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon and so on. By creating your own websites on these web 2.0 properties and leaving entries on these social bookmarking sites, you will be getting backlinks from varied IP addresses. However, you must abide by the rules of these web 2.0 properties because most of them frown upon too many backlinks in one website you create and you might find your website suspended.

One more thing most people do to create backlinks from various IP addresses is to write articles and post them in different article directories. The top article directories that the search engines favor are EzineArticles, GoArticles, Articlesbase and Buzzle.

Next, you need to vary your anchor texts. The best anchor text would be the one containing the keyword you are trying to rank for. Suppose you want to have your web page appear on page one of Google for the term 'Betta fish diseases' then you would use the this term to hyperlink back to your web page. But if this is overdone and there are no other anchor texts used, this throws up a red flag to the search engines. So vary anchor texts by including some generic ones like 'Click Here'.

Finally, create these links over time. If a few hundred backlinks are done all of a sudden, it does not appear natural. But building links over time will result in a gradual increase in search engine rankings for your web page or website.