INTERNET MARKETING ~Made Easy~

Yes, email marketing like any other form of internet marketing is painful and hard to achieve success.

It can be quite discouraging especially when you learn from those who have achieved success and you hear them boasting of over 100,000 opt in subscribers.

I remember When i first started email marketing, i placed an opt-in form on the index page of my site.

One month passed, no subscriber, two month four month, still no subscriber, i could only see one user i.e. my email address that I used as test to confirm opt-in links.

It got very frustrating and I started to involve myself in other areas of life and i completely felt discouraged about internet marketing.

Later i came to my senses and realized that you really have to work smart other than hard.

Just like you would like to get contacts for your businesses on an off line business you do not raise your expectations to 100,000 leads. But you start with a few that will show progress to your business.

In the internet there is a constant: people are looking for information, period! Anything else is a luxury.

Now with that in mind how do you build a mailing list of targeted clientèle who do not consider you as  spam?

Here is How?

1. Content: If you own a blog or or normal site, let it be one that shows great content to your readership. Otherwise you do not expect anyone to sign in if you do not have any authority content existing in your site.
2. marketing: this is the twisted point and this how we resolve it.

• Sending advertisement in email message to permission based opt-in list
• Sending email advertisement with personal recommendation to your customer database
• Placing advertisement in email newsletter
• Banner or graphic on your web site
• Link on your web site
• Syndicating articles from this site on your web site
• Syndicating articles from this site in your newsletter(s)
• Posting and handing out flyers and brochures in your community
• Bidding on relevant Cost-Per-Click search engine terms
• Optimizing a related web site for the search engines and linking to this site
• Posting articles from this web site in related forums
• Placing advertisement in print newsletter
• Putting your forward to a friend link on your email newsletters

Someone might ask how do I start to send newsletters while I do not have any subscribers.

Below are the tools that will help you from scratch

1. Go to your existing personal address book and put all the emails on a CSV file
2. Check your wallet and list all the emails you have.
3. Take your card holder and list all the emails you have.
4. Get emails from your friends friends e.g. a joke sent to numbers on c.c.
5. Any time you go to a function always get email addresses.

After compiling the lists above the people represented by the email addresses know you or have met you.

Send them an email explaining what you intend to do with the mailing list that you are building.  We all know that, charity begins at home.  Who is more likely to give you support other than your friends and relatives.

In your campaign include a forward to friend link that will automatically place emails to your database upon suggested readers confirmation.

If you continue sending great content to your new subscribers they have no choice than to continue marketing virally for you and the database cannot help to grow even without your permission.

The other question will be where do i get a software to manage my lists with all the stated features above.

There are a number of them:

1. PHPList - It’s an open source, free software found on fantastico enabled hosting companies e.g. BlueHost
2. Icontact - it has rates of up to US $ 9.90 per month with more advanced features.You can request a free demo for 15 days on  this link
3. Aweber - Specialists in auto responders among other features. find out more using this link

There is only one secret formula to internet success tools + knowledge = success

The formula is fully applied in this site to equip you.

To support this site download our tool bar on this link

To your Happy email marketing success

Mike Ndegwa

So you own a wordpress blog with a link like http://yourusername.wordpress.com So did I . However the most frustrating thing is you can’t place Ads that have a Java script in them. I have a Google Ad sense account and I tried placing the codes on a text widget as well as on html format it did not work.

Most bloggers will advise that you upgrade your blog to your own domain and hence get one of those premium adsense enabled themes.

It burns a hole in your pocket to add an extra cost of buying a domain so as to have the cpanel(i.e. website backend) rights.

Or even more painful is redirecting your visitors to your new monetized blog.

Remember your readers have already bookmarked your original site, they have subscribed to your blog feeds and now you have brought about this whole turn around procedure to migrate to a different address.

Most people don’t realize that moving from one domain name to another is like moving from physical address to a whole new location for as in the case of an off line business.

It’s wise to understand your readers and know that as much as they are loyal to you, some might just be reading your posts out of convenience. So you are a convenience store for them. what that means is if you move your grocery store 220 miles away, you may have had loyal customers but they may better off move to the next grocer. In a nut shell wordpress readers read within word press and they are not likely to use main search engines to find you, they use related tags to get to you. Its therefore important that you retain your posts in wordpress. Don’t export your blog to a different domain.

How do you get accepted by advertisers if you have a wordpress sub domain, they know its hard to insert scripts and run ads on wordpress.

Most people blogging in wordpress make money through affiliate marketing and referral programs.

Today I have brought you some good news. You can get paid by people who click on your ads.

The adorable company is NeverblueAds

When you sign up for a free account with NeveBlueAds:

You will be able to use the following tools:

• Run email campaigns
• Paid search
• Banner creative
• Text creative
• Post back Url

You will enjoy the liberty of selecting your own ads by:

• Country
• Industry
• Key word search
• Banner size
• Promotion type; web, email, paid search, downloadable software etc.
• And many other tailored categories.

Here are your Income Streams

1. You are paid Per Click
2. Then You will be paid per lead ie. when someone signs up and confirms their contact details
3. Plus you will be paid when they buy.

This means you are earning in every part of the process. Unlike the affiliate programs where you are not paid for ad impressions and the company’s brand awareness.

Now, I will open my NeverbluAds Account and select a campaign of my choice.

I will go to Write a new post on my Word press blog ;

I will place the cursor where I want the ad to appear.

Then I will click on the HTML view.

Place <code> and immediately paste the html code of the Ad I chose from my NeverBlueAds Account, I will then break </code> and click save.

Here is how my Ad appears:

We all have to start from somewhere, then climb the ladder step by step or even better you lay brick by brick till you settle securely at the top of the pyramid.

One thing that makes this blog exclusive is that it cuts excessive hype and clicks a balance between emotion and hard facts.

One one the major queries I get from starters is: “I have opened a blog, done a few posts and still my blog readership is not that appealing. It’s wise to be of a sober mind and therefore be considered competent to make it in the blogging industry.

Surely you can’t expect 20,000 hits on your second week of blogging.

There are two “Things to do” that remain consistent from day one and has to be practiced throughout your blogging life. It doesn’t matter what web masters baptize them but they remain constant. You may research and get as many terms to describe the same but they boil down to just two indisputable hard facts namely:

1. Content
2. SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Anything else is a subcategory of the above.

I highly recommend that you commit equal time to two factors above.

For a further understanding:

Content - Your content is your audience. Once you have Identified the audience you want to target then you must be knowledgeable and command authority in that field. Give your blog a brand and let its content radiate at the back of your readers. Below are some tips that will take care of the quality of your content, hence a loyal readership:

• Have a target audience - do not be misled and try to be everything for everyone. If your blog is about Golf, stick to that, period! Do not be excited to break the news and start writing about earthquakes in china. You will get hits for that day and then the following day your stat indicator will be a mark of a falling star. I have articles that I wrote on wordpress.com sometimes back. I later abandoned that blog and got myself a domain name , I visited the blog the other day after 6 months of neglect without updating and I met the shocker of the year. My blog or say; ex blog was showing an average of 50 hits per day with a minimum of 21hits on a Sunday. Now this leads me to my next point
• Let Your Posts be timeless. It can never be said better than that. always ask yourself; will my post make sense 3 years from now. if not then join the news industry, and be the first to hit headlines.
• let 75% of your posts be text as opposed to images. - I have subscribed to newsletters, am a busy person and i don’t have time to select ‘ display images’ on my in box. if your message is not in text then too bad I don’t have time to be entertained by rotating banners.
• Remain Simple and attractive. Yes strike a balance between the two. The fact that you can do a post: that makes you a publisher and if you can customize your pages a little bit it then it makes you a web master. Now remember not all your readers are web masters or publishers. They do not necessarily have ie7 or the latest version of Mozilla Firefox with over 500 add ons and tools. make sure you are not losing your audience with unnecessary sophistication.

SEO - Search engine optimization - This is a complex topic that is maturing very fast and becoming an independent field separate from internet marketing. However, do not be afraid about anything. Start with the basics. Listed thus:

• Site Submit - There are 3 major global search engines; Google, Yahoo and Msn . make sure you submit your site to these search engines for free. After that you can search for other submitting services that are free or at a premium rate, e.g. Dmoz, Jayde, Exact Search, Crawler, Entireweb, Alexa, Ask Jeeves plus your local search engines.
• Submit your articles to directories - It’s hectic but it helps, Here is a list and more info on the same.
• Write a squidoo lens - Am also challenging myself on this one I need to update my lens as well. You can earn income with a lens and also your increase internet visibility.
• Own a Key Word - Your domain is your brand. Can you imagine if Yahoo had a business name like free email and search engine .com. or Google with a site like thebestsearchengine.com it never works like that. Get a brand and leave the description of what you are about to your <title>…………<title> If you search for “mikes notice or mikesnotice or mikes mind” you are more likely to land on my my website or blog than trying the over saturated keyword like “Internet marketing”. I challenge you to build your key word today. Especially in Viral Marketing. people tend to forget exact domain names and can only Google what they remember. If you don’t own a key word then 90% of your recurrent traffic land on your competitors site.
• Develop a Tool Bar or join an existing community - My toolbar has over 1200 users and still counting. In as much as i get income from it. My major target is branding mikes notice at the same time adding value to my readers, through rss inclusion, chat room, email notifier, the love of skysports and other gadgets one can customize.
• Link Back - Always speak your mind whenever you visit a blog. you can use http://www.comentkahuna.com to search related blogs with various keywords, and leave your comments high niche blogs. this also increases your presence on the internet.
• For more high SEO techniques visit http://www.seobook.com

Again kindly remember quality content and seo optimization is an ongoing process.

Finally, “… and on the seventh day He looked at the work of his words and it was good”

If it can appeal to you then most likely it will appeal someone else or even better attract positive criticism that if observed would help make you better.

Once its done now market your blog locally and virally.

Charity begins from home.

If you are in employment then consider developing separate business cards that show you as a blogger and your area of specialty. This will help in improving your image and their perception about. You could be a working in a chemical industry and your friends cannot relate you with internet stuff. now its time to strart the viral ad.

Do articles and review your area of expertise. then give those articles to your local media for free. They could review your articles and mention your blog or even luckier give you a column to write.

Imagine your blog to be like any other business, go ahead and talk about it offline.

Most of the people you meet face to face will market you naturally for free plus they are most of the time likely to be royal/ loyal leaders.

Hold small parties of people you think would be interested with your expertise entertain them, do a small speech and you are guaranteed to have loyal contributors who are supportive and if you have joined affiliate marketing they are likely to be good and repeat customers.

I highly focus a lot more on advising solutions and affiliate products than on Google ad sense. Google adsense is more focused for lost traffic but not loyal readers.

Next post I will zero in to:

…. ways of monetizing your blog…

Never again will the Host company burn a hole in your pocket but your blog will be able to sustain itself and even better add more income and the joy of earning from a hobby as opposed to a profession that you not sure whether you really like it or even worse it was forced to you by your significant others.

This is the only internet marketing blog that focuses on solutions that don’t suck your blood but rather adds value and supports you fully till you stand on your feet.

To support this blog download Mikesnotice tool bar

To get a host with a one click Word Press Software go to; Blue Host and sign up for only US $ 6.95 a month

To join our newsletter click here

Happy Blogging

<a href=”http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/internetmarketingmadeeasy/” rel=”fdf70de1e01668fa1a9aecd3d465683661e18052″>Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification</a>

Your Partner in Success

Mike Ndegwa

For the quest to serve my subscribers better. I have customized a tool bar that can be found HERE

Here is a screen shot of the same.

Here are the Features and Benefits:

1. You connect to the world with over 25 RSS from major news channels
2. You chat with other mikesnotice tool bar users
3. you get the latest feeds from my blog
4. you get access to over 25 search engines in one form i.e. it results to getting more relevant results
5. You get entertained by your favorite music channels, on mikesnotice tool bar no need to open an FM stations websites
6. An email notifier. no need to download multiple notifiers. an all in one mikesnotice notifier
7. Privacy- block unwanted cookies.
8. Customize weather by location.
9. Sky Sports news scrolling (optional)
10. The sooner you get started the faster you will discover more

DOWNLOAD NOW

EASY INSTALL

Stay connected to us - and get so much more - with the mikesnotice Community Toolbar!

Firefox Installation Instructions
1. Click on the “Download Toolbar” button
2. Is the Software Installation window visible?
Yes: Click the ‘Install Now’ button.
When installation is finished,
close all Mozilla Firefox windows
and restart the browser to begin using your Toolbar.

No: Continue to Step 3.
3. Locate the Yellow Bar above
Look for a yellow bar at the top of the page
and click the ‘Edit Options…” button.
4. Click Allow
Click the ‘Allow’ button to add our site to the Allowed List,
then click the ‘OK’ button to close the window.
5. Click on the “Download Toolbar” button again
Now that our site is in the Allowed List,
click the “Download Toolbar” button again.
6. Click Install Now
Click the ‘Install Now’ button.
7. Restart the browser
Installation is complete!
close all Mozilla Firefox windows and restart the browser
to start using your toolbar.
Enjoy!.

Your Partner in Success

Mike Ndegwa

Good Day,

Hope you are well,………………………

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Your partner in Success

Mike Ndegwa

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One of the greatest ideas has always had a mind out there who is out to “copy cat”, imitate or counterfeit your thoughts and products.

In E-Business it’s not any different from from an off line business. You will have competitors who will scramble for your target market and they will offer products close to yours, therefore dividing the traffic hence affecting your sales volume directly.

It’s therefore wise to use traceable and real tools t measure how well you are doing. The off line method would be that of BCG Matrix.

However with internet there is a tool bar called Alexa that you can download and insert on your browser.

With Alexa tool (Sparky) bar you will be able to view:

• The page ranking for every site you visit
• You will be able to compare your site and that of your competitor
• You will be able to see site popularity by country

The other option is to register your site on Google Analytics for free. You will be a script that you will paste on all pages of your websites on on the theme of your Blog.

With this tool you will achieve.

• Traffic from your site and the individual pages they viewed other than the index (Home page)
• You will be able to see how many keywords led to your site
• You will see a global overview by country to tell where your site traffic is from
• You will be able to set Conversion Goals to see the value of traffic to your site.

Why are Reports Important?

It’s always important to evaluate the progress of your business. Know the relativity of your input to output. Any effort you put has to show results otherwise you are wasting valuable time and resources. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. It’s therefore advisable that you that you settle for goals that are deliverable and measurable.

By setting up an online business you need as many tools to evaluate your work and measure results.

Once you have compared yourself with the competitor, you will note two things:

1. You are either ahead of of competition or You
2. Are Lagging behind.

Now here is what you do to beat your competion:

1. Content, Content, Content. - During my life in the cyber space I have visited way too many sites, and there are those that I know off-head, then those that I have bookmarked and those that I hit once and navigated away and don’t think will ever visit them away. The difference in how I place these sites is the content that I found in them and how they are useful to me on an daily basis. Always put fresh contents, that is useful and attractive to give your visitors a come back and will have no time to visit your competitors sites. While you insist on Content insist on quality.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This is a broad topic to cover in a paragraph but always make sure your contents are well placed ahead of competition. Use search friendly keywords and meta tags. I will write more comprehensively on this topic in the next post.
3. Offer free services. As old as free is it still works to date. Give some free reports, E-Books, newsletters and E-Zines. and please insist on quality. If you don’t have any quality stuff then for sure don’t post anything for your readers. You don’t want to be marked as a spammer, but always use scarcity and quality as a way to keep your subscribers fond of you and wanting for more.
4. Innovate. - Beat yourself to acquire something new even if it appears foolish. New Ideas and thoughts motivate your brain to be on the look out and after some time you will realize how many workable and constructive ideas you will have gathered.
5. Customer Feedback- provide a communication tool for customer feedback. Base your products and service deliver ability partly or wholly on customer feedback.
6. It’s your business run it.
7. Sign up for newsletters and tools from helpful and community Websites.
8. Use Permission marketing (Opt-in-Lists) in contrast to spam an BCC mailing lists

Finally know your market all the more and study your field even the more.

I Love you all!

Mike Simon.

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