Viral Email Marketing Tips Resources

The money is in the list is the cliche term you often hear the internet marketing elite utter. Building an Email marketing list can be a very daunting task for someone new to the internet.

The advantages of email marketing is undoubtedly powerful. The question is how to build an opt-in email marketing list fast without spending a whole lot of money? The answer to that question is viral marketing.

In this lens I will provide you with the tips and resources to grow your email list fast using viral marketing strategies.

Viral Email Marketing Tips Resources

YTB-Your Travel Biz-YTB-Online Travel Franchise-YTB Travel

YTB brings you the perfect opportunity to transform your life through combining the fun of travel with the speed of the Internet, multiplied by the power of referral marketing to provide YOU with the ultimate home-based business solution. YTB is taking the industry by storm!! By combining an advantage-rich, home-based business (built around the Internet) with an extremely lucrative (and copyrighted) compensation plan, YTB has become "The Choice" for thousands of opportunity seekers. In today's marketplace, myriads of companies seek your time and attention, each claiming that their opportunity is the best. By combining the powerful information handling capability of the Internet with the world's most dynamic product (TRAVEL) and the personal touch of independent, home-based business people, YTB has joined these three trends together in a flawless combination. The Internet is opening the doors to the riches of travel as never before. By utilizing our simple strategies and proven techniques we can show you how to leverage your time to generate a residual income 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. YTB Offers You top A real, tangible home-based Travel Agency Business you can run from anywhere in the world or from the comfort of your kitchen table! Huge discounts on hotels, car rentals, luxury cruises, upgrades, exotic vacation packages and many more travel perks Personal travel agent photo ID card and credentials State of the art travel agency in greater St. Louis Up to 60% paid commissions on your personal website Online booking engines Affiliate marketing program Company familiarization trips Total service and support And so much more!

http://www.travelfranchise.net

http://www.booktravelnow.net

YTB-Your Travel Biz-YTB-Online Travel Franchise-YTB Travel

Marketing Plan: How to Create an Internet Marketing Action Plan That Gets Results

by Donna Gunter

There's no doubt about it -- keeping up with your marketing tasks can be overwhelming, whether you choose to market via networking, print advertising, or through a strategic set of online techniques. As I have a virtual company and can work with clients from around the globe, I don't like to limit my marketing to local efforts. Having a viable presence online is more important to me and seems to work best for my company. Therefore, I primarily concentrate on things I can do to bring visitors to my website and demonstrate my expertise to them while they are on the site.

Recently inspired by a blog post that I had read, I decided to create a regular daily, weekly, month, and quarterly marketing to-do list. First, I brainstormed a list of ideas of marketing tasks that I perform regularly, and others that have remained on my to-do list for awhile, as I've never gotten around to them. Then I categorized them into either a quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily task. On the third examination of these tasks, I went through and culled all but those to which I thought I could realistically commit on a regular basis.

Below are the tasks that comprise my online marketing action plan. Add them to your own online marketing to-do list as appropriate, or substitute other tasks that are a better fit for your business.

Quarterly Tasks

1. Send out post card campaign to targeted national media list promoting myself as an expert. Prior to mailing, have VA call contacts to update list.

2. Request testimonials from new coaching clients, membership site members, product purchasers, and speaking gig hosts and update appropriate pages on my sites.

Monthly Tasks

1. Update my blog with new reading lists, recommended resources, products, etc. 2. Update the media page on my site with links to new press coverage I've received, press releases I've submitted, and story ideas I can offer to the media.

3. Write promotional copy for free list building teleclass and have VA submit teleclass to major event promotion sites

4. Create handout for free teleclass and conduct teleclass.

5. Send out at least three feelers for potential online collaborations/strategic alliances or joint ventures with other sites, speakers, etc.

6. Create one new information product and upload it to my sites for sale.

7. Check click-through and conversions with ezine and banner ads and determine whether to renew for another month.

8. Research and find one new online advertising resource to try.

9. Write a press release based on one of my articles and submit through PRWeb.com.

Weekly Tasks

1. Check on my Google, MSN, and ClickRiver PPC ad campaigns to ensure they are still current and relevant and update any bids for any keywords on my list where I have been outbid.

2. Write an article for my email newsletter.

3. Find a great resource to recommend in my newsletter and write a personal article for email newsletter.

4. Send out the email newsletter to list.

5. Publish the article on my website.

6. Archive the ezine to my site.

7. Have VA publish the ezine content on my business blog and on my social networking blogs at MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Ning.

8. Have VA submit the main newsletter article to articles banks and distribution lists.

9. Create a podcast from my article and distribute to podcast sites.

10. Answer a reader-submitted question and post response in blog.

11. Create one additional blog post on Monday and set it up to publish on Tuesday.

12. Review my Google Alerts and find a new blog with a respectable Google Page Rank and comment on a post.

13. Do a Google search for keywords that best describe my business and see where my site shows up in organic search. As needed, conduct SEO tweaks on my sites for betting rankings

Daily Tasks

1. Read the blogs to which I subscribe and post comments as appropriate.

2. Review the emails from the discussion lists/forums to which I belong and post comments/questions as appropriate.

3. Log into my social networking profiles at Facebook, Linked In, SelfGrowth.com, Twitter, and Ning and approve friend requests.

4. Spend about 15 minutes each at Facebook and SelfGrowth making friend requests, commenting on pictures or videos, or responding to emails.

5. Send 1-2 updates to Twitter and Facebook profiles about what I'm doing at the moment.

When you have your Internet marketing action plan outlined with quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily tasks, your prospecting well never runs dry. Many online business owners are so wrapped up in working on their business that they don't make time to work in the business, like performing regular marketing tasks. Consequently, they often experience slow times in their business because they begin to market themselves only when the prospect pool has dried up. If you create and follow an Internet marketing action plan, you'll never be hungry for clients again! Copyright (c) 2008 OnlineBizU.com

Marketing Plan: How to Create an Internet Marketing Action Plan That Gets Results

Use your phone number as a handout email address

Use your phone number as a handout email address! Sounds simple, but I thought it was a no-brainer when I heard it! Use your number with a free Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail account.

Very little chance of it getting spammed, and you can remember it anywhere to scribble on a bar mat or napkin!

The 6 Most Common Reasons Why Web Sites Fail

Every year there are literally hundreds of thousands of web sites that fail to work out. The majority of these sites fail due to one of the six reasons we are about to cover. If you can avoid making these six big internet marketing direct response mistakes you will be ahead of the game.

1. Capturing Info.
The first and most biggest reason why Internet marketing web sites fail is because they fail to capture the name and email address of their visitors. On even the best sites 95% - 98% of all visitors will not initially buy your product.

To help higher your conversion it is mandatory that you collect the names and email addresses of your visitors. To do this simply put an opt in page or pop up that will ask your visitors to join you mailing list or ezine list. To help persuade them into doing this offer an e-book or e-course that is relevant to the subject you are discussing. Now you can continually market to these potential customers when ever you feel like it.

2. Poor Product Selection.
The second reason many internet marketing web sites fail is because they are selling a product that nobody is interested in or has a very low demand. Often times the products maker will tend to think they are the customer. Just because the creator is interested in the product does not mean that others are willing to pay for it.

Before any product is made some tests should be done to see if there is any demand for the product. To do this you can simply go to Goggle and type in the subject and see if anyone is using the PPC ads on the right to promote a similar or related product. In the Internet marketing world some competition is good.

If you know that others are making money in your niche you can bet that people will be willing to buy your product as well. Another thing you can do is start a blog and simply give people a poll or even better yet have them join your list so you can communicate with them directly.

3. Lack of Objective.
The third reason most internet marketing web sites fail is because the site does not have a clean and clear objective. So many direct response marketing sites are loaded with mistakes in the design. To help make your site more efficient take a look at one that you know is. See what they are doing different and make adjustments to your site. Once you have tested all you have to do is add more traffic.

4. Plain
The fourth reason most internet marketing web sites fail is because they don't stand out. Your site will have to grab the attention of your visitors. You generally have about ten seconds to do this. If you cannot get them interested that quickly you will most likely loose them forever.

One test you can do is this. Load up your site. Now load up your competitors. What instantly grabs your attention on their marketing web site? Now take this information and try to do something similar on yours. It is vital that you site stands out and grabs the reader by the eyeballs and sucks them right in. Making your internet marketing web site stand out is vital above the fold. Focus on that first part of your page and then the rest will start falling into place.

5. No Traffic
The fifth reason why most internet marketing web sites fail is due to lack of traffic. We really won't go into much detail on this one since it is a very large subject. Some of the things you can do to get free traffic are to write site relevant articles and submit them to the article directories and write site relevant press releases about products in your niche as well as your site.

If you are willing to spend a few dollars to get your internet marketing site some traffic you can try your luck at PPC. Your best bet is using Google AdWords. This may cost you a little due to the saturation that Google has in most of its keywords. Another alternative may be to use several lesser known PPC sites to try and achieve the same effect.

6. Sales Copy
The sixth and final reason why many internet marketing web sites fail is because of their sales copy. Copy writing is an art. If you are not a fairly experienced copywriter or good with words by all means don't try and write your own copy.

A professional copywriter may end up costing you thousands of dollars but if you know that your product will sell you are much better off going this route. If you do not know what you are doing you may spend weeks if not months testing and tweaking your copy until it sells well. If this is the case I strongly suggest reading a book or two on the subject.

So there you have it, the six most common things that will cause your internet marketing web site to fail. If you take the time to avoid these mistakes you will be leaps and bounds ahead of most others. It sure is not easy to get your page running to its best potential but the rewards are sure worth it.

Email marketing

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with customers, and it is one of the online 'low hanging fruits' in marketing.

It is generally cost-effective, and when done properly, can help build brand awareness and loyalty. At a typical cost of only a few cents per message, it's a bargain compared to traditional direct mail at $1 or more per piece. In addition, response rates on e-mail marketing are strong, ranging from 5 to 65% within the small tourism product market. Response rates for traditional mail averages in the 1-3% range.

One of the benefits of e-mail marketing is the demographic information that customers provide when signing up for your e-mail newsletter or promotions emails. Discovering who your customers really are — age, gender, income, and special interests, for example — can help you target your products and services to their needs. Points to consider when creating your e-mail newsletter:

• HTML vs. Plain Text: Response rates for HTML newsletters are generally far higher than plain text, and graphics and colors tend to make the publications look far more professional. The downside is that HTML e-mail is slower to download, but this is becoming less and less an issue in the developed nations where the majority of tourism customers are for SME tourism businesses.
• Provide incentive to subscribe: Advertise the benefits of receiving your newsletter or promotions email to get customers to sign up, such as helpful tips, informative content, or early notification of special offers or campaigns.
• Don't just sell: Many studies suggest that e-mail newsletters are read far more carefully when they offer information that is useful to the customers' lives rather than merely selling products and services. Helpful tips, engaging content, and humor are often expected to accompany e-mail newsletters.
• Limit questions: As each demographic question you ask may reduce the number of customers signing up, it's best to limit the amount of information you solicit or give customers the option of skipping the questionnaire.

What tools do I need before putting together an Internet marketing plan?

Simple answer is fewer than you think!

If you want to have an online presence, you only need several basic technology tools at your disposal to guarantee that you will be successful with your Internet marketing plan for your tourism product. Without the following in place, it will be difficult to successfully market your business on the Web:

Web site:

You must have a Web site to successfully market your company on the Web. And you need a domain name that reflects your company's identity and brand. Using your company name as a domain name is a good place to start, although keywords and phrases are also another way to also do some SEO along the way.

Check out your competition:

You will find that Web sites have varying degrees of sophistication. Make sure that yours reflects your industry. If you are a Spa, for instance, you cannot get away with a low-tech text-heavy Web site, you'll need a softer feel.

Reliable ISP or Web host:

The inadequacies of your service provider will come across to customers as inadequacies of your company. Make sure you do your homework first and research potential Web hosts. The key factors in choosing a provider are connection speed, site uptime, spam policies and support. In addition, watch for hidden costs.

Also, make sure that certain technologies are available to you should you need them. For example, you may want to run server-side scripts to extract information from your database to include on your site. Many basic Web hosting programs do not include such functionality.

Email:

Customers and guests need to be able to contact you by email. All staff in reservations and sales should have an email address. Train your staff to use email for guest service. And make sure your email address is easy to find on your Web site and your marketing material.

Email newsletter:

An email newsletter can be a key component of successful online marketing. Its success hinges on the number of customer email addresses you successfully collect, so it is helpful to have a strategy and set up your Web site with that in mind.