Copyright is important because if you use someone else’s work on your commercial product, you can be sued and you would lose. You need to use images that have an open-use license, meaning that we’re allowed to use them without permission from the author.

Here are some great places that I use for images:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org Pretty much everything on this site is open source and OK to use.
• http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ Stick with the “Attribution License” section only. Images from this section can be used without permission from the author as long as we put their name on the picture in our application.

For the generic links, I download the report every so often and sort it in Excel to get an idea of where my traffic is going. This is an excellent place to look for new business opportunities.

Cheers!

There are several ways you can advertise your business and promote your website online while still spending little and in many cases even no money. Even when your business is up and running or you get out of the slump, many of these marketing methods are still very effective approaches that can be used for years to come in combination with some paid advertising.

I think we all know the important role search engines play in the number of visitors our websites receive. A majority of online users find a website through the use of their favorite search engines. Of course, there are paid methods to improving your chances that search engine users will visit your site. You can utilize PPC programs and many search engines offer paid inclusion options. However, there are steps you can take to improve your odds with search engines without spending any money.

Take your time when creating your website to ensure that it is search engine friendly. Think about the keywords that you anticipate users will use to find your website. Be certain to use these keywords several times in the content of your website. Create quality content for your website. Search engines like content and people want useful and interesting content to view when visiting websites.

Another step that you will want to take when working to improve your search engine rankings is to find some inbound links to your website. You may be able to join link exchanges. Consider finding websites that relate to your own. If these are quality websites with good PR, ask the webmaster if they would be willing to exchange links with you. You can also write articles for websites and ezines. In most cases you will be able to include al ink to your website in these articles, thus providing even more incoming links to your website.

Search engines are just one of the ways to bring visitors to your site. You can promote your website and establish a positive reputation for yourself through forums. There are a variety of forums on the Internet, covering various topics. Find forums that are related to your own products and services. Be an active member of the forums by providing helpful information to other forum users. Share your knowledge with others so that they can see you really know what you are talking about when it comes to your area of business. Many forums will allow you to include your URL in your signature, thus providing you with more links to you site.

Some forums even provide you with a way to promote and advertise your services directly. They may provide a marketplace where business owners can offer services to other forum members. Often times, members can request services that they need as well. If you can provide a service that another forum user needs, you can reply to their post with information about your services and business. Forums are an excellent way to bring more visitors to your site and in some cases to even make sales quickly. For example, if a forum member needs web hosting and you tell them about an excellent plan your company offers, they may sign up for hosting right away!

You may even want to submit your URL to directories on the Web. For example, submit your site to DMOZ. If your site is accepted for inclusion, you are likely to receive some visitors as a result of your listing on this site. Find directories related to your industry. Submit your URL in the category that is most likely to attract individuals to your target market. Some directories do charge for listings but others are free. You will find some directories that allow you to submit your URL in exchange for nothing. Others will ask that you include a link back to their directory. It will depend on each individual directory.

Offering special promotions on your website may also help you to market your business and website. If you offer excellent deals and announce on your site that you actively change your sales and bonuses to offer even more exciting promotions, visitors to your site may come back to make additional purchases or they may check your promotions until they find one meeting their needs and then you will make a sale. If your business makes a really great offer or is having a spectacular sale, visitors may also tell their friends about your website. Word of mouth can lead to many sales.

When promoting your site, be creative. Take your time to think of ways to attract visitors to your site and to make them want to return to your site in the future. A marketing campaign does not necessarily need to cost much money in order to be thankful. In fact, some of the most effective methods may only cost you some time.

Although your ultimate goal is to make sales, advertisements are often not used with the intention of directly making a sale. Instead advertisements are often an important step in bringing more customers to your business and ultimately increasing sales and revenues.

In some cases the main goal of your advertising methods may be to generate leads. Advertising provides you with an opportunity to attract the attention of people who may be interested in the products and services provided by your business. Those who are interested in your business after viewing your ad, are likely to visit your website or contact you to learn more about your business. Some of these individuals may very well become customers after learning more about your products and services.

You may be using your advertising methods with the intention of increasing visitors to your site. The more visitors you have, the more sales you are likely to make. This is especially true if you use your advertising to carefully target those people who are most likely to benefit from your business. By identifying and targeting your segment of the market, you can greatly improve the chances that those visiting your website, will indeed become customers.

Advertisements are used to spread the word about your business. If no one knows that your business exists and what your business does, you cannot be successful. Advertisements mark your business visible in the marketplace. Your ads can be used to tell people what your business name is, what your business has to offer to customers and how they can visit and learn more about your business.

As a business owner, you can also use various advertising mediums in order to announce important information about your business. For example, if your business is new, you can use advertisements to inform people of your new business. Some ads may be used to announce the grand opening of your business. Your various methods will be used to provide exposure for your new business. You can also use advertisements to advertise sales, special promotions and events being offered. This allows you to reach potential customers. It also makes it possible to attract the attention of those who may not typically consider making purchases from your business. For example, if someone sees that a particular product is going to be on sale, they may visit your website because the product or service is now more affordable for them.

Your goals when advertising may also have some different objectives if your business is both an online and offline business. If you have a business that is also available offline such as an offline store, you may use advertising methods that will bring more customers into your store. Advertising may be used to attract more interest in what your offline business has to offer to customers.

When planning your advertising campaign, there are so many advertising options. The advertising methods you use will depend upon the goals of your advertising campaign. You may advertise online or even offline. Even when your business is run entirely online, you still have the option of advertising offline. This provides you with an opportunity to reach even more potential customers. By advertising offline as well as offline, you open up even more opportunities for advertising.

Your advertising campaign can include an assortment of advertising goals and methods. You may very well use a wide variety of advertising mediums. Some examples of online advertising can include; text ads, banner ads, search engine ads and so much more. Offline you can advertise in the yellow pages, on billboards, in magazines and newspapers, to name just a few.

Whatever your goals of advertising it is important to carefully plan your ads. Identify your goals, Experiments with several advertising methods to find those that work the best in helping you to achieve your goals. Be creative and have fun when advertising.

Anyone who is considering starting their own business must realize the amount of time and effort that goes into creating and maintaining a profitable business. Current business owners must also keep sight of the fact that hard work truly does pay off. Sometimes you can work fewer hours and sometimes you work more hours. But as with anything in life you must work hard to become successful and stay successful.

When it comes to running a business hard work is well worth the time and effort. Running a business can be fun, exciting and certainly rewarding. It is rewarding in more ways than just earning a profit. You get a chance to use your talents and skills. As a business owner you can provide products and services that help others in their daily lives. Your creativity can bring about positive results.

Almost every aspect of running a business involves hard work. You work hard to plan a new business. Then you work even harder to turn your dream of a business into a reality. You select products and services to offer. Deciding how to finance your business becomes very important. You make many decisions like deciding whether your business will be online or offline. How will you advertise your business? Will you have employees? How many? Etc.

As a business owner one of the things you will work hardest at is planning and then implementing an advertising and marketing campaign? Why is this one of the areas where you must put in the most work? Because without an excellent plan, your business is likely to flop. You must get out the word about your business. You must reach your target market and bring a lot of people to your business. (For the purpose of this article we will use a business website as an example). If no one knows your business exists, you will not have customers or sales.

Hours of planning and action must be spent on your marketing and advertising plans. You will first need to decide who is your target market? At times the answer may be obvious. In other cases, you may need to do some thinking and research to decide who the people are that would be most interested in the products and services offered by your business. You will then need to decide where you will advertise. Again this can take some work. For starters, you must find out where your target market is most likely to be found. If you are marketing a website for example, decide what types of websites and forums your target market is most likely to visit and decide to advertise their.

When you know who to advertise to and where to advertise, you must then plan your ads. Write content for your ads. Decide what type of ads you will use. For example, if you are advertising online will you use banner ads or text ads. What other forms of marketing should you use? Decide how you will optimize your website? Will you submit your URL to directories? What other creative ways can you promote your business?

After making all your plans you will need to carry out your plans. All aspects of a business involve hard work. Advertising and marketing may be among the hardest. Promoting your business and doing so well is key to the success of your business. A great deal of time and research is needed to plan and create a great advertising campaign. Be assured though that your hard work will pay off. When you see how well your business is doing, the time and effort will be well worth it to you.

The first part of your ad that customers will read is your ad copy. Without a good headline, the remaining content of your advertisement will not mean much to viewers. In fact, if you do not have a good headline that catches the attention of viewers, they are not likely to even read through your entire ad.

A headline must attract a person’s interest. The headline should present to the reader the benefits of your products and services. Make the reader understand why what your business has to offer is of importance to them. What can your business offer to anyone reading your ad? If you do not show a viewer, why they need your products or services, they are not likely to visit your website or to take a look at your business.

Some ads are simply just text ads. However other ad sites and ad types may include graphic ads. If you can ad a picture to your ad, go ahead! People are often very visual and using a graphic is yet another way to attract people’s attention to your ad. You will also want to make sure that the headline of your ad stands out from the rest of the ad. You can place the headline in bold or italics for example.

Your ad should “show” viewers why they should consider your products and services over those of your competitors. What makes your business different or unique from others? You may be offering the same services or products as another business and therefore it is essential that your potential customers know why they should do business with you over someone else.

Before you even begin to develop and ad, you need to identify your target market. The market you will be attracting for your business will affect the content of your ad as well as where your ad will be placed. Take time to carefully place your online ads in locations where the people most likely to benefit from your products and services can be found. For example, if your business offers products for college students, advertise on websites for college students and other websites and forums that college students are most likely to visit.

The purpose of your ad need not be to make a sale. Your ad should be used to gain people’s interest so that they will visit your website. After visiting your website they may decide to make a purchase. Or your website may interest a person enough that they will visit again and may become a customer in the future.

You know the saying, “if at first you don’t succeed: try, try again.” Not every ad will bring great results. And not every location online where you place an ad will bring results either. You need to be flexible and willing to make changes to your ad campaign. If one idea does not work well, try another. Be creative!

In order to know how well your ads are working, you need to track those ads. When using online ads, it is important to track the results of each ad. This is the only way you will be able to see which ads are bringing the most visitors and the most results. If one ad isn’t working, try to develop a new ad. When some ad locations do not work, find some new websites and venues to place your ads. In time, you will find an advertising campaign that works well.

Creating online ads takes some time and work. You need to first decide who your target market will be. Come up with places where you would like to place your ads. Carefully plan out the ad copy. Remember that you want to attract people’s attention from the very beginning (headline). Make certain your ad copy shows people how they can benefit from your products or services.

Test your ads. Try out different colors and fonts. Rework your ad copy until it sounds great and brings in the most visitors to your website. Try placing ads in various locations to find those that bring the most results. Carefully plan your ads, but also have some fun doing so. Your creativity will pay off!

Update frequently

Like Google, users love fresh content. A stale website or blog isn’t going to gain many visitors unless your site is really, really good. Know the difference between data and information when it comes to your readers. Until processed, data is simply raw facts. Information, however, is the real goldmine to focus upon. Information is data that’s been processed for users. In a sense, data is akin to the ingredients for a good salad or a well done casserole, whereas information is the finished meal itself. Which one would your users rather have? The Internet is chock full of data just waiting to be turned into valuable information for your site’s visitors. This is the #1 secret of membership-driven websites and even books.

For example, you can learn how to get into copywriting, or even just how to become a better cook with free articles online, but many still buy books written by Bob Bly and Alton Brown, respectively.

Link wisely

Links are good, especially when they are links pointing to your website. However, do make sure you are linking to related sites. Visitors tend to trust sites that aren’t “digital islands”. Throw out the lifesaver to your visitors by linking to interesting content that you think will benefit them. Combined with good commentary, this can easily lead to you becoming the “expert” and information filter in your niche.

That said, be careful with your linkbacks. You may not wish to link to many sites that have unrelated content. It may be fair to link to a friend that has supported you and your website, but you don’t need to link to 2 million personal blogs simply because you know the blog’s owner.

Research your niche thoroughly and regularly

Keeping current is the name of the game, but how do you begin the journey? Research other sites within your niche, and pay attention to the details. What is the prevailing tone of the other sites? What are they doing, and is it successful for them? What news is being discussed on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis? If the niche has a parallel to the real world, are there any authorities that are making waves offline? Researching takes considerable time, but helps to set you apart from those that haven’t done their homework on the niche. Over time, the research you gain will bring you more visitors than if you just sit and piggyback off of what everyone else is saying and doing. Adapt some of the techniques of others if you feel they’re worth it, but don’t be afraid to bring your own flavor.

Go above and beyond

Researching your niche extensively should help you get over some common jitters, like fretting over PageRank. PageRank is only a small slice of the overall picture – if you’re worried about visibility, PageRank should be the last thing on your mind.

Your research into your niche should give you a good picture of what is working for the niche overall, what isn’t, and ways you can add value. Visitors like sites that go above and beyond just normal “reporting”. Release a video on your niche – if that’s something that would be interesting to your readers. If your site is technical, releasing code that does something a lot of people want to see can go a long way when it comes to sustaining traffic.

Looking at other sources of visibility also leaves questions for the site owner: do you have users searching for your blog in Technorati? If you are running a traditional website, how likely are your users to submit your site as a story on Digg? If a reader typed your website’s name into a site like Squidoo, what content would come up? All these questions are easily addressed once PageRank is put on the back burner where it belongs. After all, there’s so many elements of your website and its promotion that you can control; why worry about something out of your hands?

Go to the real trenches

Those at the top of their niche also know when to give back. If you’re aiming to be any type of subject matter expert, you’ll really want to check our relevant forums. What better way to move up and gain bonus points with existing and future visitors than if you’re on a forum sharing what you know? A quick search on Google should yield good results for forums relevant to your site’s niche.

If you can’t seem to find a solid community within your niche, take advantage of the void and build your own. Generate noise about it on your website, and frequent visitors to are bound to be curious.

Conclusion

It seems that any strategy of building up exposure online takes time, but those that are patient in this game truly come out on top. Building up a web presence isn’t going to be done overnight; there are some fortunate enough to do this, but don’t consider yourself entitled to overnight popularity. All good things come to those that wait, link popularity and site visibility included.

When not plotting niche domination, Isabella Murphy writes about small business, accounting, personal finance, and more on Keeping You Honest.

From: EmailLabs
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 1:00 PM

I saw this blog but wasn’t sure who had posted it. http://www.howtoadvertise.net/white-label-bulk-email-providers.html

I wish I had figured it out earlier as the pricing you mention is incorrect. It is $250 for every ten sub-account, which breaks down to $25 per client. It isn’t $250 per client. That’s obviously my fault for not being clear when we spoke, so I apologize for that.

Out of curiosity, do you guys or your clients do anything with web analytics, landing pages, pay-per-click or deliverability monitoring? I ask because we are releasing our HQ product on the 15th and all of this functionality is going to be integrated into one dashboard with an all-encompassing pricing model based on the seat license concept. It’s a first-of-its-kind product in this industry and is going to offer companies a powerful way to standardize tracking and reporting and allow them to make actionable decisions based on the subsequent analyses. Currently clients are required to deal with multiple vendors to have access to the same data and functionality, which means multiple points of contact for support as well as multiple reports showing disparate metrics. With HQ it is centralized tracking, reporting and support. A true one-stop-shop to consolidate your digital marketing efforts.

Sorry I was ambiguous on pricing up-front as I think we are a great solution for you.

As a web developer in the DFW area, I’ve been getting lots and lots of requests from my small business clients to do email marketing. I’ve been handling those clients myself using a piece of Windows based bulk email software called Groupmail and my own email server, but the maintenance has grown beyond my capabilities.

Rather than host the service myself, I started looking around for bulk email services that I could re-brand and resell to my clients. I would help my customers with copywriting, html services, etc., and I would apply a reasonable markup to the product.

Definitions for this report

White label bulk email provider: A bulk email service that makes an effort to conceal their own brand from all but the most technically savvy end customers. Major stumbling blocks in providing a true white label solution were:

• Unsubscribe URLs,
• Individual account management URLs,
• And mail server “from” domain names.

Footer: CAN-SPAM requirements dictate that bulk email should provide a way for recipients to opt-out of future communication, and should also include a physical address for the sender. This is most often accomplished with a few lines of text at the end of the message.

Ratings

As an after-thought to writing this article, I decided to add a ratings system. I scored each provider on a scale of 1-5 based on their white label capabilities, their overall pricing, and their ease of use (including web sites, customer service, and responsiveness). Scores in each category were then totaled for a possible 15 points.

It is important to note, however, that I am trying to achieve a very specific goal with these bulk email providers. I want to be able to act as a middle man for their services, maintain a healthy profit margin, and interact with their systems on my customers’ behalf. My ratings system is based on the needs I am addressing for myself and is not applicable to other ways that these products could be used.

What I told the email marketing companies

In order to judge the companies on equal footing, I had to establish a baseline for requesting information. Nothing is simpler than the truth, so I gave the same details to all of the companies I called.

I run a web development firm located in Dallas, TX. I’ve been getting a lot of requests for email marketing and would like to contract with a provider that can offer white label email marketing services that I can re-brand and resell to my clients. Top concerns are price and true white labeling capabilities (custom unsubscribe urls, generic client login pages, etc.). Most of my customers will be small businesses with between 1000 and 2000 email addresses on their lists and will probably send out one to two times a month.

The reviews

emailbrain

URL: http://www.emailbrain.com
Product: Reseller Agencies
Pricing:

250 – yearly for footer re-branding
250 – yearly URL masking
20,000 minimum – $323/6 months (rates published on their site).

Notes/Opinions

I really liked emailbrain – they had almost everything I was looking for in a white label bulk email provider. I was a little disappointed that they were charging annual fees for the footer re-branding and the URL masking, but I could live with it if I had to. Their web site was also very intuitive to navigate. If I couldn’t find better pricing, they would definitely be at the top of my list.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 5/4/5
Overall: 14 of 15

iContact

URL: http://www.icontact.com/
Product: Agency Edition
Pricing: 250 setup fee plus negotiated bulk per email rate.

Notes/Opinions

iContact stands above most of the other bulk email providers because of their pricing model and the usability of their web site. So far as pricing is concerned, the $250 one-time setup fee is minimal and the bulk per-email send rate is excellent, even with the relatively low volume I was projecting. I found their web site highly intuitive and their only major competition was emailbrain.

Where iContact is a little lacking is in their white label re-branding. Aside from cost, my biggest concern in this business is that a customer will bypass my service and contract directly with my supplier if they find out who I’m going with. iContact does not make use of footer re-branding or domain masking to white label their product, but they do offer a co-branded solution.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 3/5/5
Overall: 13 of 15

emma

URL: http://www.myemma.com
Product: Emma Agency
Pricing:

Setup charge – private label setup 1500.00 includes Agency setup plus one account
25% off the published per email rate or better
One time 100.00 setup fee for new accounts.
.0225 per email (50/month minimum)

Notes/Opinions

They were there when I called. Normally not that big of a deal, but if you read the notes from previous companies this is pretty hard to come by!

Interface is a little blah, but the customer service was fantastic and I think they would be helpful and available once accounts were setup. Thanks Theresa!

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 4/3/3
Overall: 10 of 15

EmailLabs

URL: http://www.emaillabs.com/
Product: Email Marketing Agency Edition
Pricing: Measured in CPM – Cost Per Thousand emails sent and number of client accounts created.

500/month up to 10,000 emails
625/month up to 25,000 emails
250/month per 10 sub accounts

Notes/Opinions

Thanks to Ken for taking the time to talk to me. Although it looked like EmailLabs has a decent white label solution, I was turned off by the charge for each account. $250 isn’t a lot of money, but not every customer I sign will warrant the cost. What if I want to setup a trial account for someone, or what if I want an account for myself?

Update 11/09/07: After posting this article, EmailLabs contacted me regarding the setup fee for accounts under their agency program. Their per-account-setup pricing is actually 250 for ten accounts which drastically alters my original scoring and comments. I don’t think it’s right to re-write this review since communication was part of the judging criteria, but I also don’t want to post bad information. Here’s a link to the email from EmailLabs clarifying the situation.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 4/2/3
Overall: 9 of 15

ExactTarget

URL: http://email.exacttarget.com
Product: Agency Partnership
Pricing: Pricing unavailable – by quote only. There was some reference made to the purchase of a “licenses” which I assume means that I will have to pay a per-client fee in addition to an actual cost per email. The only pricing I was able to walk away with was 2 licenses – 5000/year, but I don’t have nearly enough information about what that figure will buy.

Notes/Opinions

ExactTarget was difficult to nail down on almost every aspect. I didn’t get the impression that they were designed for resellers, but rather for “the big boys” of marketing. If you’re a company like Travelocity and want to handle your email marketing in-house but don’t want to maintain your own hardware, these guys might be for you. It sounded like each setup would be unique to the customer, hence all the information gathering before price quotes. While this might mean excellent customer service for the larger companies, it also means that I would probably be hanging on hold or waiting for my sales rep to call me back while they handled bigger fish.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 5/1/2
Overall: 7 of 15

BlueHornet

URL: http://www.bluehornet.com
Product: Possible white label program – not sure because the answering service had limited information.
Pricing: 3500 setup fee plus 350/customer and 500/month for up to 100,000 emails.

Notes/Opinions

I initially reached an answering service that asked a LOT of questions about how I run my business (volume, location, etc.) and said “someone will contact you on Tuesday”. I thought to myself “Awesome – when they call on Tuesday I’ll tell them who I went with.”

I did finally get a call back from Mike in the sales department with some pricing. I found out if you tell the operator “I’m making buying decisions today,” you get a faster response.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 2/2/2
Overall: 6 of 15

VerticalResponse

URL: http://www.verticalresponse.com/
Product: VerticalResponse for Partners
Pricing: ala carte style

1000 setup fee
500 to link multiple accounts together
300 for shared credits
300-500? for domain branding
300 annual renewal fee
.015/email

Notes/Opinions

I spoke to Nick in the sales department, who said that pricing per email was the same as on the web site. Emails are sent from vertical response URLs, so there’s an issue with white label re-branding. They have whitelabled the sending for few clients, but it’s a specialty setup procedure, and the sales operator wasn’t sure they were offering it as an option any longer. I seriously doubt it would be a simple proces.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 2/2/1
Overall: 5 of 15

Cooler Email

URL: http://www.cooleremail.com
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

When I called the operator tried REALLY hard to get me to email them rather than talk to them. That was weird. Everyone was busy, so I’ll have to wait for a call back.

Someone did call me back later in the day, but they had to refer my agency questions to someone else and have them call me back.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

Responsys

URL: http://www.responsys.com/
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

Sales Department was unavailable during business hours

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

Constant Contact

URL: http://www.constantcontact.com
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

Sales Department was unavailable during business hours

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

1. Avoid HTML style e-mails and attachments whenever possible. Nothing gets a better response for me than a short, to the point, plain-text message.
2. Be personable. Approach your audience like you would a new friend. People respond best when they’re treated with respect and kindness.
3. Don’t send messages to anyone who doesn’t want to receive them. Providing an easy way to unsubscribe from your recurring mailer will save you a lot of heartache and angry customers.
4. Avoid doubletalk and corporate speak – these are major turnoffs for readers. Most people don’t read their own company memos, let alone random press releases from a stranger.
5. Don’t write too much. Your audience’s time is valuable and you should respect it. If you can’t make your point in five to ten sentences, take it back to the drawing board and try again.
6. Automate responses. If you have a way for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, why not send them an automated response? Why not two or four? With the right email program, you can schedule a full sales cycle of introduction, explanation of services, special offer and a follow up and have it run completely unattended!
7. Include a specific call to action. After you make your case or present your offer, don’t forget to ask for the sale! Something as simple as “visit our website now for 15% off this product” can mean the difference between success or failure.
8. Avoid unnecessary punctuation and capitalization. YOU DON’T WANT TO END UP IN THE READER’S JUNK MAILBOX!!!
9. Provide something of value to your audience. Give them a reason to stay on your mailing list other than “buy my product.” Offer helpful advice, discounts, or something of value that they will look forward to.
10. Personalize your emails whenever possible. I found that an email that starts out with “Dear firstname,” will be on average 15-30% more effective than a generic message.
11. Back up your emails with a web site. There’s nothing worse than getting your customer fired up from an email without having an outlet to learn more. Always direct your customer back to your web site for more information or to close an immediate sale! (Yes, I know this is #11 in my ten point list, but it was too important to leave out.)

If you’re doing an online newsletter html can work for you, but you have to be careful. Use in-line CSS and a limited number of images to reduce the annoying X’s. Here’s an example from one of my own sites to show you what I mean.

Personally though, I highly recommend using plain text instead of html. It’s less eye catching, but it’s also less likely to get caught in a spam filter or ignored as an advertisement. For myself, I’ll read anything pertinent and interesting to me – whether it’s written in html or not, and I give my audience the same consideration.

The good people at Danifer Web Services (a web publishing firm based out of Dallas, Texas) have released DeliveryConfirm.com, an online read receipt utility, to alert you when your messages have been read. DeliveryConfirm is a simple online utility that you can use to create and send email, and get a notification when it has been read.

The trick is that instead of sending the whole message, you send just a brief summary and DeliveryConfirm includes a special link and password. In order for your recipient to read the whole message and get any attachments, they have to follow the link and use the password. As soon as they do, you get an alert telling you that your message has been accessed.

It’s a surprisingly simple utility with a wide range of uses. Although it was developed for the freight forwarding industry, I could see it as an effective solution for any business that needs to know whether their emails are getting to the right place.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you check it out today.

The concept is not new, and you’ve probably accepted the terms of service or agreed to a company’s conditions online before when signing up for a new service. The aim of SignatureConfirm it seems is to allow individuals the same convenience and utility when they might not otherwise be able to incorporate it into their own website.

At the very least, this concept eliminates the need for an individual to create a contract, fax or email it as a .pdf, have the signing part review it, and wait for them to sign and send it back.

With SignatureConfirm, the online signature process is a fast as an email response.

How it Works.

This part is pretty straightforward (which I like). The site isn’t trying to be a one stop solution for everything, but rather seems to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. This is an approach that I really appreciate in my online applications!

1. Sign up for a free account,
2. Type in or cut and paste the language of the contract you want signed,
3. Send via email to the recipient,
4. They get an encrypted URL and password that they can use to access the agreement (they don’t have to sign up for an account which is nice),
5. They can view the agreement as you typed it and can choose to digitally sign it.
6. Both parties receive confirmation emails during each step of the process and both the signed and unsigned contracts are available for download in .pdf format.

All in all, a good solution if you’re needing to collect online signatures and I can think of dozens of smaller and individual companies that could use it to streamline their contracts process.

Question
How long does it take for my new website to get some traffic?

Answer
You probably won’t see much return on the things you post for at least a month. That’s why we want to get things up sooner rather than later so we can see the traffic as soon as possible.

Question
After looking at my Webalizer statistics, it looks like I’m getting a lot more traffic than I thought. Is this accurate?

Answer
These statistics include a lot of automated search traffic. This comes from the search engines like Google and Yahoo! scanning the site to determine what to return in their search results. A good rule of thumb is to assume that anywhere between one-third and two-thirds of your traffic is automated rather than human eyes on the screen.

“If I want searches such as “Southlake marketing” or Colleyville marketing” to lead to our site, do I have to incorporate those specific terms into my document, or is that just something you can register?”

The real answer behind this is too complicated for an email. It’s a skill like any other that has to be developed with time and practice. Instead of overwhelming her, I tried to lay out a sort of checklist that included some of the major elements.

These all have a similar theme, so it won’t be too hard for them to apply the theory to other aspects of their writing that I didn’t mention.

Here’s my reply:

Getting search phrases is a little tricky, and there’s almost an art form to it. You can’t just register a search phrase (well, you sort of can but it’s expensive). Instead, we’re trying to produce a niche-market website that the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) will pick up on naturally. The term for this is “organic marketing.”

That doesn’t mean you don’t have any control. There are a lot of little things you can do with your writing to help get the search phrases you want. Here are a few:

• Write your article and then decide what search phrases you think people would use to find it. Go back through your work to make sure you use those same phrases in your writing.
• Don’t target overly-generic search phrases. The search term “marketing” has a lot more competition than “marketing consultants in Southlake”
• Title your article with keywords that you think people will be searching for.
• Target a niche market. This is why I think it’s important to keep all of your local articles on the site – you’re targeting the DFW niche.

You can get caught up in doing too many things to get search engine rankings. Just keep in mind that you’re writing for other humans to read, not for machines. Don’t get carried away with tips like the above. Instead, write for the purpose of providing value to your reader and you’ll be fine.

Her goals are to build traffic, make the site more accessible, and start generating revenue. Here are the tips I shared with her:

Site Mechanics

Consider a content management system for the front page so you can control the front page content. For CMS’s I like Drupal, but not as much as I like WordPress. I’m not 100% on moving the forum to the background, but it would be nice to be able to control the front page content. Since you’re using vbulletin, you might also consider vbadvanced as your CMS. My wife ran www.scraplove.com for years with this setup and really liked it.

Marketing Strategy

• Post everyday and reply to every post that gets made. A lot of people forget or never do this one and wonder why their communities won’t grow. It’s a personal time commitment, and you get out what you put in. Try to think of it as an investment. If you’re having trouble monitoring new posts, remember that vbulletin can generate it’s own RSS feed. You can use a program like Feedreader to give you a list of everything new. It can take as little as five minutes to scan 100+ posts a day with an RSS reader.
• Define a budget – even if it’s $0. You need to know how much you have available to spend for prizes and things like that. If you already have a bit of traffic, consider monetizing with Google AdSense, YPN, or an affiliate program. If this generates any cashflow, you can roll it back into a development budget.
• A big advantage an already established site is your existing memberlist. I suggest you start with a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter to your current subscribers. If you know of any other small to medium sized forums with a similar (but not competing) audiences, see if they’ll mention you in their newsletter in exchange for a mention in yours. A newsletter is a good way to announce new contests, changes, and goings on and will motivate people to get involved.
• What I like about forums is their ability to produce search engine friendly content on a daily basis without you having to do it all yourself (there’s only so many posts you can write in a day). How about a contest? You can give a prize to the highest poster, the best tutorial writer, etc. Prizes can be as cheap as a little recognition but I find something like a T-shirt or a little gadget works well. High activity on a forum draws in new search traffic and keeps users involved. This is an excellent example of activity breeds activity.
• The other nice thing about forums is that if you build the community well, you end up having a little army of people willing to work for free! If you have members that would do it, get them to include links to your forum in their signatures on other message boards and other websites. Give them ownership of parts of your site in some way to make them feel like a part of the site. Moderator privileges, special jobs, or dedicated forum areas are a good way to do this. Again, there’s only so much you can do in a day and the more people you have helping you, the better.
• For link exchanges, I’ve been successful with this idea. Basically, you give people prime ad space on your site with a rotating banner. In exchange they post a static link on the front page of their site. This can be highly effective if you can attract the audience
• For the paid stuff, like pay-per-click ads, I would hold off until you’ve exhausted the other options. Websites can be really profitable because they have such low overhead. Don’t introduce a paid service or dedicate a lot of money unless there’s no other alternative.

• Paid advertising (e.g. sponsored search, contextual or graphical advertising)
• Actively getting links to your site on other sites
• Outbound emailsViral efforts (e.g. Tell A Friend, bookmarking)
• Organic search engine optimization (SEO)
• Offline activities (e.g. mailers, PR, local ads, etc.)

Website buyers will sometimes request to see a website’s raw logs before the will close a deal. So, what are these logs and how are they used?

Site logs (also called raw logs or access logs) contain information on every transaction that your website processes, as well as the date, time, amount of data transferred, where the request came from and more.

Every time an html page is downloaded, every picture that is requested, every request that your website receives and everything it sends out to the world is listed in the access logs.

Not everyone is going to ask for these, but they’re important to me when I buy a website because 1) they’re very tedious to try and fake and 2) I can look through them to see if you’re telling the truth about your traffic sources. These logs are often used by programs like Webalizer and AWstats (provided by many hosting companies) to create fancy charts and graphs so you can see how your site is doing traffic-wise.

Here are two lines from one of my access logs. One day worth of logs on a small site might contain a thousand lines like this:

14 – IP Address Removed – – [27/Jan/2007:23:37:54 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 7461 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=GWh&q=free++rpg&btnG=Search” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9”

The red portion in the first line shows you I got a hit from Google. Paste it into your browser and look for my site, 1km1kt.net in the results. The blue portion in the second line tells me that this page was requested by a search engine bot and not a human. Both are nice pieces of data telling me that Google is indexing my site and where it is appearing in the search results.

Where can I get the logs?

Good question. Assuming you’re on a shared hosting plan, I would hope that your provider has a control panel you can use to access them and download them in a text file (that’s all they are – basically big text files). If your host uses CPanel for your backend control, look for something labeled “Raw Log Manager” or similar.

You might not get anyone else asking for these, and I only do because there’s no guarantee that people selling websites are representing them accurately. It’s a buyer beware market, and due diligence is extremely important because once money changes hands on a website, there’s not much a buyer can do.

The goal of any marketing campaign varies based on the needs of the business owner behind it. In this case, the client sells insurance policies in Grapevine, Texas and wants to focus on auto insurance for teen drivers. His product has three features that influence his most effective advertising strategy:

1. Insurance is a universal requirement for most of the visitors who will come to his website.
2. The insurance industry can be highly competitive.
3. His product is not unique and the primary selling points will be cost, quality of service, and name recognition.

With this in mind, we’ve been working on tailoring an advertising campaign designed to generate new sales leads and bring new insurance customers to his door. For his product, I believe that passive email marketing will yield the greatest results.

Active Selling

To actively sell a product means that your goal is to seek out individuals and a) make them aware that your products exists, and b) convince them that they need to buy it.

Active selling is most effective for new products that people may not be aware of – a new service your company offers, a new invention, or a new website that’s just been released. Actively selling a product is considerably more difficult than passive selling because it’s hard to convince people that they need a product they’ve never heard of!

Some examples of active selling include:

• Cold-calls and phone solicitations,
• sales pitch websites,
• bulk spam mail.

Passive Selling

On the other hand, passive selling is considerably easier and often produces better results. Passively selling a product means that your user base is already aware of what you have to offer, and your only goal is to stand out in their mind as a preferred source to acquire it.

In the example above, the vast majority of Americans need insurance at some point in their lives. By sending out helpful emails related to the insurance industry on a regular basis, my client continually reminds his base that he is an excellent source for insurance and that he is available to help them when needed. All he has to do is be ready to answer the phone when it rings!

Some examples of passive selling include:

• Newsletter mailers,
• follow up phone calls and sales visits,
• content rich websites.

How can I use this to improve my sales?

The difference between the two selling techniques can be subtle and is reflected in things like the wording sent out in newsletter campaigns and the type of website you maintain.

If you’re selling a product that’s not a new idea (real estate, insurance, auto sales, financial consulting, etc.) consider increasing the amount of effort you spend to passively sell your product and see if your results improve. Here are a few simple ideas to improve your passive selling efforts:

• Maintain a content rich website that lends credibility to your expertise. When people shop for your product, they will probably have questions that need to be answered. If you have a website that provides those answers up front, they will be more likely to buy from you.
• Keep in touch with your clients on a regular schedule. Use a calendar or some automated program to plan follow up visits and regular emails to touch base. Providing your existing clients with useful bits of information in your field can be an excellent way to stand out when they need your service or when they need to make a recommendation to someone else.

Here are the details:

PR3 – Business networking site – All original content

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is a content driven web site related to small business marketing and networking.

Content

This site contains 19 professionally written; original articles related to small business marketing and networking that have not been republished or distributed elsewhere.

The contributing author is available to do follow-up work on a paid basis, but that is not included as part of this auction.

Traffic

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is fully indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It averages about 20-25 unique visitors per day*.

You can view traffic statistics at:
http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/stats/
username: guest
password: guest

* Our traffic numbers are not inflated with bot visits, paid traffic, or links from our other websites. Our statistics program does not count the majority of visits that would artificially inflate traffic.

Revenue

We started using Yahoo!’s YPN program to monetize MarketingSmallBusiness.net in September. Earnings are as follows:

Sep 2006 – $0.09
Oct 2006 – $6.79
Through Nov 17, 2006 – $2.38

You can view a screenshot of the most recent earnings at:
http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/ypnstats.jpg

Domain

The domain name is registered through GoDaddy. It was registered as a new domain on 7/14/2006 and is included as part of this auction.

Backend

This site is powered by a fairly standard WordPress installation. All content is contained within the WordPress database.

Terms

The buyer will receive a copy of the site contents, database, and domain name. The winning bidder will be responsible for their own hosting and moving the website to a new home. I’ll be happy to set up one year’s worth of hosting and move the site for you for a one-time fee of $200.

As in the real estate business, many investors have realized that developed web site properties can be purchased for relatively small amounts of money, improved over a short period of time, and either resold for a profit or held to provide a passive income stream.

If you’re interested in flipping a web site for profit, keep the following in mind:

The Value of Experience

The saying in the real estate business when it comes to flipping houses is that you make your money when you purchase the property – not when you sell it. The same is true with websites. When flipping web sites, always look for those that can be purchased with minimal investment and turned for maximum profit. Investors with experience in online marketing and web site ownership will have the greatest advantage because they’ll have a better idea of a site’s profit potential based on their own experience.

Start Small

If you’re looking for your first web site to flip, start small. Investing a small amount your first time out is a great way to minimize your risk. Use the profits from your first small flip to finance your next larger one.

Go With What You Know

Look for web sites that appeal to you. The key element in a web site flip is the investor, and if you have no interest in the product it will be difficult to improve or even maintain the site. Start out by looking at sites themed toward your profession, your hobbies, your pets, or your social life. Having experience in the same genre as your website automatically gives you an advantage in making it more profitable.

Ask Questions

When purchasing a web site, it is important to learn as much about the site as possible before investing. Ask the seller how much money the site is making currently, the number of unique visitors to the site for the last three to six months, the number of page views per day, the hosting arrangements and the bandwidth requirements of the site. Consider using our web site buyer’s checklist to make sure you’re asking the right questions

Watch Out For Inflated Traffic

When it comes to traffic, more is better. Watch carefully for web site owners that inflate traffic statistics artificially by manipulating log files, counting web spider and bot visits, high traffic incoming links that will expire after the site is purchased, and large amounts of paid traffic over short periods of time

Get the Business Plan

If you’re purchasing a web site that already turns a profit, make sure to get all of the information you’ll need from the buyer to duplicate their results. Are they using banner ads or text links from another source? Are they contributing regular articles? Do they purchase paid traffic from a search engine? What keywords do they target? Any reputable seller will be happy to share this information with you when they pass on the site. Often, it’s best to have them lay out a business plan on paper. Don’t be afraid to question them about any part of the process and follow up with them later on if you have a question.

Move the Domain Name

Ownership is nine tenths of the law. Always transfer the domain name to a registrar account under your own control. Never leave it in the original owner’s name.

Previous Engagements

Be sure to ask the original site owner if there are any previous engagements you’ll be expected to honor once you purchase the site. Think about things like ongoing contests with promised prizes, memberships that have already been paid, text links that have already been purchased, etc. Be sure to ask all the questions outlined in our buyer’s checklist.

Use Your Network to Promote the Site

If you’re flipping multiple websites or if you own a network of web sites already, you have a distinct advantage over your competitors! Use sites in the same theme to boost traffic, search results, and reputation while waiting for your sites to sell. Avoid artificially inflating traffic statistics, but use multiple sites to promote those in your own network. Purchasing and flipping multiple websites in the same theme can add instant value to each of the sites involved. You may even consider consolidating content and membership to a single site.

Improve the Web Site

Lastly, before purchasing any website you should have a clear idea of how you are going to improve it. Do you have a plan to increase advertising revenue or bring in new members? Do you have an affiliate program membership that would work well with your potential purchase? Do you have an existing website you can use to boost traffic to the new purchase or vice versa? Whatever your plan, make sure it is outlined carefully and within your means. Avoid purchasing a website simply because it looks cool and figuring out how to flip it later on.

1. What is the purchase price of the web site?
2. What domain names are included?
3. Will the domain names be transferred to the new owner?
4. What are the traffic statistics of the web site?
5. How many unique visitors a day/month does it receive?
6. How many page views?
7. What portion of the traffic is artificial (bots and search spiders)
8. Where does the site’s traffic originate from?
9. Will there be substantial changes to incoming links once the site is purchased?
10. How old is the website?
11. When was the domain registered?
12. When was content first placed on the site?
13. How is the web site being hosted?
14. How much bandwidth does it consume?
15. What programming language(s) does it use?
16. Is there a database involved?
17. Is there an existing member database?
18. Is contact information available for members?
19. Does the site make money?
20. How does the site make money?
21. How long has it been profitable?
22. What previous arrangements exist with other vendors?

I use snapcheck.com to locate expired domains for my projects. Try to look for ones that are more than two years old and have some incoming links. This can be a trial and error process as expired domains become more and more popular with domain name resellers, but I’ve managed to manually pick up a few good ones here and there.

Here’s a good tool from webconfs.com that will give you an idea of how old a website is (when it’s first content was published) and ties into the Internet Archive to show you what content was posted there originally.

Tip: Search engines are concerned both with the age of a website and its current length of registration. Consider registering your domain name for five or ten years to maximize its appeal.

1. Use a robots.txt file to close off your site until it’s ready to open.
2. Build some content and back links before you open the site.
3. Link to it from several supporting web sites in your own network.
4. Post comments and link to it from related blog posts and forums.
5. Purchase some text links on related blogs.
6. Send out a newsletter announcement to your subscribers about the new site.
7. Ask for feedback and thank your members for contributing.
8. Host a contest or giveaway to build interest.
9. Start a pay per click advertising campaign to promote the contest.
10. Collect email addresses and stay in touch with new members via a newsletter.

And most importantly: Always present a positive attitude to your visitors.

The text link calculator makes use of TLA’s proprietary algorithm for determining the value of a static text link on a given website. Factors in the equation include:

• The URL of the site,
• Its category,
• the number of links to be sold,
• whether the link is singular or site wide,
• and the link’s placement on the page.

As an added bonus to calculating links, TLA has included a nifty little heat map similar to the Google Heatmap published by Google.com for their publisher program.

Not surprisingly, my research shows that sites with the highest payout/cost are those concerned with gambling, finances, real estate and the other usual suspects.

I’ve recently signed up and purchased some text links with TLA and have found that their calculator was off by only a few dollars so far as the pricing was concerned. The link I purchased on talkr.com for this site cost me $50/month for placement on the top of the right hand column. For the same placement, the calculator has them pegged at $40/month, so for a free tool the calculator wasn’t off by an extreme amount.

If you haven’t signed up for text-link-ads.com yet, I highly recommend checking out their $100 instant coupon with the purchase of $125 in links. With that coupon you can sign up, do the first month as a test and only be out of pocket $25. Here’s my affiliate banner for the coupon or you can go to $100 in FREE Links.

Enter my new favorite tool, FeedReader. FeedReader is a free, fast, and streamlined feed aggregator that polls my designated RSS feeds and aggregates (or collects) the results in an easily readable and sortable format that I can scan in just a few minutes. It sits quietly in my taskbar tray collecting updates and even alerts me when something new pops up.

Because almost all of the content management systems I use to power my sites generate an RSS feed, I can collect and monitor multiple sites quickly and with relative ease.

Feed aggregating is an excellent management tool if you run one or a hundred websites that need tending to, and I recommend FeedReader as the software to do it.

Screenshots