Any entrepreneur’s goal should be SUCCESS!
If you aim for success, you must do everything within your means to achieve that. You just don’t go on sitting there in your house complaining about not getting as much profit as you expect. You have to keep moving. You have to pour in and invest enough time, money and effort to have profitable results.
In doing internet business, you must aim just the same. You should maximize all of your internet marketing strategies, given the wide market that your business will be exposed to. Imagine the whole online community as potential clients!
Now, one of the best marketing tools that you can use in your online business is building a list. An opt-in list is the best, most effective and smartest option that you can make to make it big. It is one thing to stay in business and it is another thing to have a profitable business. So if you will be allowed to choose, make use of the building list to ensure that profits will keep coming in.
What is an opt-in list?
The opt-in list basically is just a list or a database of names and email ads of people who have visited your website or made a purchase through your website. The listing will allow the owner to send updates, emails or promotions to those who are subscribed.
It is like an ordinary membership or mailing list in an ordinary shop or club, only in this instance, the opt-in list is done online.
Why should I choose to put an opt-in list?
Any visitor that will come to your web site is a potential client. That potential client means there is a potential sale and that potential sale is a potential profit. Now, let’s say that you’ve made a good internet marketing strategy as a result all these potential things have been translated to actual client, sale and profit.
The next prudent thing to do is to not let all these productive efforts be wasted. The next best thing to do is to get the email addresses and other contact details of your clients because your present buyers can still be your clients in the future.
Building a list will definitely work for your benefit. This will ensure that you can maintain close contact and a good relationship with your clients, especially the frequent visitors. This way you will have a regular
This will also save you money, time and effort because once you come up with a new product or new information, you know exactly who you will send updates to because you have a definite market. This is one aspect that you will have to maintain to have a steady source of income at the least. Then the rest of your efforts will be to make the number of your regular clients grow.
Some pointers in building your opt-in list:1. You should put a ‘subscribe link’ or ‘subscribe box’ in your web site. It is advisable to put it on all the pages. Then make sure that it is strategically positioned, meaning it has to be easily located by the visitors. The upper right hand corner of the page would be a good position.
2. Promote your website and promote it even more to make give it more exposure and to get more subscribers.
3. Come up with contests or give away freebies and goodies that will require visitors to give out their email ads to be able to join.
4. Give out information, articles and updates to your clients with your links in it. Make sure that the information will be relevant to the client.
5. Offer free courses to your visitors. This will also help maintain a good relationship with your subscribers.
6. Use your signature also to make your opt-in list expand. Every time you send out messages the link information should be included.
7. Do some networking too. Join some forums or discussions and build relationships with the people there. This way will also be a good way for you to get more contacts and clients.
At the same time you should also know what you should avoid in building an opt-in list. There is one thing that you should keep in mind as the don't's of building a list.
Don't ever spam your subscribers. It is best that you get permission from your subscribers, or else you might end up with a bad reputation.
Avoid pop-ups too. They can sometimes annoy the visitors. There are also pop-up blockers now. Your effort here might end up futile.
You should also refrain from flooding your subscribers with information. You might end up as an annoyance that you might not get a favorable result. There may be times that you'll give relevant information, but your clients may just dismiss it.
The benefits of having many regular subscribers are undeniable. They will definitely keep your business going and you will definitely enjoy the profits that will come in. Just remember that things don’t end there.
Once you’ve build up on a substantial opt-in list, make sure that you maintain it well. Keep in contact with your subscribers. Send them updates. Give out special offers and helpful tips. Freebies will be helpful too.
Just follow this and you’ll see, things can only get better.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
All You Need To Know About Blog Hosts
Apart from the chat rooms, instant messengers and electronic mails created for communication and dialogue beyond turf are the emerging innovations that help man build opportunities for interaction. The need for a personalized and human face aspect of building online communities is slowly changing the technological landscape of the Internet.
Blogs / “weblogs” or blogging are the newest gift of Internet technology to people all over the world. These are updated posts, crop up entries or personalized life snippets, of mundane or bizarre in nature. For most, a “blog” is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant to be shared in an online community. Blog site is a place where bloggers can publish anything; his thoughts, feelings, photos, special events, experiences, comments on issues and so on. It is more of an online diary with videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just about any topics you are interested.
Blogs are made to welcome the insights and opinions of all and therefore, should not be written to sound intimidating and too formal. This kind of blog is a sure way to put off the readers. In the basics of blogging, conversational tone would be more appropriate to reach the desired audience.
Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to other individuals. Having a blog has its own set of advantages: ? Freedom of Expression. If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinion, this is the best way to create a line of communication;? Networking is at its best. Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you as marketer of a certain product. Sound opinion and point of view is better than just showing the price quote;? Excellent advertising platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise products, a refreshing change from the traditional advertising outlets and it is cost-effective.? Gauging public opinion on products and services
. The key is nice and catchy titles with new ideas presented in your content. This is an assurance of quick and repeated responses from your readers. Blogs is an excellent spot for the exchange of ideas between the seller and the consumer. Good for measuring public opinion regarding services and products, even political and business matters alike.? Useful tool for internal communication. This will help your company to build a knowledge-based community of employees. Also good for harnessing employee relations and identifying human resource issues in advance.? Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO) will help your blogs to be seen often by as many people as you wish. This is very good exposure for your products and services.
Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet. But the basic question is which one of the services will be the best to start off your business blog program? Business people are usually clueless to recent technological innovations which would help them maximize their marketing potentials. For these beginners, it is best to study first the services offered by blog hosts. An ineffective business blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead of enriching them.
A company may decide to do the following depending on its capacity and needs:
1) Host their own blog service,
2) Pay someone else to host the service, or
3) Setup a “blog aggregator page” and ask the employees to select their blog hosting services individually. There are paid and free services available for individuals.
For business blogs, they are required to have the latest blogging features; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potentials.
Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials:
COMMENTS. Welcoming comments provide opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an innovative way to converse with your customers.
TRACKBACK. This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.
CATEGORIES AND TAGS. These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on site search. Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by subject matter such as business, distance learning, e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.
RSS FEED. Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.
If your company is to establish a business blogging program, considerable options should be made available by the hosting companies shortlisted for the services. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are much appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer unlimited packages best for your company’s needs. You may want to suggest checking out some blogs that use the host first, read and examine their layout and design.
Another important thing to consider is a reliable technical support the host has.
After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog: The team should:? create a style that meets the needs of the audience;? establish an open, credible tone;? schedule weekly updating of blog - ideally, a few times a week;? include weblinks of other website and blogs;? blog post should be in the “first person;”? focus on the business blog objective; and,? maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.
Remember, whatever the look, style and content found on your blog is a reflection of you and your company.
(990 words)
Blogs / “weblogs” or blogging are the newest gift of Internet technology to people all over the world. These are updated posts, crop up entries or personalized life snippets, of mundane or bizarre in nature. For most, a “blog” is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant to be shared in an online community. Blog site is a place where bloggers can publish anything; his thoughts, feelings, photos, special events, experiences, comments on issues and so on. It is more of an online diary with videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just about any topics you are interested.
Blogs are made to welcome the insights and opinions of all and therefore, should not be written to sound intimidating and too formal. This kind of blog is a sure way to put off the readers. In the basics of blogging, conversational tone would be more appropriate to reach the desired audience.
Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to other individuals. Having a blog has its own set of advantages: ? Freedom of Expression. If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinion, this is the best way to create a line of communication;? Networking is at its best. Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you as marketer of a certain product. Sound opinion and point of view is better than just showing the price quote;? Excellent advertising platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise products, a refreshing change from the traditional advertising outlets and it is cost-effective.? Gauging public opinion on products and services
. The key is nice and catchy titles with new ideas presented in your content. This is an assurance of quick and repeated responses from your readers. Blogs is an excellent spot for the exchange of ideas between the seller and the consumer. Good for measuring public opinion regarding services and products, even political and business matters alike.? Useful tool for internal communication. This will help your company to build a knowledge-based community of employees. Also good for harnessing employee relations and identifying human resource issues in advance.? Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO) will help your blogs to be seen often by as many people as you wish. This is very good exposure for your products and services.
Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet. But the basic question is which one of the services will be the best to start off your business blog program? Business people are usually clueless to recent technological innovations which would help them maximize their marketing potentials. For these beginners, it is best to study first the services offered by blog hosts. An ineffective business blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead of enriching them.
A company may decide to do the following depending on its capacity and needs:
1) Host their own blog service,
2) Pay someone else to host the service, or
3) Setup a “blog aggregator page” and ask the employees to select their blog hosting services individually. There are paid and free services available for individuals.
For business blogs, they are required to have the latest blogging features; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potentials.
Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials:
COMMENTS. Welcoming comments provide opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an innovative way to converse with your customers.
TRACKBACK. This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.
CATEGORIES AND TAGS. These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on site search. Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by subject matter such as business, distance learning, e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.
RSS FEED. Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.
If your company is to establish a business blogging program, considerable options should be made available by the hosting companies shortlisted for the services. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are much appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer unlimited packages best for your company’s needs. You may want to suggest checking out some blogs that use the host first, read and examine their layout and design.
Another important thing to consider is a reliable technical support the host has.
After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog: The team should:? create a style that meets the needs of the audience;? establish an open, credible tone;? schedule weekly updating of blog - ideally, a few times a week;? include weblinks of other website and blogs;? blog post should be in the “first person;”? focus on the business blog objective; and,? maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.
Remember, whatever the look, style and content found on your blog is a reflection of you and your company.
(990 words)
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