ESSENTIAL
ELEMENTS
OF WEB
SITE SUCCESS FOR HYPNOTISTS
CAROL
DENICKER
North
Shore Hypnosis
ESSENTIAL
ELEMENTS
OF WEB
SITE SUCCESS FOR HYPNOTISTS
CAROL
DENICKER
North
Shore Hypnosis
|
To receive the slide show (with all the resources and links) from my workshop at the 2008 NGH Convention, please email Carol Denicker at: cdenicker@northshorehypnosis.com
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER FOR CERTIFIED HYPNOTISTS TO DISPLAY ON THEIR HOME PAGES: The services I render are held out to the public as non-therapeutic hypnotism, defined as the use of hypnosis to inculcate positive thinking and the capacity for self-hypnosis. I do not represent my services as any form of medical, behavioral or mental health care, and despite research to the contrary, by law I may make no health benefit claims for my services. "As a consulting hypnotist, I utilize non-therapeutic hypnotism to help my clients inculcate positive thinking and the capacity for self-hypnosis wherein I coach, teach, guide, instruct, or train motivated individuals to achieve their goals." "Hypnotism for medical or psychological problems
requires a referral from a licensed practitioner of those healing arts.
It Is Time to Rethink How You Promote Your Hypnosis Practice! Perhaps
you've been concerned by a drop in the number of clients you see, or maybe
you've failed to generate the amount of clients you want. If so, it might
be time to rethink how and where you market your practice. The fact
is, many people are changing how they search for services. A growing
percentage are searching the World Wide Web. I know I do! It's still
important to have a listing in the yellow pages and to have ads in certain
publications, but the "Internet" is here, and nothing is
the same. Why not promote your services to the world instead of just the
limited area your local yellow pages and newspapers reach?
If
you have the time and patience you can design, publish and promote the
web site yourself. If you do, you'll save a lot of money, I did it and
so can you! Being your own "web master" puts you in control.
It allows you to update information as needed.
If
you'd rather not, or for whatever reason feel you cannot create your own
web site, then by all means, hire a web designer to create at least
a simple web site for you. If it lists your name, contact information,
credentials and/or testimonials and list your services, it is a good marketing
tool. If it has your photo and some interesting graphics, all the better.
There are a variety of affordable marketing packages on the Internet for
you to choose from. Your web site can always be changed as your needs and
resources change. Just get yourself out there, be found on the major
search engines and you'll soon have a steady flow of visitors to your site.
MEGA
TRAFFIC MADE EASY
CONTENTS SECTION
ONE: PREPARING YOUR SITE FOR THE STAMPEDE
SECTION
TWO: OPENING THE FLOODGATES - FREE MARKETING TACTICS
SECTION
THREE: LET IT RAIN! - LOW COST POWER PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES
SECTION
FOUR: NEWSLETTER PUBLISHING - CREATE YOUR OWN MEGA TRAFFIC MACHINE
SECTION
FIVE: E-BOOK PUBLISHING - THE HOTTEST INTERNET MARKETING TECHNIQUE
SECTION
SIX: THE UNSTOPPABLE MACHINE - ADVANCED METHODS OF MULTIPLYING YOUR TRAFFIC
SECTION
SEVEN: THE ULTIMATE GOAL - TURNING THOSE HITS INTO DOLLARS
Gearing
Up Your Site for Mega Traffic
If you arrived at a hotel,
and found that the room you'd been given had not been cleaned since the
last visitor stayed in it, the decor was drab, you couldn't turn the radio
off, and the water was leaking, would you stay in that hotel ever again?
Probably not. In fact, you'd probably leave the hotel in disgust.
The question is: do we treat
our website visitors like that? Or do we give them a pleasant and comfortable
stay at our website, which makes them want to return?
This article is the first chapter
of the book simply because, before you can have mega traffic to your website,
you must be able to accommodate your visitors and make their stay at your
site a pleasant one. This article will focus on some of the common mistakes
website owners make, and how to avoid them.
Download time - keep it
under 20 seconds!
We have not yet reached the
time when everyone can access the Internet at lightening speed - the majority
of us are still using modems ranging in speed from 28k to 56k. This means
that your super-cool website filled with the latest Shockwave plug-in graphics,
Java applets and huge flashing graphics, may take so long to load into
the visitor's browser that they simply lose patience with your site and
surf elsewhere. Remember that Internet users are an impatient lot who demand
results now (and I include myself in this description!). Generally speaking,
if your page takes longer than 20 seconds to download using a typical 56k
speed connection, it's too long and you will lose many visitors who are
too impatient to wait.
Of course, there are always
exceptions to any rule, and if you do have to have a page that takes a
long time to download, make sure you warn the visitor by having a message
right at the top of your page, something like: "Please be patient as this
page may take a while to download."
A flash page - is it necessary?
I have seen many sites whose
front page consists of a flashy graphic, and a link which says "Click here
to enter". This is called a splash page. In theory, splash pages are said
to make web sites look professional, but in practice, they may be losing
you visitors. Remember I said that surfers are an impatient lot? Well,
it's true. Studies have shown that you could be losing 20% of your visitors
who couldn't be bothered to click past your splash page. Ask yourself whether
that splash page is essential, and if it isn't, you may be better off leaving
it out.
Java..Flash, Shock
You may have heard of Flash
and Shockwave - these are called browser plug-ins and they are basically
programs that, when added to your browser, allows your site to do all kinds
of weird and wonderful things with graphics. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm
not saying you shouldn't use these plug-ins - I have seen some really great
stuff that takes advantage of these programs. However, there are a couple
of things you should bear in mind before deciding to use them. Firstly,
not everyone has Shockwave or Flash installed in their browser, so if a
part of your site depends on them having the right plug-in, the visitor
will simply not see your artwork! Second, graphics made with these browser
plug-ins usually take longer to load. Will your visitors wait? Finally,
some plug-ins actually freeze the browser altogether while they load. This
can be annoying to your visitors, and so my advice is to give them fair
warning before you unleash your flashy graphics onto them. The same applies
to Java. Java is a programming language which can make websites do some
clever stuff. Java code comes in little packages called applets. Unfortunately,
while Java applets are loading, many browsers freeze up ... again, a possible
annoyance to your visitors. These are just some things to bear in mind
while designing your site.
Track your visitors
This is a vital part of Internet
marketing and one we will discuss again later in this e-book. Once visitors
to your site come streaming in, it is essential that you know where they
are coming from, so you can channel your marketing efforts into the areas
that bring the best results. Tracking your visitors means much more than
a simple counter on your site - all that tells you is how many people have
visited your site. However, you need to know where these people have come
from, and which pages in your site they visited. If your Web host cannot
provide these statistics for you, you can use a great facility called Extreme
Tracking (http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/).
Do
you want your site to be as popular as Pepsi or Coke?
If I mention the word "cola",
what is the first thing that springs into your head? Assuming you haven't
rushed off to get yourself a drink, you're probably thinking of Coca-Cola
or Pepsi ... even though there are literally hundreds of other cola drinks
on the market.
So why did you think of those
two products first? Because, whether you like it or not, the hundreds of
millions of dollars that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have spent over the years
building their brands have paid off.
The key word here is brand.
Branding is what differentiates one product from another of a similar make.
For instance, what is it that differentiates Kellogg's corn flakes from
the other corn flake packets on the supermarket shelf? Apart from minor
changes in the ingredients, the only thing that is actually different is
the name - the "brand".
A good brand name is a powerful
force in economics. It often means that the company who owns it can charge
more for their products because consumers perceive the branded product
to be of better quality than an unbranded or rival product. Branding is
also what causes people to think of Coca-Cola or Pepsi whenever "cola"
is mentioned.
Does branding matter on the
Internet? Indeed it does! In this article I'm going to concentrate on how
to turn your site into a brand, and how this can increase your traffic.
Domain Name Branding
Let's face it, if you have
a URL that looks like this...
www.veryfreespace.com/~dontwannaspendmuch/onmysite.html
...then it is going to be almost
impossible for you to brand your URL, wouldn't you agree? However, for
under $0.25 a day you can get yourself a domain name that can be "branded".
As an example, let's take this
e-book, "Mega Traffic Made Easy". To sell it I bought the domain name www.megatrafficnadeeasy.com
. Why did I do this? First, it's nice and short. Second, it corresponds
to the product I am trying to sell; and finally, it's dead easy to remember!
Assuming they can remember the name of the product, someone who wants to
get back to my site but didn't bookmark the URL will stand a reasonably
good chance of remembering the address www.northshorehypnosis.com. However,
with...
www.veryfreespace.com/~dontwannaspendmuch/onmysite.html
...they don't stand a chance!
The moral of the story? Get
a domain name! And pick the domain name that can be most easily associated
with your product. Ask your friends and colleagues what domain names they
would try out if they wanted to find your product on the Internet. You'd
be surprised how many people type in domain names directly into their browser.
Site Branding
So people come to your site.
Often, this is not enough. You want them to return again and again. As
we have already discussed, one of the ways of doing this is to make it
easy for them to remember your domain name. However, not everyone will
come to your site from a banner, or from typing in your URL directly. Some
will have come from a text link which might read "Click here for a great
site about widgets" - the visitor in this case has no idea what your URL
will be.
Therefore, everything at your
site should reflect the domain name. If your site is about widget abuse,
and you have chosen the domain name "widgetabuse.com" (apologies if anyone
actually OWNS that domain!) then the title of your site should be something
like, "WidgetAbuse.com - Information on Widget Abuse". Your logo, too,
should incorporate the domain name if possible. If your company name and
domain name correspond, it may simply mean adding ".com" at the end of
your existing company logo.
Not everyone will arrive at
your site by the "front door". Remember that search engines often index
pages fairly deep within a site. Therefore, make sure that you give the
domain name of your site on EVERY page, and if possible, include your Web
logo on each page as well.
Email Branding
The most obvious form of branding
your site in email is to use a "signature file". This is a small piece
of text at the end of your email (usually between 3 and 5 lines long).
If you are a business, it should consist of the name of your company, your
URL and email address.
How else can you use email
to brand your site? If your website has a slogan ("The Ultimate Guide To
Abused Widgets"), make sure you use this in your signature file. You may
also be able to create a text (ASCII) version of your logo using symbols.
(However, you should note that it may not look the same in other people's
email programs.)
If you really want your website
to be as famous as Coca-Cola, you need to market it in the same way. No,
I don't mean you have to spend millions of dollars on it - although that
helps! I mean, very simply, treat it as you would any of your other products.
Treat it as a brand!
When you want to find something
on the Internet, many people first turn to a search engine. Simply type
in a word or a selection of keywords into a search engine, and it will
return a list of pages related to your keywords.
Here are some top search
engines
Google
Search engines can generate
you a lot of traffic, but only if you are in the top 50 results. If you
are listed further down you can forget about getting any significant traffic
to your site. People are simply not going to find you.
How to get a high ranking
in the search engines
Each search engine differs
in the way they rank your pages, but in this chapter I will discuss ways
to improve your chances of being ranked highly in the search engines.
First, consider the key words
and phrases that people would use to find your site on a search engine.
For instance, here are the keywords I use for my site, North Shore Hypnosis:
hypnosis, hypnotists, hypnotherapy
certification training schools, hypnotic techniques, NGH, clinical hypnotism,
positive changes, coaches, coaching, public speaking, tapes, CDs, stop
smoking, lose weight loss, alternative therapy, help, intuition, impotence,
athletic, healers, Reiki treatments, pain control, anxiety, anxieties,
panic attacks, fear of exams, phobias, insomnia, relaxation, past
life regressions, seminars, quit cigarettes, trance, weight loss, certified
instructors, practitioners, EFT, emotional freedom techniques, long island,
new york, ny, new york, free consultations, hipnosis, stuttering
Note that many of the above
words are plural (i.e. hypnotists instead of hypnotist). This is because
"hypnotists" contains the word "hypnotist", so people searching under "hypnotists"
will still find my site, whereas if my keyword was "hypnotist" and people
searched under "hypnotists", they would not find it.
The title
Next, each and every page of
your site should have a title. Include as many keywords as possible in
your title as you can.
If your title also begins with
the letter "A". This is because many search engines list entries by title
alphabetically. If your company name doesn't begin with A, try to arrange
your title in such a way that the first letter of the first word used is
near the top of the alphabet.
For instance, instead of simply
using: "Turfnell Foods: manufacturers of quality chocolates since 1876",
how about: "At Turfnell Foods we've manufactured finest quality chocolates
since 1876".
Meta tags
Every page on your site should
have their own set of meta tags. These are HTML tags that are "invisible"
to the Web surfer but can be read by browsers and search engines. The two
most important meta tags are the keywords and description meta tags.
Meta tags are usually located
between the HEAD tags of your HTML code, after the title but before the
</HEAD> tag.
Don't worry if you aren't familiar
with HTML. Both of the major browsers, Netscape Navigator and Internet
Explorer allow you to see the HTML code of a particular page. All we need
to look at here is the section of code at the top of the page, between
the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.
First, look at the keywords
tag. This contains a list of the keywords that people will use in a search
engine to find my site.
Don't make your list of keywords
more than about 50 words long. Some search engines ignore words after your
keywords reach a certain length.
Next, look at the description
tag. This contains a description of the page. Here is my description tag
(in HTML):
<META NAME="description"
CONTENT="Learn how hypnotherapy reprograms negative habits, improves health,
confidence, motivation, learning, memory or sexual problems, creativity,
and relieves stress or pain.">
As with the title, make your
description keyword rich and descriptive. Also, try and keep it to 30 words
or less.
Page content
Many of the search engines
check the relevancy of your page by looking for keywords within your page
content. Therefore, it is vitally important that the material on your page
is relevant and related to your keywords.
Here are a few tips:
Add a brief introduction to
your page at the top, similar to your "description" meta tag.
Make sure your most important
keywords are used frequently throughout the page. However, do not put a
long list of keywords in the text of your page. Search engines consider
this to be "spamming", and will automatically prevent your page (and possibly
even your site!) from being listed again.
Submitting your site
to the search engines
It is strongly suggest submitting
your site by hand to the search engines, since each search engine's requirements
are different. Click on the above links to each of the search engines,
and find the section where you can "add your URL", "submit website", or
"add your link".
Search engines are great for
bringing free traffic to your site. However, next we will consider directories.
[04]
Get
Listed In The World's Two Most Popular Directories... Google and Yahoo!
Directories differ from search
engines in that they do not add your site to their database automatically.
There is usually a human who reviews your submission first before adding
it to the directory.
Although there are many directories
on the Internet, by far the most important one is Yahoo! It is very important
to get your site listed on Yahoo! as it is probably the most popular directory
in the world right now. I would strongly recommend submitting your site
to Yahoo and Google by hand.
This chapter discusses how
to maximize your chances of getting listed on Yahoo!, but this advice could
equally well apply to any other directory.
Get to know Yahoo!
Before even thinking about
submitting your site to Yahoo!, get to know how their directory works.
There are two ways of searching for a site on Yahoo!. You can either type
keywords into their search box, or click on a category from the selection
listed on their main page.
If you use the search box,
Yahoo! first displays the list of results by category. Then it lists all
the sites it has found with descriptions or page titles that match your
chosen keywords.
If you use the category listings,
Yahoo! will "drill down" into its database, usually listing more sub-categories
for you to choose from, as well as a selection of listed sites.
Preparing to submit to
Yahoo!
Here are some things you absolutely
must do before submitting to Yahoo!:
· Make sure your site
is fully working with no broken links or pages "under construction".
· Find the Yahoo! categories
that best apply to your site. Note that when running a search, Yahoo! lists
results by category in alphabetical order, and then within each category
by site title, again in alphabetical order. Therefore, in a search for
business software, a company listed in Business and Economy > Companies
> Computers > Software > Business > Business Management > Small Business
will be higher placed than a company in Business and Economy > Companies
> Financial Services > Taxes > Software simply because while all the higher
level categories (i.e. "Business and Economy", "Companies") are the same,
the next category, "Computers" is alphabetically higher than "Financial
Services." Therefore, try and get into a relevant category that is nearer
the top of the alphabet.
· Write a title and
description of your site for Yahoo!. Do not make them sound like a sales
pitch - Yahoo! will reject your submission straight away. Instead, keep
your title short and your description as descriptive as possible. Try and
keep the description to one sentence of no more than 20 words. It is vitally
important to incorporate your keywords into the description, since searches
on Yahoo! find your site if the search words appear in your title, description
or URL. However, don't just write a list of keywords for your description.
Instead, make sure it reads like a proper sentence. Finally, use plurals,
since Yahoo! searches for strings, not words. For instance, searching for
the word "site" will also list sites with the word "website" in their description.
Submitting your site
Now that you're ready to submit
your site, go to Yahoo!, find the best category for your site, and click
on the "Add URL" link to make your submission.
Tip: Yahoo! has many regional
sites (i.e. www.yahoo.co.uk for UK based sites), and if you have a site
that is in, or related to, one of the countries that are served by these
regional indexes, then I strongly recommend you submit to the regional
Yahoo! index first. If you get your site listed in a regional directory
you are very often automatically listed in the main directory. Even if
this is not the case, you stand a much better chance of getting into the
main directory if you're already on a regional Yahoo! index.
After submitting your site,
you may have to wait for up to 2 months before you hear anything from Yahoo!,
so be patient. If you've not heard from them after 8 weeks, it is safe
to assume that you weren't listed. Go back to your site, see if you can
make improvements, check your description, and submit again. However, do
not continually send in submissions every month - that's one sure way of
being ignored altogether by Yahoo!
Once you're listed the correct
way in Yahoo or Google, it's a virtual certainty that you'll get lots of
new visitors to your website.
According
to the Google Webmaster Help Center:
That can I do if I'm afraid
my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There's almost nothing a competitor
can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If
you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting
the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes
information published on the web; we don't control the content of these
pages.
Our search results change regularly
as we update our index. While we can't guarantee that any page will consistently
appear in our index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines
for maintaining a "crawler-friendly" site. Following these recommendations
may increase the likelihood that your site will show up consistently in
the Google search results.
Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines
will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not
to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay
very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of
the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from
the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show
up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
Design, content, and technical
guidelines
When your site is ready:
Have other relevant sites link
to yours.
Make a site with a clear hierarchy
and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static
text link.
Use a text browser such as
Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your
site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies,
session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site
in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling
your site.
These quality guidelines cover
the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google
may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g.
tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's
not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't
included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their
energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much
better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those
who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another
site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at
http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing
scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize
hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create
scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
Quality guidelines - basic
principles
Make pages for users, not for
search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to
search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to
as "cloaking."
Avoid tricks intended to improve
search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable
explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another
useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search
engines didn't exist?"
Don't participate in link schemes
designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid
links to web spammers or "bad
Don't use unauthorized computer
programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing
resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the
use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic
queries to Google.
Quality guidelines - specific
guidelines
Avoid hidden text or hidden
links.
Avoid "doorway" pages created
just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate
programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in
an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique
and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If a site doesn't meet our
quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine
that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site
so that it does and request reinclusion.
You may also be interested
in...
Will participation in AdWords
or AdSense affect my listing in Google's free search results?
Google's advertising programs
are independent of our search results. Search results display on the left
side of our results page; ads appear on the right and in the colored box
at the top.
Participation in an advertising
program doesn't positively or negatively affect inclusion or ranking in
the Google search results. Inclusion and ranking are free services; we
don't accept payment to expedite inclusion or improve a site's ranking
for particular keywords. To learn more about how Google ranks pages, please
visit http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
SECTION
TWO: OPENING THE FLOODGATES -
YOUR SIGNATURE FILE
A signature file (or "sig"
file) is a little message tagged on to the end of an e-mail. Signature
files can be great way of bringing traffic to your site.
How many emails do you send
out each day? Adding a signature file to your e-mail with your URL opens
up the possibility that the recipient will read your sig and visit your
site.
Here is the signature file
I use:
Carol Denicker
----------
You can have several different
sig files, and vary it depending on the person to whom you are writing.
Remember to use a signature
file when posting to newsgroups, message boards and with every e-mail you
send out, and you'll soon get more visitors to your site.
A
Classified Marketing Strategy
There are many sites on the
Internet that allow you to post a "classified ad" either for free, or for
a small charge. Examples sites offering free classified ads:
Posting your ad on one of these
sites will probably not create a stampede of traffic to your site ... but
if you can get your ad on hundreds of these classified ad pages, likely
you will get a steady stream of visitors.
What's
Special About The Special Report Network?
The Special Report Network
is another great idea for boosting traffic to your site ... I will also
show how to make the best use of this network to maximize your traffic
and profits.
What is the Special Report
Network?
The Special Report Network
has captured the power of multiplication and the proven selling power of
free reports and applied it to the Web. This free service can help spread
your special report to thousands of websites fast!
First, you need a free report
on your website so that they can link to it. For best results, write something
that will be of value to a lot of people, and give it an eye-catching title.
The best titles are optimistic yet believable. For instance: "How To Start
Your Own Affiliate Program For Less Than $50!", "How To Get Free Advertising
For Your Site!", "How To Buy Anything From The Government Dirt Cheap!"
When you sign up, your link
to your free report is placed at the top position on a page just like their
main page. Your link is now on top while the person that referred you to
this page is moved down to position #2. All other links are moved down
and the last link is dropped off.
When someone comes to the Special
Report Network page from your site and joins, the same thing happens. They
get their own page with their link at the top and your link goes to position
#2.
As this continues, your free
report link moves to the #6 position and by then it will be on 1000's of
sites just like this one with thousands of visitors coming from different
webmasters sites and seeing your link and clicking over to your site!
The Special Report Network
will bring in the traffic for your report, but you still need to make sure
that this free traffic isn't wasted. Here is what I do to make best use
of this network:
At the very top of the page
I have a box which says the following: "In a hurry? Want to read this report
later? Get it sent to your e-mail box by autoresponder". Then there is
a small form where visitors can enter their e-mail address. The form will
then send them the exact text of my report by e-mail.
The above technique is very
important for two reasons. First, many people simply do not have the time
to read my report online - it is, after all, fairly long. Giving them the
option to receive it by e-mail means they can read it later at their leisure.
Second, this method tells you exactly who is reading your report. There
is no other effective way of finding this out. Once you have their address,
you can use it to send out more information and "encourage" them to buy
from you...although I would recommend you do this sparingly...don't swamp
them with additional information they never asked for.
Next comes the report itself.
Write it as a teaser for your e-book of the same name. Give great content,
but the most powerful information referred to are in the e-book. Don't
go into too much detail. Leave them wanting more.. by the end of the report,
they are eager to find out more. Then, and only then, point out that your
e-book contains all of the above information and much more. However, don't
actually mention the price on that page. At the bottom of the report have
a link which says: "Click Here for The Keys to
Health, Happiness and Success!" The link can then takes them
to a sales page, where they can immediately order and download your book
after paying for it by credit card.
These techniques can generate
lots of additional sales. However, if you don't think you can sell your
product this way, then why not sell somebody else's product! There are
literally thousands of companies on the Internet that would happily offer
you a commission for selling their product. If you write a good report,
sales will be the natural result.
I hope you're convinced that
the Special Report Network is well worth joining...not only can it bring
traffic to your site, it is also a powerful method of generating sales!
Join a Special Report Network.
Weaving
The Web - Link & Article Exchange Programs
The World Wide Web is all about
links, and so a great way to build a steady flow of traffic to your site
is to swap links with sites related in some way to yours. By swapping links
I mean this: you put a link on your site to the other site, and they do
the same for you. Many sites have a special "links" page devoted to links
to related sites, and you should have one as well.
Where to find relevant sites
Search engines are the key
to finding relevant sites. Search on the top engines using your own site's
keywords, and see what you come up with. In particular, look for sites
that complement your site, but do not compete. An example of two complementary
sites would be a small business information site, and a site selling accounting
packages.
Ideally, you want a link from
these highly ranked sites to your site, since this will mean a good stream
of traffic from their site to yours.
Requesting a link
Once you have chosen the sites
you would like to link to, put a link to these sites on your links page.
Then, write to the webmaster of each of these sites, and request a link
swap. You could say something like the following:
----------
I recently came across your
site and noticed that you have material that would be of interest to my
readers, and vice versa. Therefore I have placed a link from my site to
yours, on my links page at
<URL>
I would appreciate it if you
could do the same for me.
Thanks!
If you are willing to spend
money, you can even offer these sites cash in exchange for a link on their
main page. Alternatively, when you get a newsletter up and running with
a reasonably high circulation, you can offer some advertising space in
your newsletter in exchange for a link. This can produce results!
----------
If you are submitting articles
and are looking for a faster and easier way to do this, you might want
to consider an automatic article submitter. To watch a video on how to
accomplish this, go to: http://1trac.com/dt/t/Article_Submitter_Video.php
.
There's nothing better for
a website owner than to gain recognition for his or her site. And, now
that you have a successful website, you can contribute to that recognition
process by offering your own award!
Some awards are highly coveted
by website owners, and add prestige to the site possessing the award; others
are just cheap ways of getting traffic for the award-giver. You want to
make sure that your award falls into the former category, while still bringing
you good quality traffic.
The benefits of an award
A good award system should
bring benefits both to you, the award giver, and the recipient. When they
receive your award, make sure the other site links the award directly back
to your home page. Thus, you are creating yet another link to your site.
In return, you want to give
the recipient as much publicity as possible. I would strongly recommend
creating a web page that lists all the winners of your award, giving the
most recent winners the most prominent place. If you publish a newsletter
you should also announce the winners there.
Tip: Be selective! Do not let
just anybody win your award. Set very high standards and criteria, and
your award will be coveted all the more.
Things to consider
If you decide you'd like to
offer an award, you need to consider the following questions.
What will my award look like?
If you want other sites to display your award, don't make it too large,
either in dimension or in file size. Probably the biggest you should make
your award is 125 x 125 pixels, and certainly no more than 10k file size
(ideally, much less - other sites don't want to slow down their page loading
speed because of an award). I recommend having your award professionally
designed, unless you are a graphics designer yourself. Very few sites will
want to display a poorly designed award. A good idea is to personalize
the award for each site you give it to; in other words, when designing
your award, leave room to put some text on the award with the name of the
site that is receiving it.
Can people apply for my award?
If so, how do they apply? And what is the criteria for applying?
How often will I give out my
awards? Once a week? Once a fortnight? Once a month?
Who decides the winners? Will
you choose them, or will you let your website visitors or newsletter readers
vote on a winner?
Just to repeat: I strongly
recommend setting up a web page on your site dedicated to listing previous
winners of your award. Don't forget to include a link to each one of them!
Before long, your award will
be coveted by webmasters, and as your award goes out to more and more sites,
you will receive a steady increase in website traffic.
Getting
Sites To Link To You For Free
Another idea for encouraging
other sites to link to you is to run a "Link To Us And Win" contest.
Each week or month you could
offer a prize to one site chosen at random that is linking to yours. The
prize could be anything from one of your own products given free, to free
advertising space on your site or in your newsletter, or even cash. Just
as long as you make the prize tempting, people will want to link to you
for a chance of winning!
Make sure that on the same
page as your contest, you also supply the required banners and code they
will need to link to your site. Let them know how they should contact you
to inform you of their link.
In addition, put a link to
all previous winners of your competition on this same page. Not only will
you be giving free additional publicity for these sites, it also shows
that your contest is genuine.
By doing all this, you should
get many more sites to link to you!
Keep
'Em Coming Back For More!
Ideally, you'll want to get
your website visitors coming back to your site regularly. Why? Because
it is an established marketing fact that people only buy your product after
being exposed to your message, on average, 7 times. Besides, the more they
come back to your site, the more familiar they will be with it, and the
more likely they will buy from you, subscribe to your newsletter, and listen
to what you have to say.
The key method of doing this
can be summed up in one sentence: build a community! Create a place where
people feel almost "at home", where they can easily get the information
they are looking for, where they can buy the products they want easily,
and where they can meet people of similar minds. In this chapter I'll explain
exactly how you can do this.
Update your pages regularly!
One of the most important things
you can do to get people to return is to update your pages regularly. Imagine
how someone might feel as they make the effort to return to your site after
a few weeks, only to find that nothing has changed. Chances are, they won't
bother returning again.
Instead, add new content to
your site regularly. This could mean fresh articles, new competitions,
hypnosis research, reports, reviews, inspirational messages, jokes
or even games.
Make sure you let your visitors
know that the site is updated. Add a message in a prominent position on
your site, stating something like: "This site is updated weekly. Please
bookmark us now and return often!"
If you don't have the time
to update your pages as often as you would like, consider adding some dynamic
content to your pages. This is content that is automatically updated for
you by a third party.
Add a message board to your site
A message board is a part of
your site where people can talk with one another by leaving messages (called
posts). Adding a message board to your site is a great way of getting people
to return to your site regularly. If your web host doesn't supply you with
a message board, you can get one free (at time of publication) from one
of the following sites:
Delphi Forums
Inside The Web
BeSeen's Bulletin Boards
Add a chat room
A chat room is a place on the
Internet where people can talk to one another "live". Chat rooms can add
a "community" feel to your site, as people interested in your site's theme
can talk there with like-minded people.
Chat rooms may require a certain
level of effort to maintain. For instance, if your chat room is open to
anyone, you may get problems with spammers, rude and offensive chatters,
or even people who pretend to be someone else. Depending on where you get
your chat room from, you can avoid these problems by limiting chat room
access by the use of a password, having moderators visit the room frequently,
and banning certain individuals from the chat room if they abuse it. (For
instance, Multichat, below, offer a 'free' and a 'professional' [paid-for]
version. The professional version allows you to obtain chat transcripts,
block certain users, password protect the chat room, and much more.)
How do you go about getting
a chat room for your site? The following places allow you to get one simply
by cutting and pasting a piece of HTML code into one of your pages:
MultiChat
ParaChat
Xoom Chat
In summary...
In conclusion, the key to a
successful website that people visit regularly is to (a) update it often,
and (b) create a sense of community. Do this, and people will flock to
your site!
SECTION
THREE: LET IT RAIN! -
Email
Marketing - The Right And Wrong Way
Without a doubt, e-mail is
one of the most powerful tools ever invented, enabling virtually instant
communication with people from just about anywhere in the world. In terms
of marketing, e-mail can be very effective in bringing customers to your
website. However, there is a right way and a wrong way of using e-mail
for promoting your site.
The wrong way to use e-mail
The wrong way is to send out
your message to thousands of e-mail addresses that you have collected,
unsolicited, from the Internet. This is called spamming and although it
is far cheaper than sending out mail shots through the post, there are
several reasons why I do not recommend this method:
· Your list is probably
untargeted, which means that only a very small percentage of recipients
will be interested in your product or service.
The conclusion? Don't Spam!
It's far more trouble than it's worth.
The right way to market by e-mail
Does that mean e-mail cannot
be used for marketing purposes? Not at all...there is a right way of getting
your message out. It's called opt-in direct e-mail. This is the practice
of sending commercial e-mail to people who have approved of receiving such
e-mail. Although more expensive than spamming, it is by far the better
option for several reasons:
· The cost per thousand
mailings is still much lower than traditional mail (called "snail mail").
Here are some excellent resources for
opt-in direct e-mail:
BusinessLink http://www.businesslink.net
BonusMail http://www.bonusmail.com
Bulletmail http://www.bulletmail.com
Direct E-mail List Source http://www.copyrighter.com/lists/
E-Target http://e-target.com
PostMaster Direct http://www.postmasterdirect.com
Targ-It <http://www.targ-it.com>
We have already discussed the
power of direct e-mail. We will now take a look at another great
What is an autoresponder?
An autoresponder is an automatic
response e-mail address. You can program an autoresponder so that if someone
sends an e-mail to the autoresponder address, they receive a message back
automatically, usually within seconds. No human is involved in this process
- the autoresponder is set up to reply automatically to every email sent
to its address.
Why use an autoresponder?
Autoresponders are useful in
that they allow instant access to information. As in the above example,
if you wanted to register for hypnotherapy certification training at North
Shore Hypnosis, you'd simply have to fill out the application at
my autoresponder, and within seconds the details would be in my e-mail
box. It avoids the need to wait for me to check my e-mail, read your
request, and write you a reply - which could take hours (if not days!)
Another very important advantage
of autoresponders is that they can be used to capture your visitor's e-mail
address. Let's say someone visits your site in a hurry. They see an article
of interest, but they just don't have the time to read it there and then.
Chances are your article will be left unread. However, what if you'd put
something like this at the top of your article:
In a hurry? Haven't the time
to read this article now? You can have the article sent instantly to your
e-mail box by sending any e-mail to _________@_______
There is a fair chance that
the visitor, who is interested in your article but hasn't the time to read
it just then, will send for your article by autoresponder. Thus, they will
be able to read the article at their leisure, and you will have their e-mail
address! You will then be able to send them a reminder to visit your site
at a later date.
Tip: Most autoresponders will
reply automatically regardless of the message that is sent to them. Therefore,
a blank email will still generate a reply.
A word of advice: don't go
adding your visitor's e-mail address to a mailing list or newsletter, unless
they explicitly signed up for it. It is OK to send a follow-up message
to your autoresponder e-mail addresses, thanking them for visiting and
informing them of new articles at your site, but sending out constant reminders
to these people or signing them up to something they never asked for is
bad net etiquette (or netiquette) and will probably lose you more visitors
than you gain, since some will believe you to be spamming them ("Spam"
is the term used to mean "unsolicited commercial e-mail"). [16]
"Smart" Autoresponders
Smart autoresponders are autoresponders
that can be programmed to send "follow-up" messages at set intervals after
the initial message. So, for instance, a potential customer may request
sales information from your "smart" autoresponder, and you can set up the
autoresponder to automatically send out a "reminder" message a certain
number of days later. You can usually set up the smart autoresponder to
do this several more times at intervals you choose.
Here are three companies
that offer smart autoresponders:
Aweber - http://www.aweber.com
Get Response - http://www.getresponse.com
Autobots - http://www.autobots.net
The benefits of a "smart" autoresponder
Having an automated system
to send information and follow up with your potential customers will save
you time and money, maximize your marketing efforts, keep you organized,
and probably make you a ton of money. Experts have shown that it often
takes a prospect 7 or more exposures of your ad before they purchase from
you. With a "smart" autoresponder, your prospects will automatically receive
your marketing message the essential seven times, thus multiplying your
sales and traffic!
Ezine
Advertising: Getting Your Money's Worth
Advertising on the Internet
can be one of the most profitable ways of promoting your business. It's
possible to reach thousands of people with your message for just a fraction
of the price of traditional media advertising - ideal for the small to
medium sized business!
However, the Internet has spawned
a language of its own, and many of us know from experience just how daunting
this can be to a new user. Remember how you felt when you first realized
what a URL was? Or how about the first time you connected to the Internet
and you couldn't work out how to 'log off' from the 'browser'? It took
me a few weeks to realize it wasn't my browser I was logging off from,
it was my ISP.
Internet advertising also has
its own jargon: CPM, CTR, hits, page views, "classified" ads and "sponsorship"
ads, to name but a few. In this article, I'm going to break through the
jargon to show you exactly what each of these terms mean. This knowledge
will help you to make sure you're getting the best deal for your advertising
dollar.
Probably the most effective
methods of Internet advertising are banner adverts and ezine advertising.
I'm therefore going to concentrate on terms related to these two methods
of advertising.
Hits vs. Page Views
It is easy for the Internet
newcomer to get confused over the two terms, especially since they are
often used interchangeably. However, they do not mean the same thing. A
hit to your site occurs every time a browser asks for a file from your
server. For instance, if your page has 10 graphics, to display your page
the browser requests a total of 11 files (the 10 graphic files and the
file for the page itself). Your logs will register 11 "hits". However,
your page has only been viewed once! In other words, you've only had 1
page view or visitor, but 11 "hits". Hits are not the best indication of
how many people visit your site - you need to know the "page views"!
Before advertising with a site
that claims "25,000 hits last month", ask them whether they mean 25,000
visitors or not.
CPM vs. CLICK-THRU
Banner advertising is often
sold at a rate "per thousand impressions". This is known as the CPM (or
cost per mille) rate. For instance, if I sell banner ads at a $20 CPM,
it means I charge $20 for every 1,000 banner impressions you buy. I guarantee
that the banner will be loaded into someone's browser 1,000 times.
Some sites are now offering
alternative advertising models. For instance, some will charge you only
when someone actually clicks on the banner, regardless of how many times
your banner is displayed. The price is then set at $0.X per click-thru.
Which is the best option? To determine this, you will need to test your
banner's effectiveness by running an advertising campaign and gathering
some statistics.
As an example, let's say you
buy 10,000 banner adverts at a CPM of $20 (i.e. you purchase $200 worth
of banners), and by the end of the campaign 280 people have clicked on
the banner to get to your site. The proportion of banners displayed to
the number of times your banner is clicked is called the click-thru ratio
(CTR), which can either be expressed as a ratio or a percentage. In this
example your CTR is 2.8%.
How much have you paid to acquire
each visitor? Divide the figure you spent on the campaign ($200) by the
number of visitors you acquired (280) to find out. You get a figure of
approximately $0.71. In other words, it cost you $0.71 to get 1 visitor.
This is called the cost per visitor.
Therefore, if you are offered
an advertising campaign that charges per click-thru, make sure the click-thru
price is less than the "cost per visitor" you calculated above.
Classifieds vs. Sponsorship
In the world of ezine advertising,
you'll often hear of two advertising models: classified advertising, and
sponsorship ads. What's the difference? "Classified" ads are usually placed
in one particular section of the ezine devoted to advertising, in the same
way as a newspaper might have a classified ads section near the back of
their publication. On the other hand, "sponsorship" adverts are usually
placed at or near the top of a newsletter, or somewhere else in the publication
but not surrounded by other adverts.
Which advertising model is
better? While a "sponsorship" position will probably increase the number
of responses to your ad, expect to pay more for a sponsor ad than for a
classified ad. There are also many classified ad "bargains" available on
the Internet - this is low priced advertising that can often bring good
results. The best solution is to test both types of advertising, and see
which one brings you the best results for your money.
For instance, if classified
ad A costs you $25 and brings you 10 customers, and sponsor ad B costs
you $300 and brings you 100 customers, then advert A performs the best
- each customer from ad A cost you only $2.50, whereas each customer from
advert B cost you $3.00.
Next time you plan to purchase
advertising space on the Internet, whether it be banner advertising, or
an advert in your favorite newsletter, check out their claims. What do
they mean when they say, "Advertise here - we had 25,000 HITS last month!"
In other words, make sure you get your money's worth!
TRACKING
YOUR VISITORS FROM EMAIL
How can you track the effectiveness
of an email advertising campaign? Very often people who come across your
URL in their email simply copy and paste it into their browsers, or type
it in manually. In your log stats this will show up as "no referrer" traffic
- in other words, your log stats program is unable to tell you where these
visitors come from.
There is a simple yet very
effective solution to this problem that will allow you to track your visitors.
Whenever
you add a “?” followed by a string of letters to a URL ending in
.htm or .html, it has no effect whatsoever on the page that is called up.
For instance,
http://www.northshorehypnosis.com
and
http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/?MEGATrafficMadeEasy.html
produce
exactly the same page. Try it!
The second
URL simply had "?" tagged to the end. However, the server logs treat
these as two separate pages! Therefore, using a ? tag at the end of a URL,
you can effectively determine where your visitors are coming from. You
can use any set of letters and numbers at the end of the ? as you wish.
NOTE
that you need to put the ? at the end of a HTML file (i.e. a URL ending
with .htm or .html) - it won't usually work at the end of a domain name
(i.e. http://www.the-mouth.com?book won't usually work). However, since
if you add the / symbol to the end of a URL the browser automatically defaults
to the index.html page, the following will work:
http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/?MEGATrafficBook
Why not use this method next
time you advertise in a newsletter or in e-mail? That way you can keep
a better track of your visitors!
SECTION
FOUR: NEWSLETTER PUBLISHING -
You're starting to get significant
traffic to your website from the search engines and links placed on other
sites. The question now is: What are your visitors doing once they get
to your site? The nature of the Internet is such that a person can visit
your site, click on a link, get taken elsewhere, and never return!
Each visitor to your site is
a potential customer, and so everyone who leaves your site is a potentially
lost sale...unless you can somehow draw them back to your site at some
other time.
How are you going to do that?
You could continually advertise in the same resource that led them to your
site in the first place, in the hope that they will return. But there is
a much easier way that will bring them back, and will in fact improve your
website traffic and sales immensely. Start publishing a newsletter!
What is a newsletter?
Simply put, a newsletter is
a periodic mailing sent out by you, the website owner, to those who have
asked to join your mailing list (the subscribers). Your newsletter could
contain articles of interest to your subscribers, hints and tips that would
help the reader, as well as reasons for returning to your website, such
as the announcement of a new competition or new features on your site.
Note that you will often see
the term ezine used. This is basically another word for an Internet newsletter,
derived from the word magazine. So an ezine is an electronic magazine,
whereas a newsletter can be either an Internet publication or a "real world"
offline publication. However, in this e-book I will use the terms ezine
and newsletter interchangeably.
Newsletters are so valuable
for bringing repeat sales and visitors to your site that I consider them
an absolute must for any serious online business. In fact, they are so
important, I have devoted several chapters of this e-book to the discussion
of newsletters.
Do you really need a newsletter?
A surprising number of website
owners do not publish a newsletter, and are missing out on a traffic creation
machine that is possibly more powerful than the search engines!
It is also worth mentioning
at this point that a newsletter can be very easy to publish if done in
the right way. The following chapters will explain exactly how to set up
and market a newsletter, and how to use it to skyrocket your sales and
traffic.
As I mentioned at the outset,
without a newsletter many people will find your site, browse for a while,
and then disappear, never to return. However, you need them to come back,
since the majority of people will buy from you only after repeated visits
to your site. So how do you invite them back if you don't have their email
address? The answer is, you can't. You have to hope that they bookmarked
your site in their browser, or else wrote down or memorized your URL. And
we all know how reliable "memories" are!
A newsletter gives you the
advantage of being able to repeatedly invite visitors back to your site.
Reasons for publishing a
newsletter
During the course of this e-book
you will come to realize that there are innumerable reasons for publishing
a newsletter. Here are four of the most compelling:
1. You can invite subscribers
to return to your site. You can use your newsletter to announce changes,
new features, new articles and new competitions to your site. If nothing
else, your newsletter will be a constant, regular reminder that your site
exists.
2. You can sell directly
to your subscribers. If your site is about a particular topic, your
newsletter will also be on the same topic, so people will subscribe to
your newsletter because they are interested in that topic. Therefore, when
you sell a product or service to your subscribers related to the newsletter
topic, you already have an interested, targeted audience! I shouldn't need
to explain how your newsletter can therefore be a great sales generator.
3. You can promote your
newsletter as a separate resource. Hopefully you are already doing
your best to promote your website, but if you promote your newsletter with
the same enthusiasm, your newsletter will very quickly become a real traffic
builder! In the chapters that follow, I will show you a number of extremely
effective ways of promoting your newsletter. Use them all, and soon people
will come flocking to your site!
4. You can sell advertising
space in your newsletter. Once it reaches a certain circulation level
and becomes well-established, you can start offering advertising space
in your newsletter for a price! Most publishers base their price on a CPM
basis; i.e. a dollar rate per thousand subscribers. A targeted newsletter
with a specific audience (such as computer programmers or homeowners) could
expect to get a CPM of between $10 and $50, depending on the market. Thus,
when your newsletter reaches a circulation of, say, 5,000 subscribers,
you could charge anywhere between $50 and $250 for a text advert in your
newsletter...
...but then ask yourself: how
many adverts will I accept each issue? How often will I publish my newsletter?
If your newsletter is published
weekly, and you allow 4 adverts in each issue at $50 an ad, that's a maximum
of $200 ad revenue you could be earning every week, simply for running
an email newsletter. Now imagine how much you could make when your circulation
reaches 50,000, enabling you to charge $1,000 or more per advert...
Need I say more? For the above
reasons alone, a newsletter is absolutely essential to your online marketing
plans!
How
to Publish Your Own Newsletter for Free
Setting up and publishing a
newsletter for free is becoming easier every day. In this chapter, I will
discuss what to put in your newsletter, and how to publish it.
What to put in your newsletter
Think about it from the subscriber's
point of view. Why would they want to receive your newsletter in their
email? Simply to receive a sales pitch from you on a regular basis? Hardly.
Probably they signed up because they know you are an expert on scuba-diving,
and they want to learn all there is to know about this subject. They want
to read about the latest scuba-diving techniques, the best places to go
scuba-diving, interesting articles written by other scuba-divers, scuba-diving
hints and tips, and where to go to buy scuba-diving equipment.
Notice the last point in particular.
Yes, your readers are also potential customers, but only if you don't blatantly
sell to them! The ultimate aim of your newsletter is to make sales, but
you have surrounded your sales pitch with great non-commercial content
that the readers can enjoy. They will appreciate this, and then, when the
time comes, they will buy from you.
Some things to consider
Here are some questions to
ask yourself when planning your newsletter:
Who will write my articles?
If you are an expert in your field, you may wish to write the majority
of articles yourself. However, will you accept article submissions from
other writers? Likely you'll find that you will need to write your own
material at first, but once your newsletter becomes established many people
will want to contribute articles.
Should I pay writers if I publish
their articles? This is entirely up to you and depends on your budget.
You could offer a certain amount for the articles you publish. Alternatively,
you could offer the writer promotion in your newsletter. For instance,
the writer could be allowed a small "signature file" at the end of their
article which promotes their own product, service or website. That way
you both benefit - you by getting free content for your newsletter, and
the writer by receiving free publicity.
How many adverts will I allow
in each issue? This matter requires careful consideration. There are several
advertising models to choose from, and you might have to experiment to
find out which is the most suitable model for your newsletter. The two
most popular models of newsletter advertising are: Classified
advertising. Newsletters that use this method have a "Classified" section
that contains a large number of fairly small adverts. Prices are usually
low, but large numbers of classified ads can be sold. Sponsor advertising.
With this model, the advert appears near the top of the newsletter, often
with a brief message from the publisher saying, "Please visit today's sponsor."
Other adverts may appear throughout the newsletter, but they are surrounded
by articles and other content, not other adverts. Prices for sponsorship
advertising is usually higher than for classified ads, but advertisers
may be willing to pay extra for more prominent exposure.
Of course, it is entirely up
to you which advertising model you choose. The sponsor model might be preferable
to the advertiser, since their advert will not be competing with lots of
other ads in the same section; the classified model might be preferable
to some publishers as it allows them to sell more ads at a lower price.
As a general guide (but by no means a hard and fast rule), marketing newsletters
tend to use the classifieds model, while joke mailing lists tend to use
the sponsor model. Other newsletters may actually use both models, depending
on their size and subject matter.
Once you start getting paying
advertisers, don't be afraid to ask them which model they would prefer
to see. Would they be willing to pay more for greater exposure, or would
they prefer to pay less to have their ad included in a Classified section?
One final comment: don't get
greedy! I have subscribed to many newsletters that turn out to be 10% content
and 90% adverts. Guess what happens to them? They are dumped in my email
"Trash" box without even being read, then I cancel my subscription fast!
Don't let the same thing happen with your newsletter. Strictly limit the
number of adverts appearing in each issue, regardless of whether you use
the sponsor model or the classified model. If your newsletter becomes a
popular resource for advertisers, don't have more advertisements - simply
raise the price! As a general rule of thumb, no more than 50% of your newsletter
should be taken up by adverts.
What will be the frequency
of my newsletter? Will you publish daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly,
every six years? The more frequent your publication, the more original
material you'll need to fill your newsletter. On the other hand, you'll
also be able to sell more advertising space. Don't forget, many of your
subscribers may not want to read something every day about, say, scuba-diving.
You can always ask your subscribers how often they would like to see your
newsletter published.
Sending out your newsletter
You can send out your newsletter
using your own e-mail program, or you can use one of the many free mailing
list services available on the Internet. I would strongly recommend the
latter option. Once your newsletter reaches a circulation into the thousands,
it will become very costly and time consuming to send out mail to your
subscribers using your own e-mail program.
I can recommend three services
in particular. Each one gives you the opportunity of running your own mailing
list from the Web.
LISTBOT
At the time of writing I was
using Listbot to mail out my ezine The Mouthpiece each working day of the
week. Listbot offers a free service, and a paid service (Listbot Gold).
The free service allows you to send out a message of up to 100 kilobytes
(more than enough for most newsletters) to an unlimited number of subscribers.
In exchange, Listbot reserves the right to place a small text advert of
their own either at the top or the bottom of your message.
Subscribers join your newsletter
either from a small subscriber box that Listbot provides you with to put
on your website, or they can send an e-mail to a unique subscription e-mail
address. Listbot then sends out a confirmation request to which the potential
subscriber has to reply in order to be added to the list.
Two other great services
you might wish to consider are:
ONELIST
TOPICA
Format of your newsletter
Here are a couple of tips
on formatting your newsletter:
Line length. Always keep the
length of the lines in your newsletter to 65 characters or less. Many e-mail
programs will not format the text properly if you use longer lines. Your
text may then look like this in some e-mail programs:
---------- snip ----------
Do not be surprised if you
do not get an instant reaction to your advertising. This is not particularly
surprising as it takes time for the message to sink in. People will soon
understand what you are trying to say.
---------- snip ----------
A particularly good word processor
for formatting your newsletter is Textpad. It allows you to set the length
of a line to whatever length you choose. I write The Mouthpiece in Textpad,
save it, and then copy and paste it into Listbot, which then sends it out
to subscribers. Textpad is shareware, which means you can download it and
try it out for free, and if you like it, you pay a small fee. You can download
it from here.
Subscription/Cancel instructions.
Make sure that you include details on how to subscribe or unsubscribe from
your newsletter in each and every issue. Put them in a prominent place,
either at the top or bottom of your newsletter. Don't try hiding the unsubscribe
instructions - this will only make people angry, and since they will inevitably
start emailing you asking to be removed from the list, this will only increase
your workload.
"This is not sent unsolicited!"
Sometimes people forget that they have signed up to receive your newsletter.
In order to avoid accusations that you are "spamming" them when you send
it out, you may wish to include a notice similar to this one at or near
the top of your message:
---------- snip ----------
This message is never sent
unsolicited. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for
it, or a friend has forwarded this newsletter to you.
---------- snip ----------
Now that you are ready to publish
your newsletter, the next step is to announce it to the world!
Announcing
Your Newsletter to the World
One great free tool for promoting
your newsletter is NEW-LIST. This is a moderated mailing list which can
be used to announce the establishment of new mailing lists, and also to
announce changes to your list. Using NEW-LIST, it's possible to get up
to several hundred subscribers to your newsletter almost immediately!
Once you've set up your newsletter,
decided on its content, and arranged for it to be hosted on either a paying
mailing list server or a free service like Listbot, it's time to announce
your newsletter's existence to NEW-LIST.
First, you'll need to subscribe
to NEW-LIST. To subscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@cs.wisc.edu
In the body of your e-mail,
type:
subscribe new-list YourFirstName
YourLastName
For example, if your name is
Fred Bloggs, you would put
subscribe new-list Fred Bloggs
Be prepared to receive a high
volume of e-mail from NEW-LIST. Some days I have received as many as 50
mailings from this list! If you wish to take yourself off the list after
your post has appeared, then send an e-mail to listserv@cs.wisc.edu with
unsubscribe new-list in the body of the e-mail. Do not type your name when
unsubscribing.
Your first post
Postings to NEW-LIST is by
an online form, and must be in the following format:
Name of newsletter - i.e. "The
Dog's Life"
Category of Submission - NEW
to announce a new list, and CHANGE to announce a change to an existing
list.
Description of list - no more
than 7 lines in length, maximum 1,024 characters. For example: "The DOGS
LIFE newsletter was formed in order to discuss the care and breeding of
dogs. Related topics might include..."
How to Subscribe - specific
instructions for subscribing to your list, i.e. "To subscribe, send an
e-mail to dogslife@mailinglists.com with the word "subscribe" in the SUBJECT
header."
Email Address of List Owner/Moderator
To submit your post to NEW-LIST,
click here and fill out the online form. Make sure you follow the posting
rules exactly, otherwise your post will be rejected.
The first time I posted my
humor newsletter to NEW-LIST I obtained over 150 subscribers!
If you have followed the instructions,
you should see your post appear in your own e-mail box within 48 hours,
meaning that it was also sent to all other NEW-LIST subscribers. You will
then receive additional subscribers to your newsletter - all for free!
POSTING MORE THAN ONCE TO
NEW-LIST
As well as announcing new ezines
and mailing lists, NEW-LIST allows you make announcements of any major
changes to your newsletter, such as a change of subscription address, a
major change in format or some other significant change. Make sure that
every time you make a major change you announce it to NEW-LIST and gain
new subscribers!
Make
a "Subscribe" Box and Double Your Subscriptions
It is your responsibility to
make it as easy as possible for people to sign up to your newsletter. A
great way of doing this is to create a "Subscribe Box" like the one below,
where people simply enter their e-mail address into the box and press a
button to be added to your list of subscribers.
The North Shore eZine
Articles and self help tips
for
Enter your e-mail address and
Your e-mail address will remain
This box relies on a program
called "Formmail.pl" which resides on my server. The program can be obtained
at
http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/
However, to use this program
you will need what is known as a cgi-bin on your site. Ask your service
provider about this, and about installing the above program into your cgi-bin.
Here is the HTML for the
above "Subscribe Box":
<!-- Beginning of North
Shore eZine Subscription Box code -->
<TABLE BORDER="1" CELLPADDING="3"
CELLSPACING="0" WIDTH="200"> <TR> <TD
<!-- End of North
Shore eZine Subscription Box code -->
Don't worry if you're not familiar
with HTML. To create your own Subscribe Box, you can simply use the above
code. However, the text in blue should be changed to describe your own
newsletter.
Important: You MUST change
the part of the code in blue, otherwise the Subscribe Box will not work.
Change the
http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/newsletter.htm/cgi-bin/formmail.pl
part to the address where your
Formmail program is installed - in particular, make sure that the underlined
part (i.e. www.northshorehypnosis.com) is your Web address.
Change the "join@northshorehypnosis.com"
part to the address where the subscription request will be sent.
Change
http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/thankyou.html
to the page you wish to send
the subscriber to once they have signed up.
Using your Subscribe Box
Your Subscribe Box will make
it easier for others to sign up to your newsletter. Make sure that your
box is on EVERY page of your site! Remember, not everyone coming
to your site will do so by the "front door". The search engines may have
registered your other pages as well. You want to invite your visitors to
subscribe at every opportunity! Your Subscribe Box should also be used
on all your gateway pages, and we will discuss these later. [39]
Get
Yourself Listed in These Ezine Directories
There are many directories
of "e-mail newsletters" (otherwise known as "e-zines") on the Internet.
Here is a selection of some of the best. Pay a visit to each one, and add
yours. During the course of this particular section on newsletters you
will find that you will often have to come back to this page, as you will
need to refer to this list of directories regularly.
E-zine AdSource Directory
InfoJump
E-Zine-List
Zine World
NerdWorld
PAML
EzineSeek
E.Zine Movement
TechMailings
Liszt
E-Zinez.com
Direct E-Mail List Source
MediaPeak
Paying
For Subscribers: How, Where, And Why It Works
Once you've prepared your newsletter
for publication, posted to NEW-LIST and promoted your newsletter in as
many free ways as possible, it's a good idea to invest money in your publication.
Why? Because, as I've emphasized in previous chapters, your newsletter
is not only a great traffic machine but also an incredible sales generator
as well! You will almost certainly sell many more units of your product
through your newsletter than you would without one, because all of your
subscribers are potential customers!
Imagine running a newsletter
that not only generates you tons of sales every time you publish, but actually
generates you substantial advertising revenue as well - can you think of
anything better?
Investing in your newsletter
Even if you publish solely
with the intention of selling advertising space, it is almost certainly
worthwhile investing money in your list.
As an example, let's say that
Sally publishes an Internet marketing newsletter. She calculates that,
by purchasing advertising space in other newsletters, it will cost her
$800 to acquire 1,000 new subscribers. However, with each new 1,000 subscribers,
she is able to earn an additional $80 in advertising revenue each issue.
It would thus take her 10 issues just to recoup the costs of acquiring
those advertisers. However, after those 10 issues every advertising dollar
she earns is pure profit!
Of course, I have greatly simplified
the above example, but it serves to demonstrate the point that, when advertising
your newsletter, you need to compare the cost of acquiring new subscribers
with the revenue you will earn from those additional subscribers. In Sally's
case, it appears that her investment is a good idea.
However, she would also need
to take into consideration other factors. For instance, how long, on average,
do people remain subscribed to her newsletter? She could calculate this
by taking an average over a period of time. If she publishes weekly, it's
best to work out an average weekly percentage of cancellations. So if she
has 1,000 subscribers, and approximately 10 unsubscribes a week, her average
weekly unsubscribe rate will be 1%. Therefore, she would need to factor
this into her calculations.
Secondly, her list may actually
earn her more than just advertising revenue. What if she has a product
of her own that she can promote in the newsletter as well? Her income may
be substantially higher and thus she may recoup the cost of investing in
her newsletter much quicker!
Finding other newsletters
in which to advertise
Now that you've decided to
invest some money in your newsletter, you'll need to find other publications
quickly and easily. The best resource I have discovered so far for doing
this is Lifestyles Publishing's Directory Of Ezines, which lists hundreds
of newsletters along with their advertising rates and circulations.
Search and find a selection
of newsletters (at least twenty) where you think your advertising will
bring results. For instance, if your newsletter is about a computer product,
it would make sense to advertise in computer related newsletters. If you
offer package holidays to the Bahamas, you will have the best response
from an advert placed in an entertainment and leisure oriented newsletter.
Make sure you see a sample
copy of every newsletter in which you plan to advertise. Find out their
current circulation, the frequency of their publication, how much they
charge for advertising and the payment methods they accept, before you
commit to advertising with them.
You will now have to decide
how much advertising you can afford, and in which newsletters you wish
to advertise. Consider the following factors:
Circulation. As a general
rule, you are better off advertising in newsletters with a wider circulation.
If all other things are equal, an advert placed in a newsletter with a
circulation of 10,000 will do better than one placed in a newsletter of
5,000 subscribers.
Target audience. Having
said the above, the target audience of a newsletter will affect the number
who respond to your ad. Let us assume the newsletter with 5,000 subscribers
is about search engines, and the newsletter with 10,000 subscribers is
about the Internet in general. If your newsletter is about search engine
submission software, you may find you will get a greater response to your
ad from the smaller newsletter. This is because the smaller newsletter
is more targeted than the larger publication.
Method of advertising.
In an earlier chapter we discussed different advertising models such as
the "Classified" model and the "Sponsor" model. [20] Which methods do your
selected newsletters use? Would you prefer to have your advert stand alone
in a newsletter, or would you be happy to see it listed in a Classified
section?
Location of advertising.
Where in the newsletter will your advert be placed? At the top of the issue?
In the middle? At the very bottom? Expect to pay a higher price for top
positioning, since more people will likely see your advert.
Price. Calculate the
rate they are charging "per thousand subscribers" (i.e. CPM). In other
words, if they charge $120 an advert and their newsletter reaches 10,000
people, they are charging $12 per thousand subscribers (i.e. the CPM is
$12). There is no set rule on what is a fair price. You will have to decide
what you are willing to pay based on all of the above factors.
Once you have considered these
factors for each publication, draw up a list of newsletters in which you
plan to advertise. Next, you will need to write your ad copy.
Writing your advertisement
I am not going to give you
a
lengthy lesson on how to write killer ad copy, but here are a few golden
rules to help you write an effective advert:
Watch other successful advertisers.
If you're subscribed to any newsletters yourself, do you see the same company
advertising in that newsletter over and over again? That's because their
ad is successful! Make a note of the techniques they use, and imitate their
success.
Keep it short and simple.
Apart from the fact that the newsletter itself will impose a word or line
limit on your ad, aim to keep your ad short and simple. People tend to
lose interest in reading long ads, and many will simply skip your message
altogether.
Brief description and sample
copy. The best model to use when trying to "sell" your newsletter is
to simply offer a brief but specific description of your newsletter, and
give an e-mail address where people can request a sample copy. Make sure
that when you do send them a sample copy, you also include instructions
on how they can sign up to your newsletter.
Once you've written your ad
copy, pay for your adverts in your chosen newsletters, and watch those
subscription requests come pouring in!
Tracking the responses
In order to determine how well
your ads are doing, you need to track the responses. If your ad directs
people to a web page, you can do this by simply adding a special code to
the end of the URL (see [20] for details on how to do this.) If they can
subscribe to your newsletter directly from the advert, you might consider
setting up lots of email addresses for the purpose of tracking subscriptions.
For instance, in newsletter A you might have the ad reporting the subscribe
address as joina@whatever.com, while in newsletter B the subscribe address
could be joinb@whatever.com.
Emails received from either
addresses are then sent to your mailing list server and to a special email
box that you have set up to track subscribers. These type of addresses
are called multiple response addresses. If your Web host does not provide
them, consider switching to Virtualis, who do.
Alternatively, you could simply
get people to type in a different code in the SUBJECT line of an email.
For instance, in newsletter A your ad could say: "To subscribe, send an
email to join@whatever.com with the words "subscribe A" in the SUBJECT
line." And hopefully you know what the text for newsletter B should read.
However you do it, make sure
that you track your subscriptions and see which adverts are pulling the
best.
Once you've reached the magic
figure of 1,000 subscribers to your newsletter, you'll be in a better position
to grow your newsletter more easily.
We'll talk about selling your
newsletter advertising space in a later chapter, [32] but in any event,
you are unlikely to sell all of your space, particularly in the early months.
This is actually an advantage - you can use this space to trade ads with
other newsletter publishers.
Why trade ads?
Swapping advertisements will
benefit both parties. If you advertise your newsletter in theirs, and vice
versa, both of you will increase subscribers. And you are putting unsold
ad space to good use.
Ad swapping is very successful.
You can build your ezine from 100s to 1000s subscribers in
months primarily by swapping ads with other ezines. It definitely works!
How to trade ads
Actually this section does
not require much explanation. Simply find newsletters that are related
but not directly competing with yours, and ask if they would like to do
an ad swap. If you both agree to swap, don't forget to send them over your
ad copy, and the date(s) on which you will be able to run their adverts.
You need to aim for newsletters
that have a similar number of subscribers. After all, a simple ad swap
between your list of 1,000 and their list of 100,000 hardly sounds fair.
However, if there is a reasonably small imbalance, i.e. yours 3,000 and
theirs 6,000, you could always offer to run their ad twice in exchange
for them running yours once.
Ad swaps are very effective,
and your subscriber figures can grow very rapidly using this method.
SWAPPING ADS THE EASY WAY
Swapping ads used to mean spending
long hours finding other similar sized newsletters, and then arranging
to swap with them individually. Nowadays a number of publications and mailing
lists exist which make the task of ad swapping a lot easier. I will discuss
three of them here.
Ezine Swap
This is a weekly newsletter
for ezine publishers. Each issue contains details of newsletters that are
requesting ad swaps. You can subscribe at http://Ezine-Swap.com/ or by
sending an email to join-ezine-swap@ezine-swap.com
Ezine AD Swap
This is a mailing list for
newsletters who wish to swap ads, moderated by Troy McDonald. To subscribe,
send an email to EzineADSwap-subscribe@topica.com
Advantage Email Co-operative
This is a very useful "mass"
ad swap co-operative run by Chris Dillingham, where dozens of newsletters
can exchange ads with one another up to twice a month. To join, send an
email to AEC-subscribe@topica.com
There are hundreds of other
newsletters on the Internet, and many of them are eager to find articles
of value to their readers. Some publishers write all their own articles,
while others rely partly on submissions by other authors. An excellent
way of boosting your own newsletter subscriptions, as well as traffic to
your site, is to write an article for another newsletter.
Looking for quality
Naturally, other newsletter
owners are going to be very selective about what they include in their
own publications. Many newsletter owners, like myself, receive dozens of
article submissions a day; and whilst I make every effort to read all of
them, obviously I have only enough space in my e-zines to include a few
submitted articles a week at most.
Therefore you must - absolutely
must - make the article that you are submitting both original and relevant.
Straight away I will trash articles I receive that are not connected to
my publication in any way. I then review the remaining articles and look
for originality. This doesn't necessarily mean a new idea. It could be
an old idea, but told in a new way. Every person is unique, with a unique
perspective on life, so you can easily incorporate your own life experiences
in the article to make it original.
One thing I strongly advise
is that you subscribe to and read a newsletter before you even consider
submitting your article to the publisher. You will then get an idea of
the kind of articles they are looking for. You will definitely get more
success doing it this way.
Find the right newsletters
First of all, before you begin
writing anything, find ten or so newsletters in which you would like to
see your article published. You can use the resources listed in Chapter
[25] to do this. Subscribe to them all, and read a few back issues to give
you an idea of what the publishers are looking for. Also, check their submissions
policy! If it states on their site that they do not accept submissions,
then don't waste your time sending them an article.
Writing your articles
This is where the hard work
starts, but always remember the rewards! If you are successful in getting
your articles published, you will gain many new subscribers and lots of
additional visitors to your site.
So what do you write about?
Well, what is your site about? Hypnosis? Reiki? Alternative Healing Modalities?
Pet care? Write about what your website deals with. You probably know a
lot about your own field of expertise, so could offer some valuable information
in your articles. Even if you don't have much knowledge, what about experience?
If your site is about Internet marketing, have you ever made a mistake
from which you learned? Write about that! Really, the possibilities are
endless. The rule is: write about what you know; and if you don't know
it, learn it! But whatever you do, make sure you get on that keyboard and
write!
How many articles should you
write? Quite simply, as many as you want and can write! Ideally, you should
write a different one for each of the newsletters in which you would like
to be published.
Submitting your articles
It is extremely easy to find
material to fill your newsletter. As I mentioned earlier, many writers
are eager to see their article in your newsletter, and there are many articles
flying around the Net that have been used in newsletters time and time
again.
This is both a problem and
an opportunity. It is a problem in that many newsletter owners, who are
tired of using the same re-hashed articles in their publications, are starting
to move towards more original content. It is an opportunity in that, while
your articles remain written but unpublished, they are exactly what the
newsletter owners are looking for.
This, then, is the way to add
such value to your articles that publishers will be eager to use them.
Send one article to only one publisher at a time, and offer them exclusive
first publication rights. In other words, make them a guarantee that they
are the first and only publisher you have sent your article to so far,
and if they accept your article for publication, no one else (including
yourself) will be allowed to publish it until it has appeared in their
own newsletter.
This is much more attractive
to a publisher than simply sending them your article by e-mail. The publisher
has no idea how many times the article has already been published.
Another very important factor
to consider is how you offer them the article. Don't simply send it to
them, with a comment attached.
Here is a much more considerate
approach:
----------
As a publisher myself, I subscribe
to and enjoy your publication and its many useful and original articles.
I have just completed writing an article specifically tailored for your
publication and I am willing to offer you exclusive first publication rights.
In other words, the article has not appeared in any other publication,
nor will it do so until it has appeared in yours, should you choose to
accept this offer.
The article is entitled: "Change
Your Breathing Rate, Change Your Emotional State". The article then discusses
the following: A technique of diaphragmatic (deep
abdominal) breathing and why it eliminates the symptoms of anxiety.
I have put the article for
your review on my website at
In exchange for publishing
my article I ask that you include the "signature" at the end of the article.
Please let me know whether
you intend to publish my article. If I have not heard from you by December
30, 2004 will assume you do not wish to use it, and I will offer first
publishing rights to another newsletter.
Thanks again for your time.
The above e-mail summarizes
the article without including it in the e-mail. This makes it easier for
the publisher to decide whether the article is appropriate, without having
to read it. Notice that I have also put the actual article on the Web (but
out of "general" public access) and on an autoresponder, so the publisher
can read it at leisure.
Finally, included a signature
message with the actual article itself. This is where you get your free
publicity. Make sure it includes your URL and an address from which people
can subscribe to your newsletter. Here is one I use quite frequently:
----------
Not all of the newsletters
that you submit articles to will take up your offer - but even if you only
get one positive response out of ten, it will have been worthwhile. And
you still have nine articles to offer to a new selection of publishers!
Have
Your Message Spread Like Wildfire!
Your newsletter is now being
published regularly, and you have hundreds, if not thousands of subscribers.
An obvious - though often neglected - method of boosting your subscriber
figures is to ask your readers to spread the word about you.
Don't be shy about asking them
to do this. If they consider your newsletter to be in any way useful, they
will be more than happy to let their friends know about it.
In each issue, put a small
message at the top and bottom of your newsletter, asking your subscribers
to forward your newsletter in its entirety to others who might be interested
in the subject matter.
Also, you can use the free
services of a company called Recommend-It.com.
They provide you with a small banner for your website which, when clicked
on, will send visitors to a form that they can fill in to recommend your
site to a friend. They also provide a snippet of code that you can use
in your newsletter for this purpose.
In addition to all this, many
successful newsletter owners offer readers an incentive for spreading the
word about their publication. For example, offer to enter someone in a
prize draw who can get you 3 other subscribers. For instance:
----------<snip>----------
Hi folks. Would you like to
win a free CD or tape of your choice for yourself and 3 of your friends?
All you have to do is get 3 other friends to sign up to the North Shore
eZine, and I'll enter you for our prize draw, to be held on December 30th
2004.
Here's how it works. Get three
of your friends to sign up with us. You can either tell them how to subscribe
and encourage them to sign up directly, or you can send them a Recommend-It
message using the form at http://recommend-it.com
Once each of your 3 friends
have subscribed, send an e-mail to prizedraw@northshorehypnosis.com with
"Prize Draw" as the SUBJECT header. In the BODY of your e-mail, write your
name and e-mail address, followed by the names and e-mail addresses of
your 3 friends.
As long as they are still subscribers
at the time of the prize draw on December 30th, 2003 your entry is valid.
At the time of the prize draw, we'll pick out one valid entry at random.
If your entry is the one selected, you and your 3 friends will each receive
a free tape or CD of your choice, from a selection found at http://northshorehypnosis.com/Audiotapes.htm
You may send in as many entries
as you want - which will increase your chance of winning - but remember
that each entry must contain 4 e-mail addresses: yours, and 3 friends.
Your entry becomes invalid
if:
Any of the e-mail
addresses in the entry are autoresponders, or cannot be used to contact
the
Any of the e-mail
addresses in the entry are not new subscribers, but were listed as
A person in your
entry already appears in another person's entry; and the other entry was
You use any method
of getting subscribers the Editor considers unethical (such as
OK...that's all the rules,
folks. Now, get your friends to subscribe, send in those entries, and let's
see if we can get you and your friends a free CD!
P.S: One final rule, I'm afraid....the
Editor's decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into
regarding this matter.
----------<snip>----------
Lengthy? Maybe...but does it
work? You bet! You can receive hundreds of new subscribers as a result
of this draw, and all it costs is the price of 4 CDs and the cost of making
an e-book (i.e. practically nothing - see the chapter on e-books).
Asking your readers to recommend
your newsletter is always effective if you have a quality newsletter, and
you offer your readers a little incentive for doing so!
Free
Advertising by Autoresponder!
We have already discussed how
autoresponders can be a powerful tool for capturing your web visitor's
email address and for bringing them back to your site. Now that you have
a newsletter with a reasonable circulation, you can use autoresponders
to obtain free advertising both for your website and your newsletter!
The SENDFREE Email Advertising
Exchange
A company called SendFree have
an excellent program which I highly recommend. They claim to be the world's
first ad exchange network to take advantage of the most widely used tool
on the Internet - email.
This is how it works. As a
SendFree member you receive free autoresponders. All SendFree autoresponder
messages include one short ad when delivered. The ad in your autoresponder's
email reply is for a member of SendFree.
In short, your autoresponder
message displays an ad for another member while their autoresponder message
displays an ad for you. This system provides you with free email advertising,
the most powerful marketing tool on the Internet!
For every 2 times your autoresponder
message is requested, you will get 1 free ad sent out with another SendFree
member's autoresponder.
Simply for the fact that they
give away free autoresponders, this is a great scheme. However, it is an
absolutely amazing scheme for you and I who run e-mail newsletters! Using
SendFree autoresponders, I get literally thousands of free adverts a week,
and these free ads bring me dozens of new subscribers to my newsletters
each and every week!
Free adverts galore
Let me show you how I do it.
If you're subscribed to North Shore Hypnosis eZine (http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/newletter.htm),
you'll know that each day, as well as including the Web address of a couple
of funny sites, I also send out a funny article or a short piece of humor
in each issue. Perhaps some people would prefer to receive many more jokes
in their e-mail box each day, so do I simply include more jokes in each
issue of North Shore eZine? No! Instead, I put two new jokes on two separate
SendFree autoresponders each day, and then near the bottom of my e-zine
I include the following message:
>>> BONUS HUMOR
Send a blank e-mail to the
autoresponder of your choice, to get the joke sent to you instantly:
"Confucious Say..." [List -
Adult - Humor Rating: 3/5] [funnies2@sendfree.com]
"The $5,000 Loan" [Joke - Clean
- Humor Rating: 4/5] [funnies3@sendfree.com]
Those who want the additional
jokes send a blank e-mail to the appropriate autoresponder and it gets
sent to them instantly. Those who don't want any more jokes that day simply
skip over the above message.
Now, not everyone wants those
extra jokes...but guess what? As many as 10% of my subscribers DO! So,
let's work it out...if I have, say, 10,000 subscribers, and 10% of them
want those extra jokes, then 1,000 requests will be sent to each SendFree
autoresponder. Each of those autoresponder messages will contain adverts
for other members of the SendFree network, but because of SendFree's ad
swap system, I will get 500 of my adverts displayed on other SendFree member's
autoresponders! So...two autoresponders a day, earning me 500 adverts...that's
1,000 free adverts a day, or 5,000 free adverts a week! And since my advert
contains both my URL and the subscription e-mail address for The Mouthpiece,
just think how much free traffic and how many free subscriptions I'm getting
from SendFree's wonderful autoresponder ad swap exchange!
You may be wondering...how
does all that apply to me? Not everyone runs a joke list. Not everyone
publishes their newsletter daily. Nevertheless, there are still many things
you can put on a SendFree autoresponder. For instance, if your newsletter
is on Internet marketing, why not run a tip of the week section? The section
could look something like this:
MARKETING TIPS OF THE WEEK
Q. HOW CAN I SEE WHAT MY WEB
PAGES LOOK LIKE IN OTHER BROWSERS, EVEN
Q. HOW CAN I TELL FROM A SEARCH
ENGINE WHO LINKS TO MY SITE?
Q. SHOULD I UPGRADE MY COMPUTER
TO WINDOWS 98?
I think you get the idea by
now...in fact, you've probably already got lots of ideas in your head on
how you can use SendFree autoresponders. Notice in the above example I
asked questions, but I did not directly supply the answers. If a person
already knows the answer to the question, they won't bother with the autoresponder.
However, if, say, 50% of your readers don't know the answer, how many are
going to check the answer out of curiosity?
Other things you can put on
your SendFree autoresponder include articles, reports, sales messages,
letters, quizzes, competitions, stories...really, the possibilities are
endless!
Sign up to the SendFree Ad
Exchange program and get yourself some more free advertising! (Oh, and
free autoresponders as well....)
The
Amazing "Piggy-Back" Growth Technique
If you remember, a previous
chapter discussed the creation of a "Subscription Box" which people could
use to subscribe to your newsletter. Once an e-mail address had been entered,
and the Subscribe button pressed, your new subscriber would be taken to
a "thank-you" page.
I am now going to demonstrate
a very powerful way of getting many additional subscribers to your newsletter.
Using the many e-zine directories
listed in a previous chapter, find an e-zine that is similar in size to
yours, and which complements but does not compete with the contents of
your newsletter. For instance, if your newsletter is for dog lovers, an
animal welfare e-zine would be a good choice.
Next, subscribe to their newsletter,
paying particular attention to the method used to complete your subscription.
Do they have a "thank-you" page they redirect you to once you've subscribed?
If not, you need to find a different newsletter.
Once you've found a good newsletter
which uses a thank-you page, send an e-mail to the webmaster along the
following lines (I have written this e-mail as if I was referring to my
own North Shore eZine):
----------
I publish a newsletter called
North Shore eZine that is read by over 1000s of people, and I would like
to make you an offer.
Once a person subscribes to
your newsletter, they are re-directed to a "thank-you" page. On that page,
I would like you to put the following message, just after you have thanked
them for subscribing to your own newsletter:
"Incidentally, if you enjoy
this newsletter, you will definitely like the North Shore eZine, published
by a hypnotherapist named Carol Denicker. Each issue, Carol finds and reports
on a couple of alternative healing modalities and self help tips
authored by colleagues as well as on the Net. To sign up to the North Shore
eZine, just enter your name in the box below, and press Subscribe."
Then, please put my Subscriber
Box under this text. You can find the code for this box at http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/subbox.html
In exchange, I will do the
same for you. If you can send me a "comment" on your e-zine, similar to
the one I made above, and give me the code for your subscriber box, I will
put that on my "thank-you" page. I will keep the comment and your subscriber
box on my "thank-you" page for 3 months, and I would ask you to do the
same.
Thus, many people who subscribe
to my newsletter will now subscribe to yours also, and vice versa.
Please let me know what you
think!
Carol Denicker
http://northshorehypnosis.com/newsletter.htm
<free quarterly eZine for
health, happiness and success>
Of course, all you need to
do is adapt the above e-mail to your own particular newsletter. If one
newsletter owner won't do this, move on and find an owner that will! Believe
me, there are many newsletters that are not using this powerful technique
(often called the piggy-back or backend subscription technique), so it
won't be too difficult to find a newsletter owner who would be thrilled
to take part in a subscription-boosting idea that will benefit both of
you!
WILL YOUR BOX WORK ON OTHER
SITES?
If you are using a form-to-mail
program such as formmail.pl to create and process your "Subscribe Box"
forms, your box probably won't work on other people's sites. This is because
you need to specify in the formmail.pl script which sites are permitted
to use your forms. The solution to this is to adapt the Subscribe Box so
that it uses the host site's form-to-mail script. If you are unfamiliar
with such scripts, you will need to talk to your Web host.
Swapping ads is great for building
the number of subscribers to your newsletter, but sooner or later you're
going to want to actually make money from your publication. One of the
ways of doing this is to sell advertising space. The question is: how do
you attract advertisers to your publication? Let me address this question
in detail now.
Before any advertiser will
consider your publication, you need to make sure of two things:
Your newsletter is of good
quality. By placing an ad in your newsletter, an advertiser is effectively
giving it a vote of confidence. They consider your publication a worthy
recipient of their advertising dollars. Don't let them down - offer a quality
newsletter that readers enjoy, and advertisers will notice.
Your newsletter has a reasonably
high circulation. It is unlikely you will get advertisers if your newsletter
has a circulation of only 500 subscribers (unless you have a very highly
targeted newsletter). It needs to have a circulation of thousands before
you can seriously consider selling advertising space.
If you have these two factors,
you can start selling your space. So, how do you attract those advertisers?
Here are nine ideas you can use to bring those advertising dollars to your
publication:
(1) Get yourself known. Look
for newsgroups, email discussion groups and message boards that are relevant
to your site, and start participating. Don't simply advertise ... instead,
offer help, ideas and suggestions. Before long, you will become respected
as someone with a good knowledge of his or her profession or industry.
In time, potential advertisers will seek you out.
(2) Give advertising details
on your site and in your newsletter. Many of your subscribers may turn
out to be potential advertisers. Make sure you include advertising details
in every issue of your newsletter. Include the price, and your present
circulation figure. It is also a good idea to put all the advertising information
on an autoresponder, so advertisers can request and receive your information
instantly. If you want an example of how to structure the message on your
autoresponder, take a look at the North Shore eZine advertising message
at sales@northshorehypnosis.com. Also, put up a page on your website dedicated
to your advertising package. You can take a look at ours, at http://www.northshorehypnosis.com/advertising.html
(3) Get listed in the ezine
ad directories. These directories are specifically designed for advertisers
to find publications in which to advertise. Therefore, it is critical that
you get your publication listed in each directory, and make sure you update
your details regularly.
Here is a list of some directories:
LifeStyles Publishing's Directory
Of Ezines
(4) Use agencies that sell
your ad space. Once your newsletter circulation has reached a certain size,
several agencies on the Internet may be able to sell some of your advertising
space on your behalf. Here are two agencies that will do this for you (remember
to read the small print before you join!):
OakNet Publishing
(5) Team up with other ezine
publishers. On the Internet, co-operation is often more effective than
competition. You could find a group of publishers with newsletters similar
to yours, and agree to sell each other's advertising space as one "package".
In other words, instead of the advertiser spending $X advertising in each
of your newsletters individually, they could spend $Y in one lump sum,
and then each newsletter in the group runs the advert and shares the revenue.
(6) Referrals. Nowadays I find
that I can sell out my entire advertising space for a month very quickly.
Also, many of my advertisers are keen to get their message out to as many
people as they can afford. Very often advertising in my newsletter alone
is not enough. Therefore, many of them ask me if I know of other good quality
newsletters in which to advertise. Naturally I obliged and the result was
that the other newsletters benefit from my referral! I now have arrangements
with a few other newsletter publishers that I trust and that have similar
ad prices to mine. I refer advertisers to them, and they do the same for
me. The perfect win-win situation!
(7) Offer a partnership/ad
revenue sharing program. One particularly effective way of getting paid
advertisers is to offer a partnership or affiliate program to other website
owners. You simply pay other website owners a certain percentage of the
revenue you earn if they get you advertisers. Setting up an affiliate program
like this is very easy, and requires no programming skills whatsoever.
We will discuss how to go about setting up an affiliate program in a later
chapter.
(8) Offer free, and then discounted
advertising. A good idea used by many newsletter publishers while their
circulation is still small is to offer free advertising to a certain percentage
of their subscribers. Once their publication has grown, they then offer
special advertising deals to those who previously placed a free advert.
(9) Add value to your advertising
package. In the past, each time I found myself short of advertisers I would
give away a free copy of this e-book to each advertiser. Every time I did
this, my advertising space sold out. This is because I was adding additional
value to what was already, in my opinion, a good deal. Could you do the
same? Is there something you can give away to advertisers that will add
value to your ad package?
THE RIGHT PRICE
How do you determine the right
price at which to sell your advertising space? The factors that will most
influence your decision are (a) your circulation, (b) what your competitors
are charging, and (c) how much value you add to your package.
First you'll need to calculate
the CPM of your competitors. CPM stands for the cost per mille and is basically
the cost of advertising per thousand impressions. For instance, if it costs
$15 to advertise in a newsletter with 1,000 subscribers, the CPM is $15.
The CPM can vary wildly depending
on how targeted a newsletter is. For instance, most joke mailing lists
have a CPM of between $3 and $5. However, business and marketing newsletters
usually have a CPM of between $30 and $50!
If you cannot compete with
other newsletters on price, there are many other options. For instance,
you could add value to your advertising package by giving something for
free, such as an e-book, a product, or even free advice. Alternatively,
you could even team up with your competitors and help sell each other's
advertising space.
SECTION
FIVE: E-BOOK PUBLISHING -
Writing
an Electronic Book: How, Why and Where
It is said that we all have
at least one book in us - but very few of us ever get round to writing
it! Then there is the effort and expense involved in printing, publishing
and marketing the book. In the traditional publishing field, it is very
difficult to get published.
What about the Internet?
The Internet has revolutionized
the publishing industry. Writers, who years before would have struggled
to publish and market their work, can now bypass the publishing companies
altogether and do all the publishing and marketing on the Internet!
This electronic book (or e-book)
that you are reading now is an example of what you can do on the Internet.
When I first joined the Internet I remember reading my first e-book and
thinking, "Wow...I'd love to be able to do something like this, but I bet
it costs far too much money, and I guess you need lots of programming knowledge."
I was wrong! Later I found out just how easy it was to publish my own e-book...and
guess how much I paid to create it - thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands?
No...less than $40 actually. And the only knowledge I needed was a very
basic understanding of HTML, the language of Web pages. In fact, I didn't
even need to know that. I simply created these pages using my favorite
Web page designer, and then transferred them to my e-book!
Why write an e-book?
Before I go on, many of you
are
probably already thinking, "Just why would I want to create an e-book anyway?"
For two very simple and compelling reasons...money and traffic!
With the traditional book,
costs are high. You need to publish the book, print it, distribute and
market it. Once the publisher's costs and profits are taken out, and the
bookstores have taken their cut, the writer of the book is very often left
with a mere 10% in royalties on the book price! A $4.99 book may only earn
the writer $0.49 for each book sold.
With an e-book, the costs are
virtually negligible. The only significant cost to make the e-book that
you are reading now was the license to use the e-book software, which cost
me less than $40. I don't even have any marketing costs! In a later chapter,
I will show you how I market this book without ever having to spend a penny.
For the moment, please simply trust me on this one...if you own a website
and a high-circulation newsletter, you can market your e-book for nothing!
Let's say you decide to sell
your e-book for $9.95. First, how many e-books do you have to sell to recover
the initial investment of paying for the software license? Since the software
costs less than $40, you only need to sell 4 books to break even. Then,
from the 5th book sold, it is pure profit! Of course, you may incur small
expenses; for instance, if people pay for your e-book by credit card, the
card company will keep a small percentage of your sales for their own profit.
But even if all these expenses ate up a whopping 20% of the price of your
e-book, you are still making $8 on each and every sale! Very few books
in the real world could ever hope to make such a high profit margin.
I said there were two reasons
for writing an e-book. The other reason is traffic...more traffic to your
website! First, I can update the pages on my website much easier
than I can update the pages of this e-book, which is now on your hard drive.
True, I could release an updated version of this e-book and get you to
download it again, but imagine if you had to do that every time some detail,
say the URL of a company, changed. I think it is fair to say you would
not be too happy. Second, including URLs to pages on my site encourages
you to go and explore my websites! Now, don't think this method is solely
as a ploy to get you to visit my site...it should be a natural consequence
of reading this e-book that you would want to visit my site. Whatever the
reason, I'm still going to get more traffic to my sites! And you can too,
if you refer regularly to pages on your own site in your e-book.
What can you write about?
You can write about literally
anything you want! What is your website about? Hypnosis for Weight Loss?
Then you could write a comprehensive history and guide to weight loss through
hypnosis, complete with graphs or photographs. Is your site about men's
health? Then why not write an e-book called "The <name of your site>
Complete Guide to Men's Health". Of course, the e-book can also be used
to "plug" your own products and services, if done carefully.
How to write an e-book
Now that you've decided to
write an e-book, you'll need some software. Here is a selection of popular
e-book software. The prices range from about $30 to over $100:
E-Book HTML Compiler Pro
E-ditor
MediaPacker
Webcompiler
InfoCourier
NeoBook
SuperWin98
I have tried out E-Book HTML
Compiler Pro, InfoCourier and MediaPacker. All of them allow you to design
your e-book pages in your favorite HTML editor. This e-book was made in
HTML Compiler Pro. While some of the above require Internet Explorer 4
or above to be installed on your computer in order to view the e-book,
HTML Compiler Pro creates a built-in browser with each e-book you make
- one of the reasons it was chosen it to make this particular e-book you
are reading now.
In any event, most of the above
allow you to download an evaluation copy to try out. So download the software
of your choice, and write your e-book! In the next chapter, we'll discuss
how to effectively market your book.
UPLOADING YOUR E-BOOK
Most ebook software packages
work by taking a collection of HTML pages and then compressing them into
one executable file (which has the .exe suffix). To upload your ebook onto
the Web, simply use the same method as if you were uploading a Web page
or a graphic. The only difference is that, once a person types the URL
of the ebook into their browser, the browser will then start to download
the book on the user's hard drive instead of displaying it on screen.
For instance, let's say you
wish your ebook to reside in a directory called "book", and the name of
the executable file which is your ebook is called "hypnosismadeeasy.exe".
Simply upload the book to the directory you wish, ie.
http://www.yoursite.com/book/hypnosismadeeasy.exe
Any person who then visits
the above address using their Web browser will be able to download the
book onto their computer's hard drive.
Multiplying
Your Work across the Web for Free
I mentioned in the previous
chapter that I can market my e-book without ever having to spend a penny,
and now I will show you how I do this. Please bear in mind that these marketing
ideas can be used to sell just about anything, not just an e-book.
[1] Newsletter cross-advertising
You need to have a high-circulation
newsletter in order for this strategy to work, preferably with a circulation
of several thousand readers. If you haven't already achieved this, see
the previous chapters on marketing a newsletter for advice on boosting
your subscriptions.
Write the advert for your e-book,
and then find a selection of newsletters in which you would like to place
your advertisement. Make sure they are of a similar size. Then, offer to
trade ads. They can advertise their newsletter or any product of theirs
in your publication, and in exchange, you can place the advert for your
e-book in their newsletter.
Think of the exposure your
ads will receive by doing this. Let's say your newsletter has a circulation
of 10,000, and you can devote just 3 ad slots a week in your newsletter
to this venture. That's 12 ad slots a month. Now, if you swap those ad
slots with newsletters of a similar size, your advert will appear in 12
newsletters each with approximately 10,000 readers...in other words, your
ad will appear in some 120,000 emails!
The only cost involved is the
ad space, which could have been used for other purposes, so you will have
to decide whether this is a profitable use of your space.
[2] Offer a free version of
your e-book
Many of the e-book creation
programs mentioned in the previous chapter allow you to "password protect"
certain pages of your e-book. You could offer a free version of your book
with a certain number of free chapters, and the other chapters could be
password protected, only available once the viewer has paid to access them.
Alternatively, you could write a free book as a "taster" for your paid-for
book. In any case, there are many ways you could promote your free book:
Offer it on your
site
[3] Offer a free report
Earlier in this e-book I discussed
the Special Report Network [10]. You can easily use this network to make
sales.
Write a free report, based
on the information in your book, written to encourage the purchase of your
book, and then put it on the Special Report Network. If your free report
is valuable and not an "obvious" sales pitch, people will be more inclined
to purchase your book.
Remember, the best way to offer
your report is through autoresponder email. That way you capture their
e-mail address, and you get the chance to sell to them again. [17].
[4] Start an affiliate program
A great way to boost sales
is to pay others a "commission" for selling your e-book. I will discuss
how to start your own affiliate program in a later chapter. Needless to
say, your e-book can be a great money-making idea, and will also earn you
lots of extra traffic to your site!
E-BOOK DIRECTORIES
Electronic publishing is definitely
the way forward, and many directories are now appearing where you can list
your free e-book. Here are three of the most popular e-book directories:
The E-Book Directory
Carvers Internet Marketing
E-Book Distribution Center
EBookNet
SECTION
SIX: THE UNSTOPPABLE MACHINE -
While most of this ebook has
so far dealt exclusively with promoting your site on the Internet, there
are many ways of marketing your site in the "real world" (yes, the "real
world" still does exist!) In this chapter I'll talk about just a few of
the ways you can spread the word about your site in the offline world.
Business cards, stationery,
faxes and voicemail
The most obvious and cheapest
form of promotion is to put your URL and e-mail address on all business
cards, envelopes, letters, etc. that leave your office. This free method
of promoting your website is often neglected by companies, with the result
that they are losing out on potential traffic.
It is also a good idea to put
an autoresponder address on your stationery, where people can request further
information about your company.
Make sure your URL appears
on all faxes that leave the company; and what about voicemail? Does your
company regularly put people on hold? Why not read out your URL in your
voicemail message?
Mailshots, leaflets, and the
local media
Don't forget the traditional
marketing techniques, such as mailshots and leaflet distributions. Why
not draw up a shortlist of companies that might be interested in the information
on your website, and write to them, inviting them to visit your site? Is
your site for a more general audience? Then a mass leaflet distribution
campaign may work.
Then there's the local press,
yellow pages, radio and television networks, and noticeboards to consider.
Have you considered the opportunities to advertise your website in the
local community?
Mouse mats and bookmarkers,
thick rubber bands
If there's one item that pretty
much every computer owner uses, it's a mouse mat. Now, just imagine if
thousands of people had a mouse mat next to their computer with your logo
and URL on it. You would quite literally be getting your advertising message
in front of these people every day!
Mouse mats are not particularly
expensive to manufacture, so why not send a free mouse mat to everyone
who purchases something from you? If your budget allows, you could even
offer a free mouse mat to everyone who visits your site! Of course, in
order to receive your mouse mat they will need to give you their mailing
address...which may come in useful later on for marketing purposes. Don't
forget to send out your sales information at the same time as you send
out the mouse mat!
Mouse Messages
Free Mouse Pads
If your budget won't allow
you to send out mouse mats, how about a bookmarker? They don't have to
be made out of expensive leather...a simple cardboard bookmarker will do...just
make sure it has your URL on it! Then, offer it free to everyone who visits
your site. That way, you get their mailing address, and every time they
use your bookmarker they'll see your Web address!
Creative Bookmarks
Web cards
Web cards are a superb way
of getting family, friends and business associates to visit your site.
At Web Cards, they will create full color postcards of your Web pages.
Prices start at just $95 for 500 postcards, and there is no extra charge
for setup.
You can even design your Web
Cards online, choosing from a range of over 1,000 samples. Prices are for
cards printed full (4) color on one side. They will be printed on a 12
pt. cover weight stock, gloss coated on one side. They take a screen shot
of your Web page from the Internet, and print on a postcard with your copy.
On the back side, they will print, at extra charge, your copy, in black
ink in any of their standard typefaces.
This is a great idea for getting
everyone you know, including previous customers, to visit your site.
To order your own Web Cards,
click here.
Plan out your offline promotional
strategy now, and you will very likely find great new sources of traffic
and sales!
Getting your website or business
noticed by the media is a great way of receiving free publicity for your
site. However, you need to consider the following:
Writing a press release
First, you need to consider
where you intend to send your press release, and then write specifically
for that audience. For instance, the editor of an Internet publication
will be looking for a different story to your local newspaper. Study the
publication you intend to send the press release to, and then write for
that publication.
It is important not to send
your press release to just any publication. Make sure your press release
is relevant to a particular publication's readership.
Finally, your press release
must not simply be an advertisement for your business. Instead it should
provide news, entertainment and information relevant to the readers of
your selected publication. Ask yourself, "If I was the editor of this publication,
why would I want to use this press release? Of what interest would this
be to my readers?"
For more information on what
editors look for in a press release, see
Sending out your press release
Here are some great URLs for
locating media sources and for sending out your press release:
Searcher.com
Multimedia Marketing Group's
Internet News (fee based)
PR NewsWire (fee based)
Automated Press Releases
Remember, all it takes is one
good press release, and you could earn a tremendous amount of free publicity
and business for your website!
Watching
Your Competition: A Great Search Engine Trick!
Here's an amazing and very
powerful search engine "trick" for finding out who links to your online
competitors. This under-used tool can help you keep track of your competitor's
linking efforts, and can earn you many valuable links to your site!
Take the Web address of your
hottest competitor. (As an example, let's say your competitor's URL was
"yourcompetition.com".)
Go to AltaVista and in the
Search Box type in the following:
link:http://www.yourcompetition.com
Replacing the above URL with
the Web address of your competitor. Press "SEARCH", and AltaVista will
return you a list of sites that link to your competitor!
AltaVista also tells you how
many pages are linked to your competitor's site, saying something like:
"AltaVista found about 8469 Web pages for you." The higher the number,
the more active is your competitor in seeking out links.
Are you beginning to see the
value of this tool? Not only can you see the results of your competitor's
linking efforts to date, you can now visit these sites that are linked
to your competitor and ask them to link to you!
Actually, you can make this
tool even more useful! Let me show you step-by-step how to make the best
use of it.
(1) Open up a new spreadsheet
using your favorite spreadsheet program (i.e. Excel or Lotus123). If you
don't have one of these programs, a word-processor will do. Or you could
use good old paper.
(2) Make four columns: "URL",
"Owner", "E-mail address", and "Links".
(3) Next, visit each of the
sites that are linking to your competitor, and record their URL in the
"URL" column of your spreadsheet, the site owner or webmaster's name in
the "Owner" column, and the owner's e-mail address in the "E-mail address"
column.
(4) Now, (and this is the good
bit!) take each of the URLs recorded in your spreadsheet, and use the "link:"
command in AltaVista to find out how many sites link to them, just as you
did for your competitor. Record this figure in the "Links" column of your
spreadsheet.
What you end up with is a list
of sites that link to your competitor, and a guide to how popular each
of these sites are! Thus, you can concentrate on getting links to the most
popular sites first.
Don't underestimate this very
powerful tool from AltaVista...it should be an integral part of every Web
marketers linking strategy!
Guaranteed
Search Engine Rankings
As mentioned in a previous
chapter, search engines are a great source of traffic if your site ranks
highly on a search. However, if you're not in the top 50 in a particular
search, you will only get a trickle of visitors to your site. Therefore,
search engine ranking is of supreme importance.
There are companies on the
Internet that specialize in getting your site highly ranked on the search
engines - for a price. I will now discuss two of them:
Get Ranked!
They have the programming skills
available to attain high rankings on these top search engines, portals
and directories: Altavista, AOL Netfind, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Looksmart,
Lycos, Magellan, Metacrawler, Netscape, Northernlight, Webcrawler and Yahoo.
First, they make a copy of
your homepage and host it on their servers. Then they alter it in such
a way to get it ranked highly on search engines based on keywords you have
chosen. They monitor these pages and keep them ranked highly so that you
get a constant flow of targeted traffic.
Get Ranked! charges a one-time
setup fee of $400, and then $0.25 per visitor.
Magic-City.net
Once your site is in the top
20 you will be billed $179 per month. This monthly maintenance fee is to
cover the cost of web hosting, re-submission, monitoring your placements,
and constant alterations to your pages for improved placements on all the
ever-changing major search engines, and basically for insuring that you
get on top and stay on top.
Additional resources
Finally, here are three great
sites for learning more about search engines:
Search Engine Watch
Planet Ocean - Unfair Advantage
Search Engine Forums
As you may know, search engines
are capable of registering more than just one page of your site. A good
site will have many if not all pages listed on the major search engines.
An excellent way of getting traffic to your main page is to create many
doorway pages (otherwise known as gateway pages).
A "doorway page" is a page
on your site that has been specifically designed to rank highly on a search
engine and to generate additional traffic for your main page. Let's assume
for a moment that you run a hypothetical dog lover's site. Your main site
does not rank particularly well on the search engines.
You need to create a doorway
page that is high ranking. To do this, the trick is simply to make your
page keyword rich. For instance, let us set up a page devoted to discussing
dog food. First, save your page as "dogfood.html". You then two key words
(dog and food) embedded in the name of the page!
Second, give the page a title
that includes the keywords "dog" and "food". Make sure you start off with
words that are near to the beginning of the alphabet. An example title
could be: "A comparison of dog foods available".
Next a vitally important part
- the content. Make sure that the content of your page is not only relevant
to your main page, but is also of value to the reader. Doorway pages will
only work if you can offer the visitor something of interest or value.
Let's assume you can do this.
You decide to write a report comparing a dozen or so different dog foods
on the market, and you've titled your page "A Dog Owners Guide to Dog Foods".
Finally, include a link at
the bottom of your doorway page that leads directly to your main page.
Now, go and submit your doorway
page to the search engines, but concentrate only on the keywords that are
relevant to your doorway page. Do not try and promote your main page or
the keywords you used for your main page at the same time.
In time, your doorway pages
should start showing up in the search engines. Run a search on those particular
keywords for that doorway page, and check how well you rank. Your doorway
pages will soon start bringing you in extra traffic so long as they are
reasonably placed in the search engines.
Swapping doorway pages
Now you know how to create
doorway pages, here is a technique involving doorway pages that is not
frequently used, but has great potential for dramatically boosting traffic
to your website. I recommend you follow this technique closely for maximum
effect.
(1) Make a duplicate copy of
one of your best, most informative and content-rich doorway pages.
(2) Using the search engines,
find a highly ranked website that would be interested in the information
you have on your doorway page. The higher up they already are in the rankings,
the better.
(3) Take the duplicate copy
of your doorway page, as created in Step One, and change its title, metatags,
description, keywords and content. When it comes to title and keywords,
use the principles I mentioned in earlier chapters, but make sure you don't
end up with the same title or the exact same set of keywords as your "original"
page.
(4) Remove all "internal" links
from your duplicate page that link to other pages on your website. Then,
somewhere on the page, add two new links: one pointing to your main page,
the other pointing to the main page of the site you found in Step Two.
(5) Publish your duplicate
page to the Web (without overwriting your original page), and make a note
of the URL of your duplicate page.
(6) Send an e-mail to the webmaster
of your chosen site, along the following lines:
--------------------
I recently visited your site
and noticed that you deal with the subject of <subject>. I have a page
on my site that I believe would be of interest to you. The URL of this
page is
<URL>
You will notice that I have
adapted this page for use on your own website. That's because I would like
to make you an offer that should boost traffic to both our sites.
You will notice that I have
adapted this page for use on your own website. That's because I would like
to make you an offer that should boost traffic to both our sites. I would
ask that you do the following three things, and I will do something similar
in return: 1 - Put the above Web page somewhere on your site. 2 - Submit
this page to the search engines. 3 - Create a link from another reasonably
prominent page on your site to the above page.
Feel free to change the overall
"feel" of the above page so that it fits in with the rest of your site
(i.e. add your own graphics, logo, border etc.) However, please leave the
title, metatags, description and keywords unchanged.
If you have a page that would
be suitable for my site at <your URL>, make a copy of it, changing the
title, metatags, description and keywords, and I will put it on my site.
The point of this is to create
"doorway" pages for both of our sites. Readers who follow the links to
these pages will simply see the pages as additional content at your site.
In addition, these extra pages will hopefully earn us both additional traffic
from the search engines, leading to greater traffic to our main pages.
Please let me know what you
think of this idea, or if you have any further questions.
Once your page is on their
website and promoted on the search engines, you should start receiving
additional traffic to your site, coming from your "exchanged" doorway page.
It is also a good idea to come to some sort of agreement on how often you
will submit each other's exchanged pages to the search engines.
(7) Now...take another of your
useful, content filled pages, and do the same again with a different website!
You can make as many doorway
pages as you like. Each of these will act as traffic "funnels", and the
sum of the traffic from each of these little funnels will be one great
flood of traffic!
Doorway sites
Some webmasters don't stop
at creating doorway pages...they create whole additional sites dedicated
to bringing traffic to their original site! The principal of a "doorway
site" is very similar to that of a doorway page, but with many advantages:
They can be promoted on the
search engines. Some search engines limit the number of pages you can register
from any one domain. However, if you own more than domain name, you can
register these pages on the search engines as well, and benefit from the
additional traffic!
They can be used to promote
one specific aspect of your main site. For instance, if your main site
is about Internet marketing, you could create a doorway site specifically
about newsletter marketing. Make sure that you give your visitors the option
of subscribing to your newsletter from your doorway site, and provide links
to your main site as well as to your products and services.
You can develop reciprocal
links for your doorway site too. Just as you sought after sites with which
to swap links with your original site, do the same for your doorway site,
and soon you'll have double the number of links pointing to your sites!
Links between your doorway
site and your main site will boost your rankings in the search engines.
This is because an important factor that search engines use to rank your
site is how many other sites are linking to you. Therefore, put a link
to your main site on every one of your doorway pages and doorway sites.
As you've probably discovered
by now, advertising on the Internet is a lot cheaper than advertising in
the "real world". However, if you only have a small marketing budget, even
the low cost of Internet advertising may be prohibitive.
In this situation, you may
find pooled advertising to be very useful. Basically, this means sharing
the advertising costs and the rewards with other advertisers.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose Sally wanted to advertise her humor newsletter in a large joke
list with several hundred thousand subscribers, but simply couldn't afford
their high ad prices. She could then approach other similar-sized humor
newsletter publishers and offer to pool their advertising costs to create
on advertisement which will promote all of their sites in the large joke
list. For instance:
---------
The three publishers agree
to split the advertising costs. Thus, their site is being jointly promoted
at a third of the normal cost!
The same principle could be
applied to "real world" advertising. If you can't afford to take out a
whole page advert in your local newspaper, why not team up with several
other people, buy a page between you, and split the page up into several
panels, each panel advertising your own products. Alternatively, why not
seek out a regular advertiser and ask to buy a small piece of space in
their advert? This is especially effective for adverts that complement
the products you are selling.
If you can't afford your own
leaflet distribution campaign, why not team up with a company who is already
running their own, and ask to buy space on the reverse or back page of
the leaflet? Many companies would be only too happy to reduce their marketing
costs this way.
Remember - always seek out
new and innovative ways to promote your site, and mega traffic will come
your way!
The
"Triple Footer", "Page Swap" and "Click-A-List" Techniques
Here are three more ideas for
building traffic to your website, and they are especially effective if
you publish one or more high circulation newsletters.
The "Triple-Footer" technique
This works in a similar way
to pooled advertising [41] except that this method does not cost you anything.
Find three other newsletter publishers with similar sized circulations
that are complementary to (not competing with) your newsletter, and ask
each of them to put a small message at or near the foot of each newsletter
message, promoting all of your sites. I have done this several times, with
great results. I asked three other humor newsletter publishers to put the
following message near the bottom of their newsletters for two weeks:
----------
The other newsletters ran similar
ads promoting the other three newsletters. Using this method, we all received
a substantial amount of traffic.
The "Page Swap" technique
Instead of promoting each other's
sites, why not create one page of great content each, and then both sites
can refer their reader's to each other's pages. Make sure that you have
a "Subscribe Box" at the bottom of your page to capture subscribers!
The "Click-A-List" technique
If you publish several newsletters,
instead of using one "Subscribe Box" for each newsletter you publish, why
not create a form with multiple check boxes, where people can click the
check box of the newsletters they wish to subscribe to, then they enter
their email address just once, and press "Subscribe". A perfect example
of this can be seen at www.memail.com
To achieve this, you will need
to adapt your form-to-mail program. Details of how to do this are beyond
the scope of this book, since it will require a certain amount of programming.
Speak to your Web host, or find a perl programmer who is willing to do
this for you. In the long run, you will find that the "Click-A-List" technique
can get you many additional subscribers.
Leveraging
Your "Welcome" and "Goodbye" Messages
Many mailing list services,
such as Listbot, allow you to create welcome and goodbye messages. A "welcome"
message is a customized greeting from you, the publisher, to a new subscriber.
A "goodbye" message is a message sent to those who choose to unsubscribe.
This article discusses how
to use your "welcome" and "goodbye" messages to great effect.
Make money from your "welcome"
message
Earlier in this ebook, I discussed
Clickxchange and Clicktrade, two networks that allow you to pay others
for linking to you [18]. However, this also works the other way round -
you can get paid for linking to others! Clickxchange, for instance, allows
you to run pay-per-click adverts in your own newsletter. Therefore, why
not select two or three sites in the Clickxchange network that complement
your site, and put links to them in your "welcome" message! All new subscribers
will receive your welcome message, and as long as you don't make it look
like an advert, many people will want to visit the sites you recommend
in your message.
Feedback from your "goodbye"
message
Your "goodbye" message can
be great for getting feedback on your newsletter, since the people who
are unsubscribing must have a reason for doing so (even if it is just that
they are trying to cut back on the number of emails they receive.) Therefore
ask for feedback! Find out why people are leaving your list. This will
give you an indication of how well you are doing with your newsletter.
Include subscription and
site details in your "goodbye" message
Some people unsubscribe simply
because they are cutting back on the number of emails they receive each
day. However, that doesn't mean they don't ever want to resubscribe or
revisit your site. Therefore, include subscription details and your site
URL in your goodbye message and ask them to file away the message in case
they wish to rejoin your list at a later date. Many will appreciate this,
and will do so.
Here is another idea for boosting
your site's traffic...although this one is more complicated, and may not
be practical for some sites.
Would you like your site to
appeal to people of another language? How about many of the Spanish speakers
online? Or German? Or French. If your products or services can truly be
sold to the world - regardless of language - then think of the sales you're
missing out on by just having your site in English!
Here's the idea. Choose a foreign
market and language you would like to target. Let's say, for the sake of
argument, you would like to market your products to Spanish speaking people.
Find a company based in one of the Spanish speaking countries (which also
includes the USA...!) that already has a website, has both English and
Spanish on their site already, and that complements but does not compete
with your site.
Write to this company, and
ask them if they would be interested in translating your site and hosting
the Spanish version on their site. Also, make sure that on the Spanish
version of your site, there is a link back to your site for Spanish people
who would prefer to read the site in English. In return for doing this,
you could grant them exclusive rights to sell your products to Spanish
speakers, perhaps on a commission basis.
Ask them to submit this newly
created site to the search engines, and in particular to the Spanish search
engines.
Thus, you will have expanded
your operations to another part of the world, increased sales of your product,
and you will inevitably see additional traffic come from your other site!
If you want to capture your
visitor's email address and offer them something valuable at the same time,
why not offer them our special "MegaTrafficMadeEasy.com Internet
Marketing Course" by autoresponder? We supply the text of the course, all
you need to do is set up the autoresponders and place your own sponsor
message at the top of each email.
How it works
[1] Find a "smart" autoresponder
service that does not add their own adverts at the top of the message.
See 17] for some suggestions.
[2] Retrieve the text of each
part of our free Internet marketing course from the following autoresponder:
freecourse@megatrafficmadeeasy.com . Note that you will be sent 7 separate
emails - one for each part of the course.
[3] Remove the advert from
the top of each message and replace it with one for your site instead.
[4] Set up your smart autoresponder
so it can send out each part of our course with your advert at the top,
at 1 day intervals (with the first part being sent immediately).
[5] Now offer the free course
from your site and collect those email addresses!
Please note that use of our
free 7 part Internet marketing course (which is copyrighted) is subject
to the following terms and conditions, which you must agree to before using
the material:
(a) You will not promote the
megatrafficmadeeasy.com Internet Marketing Course in newsgroups, message
boards or in unsolicited bulk email. You also agree that you will not use
captured email addresses for the purpose of sending unsolicited bulk email.
(b) If you are a registered
reseller, you may change any <http://www.megatrafficmadeeasy.com/> link
to your Clickbank affiliate link.
(c) You may change the advertisement
appearing at the top of each message.
(d) Other than the exceptions
stated in (b) and (c), you may not change the wording of the messages,
nor the copyright message.
(e) Responsibility for the
use or misuse of the course rests solely with the autoresponder owner.
If you agree to these simple
terms and conditions, feel free to offer this course from your site!
SECTION
SEVEN: THE ULTIMATE GOAL -
Converting
Visitors into Customers
Hopefully if you've read and
digested the previous chapters, you'll have formulated your own strategy
for bringing huge numbers of visitors to your site. The problem now is
how do you get those visitors to buy from you? This is where a well-structured
site and a good offer becomes essential. Here are eight steps to convert
your visitors into customers.
Step 1: Keep Your Site Focused
If you sell only one product,
make sure the product becomes the focus of your site. Don't try to sell
other programs you are affiliated with until after they have purchased
your product. It may also be a good idea to eliminate banner advertising
on your product pages altogether, to avoid potential customers being distracted.
If you sell a selection of
products from your site, focus on one particular product and make selling
that the primary purpose of your site.
Step 2: Guide Your Visitors
in the Right Direction
Make your site easy to navigate.
Avoid putting dozens of links on your introduction page, which may confuse
the visitor. Instead, take your visitor by the hand, so to speak, and guide
them through your site by making it clear which link you would like them
to click on next. Ensure that each page follows on naturally from the last,
and ultimately this trail of links should lead to your order page after
providing the visitor with enough information to make a purchase, sign
up for a class or schedule an appointment.
Step 3: Establish Trust
While you are leading your
visitors through the site, you need to establish trust. Remember that your
visitor knows very little about you, and needs to be convinced that your
products are useful and that it is safe to purchase from you. You can alleviate
their fears by providing a page of genuine testimonials from satisfied
clients, along with their URLs. Depending on your line of business you
can also showcase your business portfolio or list of clients with whom
you have worked.
Remember: the point of this
is not to boast, but to demonstrate your reliability to the potential client
- to establish trust.
Display important awards that
you have won, and if possible, provide links to independent reviews of
your product.
Step 4: Explain The Benefits
The only thing the customer
really cares about is, Why would I want this product? What's in it for
me? Unless they plan to invest in your company, they are not in the least
bit interested in how many units you sold last year, or how much profit
your company is making. Instead, the whole focus of your sales pitch should
be: WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE CLIENT? In other words, the "benefits". Does your
product save the customer time? Does it save them money? Does it make them
money? Does it make their life easier? These are the benefits, so sell
'em!
Step 5: Issue a Call to
Action
A most important aspect of
selling from your website is to actually ask for the order! Provide a link
to your order page on all your pages, and make sure you ask them to buy.
In addition, a time limit, when used in conjunction with a free offer,
can increase the urgency of the purchase. For instance, you could offer
something free if the customer orders your product before a certain date.
Step 6: Make Your Offer
Irresistible
It's almost surprisingly easy
to make your offer so tempting that the customer can hardly say no. How
can you do this? By offering so many "freebies" that the customer perceives
your package to be worth far more than they are actually paying for it.
I use the word "perceive" because
in reality your "freebie" may not cost very much to create. For instance,
nowadays it is incredibly easy to create an electronic book. However, to
the customer, your information packed e-book may be invaluable, and yet
you're offering it free as part of your sales package! Other "freebies"
you could offer include reports, a newsletter subscription, software, discount
vouchers, advertising space ... you may be able to come up with many more.
In other words, though you
are still selling your widget for $39.95, you are making it many times
more valuable in the customer's eyes by adding value to your product. The
more valuable "freebies" you can offer, the more irresistible your package
will become.
Step 7: Reverse the Risk
Of course, no matter how many
"freebies" you add, the customer may still feel there is an element of
risk involved in buying your package. After all, how can they be 100% sure
they will be satisfied with your product?
You can overcome this by offering
a "no questions asked, 100% money-back guarantee." If the customer is not
happy, they can simply return your product and get their money back. By
doing this, you have effectively eliminated the risk for the customer.
Step 8: Offer Instant Gratification
If your product is a piece
of software or an electronic book, offer your customers the ability to
download your product from the Internet AS SOON AS they have paid! Even
if your product needs to be shipped, you can still offer a number of downloadable
freebies which customers can use instantly.
Use the above eight steps and
your customers will become almost desperate to buy from you! (Or at least,
you'll drastically increase the chances of making a sale...)
Why
Aren't They Buying Your Tapes or Booking Appointments With You?
A surprising survey recently
revealed that over 60% of people abandon an order form before submitting
their completed order - in other words, sites are losing out on a large
volume of lost orders!
Why are so many people backing
out of online orders, and more importantly, what can be done to reverse
the trend?
In this chapter I will examine
some of the major concerns your potential customers might have, and how
you can allay their fears and thus increase your sales.
Product concerns
Many people may arrive at your
order form still unsure that your product is the right one for them. In
addition, unless they are already familiar with the product they may have
some doubts about its (and your) ability to deliver the promised results.
Solution:
* Provide as much information
as you can about each product. This permits your customers to make
a fully informed decision, instead of forcing them to "hope for the best."
* Offer your customers a
free trial or free sample of your product.
* Add a money-back guarantee
to your product. Let the customer return it within a certain period
of time if they do not consider it satisfactory. In this respect, make
sure that your product actually delivers on your promises, otherwise you
will find yourself faced with lots of returns.
* Add testimonials from
satisfied customers to your site and order form. Provide a link to
the satisfied customer's site or email address, so that concerned customers
can "check you out".
* Provide links to independent
reviews of your product.
Security concerns
The anonymity of the Internet
is perfect for credit card fraudsters. Remember, unless you are a very
big-name company, your customer knows next-to-nothing about you. How can
they be sure that you're not another scam artist out to steal their credit
card details? Of course, you know you're not, but your customers don't
know that. How do they know you are a company that is going to be around
next year? How confident are they about handing over those credit card
details or signing that one year contract which requires them to pay up-front?
In addition, there are many millions of new users to the Net each month
who have never made an online purchase before. Naturally they will be hesitant
to give their credit card details out through this "new" medium.
Solution:
* Use a secure, encrypted server
for your credit card transactions, and make sure you make this fact clear
to your customers. If necessary, explain how a secure server works for
people who have not purchased online before.
* Provide contact details on
every page of your site, and especially on your order page. You should
include an email address, telephone number, fax number and snail mail address.
No matter how small or large your business, this gives the assurance that
there is a real, contactable person behind the site.
Privacy concerns
Closely behind security concerns
are concerns about privacy. Many people are worried that their email address
will be spammed by unscrupulous companies bombarding their email address
with tons of unsolicited sales messages, or that their email address might
be sold to third parties who do the same. There may also be a concern with
the demographic data you collect. To what use will it be put?
* Write a privacy statement
for your site that explains your policy on the use of any data collected.
For instance, will you be adding the customer's email address to a mailing
list? If so, make this clear, and tell them how often you will be sending
out email. Explain that you will not sell or give their email address to
any third party (and keep that promise!), and give customers the ability
on the order form to opt-out of your email follow-ups. Never violate your
customer's trust in you to abide by your privacy statement.
Order Form concerns
Some people may be put off
from buying your product when they are confronted with a long order form
which resembles an exam paper. In particular, the customer may be unwilling
to answer certain "personal" questions on your order form (such as "Household
Income") and may drop the order process altogether. The process may also
be too complicated, requiring too many confusing choices.
Solution:
* Simplify the form as much
as possible! Drop all questions that are not necessary to make the sale.
(Once you have secured the order, you can always add an additional form
to your site requesting more information from the customer and offering
an incentive for providing it.)
* Make sure the customer is
able to find the price of the product before they have to fill in the form.
Ability to purchase
Not everyone has a credit card,
and besides, some people actually prefer to pay by other methods.
Solution: Offer as many different
methods of payment as possible, including credit cards (Visa, Mastercard,
American Express, Discover) and checks.
If you go to the added effort
of answering any potential concerns your customers might have before they
fill out your order form, it will go a long way to actually securing the
order!
So you've got your own site,
and it's getting huge amounts of traffic each day! How do you convert those
hard earned statistics into actual dollars? We'll examine a few ways to
make money from your site in this chapter.
Sell your own product
The best way of making money
is to sell your own product! That way you earn the majority of the profit,
and you have complete control over the sales process.
Affiliate programs
You can supplement sales of
your own products with those of other people's. Lots of sites have affiliate
programs, and I would recommend finding products that fit in with the theme
of your site and sell those.
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