Sunday, June 28, 2009

Using Free Classifieds to Your Advantage

Contributed by Alex Wu

Given the fact that folks have been using free classifieds to find, sell, and buy items for more than thirty years, they are practically an institution. They have endured where many other trends have not. Part of the reason they are so popular is because they are so versatile. They can be used for just about anything. You can find practically any item, product, or service you might want by browsing the classifieds. You really never know what you are going to come across.

That being said, simply placing an ad does not guarantee success. You need to follow a few fundamental rules. Some ads are more successful than others. That is simply fact. What separates the successes from the failures is usually the ad itself rather than what it is advertising. There is one key thing to remember when placing a classified ad. You need to remember that your sole reason for placing it is to get people interested.

You place it because, for whatever reason, you want people to read it and contact you to get more information. You have to interest and intrigue your readers. It does not matter if you are trying to give away free puppies or to sell a private product or service.

People are not going to contact you if they are not interested. Therefore, you have to catch their eye. In some ways, it is often better to avoid actively selling something in your ad. It is far better to pique someone's interest and then try to sell what you are advertising when they contact you.

If you try to sell something too much, then people will generally do the exact opposite. Rather than being interested, they will be put off. You have to make them want to contact you rather than forcibly trying to sell or give them something. You can get to that point after you have them intrigued with the subject of your ad.

One of the ways you can do this is by staying away from ads which only run a week or so. These are considered one-shot ads and they rarely do any good. You should either let your ad run for a few weeks at least, or place a subtly different ad every week. That way, you can keep catching the readers' eyes. This is also the reason so many people prefer free classified ads.

As stated, people turn to the classifieds for many different reasons. There is literally no limit to what you can use them for; it all depends on you. They are, for instance, ideal for getting more visitors to personal or business sites or blog pages. People who are trying to sell something can also be helped by them. It does not matter if they are trying to sell services or products.

Naturally, free ads are a wonderful place to buy and sell things as well. Perhaps you are looking to buy a washer and dryer, a stove, a futon, or any number of other things. Perhaps you are even looking for a roommate! Then, too, perhaps you have something other than a private product you want to sell. People who are having garage sales and yard sales can even benefit from advertising.

Alex Wu runs a (http://www.Jihoy.com) free classifieds social network site that lets people post their ads, build profiles, and connect. He hopes to create an active environment for businesses (http://www.Jihoy.com) post free ads and build relationships.

If you have a blog, you need to read Blogging to the Bank.

6 Steps to Creating a High Converting Squeeze Page

Whether you're aware of what squeeze pages are in Internet Marketing or not, it's time to make them a serious part of your online success. Why? Because squeeze pages are designed to build a list of prospective buyers that you can email over and over again and seriously ramp up your online profits for years to come.

Before we get down to mechanics, let me explain why you really cannot afford to leave squeeze pages out of your marketing mix:

Most of the people who visit your web pages will not buy. It's a well known fact and cannot be avoided. Why don't they buy? Many reasons, including trust, not having the money available and also being distracted by their surroundings (such as screaming kids or a blaring TV). However, this can be easily worked around by capturing a name and email address via the squeeze page and staying in touch with that person in order to close the sale over time.

Another reason to build a list via a squeeze page is because you have the opportunity to sell more related products to that list of people over time. Not only can you close down on one sale for the initial item, but you can also consider promoting complimentary products that your list subscribers will appreciate.

All of this builds trust and long term security for your online business, but building a list is hard when you're unable to get people to sign up in the first place. That's why a squeeze page is so effective, because it literally forces a person to opt-in to your list in exchange for valuable, free information or rewards.

There's no distraction, just action!

So here are the 6 steps to transform (or create) your killer squeeze page:

1. Use professional graphics and a nice, clean layout. This will inspire trust and help towards removing any doubts about what your intent is.

2. Sell your free information just as you would the actual product. Remember that people are busy and untrusting, so you really need to bullet the main benefits of handing over their name and email address.

3. Remove all distraction. A squeeze page is designed with one thing in mind, nothing else... to capture a name and email address. It is surprising how many pages I see with other ads, tons of links and too much text going on. Just give the visitor enough clear cut reasons to opt-in, no more and no less.

4. Use "call to action" phrases. It's a proven fact that people respond better when actually asked (or told) to do something specific. It makes sense when you think about it, and a simple "fill out your name and email address to the left/right" is all it takes. This should be obvious to more experienced marketers, but you'd be amazed at how many people miss this.

5. Tell them what's coming. Make sure you let the reader know what will happen next and exactly when it will happen. This will improve the opt-in rate and reduce distraction on the other side of the opt-in after taking action.

6. Use a serious disclaimer. Show the visitor that you're not interested in spamming and where possible, try to reinforce this by referring to your auto responder policies which will do everything they can to stop spamming occurring within their network of customers.

Atomic Blogging can take your blog to new levels of income.

Using Article Marketing For Traffic Generation

Contributed by Raymond Krost

Generating quality traffic to your website cannot get easier these days. Today, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars to hire SEO specialists and you certainly don't need to beg established webmasters to link with you.

I highly recommend article marketing. This is an effective, hassle-free marketing tool that can help you drive interested parties to your website and pull up your search engine ranking by just distributing quality articles over the World Wide Web.

Use attractive titles. If you want to increase your open rate, you need to make sure that your article titles are interesting and attention-grabbing. They must have the ability to move online users to open and read your articles. Make it a habit to use powerful, compelling words that can evoke action or use terms that can touch human emotions.

Power up your titles. You surely don't want your articles to be ignored once they were shown on search page result. You would want online users to click on them so you can boost your open and eventually your conversion rate. You can do this by using striking titles. I suggest that you make use of words that can evoke action so you can get online users to act on your favor.

Deliver fresh, unique articles. Don't just rewrite the articles you see on the Internet. To make your copies more valuable to the eyes of online users, strive to offer fresh information that are not yet or seldom discussed online.

Be always on the lookout for new issues that your potential clients might get interested in and be sure to be the first one to write about them.

You need to feed online users with information that they need. By doing so, they will see you as someone knowledgeable on your chosen niche. This will drive them to like you or even trust you that they will consider doing business with you in the long run.

Deliver fresh content. Avoid rewriting somebody else's articles or discussing topics that were already covered by other writers over and over again. To make your articles more valuable to the eyes of your potential clients, strive to write about new topics that have direct impact on your chosen niche.

I am an affiliate marketer that uses (http://www.squidoo.com/article-marketing-7) article marketing as my major (http://www.squidoo.com/article-marketing-7) traffic generation technique because of its effectiveness.

If you have a blog, you need to read Blogging to the Bank.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Create the Best E-mail Marketing Campaign Possible

Creating a successful e-mail marketing design depends upon a few key points. The first key is to keep it simple. If your e-mail contains a flashy attention-grabbing window of opportunity, but no real content, you're not going to get the results most businesses desire. People steer clear of the gimmicks, so if your current campaign is 'gimmicky', you may want to consider revamping. If you make the decision to revamp, consider the following.

Try a simple e-mail newsletter. The reason for this is that, according to a recent report by Nielson Norman Group, the average e-mail user only reviews an Internet newsletter for an average of 50 seconds, whereas marketing campaigns by e-mail only hold the reader's attention for around four seconds. As you can see, the newsletter format will hold your average reader's attention 10 times more than the normal e-mail, Which in turn brings us to the actual design of the newsletter or the e-mail.

It's important to create a simple e-mail marketing design that both captures the attention but also keeps the attention. The simple truth is that most consumers and e-mail users only read a fraction of the e-mails they receive. The rest of the e-mails that they actually open are merely scanned for content. Depending upon the individual, different advertising dynamics are found appealing. For this reason, your e-mail newsletter or advertisement should appeal to each of these demographics.

Aside from simplicity, an effective e-mail marketing campaign will utilize ASIC principles of design, by promoting contrasting colours to draw the eye and call readers to action over the amplification of certain statements. You may also want to consider the very e-mail in-boxes from standard e-mailing sources. For example, Hotmail and AOL both offer varying standards when it comes to opening e-mail. It's a good idea to use colours and fonts that will be visually appealing in any e-mail genre.

Most e-mail forums have moved on to the concept that design segment should not contain more than 200 to 300 pixels. This means that your e-mail design should not be disproportionate. Try to ensure that your marketing design has a smooth flow and is distributed evenly for the entirety of the content.

There have been countless studies on how most Internet users read e-mail and various documents throughout the web. Your desire should be to gain reader attention and you can be sure to do this by using an e-mail marketing design. The most effective design is constructed around a five second view of any page. That means any information put on your page should be readable or able to be scanned within a five second time constraint.

It's a good idea to use your knowledge, when it comes to marketing and media, to ensure that your message takes up less real estate than standard e-mail advertisements. If your e-mail ad takes up too much space or comes across too spammy, most ISPs will automatically filter it out as junk.

The imagery you placed inside your e-mail should convey a rapid message; don't make the mistake of using photos and logos for mere beautification. To make the most of your marketing campaign, ensure that your pictures says something besides "I'm pretty".

E-mail marketing is a rapid response industry. This means you must be certain to give your potential clients every opportunity to make contact with you. You can be easily contacted via contact information placed within your messages. Be sure to include links to your site, your address information, your phone numbers, your fax number, and any other information that can be used to contact you on a daily basis, in every e-mail that you send to potential clients.

Let's face it! Without the proper e-mail marketing design, your e-mail campaign may well be predestined to fail. Knowledge is power! Use what you have learned here and from other resources well and your e-mail campaign will stand a much better chance of adding profit to your bottom line.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), Of Human Bondage, 1915

Atomic Blogging can take your blog to new levels of income.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Squidoo Marketing

Contributed by Eric Johnson

I know what you're thinking, but stay with me. It's easy to make money with Squidoo; it is simple; just follow along and I will show you.

So what is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a massive social network with affiliate marketing.

It is a network of single pages, called "lenses", which display views and opinions. These lenses can be on anything you want -- health, travel, people, tourism, sports, music etc. By making a lens you become a lens master.

Make Money With Squidoo

Squidoo is a great platform where you can give your views and opinions. It enables an opportunity to mix your passion with Internet business. Through this medium, you can run a very successful business no matter how different your products are. You can start a home business, within an hour, without your own website.

Squidoo lenses get indexed fast. Google loves Squidoo. Within 2 days you might have your own lenses listed with Google search. Your lenses may link to other big sites like eBay and YouTube. Usually, lenses don't focus on content matter. They generally recommend and then link to the content matter on the web. Therefore, effort is made to encourage your own personal knowledge and products through your lens.

Do Some Charity As You Make Money On Squidoo

Squidoo makes it possible for you to create your own unique business and then earn money for yourself or for charity. Squidoo shares its revenues with its lens masters. 50% of the revenue goes to the lens masters while 45% goes to Squidoo and 5% of the revenue goes to charity. Thus, the aim of Squidoo is to pay the maximum amount to the lens masters and to charity. And what a way to prove the old adage "Charity begins at home"! Even if your lens is not able to hit the top of the charts, it will still be able to generate money for you, as it has been included in the pool of lens masters.

To sum up, Squidoo is a lively platform where you can place your ideas and expressions and you will find thousands of people interested in it as well. It is a totally free tool to boost your affiliate sales and a very simple way to promote your product or your expertise. How passion turns into profit can be seen by using Squidoo!

Do you want free advertising to your website? Visit (http://FreeAdvertisingInternet.com) Free Advertising Internet



The best Internet Marketing reference is Holly Mann's Honest Riches.

Social Marketing and Twitter

Social marketing involves marketing techniques and strategies that appeal to the behavior of people in order to gain more prospective clients and increase traffic rates in online businesses. It focuses on target markets that thrive in social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. In order to gain more customers, Internet marketers would usually join these websites and appeal to their gained friends and followers into visiting their links and posted sites. Twitter, for example, has a lot of unique features that makes it stand out among other social networking sites, making it a very popular place for people to get to know one another. You gain relationships, share information, and basically update your group of friends what is going on with your life.

Twitter has become a massive social network and Internet marketers want to take that into their hands by taking advantage of its features. So, what they do in order to seep in their marketing into their Twitter network is through RSS feeds.

A website known as TwitterFeed.com allows people to feed in their blog's RSS to the site for a small sum. Once the process is done, each time a new entry is posted in the said blog or website, the data feed gets tweeted into Twitter. From there, anybody who is a part of your network, be it a friend or a follower, can view your tweet and visit any link to the blog entry. Since Twitter has developed into a place where people can buy and shop online as well, you can imagine the number of clicks that you'll get when you feed your blog to the Twitter network.

The only disadvantage of social marketing in Twitter is the constant updating that you have to do and managing your accounts as you are going to be creating more than five for your network to grow. This is a very good example of social marketing and a lot of Internet marketers are engaging in it as they prove to be good sources of traffic and profit. So how does earning money through Twitter work?

How do you apply social marketing in a website that only allows you to tweet statements? These are just some of the things marketers do in order to fully optimize the powers of Twitter: The first step is to actually find people to follow your Twitter updates. Adding friends and finding followers who especially key in familiar searchers are your best bet in getting hundreds of clicks.

Use avatars whenever you create an account in Twitter. This way, people will know that you're a real person and not some bot that's only adding friends using Twitter friend adder tools. The more people in your networks, the more traffic you'll get for your blog or online business.

Try uploading really interesting pictures for your avatar for surefire adds.

If you don't mind the extra work, then the last tip is to keep replenishing the accounts that gets suspended in Twitter. A lot of accounts are susceptible to suspension, especially when you tweet similar updates frequently.

To find out lots more tips on how to market your busines son Twitter and use specific techniques to make money on Twitter, go to Twitter Traffic Exposed
Do you have a Wordpress blog? Then you need Wordpress Gold Mine.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Twitter Traffic Exposed

Twitter is growing fast right now, and as internet marketers, we need to capitalise on this trend to ride the wave and increase our sales.

Two British guys I know in the Internet marketing circle, Jani G and Ian Fernando, have just released a course on exactly how to do this.

This course is called Twitter Traffic Exposed.

While going over the sales page of this particular e-book, I was impressed and decided to go ahead and make the purchase myself. Fortunately, it was worth the money spent!

The e-book in question is Twitter Traffic Exposed by Jani G and Ian Fernando. I dug right into the training and, before I knew it, had completed all 77 pages.

I have read several of the latest e-books on Twitter. I didn't find a bunch of tricks and gimmicks in this book. Instead, I found solid information on both the use of Twitter and great insight on social marketing in general.

One of the things that really stood out is the importance of have a unique profile (background image) that sets your Twitter page a step above the rest.

This is only a fragment of the great information contained within the pages of Twitter Traffic Exposed. If you are using Twitter for marketing and business, or are thinking about doing so, this is a great resource.

Twitter has just received the coveted PR 9 (page rank) on Google -- so if you aren't already using Twitter, now would be a great time to get started as it's only going to get bigger.

Twitter is a resource that is here to stay. It's been the talk of the television media and is quickly becoming a household term. Twitter Traffic Exposed is a great place to learn the right way to do things both on Twitter and in the world of Web 2.0.

Long story short, four stars guys! You've created a winner here! I can't wait to get into the videos tomorrow! Many thanks!