Marketers World

How to Build Your Email List With Free Tools?

2009-01-08T23:01:00.009+08:00

Step-by-step guide on building your list, WITHOUT an auto-responder or giveaway reports.

Image credit: KK

If you are anything like me, you'd probably try to build your list by writing a useful report, get an auto-responder and promote the report for free on your website to get visitors to subscribe to your list. Well, I'm not arguing on this tactic. In fact, it is still the best way to build a targeted email list. I just want to share another way to build a list, where:

You don't need to find or write a report.
You don't need to set up an Opt-in box on your website.
You will be given a "squeeze page" that you can immediately promote.
You will also be helping your subscribers to build their own list. So, it is a win-win solution!

This method is especially effective if you are focusing on the "internet marketing" or "make money online" niche. I'll share about it in a short while but before that, for those who are totally new to "list building," let's have a brief explanation on it.

What is list building?

List building is an activity, where you provide free useful information to your website visitors, and as an exchange, get their permission to include their email address in your list. Saying that, you get the permission to email them from time to time. Your visitors need to Opt-In, or confirm that they are willing to give their email address in order to receive the free information from you. In a nutshell, what most people do are:

Find or write a useful report related to your niche.
Register to an auto-responder such as Aweber, Get Response (Paid service) or Free AutoBot (Free service).
Create a 3D image of your report, generate an html script for your opt-in box and place it on your website or blog.
Bring traffic to your website and blog.

Seems pretty complicated isn't it? It took me quite some time to learn doing the above too. By the way, what is so great about list building? Why do most guru says that, you aren't going anywhere online if you don't have a list?

Why is list building so important in making money online?

Do you realize that many of your website or blog visitors only come once? They come, they read something, but they don't take any action and they leave forever. What a waste that you had put a lot of effort to bring them to your side, only to get them leave forever. Isn't it great if you can retain every visitor that came to your website? Will it not be even greater if you can email them every time you have something to share, or promote to them?

Building a targeted email list can sometimes sound a bit overwhelming. The good news is, I've found two great tools that will make your task easier.

Step 1: Getting free email list building tools?

I found two great free tools that can help your list building task easier. With these tools, you don't need to find a giveaway report, you don't need to register with an auto-responder, and there will be no hassle in setting up an Opt-In script on your website. Now, let's see the pros and cons of both tools.

Free Tool No. 1 - Thunder List

Thunderlist is a great tool that works with a viral marketing concept. You subscribe to it, get a squeeze page and promote it. Your downlines will promote their squeeze page too, and you are allowed to contact you downlines subscribers up to the 10th level!

The Pros:

You will build your list faster because you can also contact your downline's list. This is the strongest feature of Thunderlist.
It is 100% FREE and your subsribers won't be diverted with any promotions. (You will understand what I mean when you read on the second free tool afterward)
You can only send email once every 10 days. I consider this as a benefit. Many people are not aware that sending too many emails can in fact, encourage your subscribers to opt-out.

The Cons:

Thunderlist do not accept free email accounts for subscription. This reduces the market you can explore, as many solo Internet Marketers are using free email account such as Gmail, etc. I really hope that Thunderlist will open their subscription to free email address too.

Go to Thunder List homepage and register your FREE account here.

Free Tool No. 2 - Kenneth Koh's Passive Income Blueprint

This PIB tool is created by Kenneth Koh to help people who strive in generating passive Internet income. You will get not only a free squeeze page, but even a free step-by-step tutorial on how to generate internet passive income and driving traffic to your squeeze page.

The Pros:

Unlike ThunderList, Kenneth Koh's PIB accepts free email address.
You will get access to Kenneth's blog contents, where you can use it as ideas for you to write articles. (However, I prefer to write my own articles)
You can send one email every day, but I sincerely suggest that you don't send more than one email per week.

The Cons:

Unlike Thunder List, you will only be able to send email to your immediate first level subscribers. So, it will take a little longer for you to build a huge list.
In the tutorial series, Kenneth will promote his "plugin profit" and "GDI network" opportunities. Nonetheless, it is totally okay if you decide not to join any of these network opportunity.

Go to Kenneth Koh's Free Passive Internet Income homepage, and register your FREE account here.

Step 2: Drive visitors to your squeeze page.

With these two tools, you don't have to worry on your "call to action." Their squeeze pages, are good enough to convert visitors to subscribers. The only thing you need to do now, is to drive traffic to them.

For me, the best means of traffic is by article marketing. Not only it does bring traffic, but it brings traffic that convert. I'm not going to elaborate on article marketing here, but below are some great tips on article marketing that I really like.

If you are totally new to article marketing, here are four FREE pdf guides on article marketing that I personally used when I started to write my first articles.
And as you understand more, here is the best article marketing guide I had ever read, from Josh Spaulding. You can read his unique article submission strategy here.

Step 3: Maintaining relationship with your subscribers.

The next important that thing you should not forget is, to maintain the relationship with your subscribers. I set up a blog for this purpose, but if it sounds too complicated to you, then there are many simpler approach such as Hub Pages or Squidoo lens.

Research the needs of your subscribers and find solutions to it. Write it as your blog post, and email your subscribers to share the great solution you had just posted. The key here is to build trust by further helping your subscribers solve their problem. One main mistake done by most marketers is, they immediately send a promotion email once they get a subscriber. I'm not against sending a promotion email, in fact that is the reason why we are building our list right? But, promoting a product in each and every of your email, just wouldn't work. Business is about trust and give before you take. So, help your subscribers to solve their problem, and they will be very happy to help you with what you want.

Finally, the most important thing.

Today, I had shared with you guys on two great tools to build your online email list. While both tools have their own pros and cons, the important thing now, is not on deciding which tool to use. The more important thing is to take action. 80% of people who failed to make money online, read lots of guides but failed to act on any. Prove to me that you are not one of them. Go register with both tools, start writing your articles, and start driving traffic to your squeeze page now.

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How to Backup Your Blogspot Blog?

2009-01-03T16:32:00.004+08:00

READ THIS. IT'S VERY IMPORTANT!

This will be a very short post.
Today, I read a post by Andy from Blogherald on how JournalSpace blogging platform lost all their data. Wow, that will be a real disaster for any blogger. And since I'm using blogger, I immediately researched on how to back up our entire blog. Below is the step-by-step instruction :

Get your blogger backup software here. On the available blog tab, click the arrow and choose [Add/Update/RemoveBlogs].
Fill in your Blogger ID and Password.
Then set your settings as below. Don't forget to tick on the "save comments" tab, and click backup posts.

I've never tried to restore it back yet, but obviously it is just by clicking on the "Restore Posts" tab.

Wordpress and Blogspot had always showed a good performance, but it is always wise to take precaution.

What's next:

Discover how to build your list with a viral marketing system - 100% Free

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How to Generate Non Search Engine Web Traffic

2009-01-02T21:06:00.004+08:00

How much traffic do you get from the search engines?

Image credit: Danard Vincente
I had been quite frustrated on organic traffic from the search engines. That's why I'm really happy to see that the great blogger, John Cow is also advising us to gear up our effort in generating non-Google traffic. If even John Cow is only getting 14% of traffic from Google, how much do you think a newbie can do? Obviously, we have to focus more on non search engine traffic too.

I started to research on how to generate traffic from non search engine sources. This leads me to a blog post by Marko, who shared on how he generates 230+ unique visitors by merely commenting on blogs. You can read the details from its original post, but roughly speaking, he shared on how he generated traffic by adding depths to a high profile blog, and leaves a comment immediately once a new post is published. Frankly this is a very cool tactic, but there is only one more thing that I would like to add. Although he had not elaborated it in his post, I'm sure that Marko definitely has this idea in his mind too.

The nature of a dynamic content website such as blog is, once new articles are posted, traffic from the previous articles will gradually reduce. Although it is not an exact science, by the time you are receiving traffic from your fifth comment, the traffic you receive from your first comment might already be dying. This is of course unless, if you are commenting on a very well-optimized page... but how easy will it be for you to find a well-optimized page? And even if you can find a well optimized page, what is the probability that it will match with the things that you can and want to elaborate pertaining your niche?

The solution.

One thing is, while it is not so easy for you to build traffic exponentially with this tactic, you can, however, make your list gradually bigger. The trick is not to waste any traffic generated. When we don't have much traffic, every visitor counts. You have to find ways to switch as much visitors as your mailing list subscribers, or at least as your RSS subscribers. Well, this is the rough idea but at this moment, the only idea I have on how to practically do it is by prominently place subscription invitation on your blog. Why don't you guys help me here? Why don't you guys share your opinion on how we can increase our subscription rate?

What's next:

Discover how to build your list with a viral marketing system - 100% Free

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How to Find Free Giveaways For Your Subscribers?

2008-12-30T22:11:00.002+08:00

One of the most effective ways to invite people to your opt-in list is by giving them a free report. Experienced marketers have lots of things to share, and they can write lots of reports to give for free. But what about those internet marketing newbies? In this post, I'll share 3 ways on how you can find free reports to use as giveaways.

1. Butterfly report.

Butterfly report is the easiest way to find a free giveaway report. The reports are both written by either butterfly report staff or its subscribers. You can even submit your reports if you wish.
The pros:

All the reports are meant for giveaways, so you can use it without any guilty feelings.
Although you can only download one report a month as a free member, the search function is quite good that you will likely find a report you wish to use. You can also see how many times a report had been downloaded, and there are even reviews from people who had downloaded it.
If you have a clickbank or paydotcom account, you can even re-brand some of the clickbank and paydotcom links with your affiliate links. Platinum members can re-brand all links with their affiliate links.
Some reports do come with interesting digital covers.

The cons:

The only cons that I'm not very favourable is, most reports found in this site is meant to promote certain clickbank or paydotcom products. Sometimes, we simply just want to provide something useful to our subscribers.

2. Free e-Books.net

Free e-Books.net is a place where many people promote their e-Books for free. But unlike Butterfly Report, NOT all books here can be used freely. You should carefully check the copyright status before using any e-Book as giveaway, or otherwise you'll be in a very deep trouble.
The pros:

There are so many categories in Free e-Book.net that you can almost find something related to your niche.
You are more likely to find a useful e-Book which is not promoting any affiliate links here.
Even if you don't find anything to use as giveaway, I'm sure you can find lots of knowledge here.

The cons:

As I said earlier, not all reports here can be use as giveaways. You might find it a bit time consuming in finding one that can be used.

3. Common creative e-Books.

Common creative is a new concept in copyrighting. With this new concept, there are lots of works you can share and build upon as long as a credit is given to its original author. There are many terms in the common creative license, and I highly suggest that you understand them first.

There are 2 ways I usually use in finding a common creative report:

Scribd.com - You can use the search function and find a suitable report to use. Just make sure to confirm the copyright status at the bottom page of each report.
Creative common search engine - Another alternative is you can use creative common search engine. It works exactly like Google or Yahoo, so you shouldn't have any problems here.

Many Internet marketing newbies argue that they don't have much experience to share in the form of a free giveaway report. Some others argue that they don't have the time to write. These tips here should be able to help you. Go and get your free giveaway reports now.

Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics

2008-12-23T17:19:00.006+08:00

In our last posts, I had shared with you guys on how to research topics for your article marketing, and even an easier way to research keywords that I learned from John Cow. Following those steps, I usually manage to find good search amount with low competition keywords. But the problem with this kind of keyword is, sometime you just knew nothing about it, and there are not much information available. Let me share with you on how I usually handle this kind of situation.

How to find what people want to know and the answers to it efficiently?

When facing unfamiliar topics, of course you can browse here and there, or go to the library to research on the topic, but that will be quite time consuming. I always asked myself "isn't there a way to do it more efficiently?"

You are going to need the tools below:

A mind map - you can just use a paper and a pen, or you can use software if you prefer to do it on your screen.
Yahoo search page.
Google search page.
Yahoo answer.

We will use a mind map to visualize your overall idea. And we are going to use Yahoo search page, Google search page and Yahoo answer as tools to find out:
a) what people want to know.
b) and the answers of what people want to know.

The beauty about Google and Yahoo search is, once you type in your query, it will return suggestions on what other people are searching for the related keyword. Just look at the image below.

For example, in one of our last post we figured out that "fat burning hormones" is a good keyword to use. So, I keyed in "fat burning hormones," in yahoo search, where yahoo advised me on:

What are fat burning hormones?
Foods that release fat burning hormones?
How to increase fat burning hormones?
Six fat burning hormones.
How to trigger fat burning hormones?

Simply jot down all those suggestions in your mind map. To research on "what are fat burning hormones?" for instance, just click on it and the related websites will be displayed. Read a few sites to find out what it is all about. While doing this, you might find other related ideas. Jot down those ideas in your mind map too. Once your mind map is filled, then it is time to start writing.

With this strategy, you get to know what people want to know, and what the answers will be, both at the same time. Other than Yahoo and Google search box, you can also use Yahoo Answer. There is a vast amount of questions here. And if your luck is good, you can just find the answers right below it.

Dig deeper and add depth.

Nevertheless, simply repeating information found from the websites will not make your article unique. Try to think one step further and add your own opinions on the topic. For instance, if you are writing on foods that trigger fat burning hormones, maybe you can add your opinion whether it is a safe strategy for weight loss or not.

If you still couldn't grasp the topic, why don't you dig a little bit deeper? Try to see what normal people like us are saying on the topic. Websites are mainly built by people involved in the business, and sometime the information can be a bit bias. Some great resources to see what normal people are talking, are such as:

Blogs - Use Google blog finder or Technorati to find related blogs. You might want to skip if you find a commercially-oriented blog.
Social networking sites - My favorites is Digg. I usually refer to the most votes resources.
Forums - Forum is great, but sometimes it is a bit difficult to find the appropriate forum.

It is frustrating to search the web only to find the same information being repeated again and again. Fortunately for you, there are lots of people who are merely repeating contents on the web. By adding depth you will raise your article value, and your readers will definitely appreciate that.

What are other ways to add depth?

I'm sure you guys have your own ways on adding depth to your articles. Why don't you share your expertise with us?

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Related and intended posts in "article marketing for traffic series."
Article marketing for traffic: Your complete guide.
Making commitment and scheduling your article marketing.
How to choose your topic?
How to get your articles found?
How to get "founders" read your articles?
Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics
Bringing readers to your article resource box.
Crafting resource box for traffic.
Quality control and polishing your article.
Transforming article marketing visitors into leads.

An Easier Keyword Analysis For Article Marketing

2008-12-19T12:21:00.002+08:00

This will be a very quick one.

Last week, I wrote about how to decide your article writing topics, based on finding good search count + low competition. However, today I read a great post from John Cow, that explains on how to do it easier with google suggest feature. In a nutshell, we are going to find good search terms by simply building on keywords using google search box. Here is how it works:

Simply type in your core keyword in google search box.
Wait for google to return a few more related keyword terms.
Choose a keyword with three words term or more.
Do some research to confirm that it is related to your core keyword.
Simply go back to 1, and dig deeper.

The tips given by John Cow is great, in a sense that three words keyword usually don't have high competitions. But just for checking purposes, I would suggest that you check the competition strength, using a free keyword difficulty checker I explained in my last post, "how to choose topics for your article marketing."

Related and intended posts in "article marketing for traffic series."
Article marketing for traffic: Your complete guide.
Making commitment and scheduling your article marketing.
How to choose your topic?
How to get your articles found?
How to get "founders" read your articles?
Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics
Bringing readers to your article resource box.
Crafting resource box for traffic.
Quality control and polishing your article.
Transforming article marketing visitors into leads.

Article Marketing for Traffic: How to Choose Your Topic?

2008-12-16T21:29:00.005+08:00

Image by: edmittance

Have you been submitting lots of articles, but have very less traffic returning to your site?

The chances are, either you are writing topics that people are not searching for, or you are writing topics with too many competitions.

So how do you find out topics that are being searched, but with not too many competitions? Let me share with you my tactics. Mainly these tactics are a hybrid of what I learned from John Cow and Josh Spaulding.

1. What is your website about?

To start, you need to know what your website is all about. There are two ways you can do this:

Take a pen and a piece of paper, and start brainstorming keywords related to your site.
Or you can go to Google's Free Keyword Tool, fill in your site's URL and let Google do the thinking for you.

Let's say you want to promote your blog, which is discussing on weight loss. You had brainstormed and have the keywords weight loss, diet and exercise as the core contents related to your site. Let's try to input this in Google Free Keyword Tool and see what we get. At the time I did this, the top 5 keywords that we got were:

diet - 20,400,000 searches
weight loss - 9,140,000 searches
exercise - 6,120,000 searches
exercises - 2,740,000 searches
diets - 1,830,00

2. Refine it to keywords that sell.

This is a tactic that I learned from the famous blogger, John Cow. Not all keywords are created equal. If you want to sell, then you need to use keywords that sells. We are going to analyze what keywords are being used by those people who are making money.

Go to Google, and type in one of the top five keywords we got in step 1.
Then see if there is any "sponsored links" comes out.

As an example, I typed in "diet" and there were seven sponsored links returned on the first search page result. Now copy the URL of all these sites, and we'll go to the next step.

3. Finding low competition keywords.

High search keywords are great, but the problem is there are probably already thousands if not millions of people who had written articles about it. So what are the possibilities for your article to be found.

A smarter way is to find keywords that have reasonable search amount with lesser competition. This is a tactic that I learned from Josh Spaulding, but I made the competition analysis step a little bit easier.

Here are the steps:

Go back to Google's keyword tool, and type in one of the URL you found in step 2.
Copy the highest returning keywords from each category. In our experiment here, the core keywords are:

how to get rid of fat - 22,200 searches
how to burn fat - 22,200 searches
body fat - 550,000 searches
burn fat - 246,000 searches
fat burning - 201,000 searches
fat burner - 110,000 searches
low fat - 550,00 searches... and so on.

Now, based on these keywords we are going to find the "low hanging fruits" as what Josh says.

Go to SEOBOOK keyword analysis tool, and type in one of the keywords above.
Then, find keywords that have a total searches of around 100. For example, I typed in "fat burning" and we found "fat burning hormones" is being searched 111 times a day. This seems like a good topic to cover, now let's analyze the competition.

Taking "fat burning hormones" as an example, Josh would advice us to calculate the average Page Rank (PR) of the sites that are returned in the first search page result. However, doing this manually can be quite time consuming. Another option that I would suggest is to use a free keyword difficulty analyzer tool.

Just type in "fat burning hormones" in the add key column, and click "add key." You can fill in 3 keywords at a time. Then, click "Start analysis."

In our case here, there are only 399 sites which have "fat burning hormones" in its title. And the average PR of the top 10 sites is even "0"! According to Josh Spaulding, anything below PR 4 should be reasonable competition, so it seems that "fat burning hormones" is really a got topic to cover. That's it. Simple isn't it?

Now you know what to write about. But do you know what people want to know related to the topic? Let's have a break and discuss this in the next post.

Leave a comment.

Related and intended posts in "article marketing for traffic series."
Article marketing for traffic: Your complete guide.
Making commitment and scheduling your article marketing.
How to choose your topic?
How to get your articles found?
How to get "founders" read your articles?
Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics
Bringing readers to your article resource box.
Crafting resource box for traffic.
Quality control and polishing your article.
Transforming article marketing visitors into leads.

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How to host your pdf files for free?

2008-12-14T23:12:00.004+08:00

Where can I host my pdf report for free?

This will be a very short post. Most Internet Marketers know that without a strong list, you will almost go nowhere in the Internet business. One common way to build your list is to write a useful pdf report, and give it away as an exchange for people who opt-in to your list.

For serious Internet Marketers, you should already have your web hosting where you can host all the pdf reports you wrote. But what about Internet Marketing newbies who had just started out? You surely don't want to waste a lot of money before your effort show some stability.

I found just the solution for you. KeepandShare offers a free hosting for your pdf files. While there are many free file hosting providers, for most other providers, you will get a "click here to download" type of page when you share your pdf links. But with KeepandShare, your pdf files will directly showed when you share your links. Just as if it is being hosted on a paid hosting site. This is really a great service you should go and look.

Have you claimed your FREE Internet Passive Income Blueprint yet? Get it here now.

Leave your comments here.

Web site promoting: Should you submit your own site to Digg?

2008-12-13T18:34:00.003+08:00

I just want to write a quick article on blog promoting through social networking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon,etc.

Image by mkeefe

I observed many people are trying to promote their web site by submitting it to social networking sites. On the other hand, many people think that this is unethical. So where do you stand?

Basic concept of social networking.

While there are many social networking sites out there, they are all sharing one basic concept. That is to share things that are beneficial with the community.

So if you ask me whether it is ethical to submit your own site to social networking platforms, my answer will be yes, provided that your intention is to share something beneficial with the community. But if your intention is to merely promote your site, then I don't think it is the right thing do. One easy way is to ask yourself these two questions below before submitting your site or blog to social networking sites:

Do you think the site you are going to submit is beneficial to the social networking community?
Will you still share the site if there are no gain in term of returning visitors whatsoever?

If your answers to the 2 questions above is "yes," then you definitely should submit it to the social networking sites.

Although there are some people who believe that submitting your own site is unethical, I don't think that should stop you. If you really have something beneficial to share, what differences would it make if it is being submitted by you or somebody else?

How to avoid being considered spammers.

Whatever it is, there will still people be annoyed if they see you are only submitting your own sites, regardless of how beneficial your sites may be. One way that I would suggest is by alternating what you share. Submitting one of your content after sharing four to five contents which are not yours is one example.

What about you? What do you think? Share your opinion here.

Have you claimed your FREE Internet income blueprint. Get it here now.

Article Writing For Traffic: Why and How to Schedule Your Article Writing?

2008-12-11T21:48:00.006+08:00

Do you know why 80% of people who did article marketing failed to drive traffic to their site? No, it is not because they could not write, but instead because they fail to continue writing.

Image by Silent Penguin

I was guilty of this sin too. When I started article marketing in my early days, I thought that traffic will immediately be generated. Each time I submitted a new article, I anxiously checked my Statcounter results, thinking that traffic will "swarm" to my site. After submitting around 4 articles, I found very less traffic were returned, and I decided to stop writing articles. I thought that it was not worth the effort.

How article marketing works?
However, now I had understood on how article marketing works. Unlike PPC, it will not give you immediate traffic. Instead, article marketing needs time to develop. Despite of this, article marketing will drive passive traffics once developed.

For instance, I submitted an article 6 months back, and it is still returning average 3 visitors per month. Looking at the trend, I think that it is still going to continue. Just imagine if I had submitted 100 articles. Wouldn't that give me almost 300 visitors per month! And that will be going to continue passively.

So the conclusion is, to drive traffic from article writing, you need to write a lot of them, and you need to be consistent with it. Anybody can write 10 articles a week when they just started. But how do you continue writing that down the road? One way that has helped me is by planning and scheduling my article writing.

How to schedule your article writing?
I use a notebook to schedule my article writing. You don't have to follow me. You can use google calendar, excel sheet, your diary or whatever organizing method you like best.

I divided one page of my notebook into 7 columns, and I write down my plans in those columns for the next week. Here is an example.

Monday: Article topic research.	Thursday: Article 2 writing.	Sunday: REST DAY + next week planning
Tuesday: Article content research.	Friday: Article 1 Polishing and submission.	-
Wednesday: Article 1 writing.	Saturday: Article 2 Polishing and submission.	-

Please note that I write only 2 articles per week, and I try to limit my daily sessions for not more than 3 hours. I always have a kitchen timer when I do Internet Marketing activities. It puts me in focus as I know there are only 3 hours to complete my task. Otherwise, I can be browsing "stumble upon" for almost half a day and not write a single sentence. Another reason why I write only 2 articles a week is to avoid overwhelming myself. Also, do note that Sunday is my day off. Everyone needs a day off when you are planning to write articles in the long run. Don't underestimate this simple step. It is very very important.

You should also stagger your article submission in a period of time. Try not to submit more than one article to the same article directory in the same day. Do you want to know why?

The person who is reviewing your article is receiving almost hundreds of article a day. Try to reduce her workload. It is a good deed, and good deed pays.
Your articles might be approved in the same day. And if your resource box in all those articles are pointing to the same URL, it will create some "doubts" from the SEO point of view.

How to research topics for your article marketing?
If you see my plan on Monday, I wrote down "article topic research." Why is researching your article topic is important? Can't you just write anything that comes to your mind? I'll share with you on that in the next post. Subscribe to our mailing list, and I'll get you triggered once the next post is out.

Leave your comment

Related and intended posts in "article marketing for traffic series."
Article marketing for traffic: Your complete guide.
Making commitment and scheduling your article marketing.
How to choose your topic?
How to get your articles found?
How to get "founders" read your articles?
Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics
Bringing readers to your article resource box.
Crafting resource box for traffic.
Quality control and polishing your article.
Transforming article marketing visitors into leads.

Have you claimed your FREE Internet Passive Income Blueprint? Get it here.

Article Marketing for Traffic: Your complete guide

2008-12-06T20:31:00.011+08:00

Do you write articles to attract visitor to your site?

If so, is it working?

Does your articles bring visitors back to your site?

Do you want to know how to write articles that bring back traffics?

I agree that PPC is the fastest way to bring traffic to your site. However, article marketing is still my first choice for web promotion. The reasons are:

The articles that you submitted remains in the article directories forever. It means that, you can still see visitors coming from articles your wrote months or even years back.

The success of Internet marketing, depends on trust and good reputation. Writing good and useful articles is one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

As I research contents for my articles, it broadens my knowledge on my niche.

Good written articles can be viral. Ezine and blog owners may use your articles on their sites, giving you more exposures.

Advertising your site will only bring visitors to your site, whereas article marketing will also build backlinks to your site. Over time, this will increase your ranking in the Search Engines, where this will bring more visitors.

And of course, it requires very minimal to no cost.

Finally, which is the most important one, I believe business should be a win-win situation. Article marketing gives just this. Your
visitors get the information they want, and you get their trust and sales.

Despite these good reasons, if you had ever tried doing article marketing, you might agree that it is easier said than done. So just how to do it correctly? I intend to share with you my tips in article marketing. I humbly admit it is not the best way, but these are the ways that had worked for me.

Related and intended posts in "article marketing for traffic series."
Article marketing for traffic: Your complete guide.
Making commitment and scheduling your article marketing.
How to choose your topic?
How to get your articles found?
How to get "founders" read your articles?
Article Marketing: How I deal with unfamiliar topics
Bringing readers to your article resource box.
Crafting resource box for traffic.
Quality control and polishing your article.
Transforming article marketing visitors into leads.

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Free Internet Passive Income Blueprint

2008-11-12T16:22:00.004+08:00

Are you frustrated with your Internet marketing progress?

Image by : heatsink

If you had been trying to generate income from the Internet, or if you are trying to promote your business in the Internet for a while, you'd probably found that:

Driving traffic to your site is very crucial, but it is the most difficult thing to do on earth. Furthermore, you don't have much cash to throw on PPC. And even if you do have the money, competition is fierce and you are not so confident that it will work.

You now understand that, generating leads and keeping in touch with your leads is very important. But to do this, you need an auto-responder which cost around $20 a month. Well, $20 a month is not a very big money, but before your efforts prove to work you are not willing to waste $20 a month. So do I.

You found too much "how to" guides in the Internet, and you are now overloaded with information. Wouldn't it be nice to have a down to earth doable guide that you can rely to.

If you are facing any or all of the above, don't be sad. I was just like that when I started to do marketing on the Internet. That was until I discovered a simple blueprint that taught me to:

Drive targeted traffic through article marketing. Many people do article marketing but were unsuccessful. Some frustrated people even said that article marketing is dead, but trust me, it is still and always a very effective source for driving targeted traffic. Allow me to show you the correct way.

This blueprint will also give you a free mailing list application that you can use to keep in touch with your leads.

I was finally able to free my mind from all those overloaded information, by following a simple 5 steps procedure shown in this blueprint. All I need to do is to commit a 2hrs per day for my Internet marketing works.

The system is very simple and effective. Click here and allow me to share with you more.

Branding Your Small Business in 3 Simple Steps

2008-10-24T11:56:00.005+08:00

Is this a motorbike, or is this a Yamaha?

Photo by: jeanieforever

When I was in Japan for my bachelor degree course, I have a friend from Sri Lanka. One conversation that I can never forget is, he told me that in Sri Lanka, when talking about motorcycles, regardless of what motorcycle it is, they will always call it as "Yamaha." Now this what I call "branding." Lots of tips had been written on branding, but in fact it can be easily explained in 3 simple steps.

1. Strive for repeated exposure and don't forget your slogan

Not very long ago, I was doing some research on weight loss. (I am no longer overweight. Ha ha)
One thing I observed, there is a product probably you've heard of it too, which is called "Fat loss for idiots." It has become a strong brand in weight loss niche. As I surf the internet in finding information on weight loss, "fat loss for idiots" pop out everywhere. It was found as Adsense ads in lots of sites, their affiliates are writing review on it, and even when I signed up at free Ebook.net, it appeared again as a promoted product. Obviously, to brand your business you must strive for repeated exposure. Small business usually don't have much budget on promotions, but do whatever you can to expose your business. Some ideas are such as:

Attend trade show.
Sponsor local events.
Distribute low cost but viral gifts such as postcards.
When exchanging business cards, give your prospect not one, but multiple business cards. Who knows they might distribute it.
Direct mail and email campaign.
Establish a blog.
Host a seminar or webinar.
Attend network events.
Share your profit with affiliates, and let them spread the word for you.

Another thing you should not forget is slogans. Fat loss for idiot is an example of it. Almost all great brands have their slogans. For Nike it is "just do it" and for Nokia it is "connecting people." Learn from these great brands. Decide your slogan, and strive for repeated exposure.

2. Be known as a helpful source

Having a good and repeated exposure is good, but it is not sufficient. You must expose yourself as a helpful source. A source which is providing solutions to your customers. Here are some tips on how to be seen as a helpful source:

Do not just join local business events, be a committee.
Write useful content and let it be published in newspapers and magazines.
Find opportunities to speak at events, and talk on helpful topics.
Do the same way in the Internet. Write useful content and publish it in article directories, Ehow.com and wherever possible.
Establish a blog, and write valuable helpful content consistently.
Write helpful e-books and distribute it on the web.

There are many other ways, but the bottom line is to find ways in contributing to the community in your niche. As the wise people always said: "give before you take."

3. Be unique and be an expert

Many of your competitors will also strive for repeated exposure, and many of them will also strive to be a helpful source. To be known as the only one solution provider, you have to differentiate yourself. You must be unique and known as an expert. Here are the steps to establish yourself as a unique expert:

Build passion in whatever you are doing.
Think one step ahead on whatever you are doing.
Do lots of research and make sure you keep abreast on all buzz related to your niche.
Always thinks on how to make things better.

Did I missed anything?

These are my 3 commandments for branding. Do you have a different approach? Please share your ideas with us.

How to be there when prospects are ready to buy?

2008-10-18T22:03:00.007+08:00

What do you do, with prospects who did not end up buying your products?

Photo by: Gauravonomics

I learned a very important fact recently. I feel quite ashamed about it. After years in marketing, only now I realized this very simple fact.

"People buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell."

I'm sure just like me, you should be facing prospects who are not ready to buy your products yet. In fact, you might be facing this situation every day. But prospects who don't buy now, still might buy something in the future. So, how do we deal with it? I am ashamed to admit that, previously I will just let the opportunity go and focus on the next prospect. This is my biggest mistake. I understand that now. I had been thinking, researching and experimenting on how to keep in contact with those prospects.

The ultimate purpose is, so that when they are ready to buy, we will be there for them.

Let me share some of my ideas.

1. Generate satisfied prospect, and exchange contact details

Often we emphasized the importance of satisfying customers, but having a satisfied prospect is equally important too. Once my father went to a car showroom. He was just looking and have no intention to buy a car yet. Looking an old man with sluggish shirts and cheap sandal, non of the sales people there, ever cared to assist him. Except for a very young sales girl, who apparently just joined the company. She explained on various options of available cars with great enthusiasm, despite knowing that my dad is not going to buy. She also left my dad her name card. Years after that, my dad decided to buy a small K-car. Guess who my dad went to look for. I learned 2 important thing in that incident:

Always treat prospects as though as you are treating your best customer.
Always leave your contact details, or even better get that prospect's contact details.

2. Remind prospects about you with informative materials

Another thing that I found to be very useful is, to keep in touch with prospects by providing them informative materials. Providing informative materials will not only remind them on you, but also they will remember you as someone who is really knowledgeable in your field. 3 things you should take into consideration are, the materials must be interesting, informative and relevant to your prospects. Submitting too much of promotional materials will only destroy your reputation. You might be seen as someone who only care to sell your things. However, it is okay to submit promotional materials once in a while. Your prospects should be updated on your latest products too isn't it? Only that the frequency should not be too much compared to the informative materials.

There are many ways of doing this. I usually either distribute technical newsletters that I wrote myself, or recommend some information available in the Internet which might be in the interest of my prospects. Mainly my prospects are located quite far, so I usually distribute those material by email. However if they are within reach, I will always prefer to distribute it by hand to them.

3. Provide consultation for your prospects

This was something done by a friend of mine, Conrad. He is selling air purification products, and was trying to market his products to a big company. At that point, his prospect was not willing to buy from him yet, but they were having a big hydrocarbon contamination challenges in their compressed air system. It seems their end user had asked them to stringent their hydrocarbon level control.

So what Conrad did was, instead of talking about his products, he gave ideas on how his prospect can solve their problems. He even helped his prospects to perform some modification to their system. The challenge was finally able to be solved with the help of Conrad, even though not a single sales was made.

Several months after that, the company's operation increased and they need to upgrade their compressed air system capacity. And guess who got that project? Yep, it was my good friend Conrad. If that is not enough, normally vendors need to make an appointment prior to visiting the manager in charge. But Conrad is always welcome to come at any time.

Nevertheless, you should be careful with this strategy. There some handful prospects, who would just use your knowledge without even thanking you. How to differentiate prospects worth helping and not? That is something I had to learn further. Maybe you can share your opinion and help me learn on this.

I have shared mine, so what about you?

Well, these are my opinions on how to respond to prospects without immediate need. What about you? What kind of tactics do you use? Do you follow up all your prospect? Or do you follow only some of them? Please share your opinion with us.

How to promote your blog by ethically building on other blog contents?

2008-10-15T00:16:00.006+08:00

Photo by stephenccwu

In our previous post, we talked on how you can market your products online by building an e-bay store and promoting your store by a blog.

As you can expect, the first challenge you are going to face, is not on promoting your e-bay store but rather on promoting your blog itself.

The first thing I learned on promoting a blog, is by commenting on other people`s blog. I learned that from the very first e-book I purchased in the Internet. Personally I am not against this tactic, but I believe it should be done more ethically. Business should be built on trust and a win-win situation. I had to admit that I was guilty of giving a comment that sounds, "Wow that was a great article you have there" on other people's blog back then, but now I am doing it on a more ethical way. Let me explain on how it works.

1. Identify related and complementing blogs

To find a blog is easy. Just go to Google, select the "more" option and choose "blogs." Key in your niche related keywords, and find blogs which seems related and complementing to yours.

2. Can you add some more depths to the blog content

Now read the latest post on the blog you choose. The latest post is usually the one which is having the most reader. This is why you want to choose the latest post to build on. See if you can:

elaborate any points in post.
give more specific examples.
suggest how you have previously applied tactics in the post.
suggest other alternatives.
and so on...

For example, I once read a blog on why small businesses can stand the recent global financial crisis. The post is great but lacking on specific examples. So I figured out that maybe I can elaborate further, and give 3 concrete examples on how it can practically be done.

3. Think more - How can you elaborate your own post further?

I had to admit that this is the step I missed when publishing 3 examples on how small business owners can turn global financial crisis as opportunities. I should have think further. If I do this, I might be able to identify that "a step-by-step guide on how to recruit risk free sales reps" is probably a topic I can write as a future post. This process is used for retaining readers. I will explain it in the next paragraph.

4. Write your blog post

Now write your post which adds value to the blog you want to comment. Your post should be of high quality and not just some scraps, otherwise your readers will never be looking for it again. On the other side, if your post is in high quality, not only your readers will be looking for it again, they might promote it to their friend, or they might submit your post to social bookmarking sites such as digg, stumbeupon and many others which will promote your blog even more.

At the end of your blog, promote your next post. In my example here, it will be the "step-by-step guide on how to recruit risk free sales reps." Then encourage your readers to subscribe to your RSS or your email list. This is a tactic to retain your readers.

5. Leave an ethical comment on the targeted blog

Once step 1 - 4 are done, now it is time to leave your comment on the targeted blog. Leave your comment by summarizing the complementing article in your blog.

In most cases, you will have to give a "name" and "URL" to leave a comment. For the name, use a short description which clearly indicates the content in your blog. For our example above, I might want to write it as, "Turning financial crisis to opportunity." And for the URL, use the URL of the complementing post in your blog. You might think that this is a search engine back linking tactic. Yes it may do just that, but for me I do it to encourage the blog readers to visit my site.

The conclusion

In my opinion, although commenting on other blog this way is time consuming, it is more meaningful in the sense that:

It will help to strengthen the other blog owner's post.
It helps both your blog readers to find more depth in whatever they are searching for.
It will give you lots of content ideas for your blog.

Since this tactic is giving a win-win solution to all people involved, it should be a very good solution.

Other ways to promote your blog

There are other tactics to promote your blog. One of them is article marketing. But as you can expect, it will not be easy. Some of the articles that I submitted to the article directories get high returning visitors, but some get very less. And as I track back links to my site, some of my articles were used by many other blog owners, while some were not used at all. What are the differences between workable article marketing and the non-workable? I plan to write a real case study about this in one of our future post. If you are worried that you might miss the post, I suggest you subscribe to our RSS or email delivery service?

Related post:

Marketing Strategy: Should you consider internet marketing?

How to self start internet marketing for your small business?

2008-10-12T21:09:00.012+08:00

I want to market my products in the Internet, but how do I start?

Image by kokogiak

I browsed Yahoo Answer yesterday and found lots of people asking on how to start Internet marketing. I can understand how they feel. When I started internet marketing, I bought several ebooks and videos only to find that there are more things to be learned. Big organizations can just simply "outsource" their Internet marketing. Even if they decided to do it internally, they have lots of budget to throw on education. But what about small business owners and solopreneurs? How are we going to learn Internet marketing without throwing too much money in it?

Other than ebooks and videos, the way I do is by reading blogs. Learning internet marketing is a "learn, test and re-learn" process. Many people who had gone through this cycle shared their strategy in blogs. So you see, this is where you can find free but highly workable tactics.

I had to admit that I myself is still in the learning stage. But allow me to share a 5 step tactics that I learned recently. If you want any areas of the tactics to be further explained, please do leave a message so that I know which area to elaborate. For those who had been a while in internet marketing, why don't you give your advice or correct me if I'm giving a bad advice. For those who wish to write guest posts, you can just simply email your post to me. Let us build a marketers community who loves to help each other.

1. Are people looking on your products online?

In our post Marketing Strategy: Should you consider Internet marketing?, I had showed how I would decide whether to go online or not. Internet marketing when done correctly, is really worth putting efforts in. But I'm warning you that it needs great effort and commitment. It is just as if you are going to establish another branch of your business outlet. Only this time, it will be in the cyber space. I highly advise you to thoroughly confirm whether there is actually a market place for your products before sweating your way to success. Just go back to our previous post and learn how to analyze it.

2. Set up a pay-pal account

In this 5 step tactic, we are going to set up an ebay store to promote your products in the Internet. This way, you don't have to build your own website. Building a website is great, but if you don't already have the knowledge it can be both time consuming and costly.

Okay now on pay-pal thing. Why do you need it? You can still sell things through ebay by wire transfer or other payment methods. But with a pay-pal account you can sell your products internationally. Why limit yourself when you need to put a little bit more effort?

3. Set up your ebay store

Once you have your pay-pal account ready, the next thing to do it to set up your ebay store. Do you know why ebay is great?

Ebay is well-known to the world, and saying that there is already a big market place over there. It means that some portion of your promotion job is considered done.
Although it is basically an auction site, you can sell your products in fixed price.
You don't need to learn html and web building. You just need to set up your store, and you are ready for business.

Once your store is established, you will have a URL of the store. In the next step, we are going to market and promote your store by driving prospects to this URL. Step 1 - 3 is not difficult. It is only the technical part. The next part will be the heart of the story.

4. Promoting your ebay store by a blog

Now, this is the hardest part. Marketing and promoting your ebay store. One most valuable thing I learned in business is, people don't buy products. People buy solutions that solve their wants and needs. One great way to address people wants and needs is by blogging. Why do I choose blog?

There are many easy to use and free blog platforms such as blogger and wordpress.
You don't have to learn too much html to start blogging.
Blog is very easy to be updated and managed.
Blog is very versatile. You can easily add images and videos to enhance your post.
Search engine loves blog.
You can write posts in sequences (Such as part 1, part 2 ...)
Your readers can leave their comments and create a 2 way communication.
It is easy to burn your blog in feedburner and let it reach your readers through RSS and email subscription.

For effective result, you should not blatantly promote your products in the blog. Instead, research on what are your prospects' needs and wants. Find a solution to it. While sharing the solution, show how your product can be used as a tool in the solution. For instance if you are selling PDA, research and post a topic on how self management can help to boost people's career. Then in the post, show how self management can be made easy by your PDA and direct them to your ebay store. Always remember that, "people don't buy products. People buy solutions for their needs and wants."

5. Promoting your blog

In the offline world, do you realize how sometimes we hold free seminars to increase exposure on our products. While these seminars can really help to promote your brand, you have to promote the seminars first. It is the same with your blog. Your blog is the seminar that will promote your ebay store. But first, you have to let people know that it exists. There are many ways to promote your blog. Below are my favorite techniques:

Fixed rate advertising by adbrite - I search for related sites with around 7,000 unique visitors a day and allow fixed rate advertising. It costs only around $5 a week.
Article marketing - I usually write to ezine article. I found that this is the most effective article directory.
Researching related blog articles --> Write a post that furthermore build on the topic in my blog --> Leave a comment on the original post which summarized my elaborated post (of course with a return link to the related post on my blog)
Promoting the blog to my friends who may benefit from it.
Researching related open "yahoo answer" questions --> find a solution to it and write a blog post --> respond to the original question with a reference back to my blog post.

There are much more techniques I had tried, but these are the ones that I found really works. This way of internet marketing requires time and great efforts. But it really works because it is based on a win-win situation. You provide solutions for your customers, and you gain back by the sales they make.

What's next?

I tried my best to write this post as simple and as clear as possible. However, if you are very new to internet marketing, you will still be "blinking" when reading this post. Do leave a comment if you want me to clarify further on anything.

How to promote your blog by ethically building on other blog contents

Global financial crisis: 3 weird ways on how you can turn it to opportunity

2008-10-09T15:16:00.006+08:00

I just want to write a short post on the global financial crisis. In these few days, medias had been talking (or should I say publishing) about it quite a lot. Even my college mates are also debating about it in our yahoo group. But as the old wise man usually say, there are always two sides of the coin.

Photo by SvobodalT

As a small business entrepreneur, how can you find opportunities in this situation?

I see 2 immediate impact of the crisis.

Companies which are depending too much on the banks, might need to re-size, reconsider their expenditure habits, or in worst-case
scenario can even collapse.

Due to organization resizing or collapse, we might see some increase in unemployment.

So how do you turn it as opportunities?

I don`t know why, but I suddenly got these 3 weird ideas. And there is something inside that is urging me to express the ideas in the form of a blog post!

1. Recruit a win-win risk free sales reps

With the increased unemployment, there are probably lots of people searching for risk-free temporary income source. You can recruit them as "partners" to promote your products. To make it more interesting, you can even consider to share the profit at a rate let say 50% - 70% to them. Although you will have lesser margins, you will also have more people who try really hard to promote your products.

As a summary, your win situations are:

More people promoting your products.
As they are "partners" and not "employees," you don`t have to crack your head finding ways to pay their salaries.
You are contributing to your country by providing means of income, and therefore preventing crimes. (Unemployment is known as a cause of crimes)

While the win situations on their side are:

They get a flexible temporary source of income.
They can quit any time they like (Such as if they manage to get a new employment)

2. Change your products to less risky solutions

I read in the newspaper somewhere two days back that car buying trend is changing. More people are choosing used cars rather than new cars. Apparently, due to the financial insecurity, people prefer to reduce their monthly expenditure. You can use this fact to your favor. If you are selling new cars, then start selling used cars instead. And whatever your industries may be, try to employ the same idea.

3. Reduce your MOQ to the big players

Just as consumers, big organizations are also cutting down on their monthly expenditures. If you are not in the position of giving discounts, you should not do it. But one thing you can do to help those big players, is by reducing your MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity). This might look simple, but I had actually saw a company won a bid only because they provided smaller MOQ.

Well, these are the 3 tactics you can use to market your products in this turbulence time. Frankly I don`t know whether it will work or not, but I think it is worth trying.

Till the next post... Bye bye...

Marketing Strategy: Should you consider internet marketing?

2008-10-06T18:59:00.006+08:00

I was in a discussion with some of my engineers one day, and we were discussing on ways how to boost our sales. One of my engineer said, "Why don`t we think outside the box? Why don`t we go online?" Really, I`m very happy to hear such a creative idea. But the question is, how do we decide whether should we go online or not?

1. Understand how people search in the Internet

Millions of people are searching information and products in the internet every day. But the question is, are they looking for your products? No point in putting all the efforts, when the returns are insignificant. Luckily there are ways to analyze this.

Original image by photojonny

2. List down your products or services

The first step in deciding whether you should go online or not, is to list down your products and services. In the next steps, we are going to analyze whether or not, people are searching for your products in the Internet.

There are many ways on how people find information and products in the Internet, but I usually check at these 3 main areas:

Search engines

Social networking and bookmarking

E-bay

3. Check if people are searching for your products online?

Once you had listed your products and services, let`s see if people are looking for it.

First: Let`s check the search engine

Let us check what people search by the search engine. We can analyze this by keyword analysis tools. There are both paid and free keyword analysis tools. But personally I think, free tools such as Seobook Keyword Analysis work just fine. Now key in all the keywords in your list one by one. See what kind of search amount returned for each of your keywords. Although keyword analysis is not an exact science, personally I would go online only if the searches related to the majority of my keywords is more than 100 per day.

You might also want to see if the searches are consistent or not. For this, you can use google insight tool. Key in your keywords and see if the trend is consistent or not. It is okay if some of your products are seasonal popular items, but if it is me, I will make sure that 75% of the keywords came from a consistent trend.

Second: Let`s check e-bay

E-bay is another place you want to check. Lots of people search for products here, and if your product is also on the popular category items, it indicates a good market potential. To analyze, just go to ebay pulse and see if your products are being searched. Browse through the categories and see if your products are among the popular search items. If it is good, you might even want to market your products in e-bay!

Third: Let`s check social bookmarking and networking

Here is another good indicator. This is where people "talks" about your product and services. I had found a useful tool to help you check if people are talking about your products at:

Digg

Myspace

Youtube

Flickr

Twitter

Just go to SiteVolume, key in your keywords and see if people are talking about your products.

How do you decide?

The steps above is my personal criteria in deciding whether to go online or not. And it can be done with free tools. It might not be the best way, but if you can learn anything from this post, then let it be "confirm that your products are being searched in the Internet, before jumping in."

For those who had already jumped in, why don`t you share with us on how you decide to go online.

How to promote your blog by ethically building on other blog contents?

Blog promoting: 5 tips to invite readers by email

2008-10-03T23:22:00.002+08:00

You have categorized your prospects, established your blog and had carefully crafted your initial blog contents. And now it is time to announce and promote it.

Just in case your missed it, we are now discussing on how to use blog marketing for offline products. If by chance somehow you stumbled on this post, you may want to read our previous posts on this topic:

Why email?

As said in on one of our previous posts, Conrad invited prospects to his blog in 2 ways:

Inviting by email.
Personally meet prospects and promote it.

But he found that inviting by email is more effective. This is merely because when inviting by email, the link to your blog is already in the email body. The only thing your prospects need to do, is just to give a click on it.

1. Do not spam

The first rule in inviting readers to your blog by email is, "Do not SPAM." You should only invite people who you personally knew. Or maybe I should say, who personally knew you. When you meet your prospects for the first time, you will usually exchange business cards right? These are the people that you can invite by direct email.

If you get some email addresses by referral from your existing customers, but had never met them yet, I would not suggest on emailing them. The chances are they will be surprised and irritated. It is better for you to call and set an appointment with them, and let they know who you are first.

I mean, how do you feel when you open your inbox and see emails from people you don't know? Most people will be irritated. Spamming will just destroy your rapport. Don't do it.

2. Send personalized emails

When you have lots of prospects that you need to email, it is very tempting to send a generic email to all your prospects by writing their email addresses in the bcc column. But trust me, don't do this. Marketing is an art. It is an art of reaching people. You are not only conveying information when you send an email. You are also conveying emotion and trust. How do you feel when you receive an email addressing you as Dear All rather than Dear John? So for maximum impact, send individually personalized emails to each prospects.

3. Eye catching subject line

The average people I knew, received more than 20 emails a day. The higher we go in the organizational hierarchy, the more emails we receive each day. When you check your inbox each day, how do you deal with it? For me, I usually browse through the subject and see which are the one which relates directly to me. And I bet that 80% of the populations are doing this way too.

If you want your email to be outstanding among all other emails received by your prospect, you need to give an eye catching subject to it. There are many ways of doing this, but the most common way is to emphasis on your prospect's concern. For example if you know your prospect is having a headache on clean dry air contamination, you should write "Ways to prevent contamination in clean dry air," rather than "My blog of clean dry air." The first subject deals with your prospect's concern, while the later is addressing your own concern. People are always thinking on WIIFM (what is in for me). If you want to win your prospects' heart, show that you are thinking about them.

4. Crafting persuasive email body

Now that your email subject had successfully brought your prospect into your email body, in the same way now you should direct your prospect to your blog by means of your email body. Again the main thing is to emphasis on their concerns. Avoid anything that might sound like a sales pitch.

Here is one example:

"I had been writing some articles on how to prevent contamination in clean dry air in my blog. The tips should be useful to you and your engineers. Why don't you take a look at it. Hope it will be useful."

This is only an example. I know you can write a better statement than this. The important thing is to emphasis on "their needs" and not "ours."

5. Linking to your blog

As had been said earlier, email is good because it provides a link to your blog. Your prospect just need to give a click to visit your site. You can choose to use an anchor text to make your email looks natural. But never forget to provide your site's URL too. The reason is simple. Not everyone can read an email with HTML coding. Some will only be able to read text only emails. So, provide both anchor text and HTML URL. It covers both email types.

The question is, "is your business online compatible?"

So far we've been discussing on using blog marketing for offline products. But what about other Internet marketing strategy? Should you consider online marketing? Is your business online compatible? I'll share my opinion in my next post. If you don't feel like checking this site each and every day, just tell me to directly email the article once it is ready. See you then.

Blog marketing: 7 ways to find contents for your blog

2008-09-25T22:17:00.004+08:00

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In the last 2 posts, why blogging is a great marketing tool and how to use blog marketing for offline products, we had discussed on why blogging is a great marketing tool, and how my friend Conrad had been using it for his offline products. Today we are going to share some tips on how to find contents for your blog.

Lots of tips are available if you are blogging for online products, but not so much if you are using blog marketing for offline products. Most offline products are relatively hi-tech in nature, and it will be difficult to find contents, especially if the only thing you are doing is reading other blogs.

Now let me share 7 ways that might help you to find contents for blog aimed on offline products.

1. Build from what you know

As what Conrad did, although only at surface level you`d probably known some of your prospect`s concerns. You can immediately write some posts on those topics. For instance, Conrad knew that his prospects have concerns on contamination in clean dry air, so he wrote about "how to prevent contamination in CDA." As a call to action for that post, he asked his readers to share on what kind of contamination that they think is most difficult to be dealt with. When his readers responded, he gets more ideas of what to write.

2. Find information from Google Knol

Unlike blogs, Google Knol is written as an authoritative articles. You are more likely to find technology specific articles in Google Knol than in blogs. One important thing is, don`t just copy everything you found. That will be meaningless to your reader and unethical. To add weight for your posts, you can:

Give examples on practical implementation of ideas.
How can the original ideas be enhanced or improvised?
If you disagree to any ideas, then state your reasons politely.

3. Find information from About.com

About.com is another good source if you want to find information on technology specific topics. I tried to browse its channel today, and there are 22 big categories. There are more micro categories in the main ones. Your luck of finding contents for offline product blog marketing should be higher here.

4. Article Directories

Article directories are mainly used for article marketing, to drive traffic to the publisher's website. So, you can expect to see more articles related to online products. But do not underestimate. Good article directories like Ezine Articles have lots of articles related to offline products too. I searched for "compressors" in Ezine article, and it returned me 762 articles on the topic. Not bad.

5. Browse Forums

Forums are also another popular place for Internet marketer to research concerns pertaining their niches. But there are also technical specific forums that provide information related to offline products. I managed to find a technical forum on stainless steel manufacturing, and another on electro plating. I did that merely in 10 minutes. You can find more if you put more efforts.

6. Search Engine and Specific Search Engine

You should not forget search engines. You will be amazed on the search engines precision nowadays. Try to use a few different search engines for the term you wish to research. Different search engine will return slightly different results. The information that you want, might not be captured by Google but it might be shown on Yahoo. So, use several search engines.

There are also "specific search engines." These search engines differs from the usual search engines in the sense that it searches on a specific field. Just type "engineering" search engine in Google, if you want to find specific search engine related to engineering topics.

7. Build from your own posts

Finally, don't waste the efforts you had put on your blog. Elaborate some more on your own posts. For example, I had posted a topic on "how to use blog marketing for your offline products in 5 simple steps." One of the tips is to write quality and relevant contents in your blog. And here it is in today's topic, I am building on that post by elaborating another 7 ways to find content for your blog. If you continue building your post this way, you might even able to convert it into an e-book one day, who knows.

Do you have any more ideas?

These are the 7 ways that I think can help you in finding contents. Obviously they are not the only way. I am wise enough to know that I don't know everything. What are other methods that you think can help find contents for your blog? Especially if you are blogging for offline product marketing. Why don't you share your ideas here?

How to use blog marketing for your offline business in 5 simple steps?

2008-09-23T23:47:00.004+08:00

In our last post, 5 reasons why blog is a great marketing tool, we have seen how my friend Conrad successfully blog his way for his offline business. But you need to do some "fine tuning" if you are blogging for offline products. What we mean by "offline products" are, products that will not be able to be delivered if an inquiry came to you by the Internet. But if your products, despite being "offline" are able to be delivered almost anywhere in the world, then for us that is very much considered "online products."

1. Categorizing your prospects

The first thing Conrad did even before setting up his blog is to categorize his prospects. Your prospects might be interested to a same product, but their utilization might not necessarily be so. If you are selling air compressors for instance, a car repairing workshop and your local hospital might be interested in the same model of compressor. But imagine you go meet the hospital contact person and started to talk about cars. It doesn't make sense isn't it? So in the same way, your blog contents should match your prospects interest. At the end of the day, Conrad found 3 major categories of his prospects:

heavy industry.
hospital and pharmaceutical.
semiconductor and media industry.

2. Fill your blog with helpful relevant contents

Once Conrad had decided his blog niche, he started to fill it with relevant and helpful contents. For example, he found from his meetings with his prospects, under the category of "hospital and pharmaceutical" category seems to be interested on air supply contamination. Since Conrad is selling air compressors and air purification systems, he did some research and wrote several posts such as:

How to effectively remove hydrocarbon from CDA (Clean dry air)
How to achieve class 1.1.1 CDA.
How to maintain a class 1.1.1 CDA.

On some of our future posts, we intend to write on "how to find contents for your blog?" But as for now, just remember that your blog contents should:

relate to your prospect needs and interests
the first few post should be helpful posts without any sales pitch. In fact, the more posts without sales pitch the better. It helps to build trust.
relate to your products or services in some way.

If you are worried you might miss our future post, then you may either:

subscribe to our RSS
subscribe to our email list, and get our future posts sent directly to your inbox (Don't worry, we hate spam as much as you do)

3. Inviting prospects to your blog

One mistake that Conrad did was, he did not block his site from being found by the search engines. So his blog was accessible by people throughout the world. Luckily his blog is educating in nature and not so much focused on sales marketing, otherwise he will be having a hard time explaining to those readers that their inquiries will not be able to be responded with.

So the best way for Conrad to invite his prospects to the blog are by:

Email invitations (We will also write something in the future on effective email writing)
Personally meet his prospects and invite them to see the blog.

But frankly for Conrad, email invitations seems to be the best. Maybe because by email, the blog links is already there, and the only thing his prospects need to do are to click on it.

4. Encouraging comments

One of the greatest aspects of a blog is, it can act as a 2 way communication tool. Conrad wrote a few articles that he "thought" might be relevant to his prospects interest. But he knows that he had not grasp deep enough. So in his blog posts, he encourages his readers to respond.

Such as in his post on hydrocarbon contamination in CDA, Conrad encouraged his readers to respond by asking questions such as:

Is hydrocarbon a critical contamination in your application?
If yes, what is your present method of eliminating it?
Other that hydrocarbon, what are other contamination you hate to see in your CDA?

By asking questions, he encourages his readers to respond. You know what, Conrad then write more posts by:

Answering questions from his readers.
Or if his readers gave any ideas, he elaborate and build on it.

Blogging this way, Conrad gets continuous ideas for his posts. And at the other side, his readers feel happy because they see that their ideas are being responded to.

5. Making your call of action

After submitting several posts and addressing his prospects comments, finally Conrad thinks that he had been able to understand what his prospects core need is. He knows that there is one great product that might just solve his prospects problem. So it is now time to write a post which will generate a sale.

Conrad now knows that one of his prospect is controlling amide types of hydrocarbon at a very stringent level. He had discussed with his technical engineer, and he is confident they have a solution to that. So Conrad wrote another post on "how to combat amides by AC activated carbon filters series?" He did not ask his readers to buy the product in the post, but he just merely left a comment saying, "email me for more info on this great solution." And sure enough, he received an email inquiry a few days after that.

Wait for our future posts

This was how Conrad blogged his way to success. In our future posts, we intend to elaborate on:

How to find contents for your blog?
How to effectively invite prospect to your blog?
How to encourage comments from your readers?

We are not sure when we are going to submit those topics yet. But in order not to miss, why don't you subscribe to our RSS, or let us email the article directly to your inbox?

Till then, good luck.

5 Reasons why blogging is a great marketing tool

2008-09-16T12:42:00.007+08:00

Do you want to know how blog marketing solved Conrad's problem?

My friend Conrad, was finally able to set an appointment with one prospect that he had been cold calling recently. But he could not get things going in the first meeting. He was unable to find any products which will satisfy that prospect. More important is, he still couldn't figure out what that prospect actually needs from him.

He resolved to a different approach, blogging. Conrad had been using blog as a tool for his Internet marketing works, which he does as a hobby. But this time, he is going to do it for his offline business.

1. How Conrad blogs his way to understanding his prospect's needs.

During the first meeting, Conrad had understood that the prospect who is in the media manufacturing business is having some "yield" problems. He took some initiatives and researched information in the Internet, and found that some causes of yield problem in the media industry are such as particles, ionic and hydrocarbon contamination.

As Conrad is in the compressed air purification business, he set up a blog on the niche and posted a few articles on how particles and hydrocarbon contamination in compressed air might affect media fabrication. At the end of each blog posts, he asked his blog reader to share more on their problems. As his readers started to respond, Conrad came to understand their needs at a deeper level.

2. Blogging enables mass communication

When Conrad started his blog, his intention was to approach the one prospect that we said earlier. But as he was establishing his blog, Conrad realized that there are other prospects who might benefit from that blog. So he emailed and promoted the blog to all those prospects too.

3. Blog shifted Conrad's prospects from passivity to activity.

To his surprise, a few weeks later a single comment started to appear in his blog. He responded to the comment by digging deeper research, and publishing more blog posts. When Conrad met that prospect in the first meeting, he was quite passive and unresponsive. Conrad felt very happy that the prospect now started to be more open and active.

Then somehow like magic, more comments started to appear. The best thing is, they are coming from several people now. More prospects are communicating with him now.

4. Conrad's blog marketing became viral.

Conrad is tracking the status of his blog visitor by Google analytics. He knows that the prospects which he had emailed to promote his blog before, should be within his sales coverage region. But when he checked with Google Analytics, Conrad was surprised to see that there are readers from regions he did not expect to see. In fact there are two or three readers came from other countries as well.

Tracking his visitors source, he found that there are some readers who came from email sites such as yahoo mail, Gmail etc. Obviously, somebody had been spreading the existence of his blog by email. And there were some organic search from Google itself.

5. Conrad became an authority in his field.

One of his prospect called Conrad the other day. He said they are in the middle of improving their compressed air system and need to buy some air purification things. And his boss (the prospect's manager), had asked him to call "the expert" down there.

Apparently, due to his blog, Conrad had been widely recognized in his prospect's company. Not only is he recognized, he is recognized as "the air purification expert." Finally all his hard work pays off, and Conrad felt very happy that he took the effort.

Do you use blog marketing?

In the future post, I intend to write on how to use blog for offline marketing, but in the meanwhile, are you a blogger? Do you blog for personal reasons, or do you blog for business purposes? If you blog for business reasons, how is your approach? Why don't you leave your comment and share your opinions with us.

About Us

2008-09-12T22:07:00.003+08:00

Once upon a time, there was a technical manager who worked in a small support industry. He usually deal with engineering and manufacturing issues, but now he was given the responsibility to handle marketing tasks of the company. He did not have much knowledge in marketing, and found it was rather challenging. In his engineering world, 1 + 1 is always equals to two. But in the marketing world, 1 + 1 can be anything! Indeed marketing is a piece of art.

He took the challenge positively and started to learn the art of marketing from various sources. He even started internet marketing as a hobby. Years after that, after lots of trial and errors, he started to understand the art in marketing.

The birth of Marketers World

In learning the art of marketing, he referred to many how to articles written by real marketers both online and offline. He decided that it is now his time to contribute to the society. So he decided to write a blog centering on helping small business owners and solopreneurs in the art of marketing.

And this was when "Marketers World" started. He hoped by the blog, marketers will be able to exchange ideas and opinions, and create synergistic ideas that will build a better world.