wadeandalexia.com

Archive for May, 2009

. Affiliate marketing is growing by leaps and bounds and it seems there is no stopping it. This form of marketing has become so vital for every business that without it a business is nothing less than dead. Affiliate marketing multiplies the internet presence of a business’s products or services in the market by encouraging other internet sites to promote them. It enhances the exposure of the products and services of a business, thus also improving the efficiency of its overall advertising costs.

A natural focus of any marketing initiative is to ensure that more and more number of surfers click onto a site and also become active buyers. There are various ways to promote your site through other online channels using affiliate marketing such as including banners that affiliates can display on their sites or developing email templates that can be sent by affiliates to the database of their users.

An affiliate works by way of developing traffic by taking care of the individual needs of each user and customizing their content to prospective customers’ requirements and expectations before facilitating delivery of a call into action through to your site. The interesting part is that customers that are diverted to your site have already made up their mind about what you are offering, and therefore are very likely to make a purchase. This way you get a pre-qualified customer, and all of you have to do is make a purchase bill. All this has been possible only because of affiliate marketing.

Contacts that are developed through affiliate marketing are very important because they are derived from places where your business would have not reached or would have reached after having to part with valuable time and money through conventional channels.

Now the big question is who should be hired to carry out affiliate marketing for your business and the answer is it should be the best in the industry. Logic applied here is simple. An affiliate that understands your needs and has a trusted and close relations with the major operators so that it is ideally placed to run is affiliate marketing services should be the one you should have

Introduction

Many organizations are utilizing email marketing as part of their internet marketing strategy.  There are numerous email marketing services provided that support all types of businesses such as: Emma, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc.  In today’s environment, businesses are sending emails to promote products & services, cross-sell additional services, inform customers, and provide discount coupons.  The question is: Are businesses leveraging email marketing to support multi-tactical internet marketing campaigns?

In most cases, businesses are not leveraging email marketing to drive successful campaigns.  Marketers continue to see email marketing as a single tactic that has a limited impact on the goals of their campaigns.  The biggest example of this is the lack of integration between databases, website, and email marketing campaigns.   A local business owner has a limited amount of hours in a day and a limited amount of resources.  However, most of them do not streamline the lead acquisition process to work together.  If the systems were integrated, a similar scenario can be applied to large corporations that employ or utilize 3 different employees to do the job of a single email marketing professional. Simply put, the website form does populate to the database, and neither of these automatically feed to the email marketing system.  In general, this is a manual process that costs businesses time, resource, and money. 

How can effective Email Marketing Help Your Business and Drive Results?

How you ask?  Well, let’s start with efficiency.  The ability to integrate your website with your business’s database, website forms, and email marketing services tools may cost additional money upfront; however, in the long-run you will not need to use manual processes that require more resources.  At DaBrian Marketing Group, we provide businesses will the tools to connect website forms to an email marketing system and eliminate the database itself.  In our client’s case, the email marketing system or email marketing service is the database.  In addition, you can use event or email triggers to confirm opt-in email addresses after receiving a contact submission form.  In less than 30 seconds, you have populated your form into a specific list with the email marketing tool, confirmed an opt-in email, and responded to a prospect with relevant content.

 Email triggers can be a useful and impactful tool for customer acquisition & lead generation.  We live in a society of instant gratification so being able to deliver relevant information or set the expectation to receive a response to a question is critical.  This can help to separate your business from the competition.

The ability to reduce the resources used for an email marketing campaign will reduce the campaign cost.  If implemented effectively, email marketing can position your business to be on your customers’ minds and reduce your overall acquisition cost. The bottom-line is Return-on-Investment. 

 Testing to Drive Results & Revenue?

Once you have become proficient with your automated process, it is time to start testing your email campaigns.  There are a number of different tests you can do with a single email campaign.  These tests include A/B, A/B/C, and multivariate testing of headers, subject lines, layouts, landing pages or calls-to-action.  The more successful your business is at getting customers to open emails, the greater the probability that the customer will respond to your call-to-action. Usually, better open rates and click through rates translate to better ROI. 

Conclusion

The truth is that just about every business uses email marketing to communicate with customers.  Unfortunately, not every business takes the time to evaluate opportunities to integrate technologies, test, or measure their results.  These are simple fundamental businesses practices that should be gone.  The ability to establish internal processes and best practices are critical to every business’s success. 

 The fact that you have an email marketing tool does not mean that what you are communicating is relevant to customers, or even driving results.   It is our recommendation that businesses start to take a holistic approach to all internet marketing strategies & tactics.  Continue to push the envelope for maximum results that will lead to maximum returns.      

How to get rich the smart way? Read what some creative people did:

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire. 

What is the idea? (from FAQ on the site)

The idea is simple: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each. Hence, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage”. The main motivation for doing this is to pay for my degree studies, because I don’t like the idea of graduating with a huge student debt. I know people who are paying off student loans 15-20 years after they graduated. Not a nice thought!
So, everyone is welcome to buy my pixels, which are available in 100-pixel ‘blocks’ (each measuring 10×10 pixels). You will see the homepage is divided into 10,000 of these 100-pixel blocks (hence there are 1,000,000 pixels in total). The reason for selling them in 100-pixel blocks is because anything smaller would be too small to display anything meaningful.
You can buy as many pixels as you like, as long as there are some available (see the live stats in the top right corner of the page). When you buy some pixels, you can then display an image/ad/logo of your choice in the space you have purchased. You can also have the image click through to your own website. However, no obscene or offensive images are allowed.
The pixels you buy will be displayed on the homepage permanently. The homepage will not change. Using some of the money I make from the site, I guarantee to keep it online for at least 5 years, but hopefully much longer. I want it to become a kind of internet time capsule. So, in the long run, I believe the pixels will offer good value. You will have a piece of internet history!

2. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer.

About SantaMail from their site

Since 2002, Santa has been helping us write over 275,000 personalized Christmas letters. Santa makes sure that we use the finest heirloom-quality, acid-free linen paper so that his letters last a lifetime.

As Santa’s helpers, we help Santa print his letters and then mail them to him in North Pole, Alaska where he affixes a Christmas stamp on it and sends it on the way to your child. From there, the letter gets postmarked and mailed. (After December 16, he has us mail them directly from Austin, Texas so they reach the children in time!).

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me. 

About Doggles from their site

We are famous for Doggles   goggles for dogs – the first and only eye protection designed and created just for dogs!  Seen on CNN, Regis and Kelly, The Today Show, Good Morning America and many others, they are quite a hit with everyone who has tried them! We are also an environmentally conscious organization, using as much “green” or recycled fabrics and materials in our products as possible, always keeping in mind that what is good for our planet is also good for our pets. Our standards are high, and you will see this in each and every one of our products. We are market leaders in the design and manufacture of tough and durable and yes, even “green”, dog toys. Please be sure to check our offerings in the toy category as you look through our site. Our outdoor line has won the praise of many an outdoor enthusiast as we continue to grow and improve the line. And of course, our fashion sense has never ended as we are always adding and improving to our fashion harness line. We have a wide range of products that are truly functional and have helped many pets over the years as we continue to innovate in the pet products field.  As always, keep an eye on us for more.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord.

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire.

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year.

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

Not two weeks ago I had a chat with someone (an SEO) about some online media buying and although the figures made an infinite amount of sense (6 figure monthly page views – prime location banner purchase for less than £90 per month!), he said, “but there is no SEO value from the banner link” (it was JavaScript)! Astonished, I spent the next hour arguing the case for buying the coverage, but it would seem that the majority of SEOs just don’t see the value of applying traditional marketing techniques to the web – they just don’t “fit” into the SEO mindset.

What is really bizarre though is that while the optimisation industry doesn’t see the value in some less search engine focused marketing techniques, they will pay a veritable fortune for paid links. The likes of ReviewMe (http://www.reviewme.com) change up to $250 for a single “review” (which is SEO speak for a plain text link not so subtly hidden in a purpose written article). One text link. One! Not just that, but a single text link on a new page that has no PR (and will maybe only will ever receive minimal PR filtered through from other page links)!

For that $250 (around £150) there are so many different options you could aim for. While a lot won’t have any direct SEO benefit, we still need to consider traffic and branding benefits.

$250 would allow me to buy banner advertising on a niche site / forum / blog for a limited amount of time. Depending on the type of site and its subject area you could be looking at a decent amount of traffic, enquiries and exposure – certainly enough to justify the cost.

An alternative would be to spend the money on a directory listing on a site such as TheBestOf (http://www.thebestof.co.uk) – £10 per month for a year and you get a full page listing (written by your local contact), an audio advert where you can pitch your service, inclusion in a high traffic site and a direct (SEO friendly!) link back to your site. A link AND qualified traffic – that’s like SEO Christmas!

Online marketing professionals do focus on SEO a lot and that isn’t a bad thing – it just isn’t the only thing and you should be looking to spend your budget wisely and spread your marketing scope.

Cars for Sale:

Are you looking for a “cars for sale” auction to buy a car/cars? At best car deals website you will get instant access to thousands of new and used repossessed homes, cars, trucks and SUV’s on sale that have been seized by the government, police, IRS customs, DEA, banks and lending institutions etc, all car makes and models, new and used cars for sale from up to 95% off, used cars with low miles and clean records. This is a closely guarded resource only used by car dealerships and realtor to buy and sell cars and homes due to the extreme discounted prices and amazing deals not possible in any other way. Click here to see Best Car Deals site.

Repossessed Cars:

Every day thousands of Americans default on their car payments, or fail to abide by certain law which in turn, causes the law enforcement agencies to seize their cars and other property indefinitely. Some of these cars are repossessed from criminals and individuals or institutions with large amounts of bank loans and debts which they are unable or refuse to pay and also in cases of tax evasion. For this reason vehicles repossessed in these kinds of situation are quickly repossessed and auctioned on non – profit basis for the banks and lending institutions to cover loses and to minimize cost of storage and maintenance. This is therefore a perfect source for you to buy your dream car used / new. The general public does not know about kind of cars for sale and homes auctions! After being a member of the site there is no reason to buy fr