Most people want to build a loyal website following and one of the best ways to do that is to allow your visitors the ability to opt-in to your email list. I have stumbled upon some good ways to increase your conversion to signup rates over the years. Here are my top 8 favorite ways that you can really boost your list numbers.

1. The most obvious tip would be to not hide your email signup form. Keep it above the fold and make it clear and easy for people to signup for your email messages.
2. Less required fields = more signups. I have found that the less fields you ask for is directly related to the number of people that will actually signup. Instead of having a large signup form asking for Name, Email Address, Address and Other fields, try just asking for First Name and Email Address. After you have that you have these 2 fields you can trigger an auto-responder email at any time asking for more information.
3. Offer incentives only available to people on your email list. This can be as simple as “Sign up and get valuable coupons or promotions via email before everyone else”. Sometimes this is all the incentive that a user needs to see in order to click the submit button and opt-in.
4. Contests. Offer a contest for people that are on your list. Again this can be a simple giveaway “Everyone on our email list is eligible to win our monthly prizes” With a link to the details about the contest.
5. Signup during the checkout process. Capturing opt-ins on the checkout page is one of the most important ways to get valuable subscribers onto your list. You must offer the customers the option of signing up during the checkout process. These are your most valuable customers and you need to keep in touch with them. If you are using BlueHornet, like I do, then you would use the BlueHornet API in order to pass the variables to the email database if the visitor checks the box to opt-in.
6. Add a signup box while leaving a product review or a blog comment. This is a great way to get new subscribers. Just look at how many comments or product reviews you have on your site. If you had a simple checkbox in this form you could allow your visitors to subscribe while leaving a product review, blog comment or even filling out your contact form. Very valuable subscriber data that will add up fast!
7. Ask for referrals in your email. Every once in a while promote the forward to a friend feature, in your email marketing software, and actually ask them to forward the email to friends. It never hurts to ask for help from your subscribers and most will like to help you. Make sure you have a link to subscribe to the email list in all the emails that you send out so people that get the message forwarded can easily find the opt-in information.
8. Social Media. Setup a tab or a link on your Facebook page asking for fans to subscribe to your email newsletter. They like you enough to be a fan, so they are likely to signup for your email list if presented with the opportunity.

Setup a specific Twitter landing page that thanks the users for clicking on the profile link and asks them to signup for the email list. Most Twitter users will visit your site using the Twitter profile link, so setup a special page for these Twitter users and greet them accordingly.

Finding creative ways to build your email mailing list can be fun and rewarding. Just put yourself in your customer’s shoes and make sure you are offering an easy way for all visitors to signup for your list. Capturing and using this valuable data should be a big part of your online marketing strategy.

One way to track the success of all these different capture points is to setup different groups in your email software, so you can track to see how many users are signing up from all the different places throughout your site.

To create you email list most professionals use the services of Aweber. You can find there web site at  https://www.aweber.com

The first thing is to BE POSITIVE.

People naturally gravitate to positive people. Post positive sounding posts. Don’t get personal about other users (even if you don’t agree with them) or products/services you don’t personally like. Everyone is trying to grow or create their business — it pays to be nice.

Visit your forum every day and contribute. Get a reputation for being helpful. Try and give back when you can — rather than asking for help/advice all the time.

Don’t be scared. Ask questions. Get involved. Don’t be shy. Even if you are brand new — say that. Introduce yourself. Very quickly you WILL build up a supportive network on online friends.

Never post an ad on a forum!

Create a ‘stand out’ signature file. A signature file is what you use to ‘sign off’ your posts with. You can often make them as eye catching as possible. Be always on the lookout for people who you can connect with. Maybe they have a service that would help you market your site or maybe they are just fun people to get to know. Maybe they would benefit from your encouragement.

Forums are a lot of fun. You may get many leads from people who respond to your question publicly – or they may contact you privately through the forum, known as a PM – personal Message.

Sign up for as many forums as you can handle but try and spend no more than half an hour every day at your forum. Forums can get very addictive, and eat up a lot of your time. I log on once a day, maybe answer a few posts, maybe post a few, then log out. Except for course for my own forum – where I am for on average about 4 hours a day – answering questions and posts.

If you find someone who you think (from reading their posts) would be a good person to approach to suggest helping each other to grow your respective business – send them a Personal Message. Just say hi. Mention that you enjoy reading their posts and would like to be friends.

Remember the web is called the web for a reason – it’s all about connecting people. A forum is a great opportunity to find like minded individuals online.

Anyone with a website knows that search engine optimization is a critical part of marketing.

So, how much does fresh content matter in SEO? Having frequently updated content is one of the core principles of SEO success. However, unless you integrate other key principles of search engine optimisation, fresh content will not matter.

It is a good idea to have fresh content, as many search engines, including Google, feed on it, and will usually give a higher ranking to a site that has updated and fresh content. However, standing alone, it does little, or nothing to get you rankings.

Some of the other things you need to be doing to get SEO on track include the following, as well as many other things:

1. Create quality content. It doesn’t matter what else you do, if your content is crappy, your SEO will be crappy. The reason is that traffic drives more traffic, but if people don’t like what they see, they won’t be coming back for more. If the site is poorly made, and the content is irrelevant, or not useful, they are not going to keep coming back. However, on the flip side, if they find that they always get value, and that they are sure to find consistency in when there is content, what the content gives them, etc. they will visit your site.

2. Build internal and external links. Linking is a huge part of SEO success. The first thing you have to do is optimize your internal links, making sure the right keywords are optimized, and that you are providing the right link text for back links. You want to make sure that you spend time on this, as it is completely within your control. Next are the external links. You get these by doing things like getting on local listings and directories. You do this by asking people to link to you. You do this by providing a “link to this page” box on every page you have on your site. Of course to do this, it overlaps with the first thing, and you have to have quality content that people want to link to. Take the time and effort to build your links externally and internally.

3. Optimize keywords. The next thing you want to do is optimize your keywords. You want to choose the keywords that are most relevant. You want to ensure that each page is optimized for specific keywords (usually no more than 3 per page), and that those keywords are in the title, and in the text.

If you do the above things in conjunction with providing fresh content, you will soar to the top of SERPs and find that Google, Yahoo! Bing, and other search engines love you, and rank you. High rankings is the kind of marketing tactic you need to achieve to be successful.

What is Google AdSense?

Google.com earns most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search result pages. All this is managed through a program they call AdWords.

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by placing these same text ads on your site.  In other words, you’re helping Google advertise and they pay you a percentage of what they earn.

This program is called AdSense.

Every website owner should be involved in this.  It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up.  Even if your site is just for information purposes, you can still participate and make decent money with AdSense — or at least enough to fund your website.

So if you are one of those people that don’t like the idea of paying for a site, this is an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.

Even if you earned as little as $10 in a month, it would more than likely cover some or all of the costs for your web site.  Perhaps you are simply looking for ways to add additional revenue to your website, then it’s perfect for that situation too.

This program is getting so popular, people are creating websites just to display the ads and profit from Google’s AdSense alone.

I don’t usually like to use the term “easy money” because there really is no such thing. You still have to create your own website and learn how to bring in traffic in order to make good money with this program.

I certainly don’t want to make it sound like you get something for doing absolutely nothing.  There’s no such thing.

However, I’ve got to say that AdSense is probably the closest you’ll ever come to fast money on the Internet — especially if you already have a website that gets a good amount of traffic.

What’s even better…the program is completely free.  You can also use it on multiple websites and there is no limit to the amount you can earn.

If you go to google.com and do a search for almost any keyword phrase, you’ll notice some “Sponsored Links” that appear on the right side of the screen that are relevant to the keywords you just searched for.

Website owners pay Google to display these ads and are charged a predetermined amount every time their ad gets clicked by a web surfer. With the AdSense program, you will display these same text ads on your site just like Google and get paid for it as well.

All you do is copy and paste some provided HTML code into your pages and Voila! the ads will show up. Every time an ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser.

Once your account reaches $100, you’ll receive a check in the mail.

It doesnt get any easier!!

Becoming an affiliate of an affiliate program is one of the easiest ways of getting started as an online business entrepreneur. Getting started does not mean in anyway that you are going to make money and be a successful affiliate marketer. To be successful it is extremely important that you check on several vital aspects of an affiliate program as indicated below before you join it so that you do not regret later.

1. Check whether the affiliate program is free to join. If there is a fee to be paid it will be wise to keep away from it. All good affiliate programs are free to join.

2. If you are already an affiliate marketer, choose one that is related to the theme of your website and to the targeted visitors to your website. This will help you grow your business much faster.

3. Visit review sites and forums and check with other affiliates whether they are satisfied with the affiliate program you have identified.

4. The commission offered for the sale of a product is very important. Unless the commission is between 25% and 60% it might not be worth the while spending much time and effort promoting the product.

5. Do the program providers have an efficient tracking system to track your sales? Good affiliate programs provide their affiliates the opportunity to check the sales statistics by visiting their sites or they send e-mails every time a sale is made. Ensure that they provide these facilities.

6. How often are commission checks paid and the minimum amount of money that has to be accumulated for payment? If the commission is not high and the minimum amount required for payment is high, then you will not receive any pay checks for months.

7. Is there a customer support service and will you be able to talk to them over the phone for assistance if necessary.

8. Good affiliate program providers regularly send newsletters and tutorials to their affiliates to help them succeed.

9. A very important thing that you have to check is whether you will be provided with promotional material such as banners, text links and sales letters. Without these it will be difficult to promote your product, especially if you are new to affiliate marketing.

10. In spite of all these checks, ensure that you are not blown away by the hype and get caught to a scam.

Once you have made a decision to become an affiliate of an affiliate program, act wisely, spend a few days checking on the above and make your move. Choose the program that you think will give you the best results. Work with dedication and promote your affiliate business in every possible way you can. You cannot fail.

Author – Kanaga Siva

The low cost and relative ease of using email has made it an ever more important marketing tool. This has caused the in boxes of your customers and prospects to become ever more crowded with messages competing for their attention. For this reason it is increasing important for you to take more care when developing the Subject Lines of your emails. Ten tactics can help you craft an attention grabbing subject line, leading to greater success.

1) Learn from newspaper headlines. Like email messages, newspaper headlines have to be short, succinct, and catchy. As for headlines, subject lines should clearly state what your reader can expect from your email, what they will gain from reading them and what you want them to do as a result.

2) Concentrate on the objective. Of course you want recipients to open your message, but that’s not your ultimate objective. Do you want them to place an order? Request a catalogue? Visit their local outlet?  You must determine what that one action is, and make sure all components of your email, especially the subject line are focussed on this objective.

3) Leverage the “from” line. Do not assume your recipient know who you are. Include your company name in the “from” line and if possible perhaps the purpose of the business. A message from “Smith & Jones Gift Hampers” will usually have a higher open rate than one from “Smith & Jones Ltd”. This also means that you’re using the company name in the “from” line so you don’t have to repeat it in the subject line, offering you more characters to work with.

4) Mention key information first. Consider what you want recipients to do when they see your email and then put what you think will get them to do it front and centre in your subject line. Bear in mind that most email preview panes allow just fifty characters, including spaces, to be immediately visible. Make sure you keep within these boundaries.

5) Use Personalisation. You can personalise greetings as well as the actual offer or within text of the message based on the recipients’ past purchases or interests. Properly implemented, personalisation boosts open rates. Erroneous personalisation, or misspelling the recipient’s name, for instance, will damage not only response but also their impression of your brand.

6) Add a sense of urgency. Successful marketers use this tactic.  “Order by 18 July”, “Be one of the first 25 respondents…”, “Only 24 hours left…” are examples of messages with a sense of urgency. It is not necessary that the offer will actually close.

7) Lead, but don’t mislead. You already know this, of course, but it bears repeating. Never promise something you can’t deliver, and never make an offer in the subject that is has so many caveats in the message that the offer is all but impossible.

Don’t shy away from “free”. Conventional wisdom held that including the word “free” in a subject line was a sure-fire way to have your email blocked by spam filters. However, this is not usually the case, and “people still respond to the word ‘free’, so the increase in orders or other actions will almost always outweigh the messages lost to filtering. To help get through spam filters don’t make “free” the first word of the subject line, don’t use exclamation marks and don’t write in full caps.

9) Plan for deliverability. Emails that don’t get delivered cannot be opened. Look for trends in your rejected returns and use credible software and service providers.

10) Test. For all your activity test different scripts, measure your success and failure and learn from analysis of the results.

eBay is no longer just an auction site! Just like Amazon the brand has grown to be a central shopping destination offering opportunities for companies on every scale.

Annually billions of pounds worth of products sell through eBay stores. The garage sale site has evolved dramatically. Sellers getting rid of their junk have been replaced by traders selling new products via the vibrant online marketplace.

Serious online retailers are using eBay stores to generate brand awareness, get new customers and sell products.

There are approximately 500,000 online eBay stores and regardless of the recent increases in eBay fees, eBay stores still great value. It is worth researching which one of the eBay stores is best for you and your business. There are several different types of eBay stores to choose from with a huge variation in subscription prices – Basic, Featured and Anchor.

The basic price starts at £14.99 per month in the UK, rising to £349.99 for an Anchor store.  eBay stores do offer excellent features and may be just what your business needs to boost sales volumes and revenue.

Some of the eBay stores features include:

- A place on the web to boost your brand
- Tools to personalise your eBay stores
- eBay stores home page plus product pages
- eBay stores can use longer listing durations and lower insertion fees
- You get your very own eBay stores URL so you can drive all online buyers directly to your eBay store.
- The eBay stores logo appears next to your store name in your listings adding gravitas

- All listings include a “See All Items Listed in Your eBay store” link
- Listings show up in eBay Stores gateway search and browse results.
- A useful feature of customised newsletters and promotional emails
- You can analyze your eBay store traffic to improve your strategies

There are strict rules about advertising your website within your eBay listings. For instance you cannot link from a listing directly to your website. However, an indirect feature offered by eBay stores includes the ability to advertise your web site and link to it! A customer email address captured on your eBay site can still be added to your general marketing database.

You can list your products in eBay stores for as little as 1p per item per month in the UK (not with the Basic eBay stores though), and eBay stores items get cross-linked from your featured eBay listings bringing you more visitors and lots of targeted traffic.

Ebay’s place in the public conscience as a destination website and its trusted nature will benefit your own business. With so many websites fighting to get high search engine rankings and with eBay getting most of the auction traffic, eBay Stores is an essential factor in any eBay business. For a low investment you get high visibility and extra traffic. It is only worth doing if you have enough products!

So as some of the less profitable sellers may get squeezed out of eBay stores, lots of bigger, more knowledgeable ones will be arriving and setting up their own eBay stores to get a piece of the action! As bigger brands get on board the number of buyers can only increase.

Article submission is a great way to increase your Google rankings and get exposure for our site. It really helps with yoursearch engine optimization

There are many pieces of software that will submit your article to directories for you, for instance…..

http://www.articleannouncer.com/

Which is all the rave now.

You can also hire services like Submityourarticle.com and Phantomwriters.com to submit your articles for you, but this gets very costly if you are writing lots and lots of articles at once.

Personally, I like to do it myself. Here are list of article directories I submit my articles to.

http://www.GoArticles.com

http://www.EzineArticles.com

http://www.ArticleCity.com

http://www.Isnare.com

http://www.Ideamarketers.com

http://www.ArticleCentral.com

http://www.ArticleWarehouse.com

http://www.AuthorConnection.com

http://www.Zongoo.com

http://www.Article-Emporium.com

http://www.ArticleHub.com

http://www.ReprintArticles.com

There are also a range of Yahoo Groups

groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
groups.yahoo.com/group/aageneral/
groups.yahoo.com/group/aainet/
groups.yahoo.com/group/articles4you2use4promotion/
groups.yahoo.com/group/articlesubmission/
groups.yahoo.com/group/articles_archives/
groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce
groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce_list/
groups.yahoo.com/group/epub
groups.yahoo.com/group/ezinezone
groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content/
groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles
groups.yahoo.com/group/freeezinearticles
groups.yahoo.com/group/freelance_promotion/
groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeWrites
groups.yahoo.com/group/freezinecontent
groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_eContent/
groups.yahoo.com/group/hersmallbusiness
groups.yahoo.com/group/I_Need_Content/
groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publishannounce
groups.yahoo.com/group/PromoteYourArticle/
groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network
groups.yahoo.com/group/qc_reprint_articles

There are more directories and other places to submit your articles, but the above list is great for getting started and will get your article the exposure it deserves.

Here’s to your success.

How to Get Great Traffic to Your Website

In Internet marketing, there are essentially two key ways of building traffic on a website. There are the free methods which consume time and energy and offer a continuous stream of visitors with little or no upkeep, and there are paid methods such as cost per action and cost per click advertising that only offer ROI based on how much money you are willing to trade per visitor or per lead.

Both methods can be profitable, but in general targeted website traffic methods can be broken up into three key categories:

Search engine optimization (SEO) traffic

SEO traffic consists of traffic that comes to your site strictly by ranking high in the search engine
results. The best way to build your rankings in the search engines and guarantee that you will get visitors from Google, Yahoo and MSN? The answer is keyword targeted back links. Having your
site linked by relevant websites within your niche, preferably with a high page rank or a higher page rank than your own website is essential in this process. Content also greatly improves your odds of getting ranked high as well.

This method is essentially the cheapest for people who can not pay for things like Ad words or CPA marketing. If you need visitors but can not afford to pay a whole lot to get them, you should really utilize SEO traffic as one of your primary resources.

Back link Traffic

Back links are essential for search engine rankings. They also serve as their own source of quality traffic when utilized in an appropriate manner. Essentially this is about building an image to visitors on other websites by building articles in directories and other websites or blogs. Videos on sites such as YouTube, and relevant and helpful posts on popular forums within your niche will help.

This is another great free method of traffic generation you can utilize if you are trying to build traffic to a website, but do not have enough money to outsource it or go with pay per click
methods.

Paid Traffic

For successful e-commerce and marketing websites that have a high conversion rate and are profitable enough to afford it, paid traffic is another excellent technique for building traffic to a
website.

Paid traffic consists of just about any form of traffic you can get by paying cash up front to the provider of this traffic. This includes ‘pay per click’, ‘pay per action’ such as form fills and lead generation, and even alternative forms of paid traffic such as pay per tweet or pay per 1000 impressions types.

Paid traffic is usually the most expensive but highest quality traffic you can acquire. Targeted traffic converts better than not so targeted. Someone who clicks on a relevant ad in Google is probably going to be a hungry buyer. This is why Google often charges top dollar for each click in a competitive niche and screens the websites strictly for irrelevant and unwanted content.

If you are considering PCC you should learn a bit about it before you start and always set a limit to how much you are prepared to spend. Even the best have been caught out.

Plan your campaign carefully if you want to get traffic to your website.

Google measures your websites overall relevancy based on who is linking to you. It’s a way for them to quickly evaluate your website and to connect it with a specific niche market.

Backlinks also count as votes for your website, and the more votes you have, the higher ranking you’ll receive – plus, developing a solid backlink campaign can help you rank for some remarkably competitive keywords that you otherwise might not be able to secure. Plus, when you work towards developing a targeted backlink campaign, your website will not only gain higher positioning, but it will appear more frequently.

Search engines determine how relevant your website is not just by the NUMBER of back-links pointing to your website but by WHO is linking to you. This means that not only do you want to focus on building a high number of back-links but that you also want to focus on quality back-links that are housed on authority sites.
This means that you want to do your best to develop back-links on established websites in your niche. These are sites that have been around for quite some time, have developed a following, established a community and of course, receive a significant amount of traffic each day.

There are many different ways to begin your link building campaign and while many of the traditional strategies can be time consuming, once you have developed a solid back-link structure and begin to increase your search engine positioning, you will be able to easily maintain it.

Search engines love blogs, and back-links posted on authority blog spaces will give you instant search engine “juice”, with very little work involved.

When it comes to generating back-links with blogs, you need to:

1) Find blogs that provide a ‘do follow’ (the only kind of blogs where a link back to your site will count as a “vote”.)

2) You explore and read the blog and then you make an insightful, useful or relevant comment to the post that is likely to be approved by the blog’s administrator.

3) Include your back-link with relevant anchor text on the blog.

4) Repeat the process again

You can also generate a valid backlink by creating your own remotely hosted blog as well.

These sites often have substantial authority with search engines, so they have the potential to provide some of that authority to your own sites. You also have fewer rules to deal with that you would at a site like Squidoo or an article directory, so you can link to your own site in every post if you wish. You could even link to it multiple times in a single post as long as you don’t go overboard and you provide quality content.

The main requirement most blog hosts have is that you post quality content. They don’t want their sites to turn into massive link farms, and they don’t want to host a bunch of untouched PLR or stolen content.

There are two main blog hosts:
http://www.blogger.com
http://www.WordPress.com

The main difference between Blogger.com and WordPress.com is the fact that Blogger allows affiliate links and WordPress doesn’t. If you host a blog on WordPress.com instead of your own domain, you won’t be able to make any “commercial” posts.

You could link to your own blog, but if you aren’t careful, it could be seen as commercial and be taken down.

Blogger does allow commercial posts, as long as you are careful to post quality content. You want to make sure your blog doesn’t look like a “splog” (spam blog) or it could be taken down. The best advice is to make a new blog for every main keyword phrase you wish to rank for, and making at least 5-10 posts of at least 200 words on each blog. This way it looks like you are actually contributing real content. If you create dozens of blogs each with one post, you will probably be flagged.

When generating backlinks from established blogs and authority communities, you can include your back-link within the website URL attached to your post as well as within your actual comment box (if permitted).

When creating your back-link, make sure that you use anchor text to describe the website where you are directing people to. To do this, you need to include a bit of HTML code to create your back-link with anchor text:

You want to make sure that you include relevant keywords within your actual anchor text so that you can rank for specific keywords.

One thing to keep in mind as well is that you should never use keywords that are already a part of your website title or domain name but instead, focus on including keywords that you hope to rank for but are not already optimized or included on your own site.

Here’s an Action Plan to get you started:

Step # 1: Download the free Firefox plugin available from SEO Quake and use it to locate blogs that allow back-links (dofollow): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir…tion/seo-tools

Step # 2: Create a keyword swipe file of relevant keywords and phrases relating to your niche market that you can use within your blog comments.
Step # 3: Create individual pages on your website that feature high quality content and articles that are likely to attract attention from visitors to the blogs that you post your comments on.

Step # 4: Use the free Comment Hut software to pinpoint blogs based on keyword and customized search terms to quickly locate relevant blogs in your niche market (all of which offer do follow back-links)

Step # 5. If you choose to speed up the process of submitting to websites you should think about purchasing www,Roboform.com. (There is a free version that will work on a trial basis).

Step # 6 Make sure that you include a relevant description with each submission, including your primary keywords that are focused on your target market.

Step # 7 Avoid keyword stuffing when creating your website’s description.