5 Tips to Get More Results from Your Marketing Materials

The moment I decided to specialize as a direct response copywriter (which means you get a response directly from the marketing materials, there's no middle person involved, like a sales rep) I knew there would be one thing that would determine if I would be eating steak or eating mac and cheese.

And what's the one thing? The results I got for my clients.

Therefore, improving results became a pretty big focus of mine. You might even call it a passion. (Some people who aren't nearly as nice have called it in an obsession.)

Regardless, here are 5 tips that can help you improve the conversions of your marketing materials.

1. Know who you're talking to. If I hear anyone say "women are my potential customers" or "anyone with skin is my target market" (yes, that really was a direct quote from someone who sold Mary Kay or Arbonne or something like that) I will send my border collies (all 3 of them) to your house and force you to play fetch with them until your arm falls off. Seriously, the quickest way you can end up with the most dismal results imaginable is to try and talk to everyone. Come up with a specific customer -- the more specific the better -- and make sure your marketing materials speak directly to that customer.

2. Make sure you write benefits, not features. This one is probably the hardest one to "get" but also one of the most critical. People buy benefits, not features, so if you only talk about features you're just asking for people not to buy what you're selling.

So what is the difference between features and benefits? Features are a description of a product -- for instance, if we're talking about a diet pill, a feature would that the product is a pill. A benefit would be the solution the product provides -- in this case, losing weight.

As much as you possibly can, write about why someone should buy your product. No one buys diet pills because they like taking pills, they buy them to lose weight. Think of the solution your product or service provides and write about that.

3. Work on that headline. David Ogilvy, famous ad man and author of Confessions of an Advertising Man, has said that people make the decision to read your marketing materials based your headline.

Your headline should: a. speak to your potential customers, b. contain a benefit, c. be so compelling your target market is compelled to read further. That's a lot to ask for from basically a handful of words. So don't rush the process -- take as much time as you need to create the very best headline for your particular piece.

4. Don't forget the call to action. You've got to tell people what to do next. If you don't tell them what you want them to do, chances are they won't do anything.

Don't assume your potential customers know what you want them to do. They don't. They can't read your mind. Nor do they want to. They're busy people. They don't have the time or the energy to figure things out. Tell them what to do next, or don't be surprised when they don't do anything.

5. Use P.S.'s or captions. Postscripts (P.S.) are the second most read item in a sales piece. What's the third? Captions. (The copy under photos, diagrams or other illustrations.) Now that you know that, think of the ways you can use either or both of those items in your pieces. Maybe you put a special offer in there or you highlight a particularly compelling benefit. Or you tell them again what you want their next step to be. Whatever you do, don't waste that space.

If you even do just one of these tips, you should start seeing better results. Work on all five and you might be amazed at how much your results improve.

5 Things To Consider When Publishing A Newsletter

Providing a newsletter for your opt-in list subscribers provides many benefits in terms of driving traffic into your site as well as boosting the sales and profits of your site and company. This is a marketing ploy that will not hugely dent your marketing budget and will not also require many man-hours in developing this project.

With a newsletter, you can inform the public about your company and products as well as services. You can keep them posted and updated about what’s going-on with your company as well as many of your promotions and offerings. With these, you keep on reminding your subscribers that you are still here and is willing to offer them good deals and services.

Newsletters also allow you to impress your subscribers. It can show your expertise and knowledge about the topic at hand and the many benefits you can offer them. When you impress people, they will become potential customers and another great thing is that they can recommend you to their friends, colleagues and family. All of them could very well be customers in the future.

If you do not have a newsletter or publishing one for your site, then you may have to consider about researching and be well informed on how to publish one. It is not as easy as it seems but if and when you get the right idea and process, it will be smooth sailing from there on. Try to take the time to learn what you need to learn and get that newsletter ready and good to attract subscribers to your newsletter as well as traffic to your site.

In the next few paragraphs, I will provide you with some things to reflect on when you decide to start your own newsletter for your site. Here are five things to consider when publishing a newsletter.

1) Make sure that the content of your newsletter pertains to and closely associated with your business or the theme of your site. Do not dwell too far on what could be regarded as your field of expertise. You have started a site and your theme for your site will always be something you are knowledgeable about. For example; if you have a site that sells auto car parts, your newsletter must contain articles or content like photos that pertain to cars, auto parts and such. You may also include content about your company and your staff.

Remember that visitors of a certain site are there because they are interested in what the site has to offer. If they sign up for an opt-in list or for a newsletter this means that they want to be updated for that certain theme or subject. Be sure that when you publish your newsletter you are providing for the need of the subscriber as well as their interests.

2) Ensure that you have well written, information riddled and content rich articles. You articles will be the body of your newsletter and that they should be able to excite your readers as well as provide information. Articles should be well written and checked for errors such as spelling and grammatical errors for it to look professional and believable. The trust of your client to you and newsletter is at stake here.

3) Fact-check your articles. Make sure that you provide true facts and figures so that your reputation as an expert and knowledgeable in that field is not questioned. If you lose the trust of your subscribers these may persuade them to unsubscribe to your newsletter. You will lose many potential sales this way.

4) Provide fresh and new articles that can provide new information to your subscribers. If you publish stale and old news in your newsletter, there is a tendency that people or your subscribers already have read and known about them. This will lose their interest in your newsletter and they wont get to read what is most important, your ads. They may not open or read any of your succeeding newsletters losing your intention in writing and publishing newsletters, to get them to visit your site and make a purchase.

5) Never use copyrighted materials such as photos and articles. This is outright plagiarism, you may get into a lot of trouble for this. You can lose your business and get sued over copyright infringement. If you do not have the time to write your own articles, there are many willing and able professional article writers that can do it for you for a reasonable fee. All your investment in writing and publishing articles will be well worth it when you see your list build up and your traffic increasing.

5 Steps To Profiting From News Feeds

Looking at News Feeds, you might think they’re some of the most complex things to set up. Nothing could be further from the truth. They’re actually super-easy to create once you have the system set up properly.

You can break down the news feed system into a fast, low-cost system that you can do once, or several times over.

First I’ll answer a few of your questions about news feeds. Then I’ll reveal the “secret” steps to setting up and profiting from a news feed.

Common Question #1: What is a news feed?
A news feed is an automatically updating list of the latest news on a particular subject. For instance, the news feed on my Web site is on the subject of small business marketing.

Common Question #2: Why do I need one?
Other than being a really cool thing to have on your Web site, News feeds are also really great traffic boosters. Not only do they make your Web site more attractive to the all-important Web crawlers that view what's on your site, but News feeds also inspire visitors to come back to your site for fresh news.

So the benefits are two-fold:

• new visitors, and
• return visitors.

Please keep in mind there are a few things you need to do to see benefits from news feeds.

1. Choose a subject of interest to your audience. I chose small business marketing news. For you, it could be the latest news on a tough problem gripping your industry. The great part about it is that you don’t have to provide answers, just create a forum where your target market can access information about an issue.

2. Find your news feed. There are several services providing news feeds of various pieces of information. In my experience it’s best to locate news aggregators based only on your industry.

3. Place the feed on your Web site. This is where I initially ran into problems, but a programmer friend passed on a rather affordable solution that I was able to easily place the news feed on your Web site. The great thing about it is, once you set up the feed, you never really have to touch it again.

4. Make your site profitable. Consider placing advertisements on the same page as your news feed. No doubt the regularly updating news will be a hit with your audience and as more people come to the site you’ll be producing passive profits. (Say that five times fast!)

5. Drive traffic to your site. Over the years I’ve found the best way to drive traffic to a site is through article writing and distribution. It’s like an instant shot in the arm for quality traffic.

And that’s the “secret” formula to profiting from news feeds. Really, it’s no secret. It’s all about know which resources to use to make the news feed work for both you and your target audience.

5 Steps To Generating Your Own Passive List Building Machine!

How do you build a list building system that funnels subscribers passively into your database day in and day out?

Well, this one question is one of the major questions I get from many of my subscribers who are interested in building a responsive email list. The majority of my subscribers say that they built a marketable email list by using various tactics like ad swaps, articles, and solo ads. But their major problem comes in the area of sustaining their email list growth.

A lot of my subscribers shared with me that they are actually losing more subscribers than they are actually gaining. So how do we avoid this?

Well, that is the focus of this article.

Now let me start off by saying that you will be deceiving yourself if you just think that you can overcome this problem of constantly losing subscribers without any work.

Sitting on your butt and doing nothing is the hogwash approach to online marketing!

It really frustrates me to even think that there are actual individuals who believe that success can come with no work at all!

So before I move forward, make sure you get the lazy approach to online marketing out of your system as soon as possible. If you do not extract laziness from your life and your business, you won’t see any improvement in your life and online business.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me begin describing a legitimate way to passively funnel fresh responsive subscribers into your database.

I will list a series of steps that you can follow below:

1. Generate a content site for your niche

The goal in this step is to generate a website full of useful content that is related to the niche you are trying to build an email list for. A good content site, when organized well, can actually send repeat visitors to your website.

2. Place a Tell a Friend form at the bottom of the pages on your content site

A tell a friend form is a form that allows a visitor to recommend their friends to your website if they find the information on your website useful. A good content site with very valuable information will be virally recommended to a visitor’s friends and family if they find the content enjoyable and full of high quality information.

Therefore, make every effort to select or add the best quality content you can.

3. Add a popup note to every page of your content site

Adding a popup note to your website is an easy way to instantly grab the eyeballs of your visitors and force them to sign up to your newsletter or ezine. The type of popup notes I am referring to have been known to increase the responsiveness of website visitors to a certain offer just by describing the offer in the note.

To see an example of this type of popup in action, visit the link below:

http://www.free-traffic-generation.com

Now do you get the idea!

Just make sure you put a popup note on every page of your content website and you should see some consistent list growth. Also, make sure the popup is advertising your newsletter or ezine.

4. Write an article or press release about your new content website

Writing an article or press release is just a way to jump start the traffic to your website. Just one press release can send you hundreds of links to your site as well as some media publicity.

5. Generate another content website by repeating steps 1 thru 4...or just continue adding original content to your website.

Now this is all it takes to produce a passive list building machine that consistently sends streams of subscribers to your newsletter or ezine. The more content sites you have, the more subscribers you will be able to passively generate.

5 Simple Steps To Setting Up Your Own Profitable Lead Capture System

List building is one of the most important parts of any online business. By building your own list you have the opportunity to try selling your products more than once. You also have the benefit of being able to offer your subscribers other products, and services when they become available.

So just how would you capture those leads and make them profitable for you?
Here are your 5 simple steps to setting up your own profitable lead capture system.

1) you will need your autoresponder setup, ready to accept your subscribers. To make it easy on yourself you can pre-load it with messages to send your subscribers from the outset, to remind them that they are on your list. Useful, informative and educational messages sent once or twice a week automatically will keep your list subscribers interested.

2) Setup an irresistible offer page, giving something of value to your potential subscribers for filling in the form to subscribe. This page needs to be as powerful as any sales page where you are charging for a product, as you will want it to convert as many visitors to subscribers as you can. Outline the benefits of what you're giving away, and even the benefits of the information in your preset messages (you did setup those messages right?).

3) Most autoresponders allow you to set a url (website address) to send your subscribers to after they subscribe, you should send them to a thank you page, and let them know if they need to confirm their address before they receive the first email from you. If they do need to confirm (they should, this is called double opt-in and may help save you from spam complaints), let your new subscriber know they will only get the email with the gift link after they confirm their subscription to your list.

4) Your first email to your new subscriber should contain the download link for the free gift you offered for subscribing. The ideal situation here is to send them to a web page to download. This page can also contain a special offer, sometimes called a one time offer (or OTO). Make this an unmissable deal related to the subject matter of your emails. Let the subscriber know they will only see this offer right now, if you do not have a special deal to offer, you can instead add a link to a product you sell as an affiliate, but make use of this valuable backend sale opportunity.

5) Keep sending traffic to your offer page and keep those subscribers coming. Join JV giveaway promotions which are happening all the time to put your gift in front of more and more people. Make sure you keep your subscribers by sending them regular informative emails, and it helps to give them more free gifts on a regular basis.

Words of advice, your list can be your own personal goldmine, but don't treat your subscribers as your personal ATM. Your list subscribers are people just like you, treat them as you'd like to be treated. Now get out there, and start building your subscriber list, using your new lead capture system, and watch how your profits increase as your list grows.

5 Simple and Easy Ways to Advertise Online

Some people say that advertising is everything!  Regardless if you have a product, a service, a hobby website or just want to share pictures of your wedding, you have to advertise somehow to get the traffic to your site or blog.

But not all traffic is equal. There are services that can help you drive tons and tons of traffic to your site and it won't do you any good at all because it's not targeted traffic.

Take for example all of the many different 'surf for traffic' or 'traffic clicking' programs that are out there. If you have a website that is about your hobby, say model airplanes, then what good is this traffic really going to do you? Who's using these services?

Webmasters and marketers that want traffic on their own site. So they most likely won't spend any more time on your page than is required by the little timer these services use and then they are gone again. Even if your site is about these traffic services (this is about the only time you will see very much benefit from using such a tool) you will still have to spend a ton of time just surfing and clicking around to get a real benefit from these programs. Once marketers realized this they switched gears. They started promoting all the different programs to a lot of other marketers to get them in their downlines, so they could get some traffic as a bonus. This became their new focus. The problem is that everyone else did exactly the same thing, so not a lot of people were surfing the internet anymore.

Bottom-line is this. You need targeted traffic. So here are some tips on how you can generate exactly the traffic you need and bring the visitors you want to your website without having to chase after them.

1. Content
What is your website about? Do you just have a page with a lot of links and not much else?

If this is the case, think about adding some content to your website that will be of value to any potential visitors. You could write articles or find articles at one of the many directories that you can reprint on your site.

2. Talk about your experiences in your subject matter.
You don't have to put up some kind of resume (although that can work too), but rather try writing about what you are doing, as it relates to your topic of choice. Let's look at the model airplanes again briefly, you could talk or write about the latest plane type you built, how the last time flying your plane went, what challenges you run into or perhaps even post some pictures of your plane or of you flying it.

3. Forums and bulletin boards.
You could add a forum or bulletin board to your website where your visitors can interact with each other. There are a lot of free services available out there that you can use to either remotely host a forum for you, or even software you can install on your website's server. To find some of these, just head over to your favorite search engine and you will definitely find plenty to choose from.

And while you are visiting the search engine, why not run a search for any bulletin boards and forums that are already out there for your chosen topic? You could visit those and interact with the visitors there and since many allow you to post a signature or a profile, you could add a little line about your own site with a link (just check the rules of the forum first so
you don't violate any of them).

4. Start a blog.
Blogs are very popular and search engines love them because they provide constantly new and fresh content. Your blog would be a great place to talk about what you are up to that day. So if you spent some time today buying new parts for your plane you could write about where you found them, how much they cost you, why you chose those parts, anything really goes.

The really great part about this is that you can point links from your blog back to your website, so when the search engine stops by to grab and index your latest content, it will also stop by your website and you will start seeing very targeted traffic heading your way.

5. Write articles.
Writing articles isn't hard and can be a great source of fresh, new traffic to your website. There are a lot of ezines on any topic out there and there are also a lot of directories where you can share your article.

Basically, what you do is write an article and then add a small resource box that links back to your website (just like a signature) and then let other ezine publishers know that you are allowing them to print your article in their ezine. And many publishers go to the article directories to find new content for their newsletter and even their websites. And since there are
websites and ezine newsletters on any imaginable topic out there, you can't lose. Write an article every couple of days and post it in the directories (even one a week or every two weeks will start getting you traffic). Very soon you will find new traffic coming from search engines, newsletters and websites.

Best of all, these 5 simple tips will bring targeted traffic, meaning the visitors are coming to you because they are interested in what you wrote.

So there you have it. Whether you have a simple and basic Work at Home Business or a significant Internet Marketing enterprise you can benefit from these 5 easy and simple ways to advertise and drive traffic to your website at absolutely no cost.



Stephen Wright is President & CEO of InternetMarketingUSA.com
Looking for Internet Marketing Ideas, Tips, and Solutions?  Get everything you need to make money online in "Dotcomology: The Science of Making Money Online". Absolutely Free at: http://www.InternetMarketingUSA.com/dotcomology.html


NOTE: You have full permission to reprint this article within your website or newsletter as long as you leave the article fully intact and include the "About The Author" resource box. Thanks! :-)

5 Proven Ways to Waste Advertising Money

1. Yo Yo Advertising
My friend Dottie can precisely predict her sales peaks and plummets accurately...and no, she's not into fortune telling.  Experience has proven that March, April, and May will bring a lot of money to her account, while September and January will put her in the slumps

Sound familiar?  Have you too been caught in the vicious cycle of high and low sales volumes?  Why?  Most of us tend to advertise heavily while things are slow  - in a desperate attempt to get customers through the door, but back off when things are hopping.

If you're looking for an even-keeled market, develop a steady marketing plan.  Steady advertising produces steady growth...and steadily climbing profits!

2. Single Shot Advertising
One shot ads, rarely get results.  Most customers are just like you, they don't jump on the band wagon the first time it passes by.  They often need to see your sales material several times before they actually make the move to walk through the doors.

 Follow-ups are necessary for success.  We're not just talking about prospective customers now...even your loyal customers need to be cultivated for sales.  How many times have you thought about making a purchase, but just never followed through with it?  Sure, we all do it.  Sometimes it takes a little pressure to get us to part with our hard-earned money.  Make it a point to spend time building relationships with both new customers and your faithful following.

3. MonkeySee, Monkey Do Advertising
How many times have you seen the same advertisement ideas written with just a little different twist?  If you're surfing the Web you've come across plenty of the aped ads! Yeah, you can predict what the next paragraph will cover, because you've seen it so many other places.

 Sure, copy cat ads can be effective for a little while, but the results will quickly die down as others join in the copy mania.  If you're looking for REAL and LASTING results, be original.  Do what only you can do, forget about what everyone else is doing.  Be you.  When a competitor does have a good idea, improve on it.  Don't follow in his footsteps...step out and lead the way to more effective advertisements.

4. Wild Shot Advertising
Ready, aim...yeah aim before you advertise!  Don't be caught up in wild advertising that gets your message in front of a lot of people who have absolutely no interest in your product or service.

Target your market...and get better results for your investment.  Finding the target market that has a specific need you can fulfill takes a little time and research, but you'll feel the effects when you hit the bullseye!

Think about this...there are advertising venues that your competition is overlooking. What about postcards?  These high impact marketing tools are often overlooked.  Yet, they're the perfect low-cost way to generate prospective customer interest.  Keep an eye open for overlooked marketing gems, and get one up on your competition!

5. Me, Me Advertising
What is it that consumers are looking for?  ...Exactly, something that is going to benefit them.  They really aren't interested in the facts about your product...they want to know how it will impact their life or lifestyle.

Take a look at your ad copy, and ask yourself what are you portraying...facts or benefits. Multi Level Marketers have this all figured out.  Rather than tell you they have a business to offer, they spend a lot of time promising you freedom to work your own hours, countless vacations, summer homes and a host of other things you've probably already dreamed about at some point.  Hey, don't knock it...the MLM industry is a steadily growing element in our economy. 

Don't bore your readers with the facts...attract them with exciting elements that will fulfill their needs or desires. 

Are you getting the results you've been looking for?  Take another look at your marketing strategy...are you making the same mistakes many marketers unknowingly make.  Hey, real success may only be one change away!