Three online advertising tools that do not work

It should be common knowledge for most advertisers on the net that they should not use any of the three advertising tricks of bad pop-ups, spamming or tons of sneaky ads that disable a computer screen. However, many advertisers do not take this advice. People that you are targeting with advertisement to can get very annoyed, and even down right mad if you try these antics. Also, consider the financial cost if you are thinking about employing these tactics. In the end, it is not worth the headache and risk. Read on about why these forms of advertising will not work. A tight, well thought out marketing approach it the best way to promote your business. Do not think for one second that you will gain customers by using spam. Sending out bulk emails harvested from a spam list and then trying to forge where the email is sent from is tacky and deceitful. There are many federal laws against spamming and people can take it very seriously. They take it so seriously in fact that some advertisers went to court and the court forced them to pay a hefty fine for spamming email accounts. Shutting down someone’s email is not the way to gain business. Talk does fly at Internet speed, and your reputation will go down the tubes as word spreads about your annoying advertising. The use of spamming software is very sophisticated today. If you want to take a chance with it, it would not be a very good idea though. The likelihood that you will even get a few good customers out of it is almost nonexistent. People enjoy your asking them to join your network or buy your product in a legitimate way. Financially opening up to involving a third party is certainly asking for trouble. By using some else’s email and causing a lot of heartache for them will open a complex issue for you. The next form of advertising that will turn off a customer in a heartbeat is pop-ups. Today, there is not only the traditional pop-up but pop-under too. A barrage of pop-ups or quick pop-ups from under the screen will leave your customer insulted and angry. It does not matter how great your product is – do not do it. In addition, a new marketing software technique slides pop-ups across the customer’s screen. This might sound non-intrusive, but think about this – what if they are in the middle of reading some information about your site? That is not helpful to your cause. It can be especially bad if they were about to click to the order page. Loss profits are never good for your wallet. If you are going to use them pop-ups for goodness sake, learn the software, and more importantly learn a bit about the human psychology of advertising. Look around for information on how and why people buy on the Internet, and apply that to your advertising and marketing campaign use. Not only are spam emails, pop-ups and pop-under ads bad advertising techniques to use, but the tactic of high speed spawning is hideous and more than irritating to your potential customer. If you have ever thought about using it on a customer and have experienced it yourself, then go back and experience it again. You may have forgotten what it was like, although that is hard to see how you could forget it. A vicious attack on your customers’ browser button will not let the customer leave your site. Worse yet, they are forced to do an emergency shut down of their computer. Let us hope they have saved all information they were working on because ad after ad upon hundreds will over take their screen. Please do not use this software to try to increase your profits. I hope that you will avoid using any of these three tactics in your marketing campaign. Using them will not bring the money in at a faster rate – in fact, just the opposite may occur. Take the time to use good marketing strategies. Learn what people appreciate in the way of business practices. Also, use manners and courteous along with a little shrewdness in your marketing strategy. There are many ways to do it. By exercising patience and learning your way around the Internet, you can bring in many very happy customers and a lot of money for you.

Owning a piece of the internet

Yes, you can do it, it is not at all expensive and difficult. To the contrary, the cost to build your property can be a very small fraction of the value it will gain and the income it will allow you to get from it. Because the cost is low and fixed, but the value depends mostly if not entirely on you. It is similar to owning a big ground for a small price, and being able to build on it whatever you want, with your fantasy being the the limit. This is what the internet allows you to do. In fact, for setting up your web site you need: 1) To define a name for it. This will be your "domain name". This is your choice, the only important point is that the name must be new, not already used by another site. Of course you will want to choose a name that is attractive and easy to remember. 2) A service called "hosting", that will serve as the ground where your site will find space, and where everybody will be able to visit it. These are the things you "buy". It is a really small investment. Then you need to build the content, and this is entirely up to you. Some easy "building techniques" are more enough to get you started. Then, according to your future needs and development, you may decide to learn some more advanced tools. After you learn some simple techniques, you can quickly start building your site on your personal computer. You do not even need to be online. When you are happy with what you have done and you feel ready, you will simply transfer your construction to your hosting service. In the same way you can easily change and "update" your construction. Just work on your personal computer, then transfer your work to the hosting. You saw it is not difficult, rather you will likely have fun in doing all this. But Owning a piece of the internet can be financially very rewarding, too. Here we come to talk about the value of your site, or the income that you can get from it. You can use your site to create your own business. In this regard, possibilities are countless and we will not cover this topic here. May be you already have some ideas. May be not, but there are even some methods to help you find good business ideas. The great benefit of having a business in the internet is that your site can produce income 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and without you being at work on it. Once the business is up and running, it will run mostly on its own (of course some activities are needed, but nothing compared to a traditional business). There are also other advantages. One of them is that you will often find your competitors helping you than working against you. It is more a form of cooperation than a competition. Another one is that you can operate your business from the comfort of you home, with no need to lose hours of your precious time on the road. The key point is that for your site to develop into a business, you need to attract traffic to it. It will not be enough to sell the best product at the most convenient price if nobody is aware of your offer. But nothing to worry about. As there are easy techniques to set up your site and to generate ideas, there are effective methods to bring traffic to your site, as well. You just need to learn the proper web marketing tools. And this also is fun and easy to do. My best wishes to you !

Do your autoresponders drive your customers crazy

Writing chained auto-responder messages to sell a product is a good idea in principle, but in practice it can LOSE you clients just as well if you don't get right. A chained auto-responder is a sequence of emails that gets delivered automatically when someone subscribes to this autoresponder. It is used in marketing to deliver mini-advertisements, teaser courses, demo extracts, testimonials or stepped sales letters, and all of this is designed to get the client eventually to click on the "buy me now" link for the main product that is being promoted. There are three main problems with chained auto-responders. Avoid these, TEST your linked auto-responders before you inflict them on the general public, and you should see significant increases in your sales. Problem No. 1 - No Content Beyond Selling This is THE most VIOLENTLY annoying class of chained autoresponders - message after message from the same place, trying to sell you something, in so many different words. YUCK! What marketers who don't THINK seem to forget is that folk who own and manage PCs and email aren't that stupid. They can read and write, you know, and they are not IDIOTS. After two or three repeats, they will immediately delete such messages from their inbox and probably put a spam block on the sender domain for good measure. That's not what the marketeer had in mind, I should wager ... Problem No. 2 - Too Little Content I remember one "mini course" which contained nothing but teasers and virtually no useful information whatsoever. Once again, look, marketeers! If you want people to "try" the product, you need to give them at least a little taste of it. Don't hold the glass with the sample wine under their nose, and when they reach out, oops, that'll be $875 dollars please ... but we do have a "money back" guarantee ... This is just ANNOYING, it's even dishonourable and an angry person does not make a good customer. Problem No. 3 - Too Much, Way Too Much ... I subscribed to another auto-responder teaser mini course just a few days ago, and here, the folks in charge had done a 180' U-turn on the two points above, most likely because they got it that those content less/content poor efforts don't work to sell more of their product. In their desire to have it be known how marvellously content packed the main item was, they created this huge long document, of at least 20, 25 paragraphs for the first instalment of their chained auto-responder. Gee. Now I don't know about the rest of the planet, but I'm actually quite a busy person and I get STACKS of emails every day. I try and cut down the time I spent on dealing with email because it does get out of hand, and on this occasion I was into something else anyway. I took just *one look* at the plethora of writing and went, "Oh god, I don't have time for that right now ..." and left it. Have you ever left a non-priority email for later ...? Yeah, you know what I mean. But then, the very next day, the 2nd instalment arrived. I opened it and damn me, there's another REAM of goodness knows what, but now I've missed the boat because this is No. 2 and I haven't read No. 1 yet! I hastily closed it, feeling guilty and moved on. But then, No. 3 arrived - another book length instalment. I just couldn't handle it anymore. I deleted the lot. Now that's a terrible shame because there may have been valuable information I never got, and the guys who wrote this spend AGES doing it. So, here are my suggestion for chained auto-responders copy. 1. Head it with, "Busy? Save me! I contain important information!" or words to that effect. 2. Keep it SHORT. Pick out ONE USEFUL thing and just - tell me THAT. So I can glance at it and say, "Hey, that's useful! Cool! Thanks, guys!" When I mean short, I mean anything above three paragraphs is way, way too long for an autoresponder email in this day and age. 3. Keep it TOTALLY FOCUSSED on the product you are selling. I'm on autoresponders where you wouldn't begin to guess for all the waffle, testimonials, side tracks and "personal messages" what I'm supposed to be BUYING at the end of the day! 4. Give people a chance to keep up. Space your messages three days, don't inundate us. Or better still, test this for yourself. One hell of a lot of "internet marketing wisdom" is completely out of date now because it was researched back in the days when we got four emails a week, and not fourteen thousand each. Time has moved on and requires NEW thinking, and different strategies. My last tip on chained autoresponders is as follows. Subscribe yourself to OTHER PEOPLE'S efforts. Don't look at them as a marketeer would, but as though you were a human being in front of their computer, if you know what I mean by that. You can learn what pleases and what works, and what doesn't. Mark out to yourself what you like and use this in your own efforts, and avoid what really turns you off. Lastly, keep working at your chained autoresponder copy until you have something that really works, and really brings in lots more sales. They are a great resource - if handle them right.

Common sense the missing link in online business

I like to think that my approach to business is 1 part experience, 1 part research and 2 parts common sense. I know my business; that’s my experience. I read as much as I possibly can to strike a balance in my efforts between tried and true and newer methods of business planning and marketing. But to me, the most important, and often lacking in my opinion, is the common sense part of running any business, especially online. I do not claim to be an expert in SEO or SEM or any of those acronym concepts. In fact, I’m not sure who legitimately can claim to be. In my observation, the rules to those theories seem to change daily if not more often. However, like most online entrepreneurs, I do try and pick up as much as I can from all sources in trying to market and run my business. In working on both my own business and my client’s, I have found that too often I can get too focused on the technical aspects of my website and business. We are constantly inundated with tips, tricks and techniques for getting more traffic and finding new leads. Please don’t think I’m discounting any of those or disparaging those giving advice. On the contrary, I think it is necessary to take in as much information as possible in determining your own strategies. The problem, in my eyes, lies in getting too involved in these “new” concepts and losing sight or doubt your innate sense of how to do things. I am not suggesting any hot new modes of marketing, nor am I guaranteeing any way of making thousands of dollars a week! I am merely suggesting that before, during and after implementing any new techniques, you always take a look at your website and all your materials from your customer’s point of view. Better yet, have someone else take a look. Make sure that you have designed your site and written your copy in a way that is accessible to both ends of the spectrum: the techies and the technically challenged alike. In a perfect world, each visitor to your site would be very computer and internet savvy. Unfortunately, we all know it is not a perfect world. You must make your site as user-friendly as possible. I spent a lot of time designing my website. I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it and how I wanted it to function. Those are all important things to consider and steps that must not be skipped. However, shortly after launching the site I discovered what I could improve. The first thing I did when I uploaded the site was to inform all my friends and family. I knew within two days that I needed to make things a whole lot simpler! I had not taken into account that I have grown up in the internet age and things that I take for granted like knowing how to navigate a site via a site map or navigation bar are not second nature to everyone. I got the best feedback from my 91 year old grandfather who really wanted to see the whole site and know what it was all about. He tries so hard to keep up with the technology, but using the internet is not his cup of tea. After speaking with him and a few other relatives, I sat down and took a hard look at my site. I went through and made two ways to get to every single page. I tried to simplify things as much as possible. I didn’t change the copy because I had made a point to write copy that was inviting to potential clients from any background. I used my keywords as much as I felt comfortable doing without sounding like a broken record. Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” In our excitement to boost our search engine rankings and generate traffic, I think it’s important to remember those words. The more people who can use your site and hear your message; the more customers you will have!

Purchasing websites vs building your own

When you decide that you want to run your own online business, the question will soon come up in your mind about whether you should purchase an established website, or build one from scratch. The answers may surprise you, and in this article I want to go over both strategies in detail. Building your own website from scratch is a lot of work. You will have to work very hard, and unless you have thousands of dollars up front to get started, you shouldn't expect to start earning any serious money until after a year has passed. It takes time for a brand new site to build link popularity, traffic, and content. It is necessary for a website to have these things before it can begin to earn money. When you build a new website, you may find it hard for seasoned webmasters to take your site seriously. I've found that some webmasters will even refuse to exchange links with your site if it is brand new and has a zero page rank. You can avoid this to some extent by adding lots of content to your new site. Purchasing a website is easier in the sense that if you buy a site that is already established, there is no need to wait long periods of time in order to get it to the point where it is earning money. If you purchase a good website, you should begin earning money within a month of making the purchase. However, there are a few things you need to know before going out to purchase a website. You need to do careful research on the site you're interested in to make sure it earns what the owner says it earns. Request from the webmaster a copy of earning statements for the last twelve months. Join webmaster forums and ask other veteran webmasters their thoughts on the site you're interested in. Listen carefully to their answers. If more than one person says that they wouldn't buy it, and gives good reasons for doing so, you may want to take their advice. It is also important to get the website appraised. Make sure that is is worth exactly what the seller says its worth. You also want to make sure you buy a site rich in content. Check to make sure the content is original and not copied from another source. If you are a busy person who doesn't have time to build a website from scratch, purchasing a website would be an excellent choice. However, purchasing an established website which is earning money will not be cheap. You can expect to pay at least $10,000.00 for a three year old website with a pagerank of 5 or 6 which is earning $500 per month. It is important to do your research and look at all the factors involved in both building and purchasing a site.