Blogging For Fun

Email marketing is one of the most profitable strategies available to the online entrepreneur (and offline business owners, too).

Consider this: About 99% of your website visitors will leave without buying anything from you on their first visit. But by creating a great opt-in offer you can at least get their contact details — and then use email marketing to follow up, build relationships, and turn them into paying customers.

And email marketing is by far the BEST and CHEAPEST way to stay in touch with your customers and build rock-solid relationships with them — so they’ll buy from you again and again! (This is called the “lifetime value” of your customers, and it’s extremely profitable.)

Email marketing just plain works! Just take a look at these statistics from PostFuture:

There are now more than 1 BILLION Internet users worldwide — and 90% of them use email. 70% of users receive opt-in email from online businesses. 82% of online buyers have made at least one purchase in response to an email promotion. 32% have made an immediate online purchase in response to an email.

With numbers like these, you can understand why I’m always stunned to hear about a business that STILL hasn’t started to take advantage of email marketing strategies.

If you’re stuck for ideas on how to use email marketing to ramp up your profits? Here are 10 proven email marketing strategies to get you started…

Email marketing strategy #1: Develop relationships and establish credibility by offering free information

Sending your subscribers valuable, free information — such as an authoritative eBook — will help them get to know and trust you. Once you’ve established your credibility, you dramatically increase your chances of converting subscribers into lifelong customers.

You can offer anything from a free report to a free trial version of software… whatever you think your subscribers would like!

There are lots of affiliate revenue sharing programs available for individuals to consider.

Some individuals start an affiliate program and simply overload it with PPC advertising slots hoping that if the site visitor doesn’t find what they want through their affiliate maybe they will click on the PPC ad and send some residual income to the site owner.

If you believe in the product you are representing as an affiliate you may not need to rely on significant PPC advertising to make up for any losses you think may be occurring.

Here are a few things to look for in a quality affiliate revenue program.

1) A quality affiliate revenue company will want you to succeed. They will assist you in marketing the product and making sure it is well represented with quality customer service to back up the trust you are placing in them.

2) A quality affiliate revenue program will provide statistics that are current and verifiable. Some revenue sharing sites rely almost exclusively on outdated data that will present them in the best light.

3) A quality affiliate revenue site will make sure you have a variety of advertising methods available. Some sites only provide one advertising banner and that can get stale pretty fast. A rotating supply of banners will keep things fresh.

4) A quality affiliate revenue company can supply you with knowledge-based articles or help you in developing your own that will assist in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies making your site more desirable to search engines and potential consumers.

5) A quality affiliate revenue program can help you find creative ways to promote the product in newsletters and/or ezines. They will realize their success is tied to their affiliates who do the best job of directing traffic to their primary website.

Are you constantly blogging but the numbers you see in your traffic logs are embarrassingly low? It can be maddening to check your stats and realize that no one is actually stopping by. Don’t give up yet, because there are four great ways you can get traffic fast.

Traffic Tip #1: Do Your Keyword Research

Many bloggers make the mistake of thinking they can just throw some posts up there and expect to get traffic. There is a lot more to it than that! You need to make sure you are looking at the keyword data to find terms that are getting a lot of searches. Ideally, you want these terms to have low competition so it’s easier for you to rank. Once you start basing your posts around these kinds of keywords you should find that you’re getting a lot more traffic.

Traffic Tip #2: Write Enticing Articles Off-Site

Submitting to article directories isn’t just a good way to get backlinks to your site, it’s also a great way to get readers! Sites like EzineArticles.com have their own readership of people who are looking for the exact topic you’re blogging about. If you write a compelling article that leads into your resource box, people will be enticed to visit your blog.

Traffic Tip #3: Give People a Reason to Come Back

Getting traffic in the first place is one thing, but what you want to do as a blogger is have them coming back over and over again. The best way to do this is to create special offers or exciting events. For example, you can give away a prize each week to the new people who subscribed to your list or your feed. You can also run a contest for people who leave answers as comments on your blog posts. Make your blog a happening place to be and people will want to visit often and tell their friends.