Building Loyal Subscriber Lists

Successful online services are those that provide good customer satisfaction and have well-implemented customer loyalty plans. Statistics are continuously being compiled and published showing that across industries there are a variety of different ratios between the costs of retaining customers and the costs of obtaining new customers. But, these statistics continue to show that across nearly all industries it is cheaper to take steps to retain customers than it is to try to replace them with new customers. This presents the problem to all business owners of “How do I retain my customers?” On the Internet, where you have much less direct contact with your customers, this is a particularly hard question to answer. But, the good news is that there is a proven solution that can work for nearly all Internet business types. Building loyal subscriber lists through newsletters that fill the same niche topic as your business is perhaps the most proven customer retention strategy for Internet businesses.

Even those website visitors who do not buy your products are there because something on your site appealed to them. Provide them with an opportunity to subscribe to a newsletter on the same topic that appealed to them and you can hold on to them just as if they were already a customer. Likewise, of course, you want to provide each paying customer with this newsletter that appeals to them in the same way as the products you sold to them. These people are the most likely people to be interested in the topic of the newsletter, as they've already shown a willingness to make a purchase related to that topic. This means they will be the most likely people to read each edition of your newsletter as you email it and thus see whatever advertisements or promotional materials you place in that newsletter.

One of the great aspects of retaining customers in this fashion is that it is so inexpensive. Even if you do not write the articles in the newsletters by yourself, paying a few dollars for a high quality article that goes out to thousands of proven customers is about the cheapest high-turnover advertising medium conceivable. Most of the newsletter management is handled almost completely by scripts you have installed, so maintenance time and costs are very low. As long as you remember to keep your newsletters interesting and related to the niche of your website, you can be sure your advertisements will get a high readership from a very well-targeted market.

Any time you are offering a new product, service, or reason why loyal subscribers would be interested in visiting your site, you just mention it in your newsletter and you have nearly free advertising with high conversion ratios. In fact, if you build loyal subscriber lists by providing highly entertaining content, it is not uncommon for your subscribers to forward the newsletters to people they know who may be interested in that topic. Since that topic is directly related to your site niche, you have just achieved viral marketing and customer retention at little or not cost.

Many people fear the use of the "unsubscribe" link when they try to build loyal subscriber lists. This should not be the case. This link provides a service to subscribers who are no longer interested in your newsletter. More importantly, any spikes in the percentages of subscribers unsubscribing can be an alert to you that something needs fixed or refined. You will then be able to investigate matters to determine if you need to make your articles either more interesting, more colorful, or more niche specific to keep your subscribers loyal.

Or, in some cases maybe you just need to give them more bonuses or good deals on your products. Free giveaways or sweepstakes, where allowed by law, can keep people reading your newsletters. Consider giving away free ebooks if they are of a high quality. Coupons are sometimes a good idea too. Having a super-sale for the first few customers to read the newsletter on a regular basis is a time-proven subscriber retention and readership booster.

Sometimes your articles may be well-written and right on topic, but your tone is turning people off your newsletter. Generally speaking, keeping the tone of your newsletter lighthearted, when applicable, will keep more of your readers. For most topics people will find this refreshing. You can diversify your tone for your topics to keep people guessing. Sometimes be humorous. Other times, be wacky. On sad topics, pull their heart strings and then end with a bright outlook for a better tomorrow. On anger-inducing topics, end with a call to action.

8 Types of Online Advertising

If you have a niche website or online business, you can benefit from online advertising because you can reach a very specific niche audience that you wouldn't possible reach through traditional advertising avenues like niche and trade magazines.

Cost is the main and biggest difference between niche online advertising and niche print advertising. You have several affordable online advertising options available to you. And because hundreds of niche sites are being launched every day, your online advertising opportunities are practically limitless.

Online advertising has different types and they range from the obvious, in-your-face advertising to the subtle, soft sell type. There are 8 basic online advertising types that most website or online business owners use.

1. Banner Advertising
Banner advertising involves the use of banner ads to promote a website or online business. Your banner ad would include your company or website logo, tag line and advertising message. Banner ads can be static or animated, and they can range size. The size of your banner ad would depend on how big the space is available on the site where you buy banner advertising.

2. Sponsorships
Many advertisers gain exposure for their website or online business through online sponsorship. Sponsorship could be either through site-wide text links and banner ads or online video commercials. Some advertisers sponsor free Web templates, for instance, wherein their link remains intact whenever a template is used.

3. Text Link Advertising
Text link advertising works in the same manner as banner advertising. Text links can be site-wide and located in the sidebar, footer or any other area in the advertising site. Text link ads can also be incorporated within the content itself.

4. Video Advertising
Video advertising can be done in the same manner as banner advertising by using different video screen sizes or it can have blatant advertising and presented as Web commercials. Video advertising is popular in video sharing sites, particularly if the video has an entertainment value attached to it and has the potential of going "viral" (being passed around through referrals or word-of-mouth).

5. E-mail Advertising
E-mail advertising is a type of online advertising that involves purchasing a text link ad or banner ad for placement in e-mail newsletters or e-zines.

6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising or Search Engine Advertising
This type of online advertising involves purchasing text ads and banner ads and having those ads show as sponsored results when certain keywords or phrases are searched for. You would purchase this type of online advertising from Google AdWords, for instance, and have your ads appear on websites relevant to your keywords through Google AdSense.

7. Online Classifieds
Online classifieds are similar to how offline classifieds work. You would promote your website or online business to an online classified site that lists other ads for the general market.

8. Pop-up and/or Pop-under Advertising
Pop-ups and pop-unders are online ads that appear under and over the original website you are visiting. Pop-ups and pop-unders may be triggered when visitors enter or leave a website or when they click on a link. Pop-up and pop-under advertising are regarded as an intrusive type of online advertising and browsers now come with built-in pop-up blockers.

Inexpensive Internet Marketing Ideas

It is not enough to have a great product and a beautiful website. If you want to be successful on the Internet, you need to implement some form of a marketing plan. Fortunately, the Internet gives you many opportunities to market your site and products without much expense.

Below are some ideas you can use to help your convince potential customers to take a look at what you have to offer. As you read through this information, take note that each idea is something you give to your customer. One of the great truths of Internet marketing is that many people cannot resist the opportunity to get something without paying money. In the modern era, people put great importance on the concept of "value."

1. Find at least one item you can dangle in front of your potential audience as being "free." Of course, it is not really free. They have to visit your site or join your mailing list to get the free stuff you are offering. If it is something such as a short report or e-book, you may be able to make it yourself. You may also be able to find something you can give away for free that will be of interest to your site visitors. Or, for a fee you can hire a writer or software developer to make a very unique software tool or an e-book pertinent to your site topic to give to Web visitors.

2. One of the oldest Internet marketing techniques is to offer a free subscription to a newsletter or e-zine on your site. If you write your own newsletters, this can be done at not cost to you. Best of all, the people who sign up for your newsletter will be people interested in your site. It is much easier to sell to people on this type of list than to sell to random visitors to your site. Make sure that you continue to give either great information or links to more free items in your newsletter so that your subscribers will still be paying attention to the content when you provide information about the products or services you want them to buy.

3. Provide some kind of news on your site that will be of interest to potential customers. Keep it fresh. Make it good enough for them to keep coming back for the news and they will become familiar and comfortable with your brand. If you are a good writer learning to publish, press releases can be golden. Don't sell your products in your press releases, but rather focus on establishing your brand's credibility as a reputable resource in the field. There are also inexpensive press release writers and submission sites available on the Internet.

4. Many people seek out the opinions of others before making decisions. Take advantage of this by writing reviews of products or services related to your site. Some ideas of things that you can write reviews of are books, broadcasts, schools, seminars, blogs, and other media. Try to avoid writing about your direct competition. Don't forget to attach your brand to your reviews.

5. Don't forget that previous customers make the best future customers. Offer your previous customers incentives to do business with you again. Offering a time-limited discount is an excellent way to gain repeat business and get control over the timing of cash flow. You can also offer them opportunities to pre-order items before they are offered to new customers. Consider setting up a free service for repeat visitors. If appropriate, help forums are an excellent way to hold on to customers by both increasing satisfaction and keeping your brand fresh in their minds.

Using Online PR to Promote Your Website or Online Business

Online public relations, or online PR for short, refers to ways of connecting with your site's or business' key audience with the goal of either building awareness and increasing exposure, building and maintaining trust to your image or brand, or communicating to your key target to solve problems or crises. Online PR works similarly to traditional PR, but using different PR tools.

There are several benefits to including online PR to your Internet marketing efforts.

1. You can send out your messages quickly to your key audience regardless of what your message is -- from breaking news to response to a problem or crisis situation,.

2. With the right set of online PR tools, you can directly connect with your target audience instead of simply just to non targeted groups through media outlets.

3. With online PR, you can easily evaluate your online PR campaigns because you are directly sending your message to your target audience. You can easily and immediately gather data from viewers, readers or listeners because you can have direct interaction with them through online PR.

4. If you are a small website or online business, you'll find that online PR tools and strategies are more accessible to you than the traditional or offline PR tools.

There are several online PR tools you can use for your public relations efforts, and these include:

1. Press Releases

You would use press releases for your online PR efforts similarly to how you would use them in traditional or off line PR. Although nothing beats manual targeting of quality media outlets and trying to establish relevant media relationships, distributing press releases or news about your site or business to news engines like Google News and Yahoo! News can be seen directly by people within your target market.

2. Blogs and Forums

Blogs and online forums are two great online PR tools you can use to establish and maintain your reputation or status as an expert in your field or an authoritative source on a niche. However, when using these two online PR tools, you need to use a "soft sell" technique rather than a blatant sales pitch. Some soft sell techniques include writing quality content and answering questions about your niche. You can use blogs and online forums to build trust and gain the respect of your target market, which will eventually generate traffic to your site or convert sales for your business later on.

3. Article Distribution

Another way you can establish your expertise in your chosen niche and build trust among your target audience is to write expert articles and then make them available online via the different article directories.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Commonly thought of as a marketing tool, search engine optimization or SEO is actually a narrow online PR niche. The purpose of this online PR tool is to build exposure and raise awareness about your site or online business through the soft sell approach via search engine placements. When done properly, SEO will bring natural traffic to your website or convert sales for your online business.

5. E-mail Newsletters

An e-mail newsletter or e-zine is an online PR tool you can use to directly communicate with your key audience or market. By regularly publishing an e-mail newsletter, you can maintain your image as well as make your key audience remain aware of your brand.

6. Podcasts and Webinars

Podcasts and webinars are regarded as the online counterpart of off line seminars. You can use podcasts and webinars to establish reputation and reinforce your expertise in your niche.

Search Engine Optimization Explained

To succeed in e-commerce, you must use every tool at your disposal to compete against others doing the same. More and more business owners are realizing that search engines are the greatest source of traffic because the traffic from search engines are actually people looking for what their sites sell. If you aren't continually working on the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site, you could get run over by the competition before you know it.

SEO has become a buzzword on the Web. The popularity of search engine optimization stems from its value. Most people don't go looking for things on the Web by surfing. Most people go looking for things on the Web by going to a search engine and typing some keywords or a key phrase. Search engines are just as valuable of a tool to those looking for things as they are to those with things to offer.

The most important thing for a website owner to know is that most people who do a Web search never look beyond the first ten results that show up for the keywords they have typed. And, most of those people don't look beyond the first three results they see. This is why search engine optimization is vital to your business on the Web. You must be sure that your page is among the top results from the billions of pages available on the Internet.

It is important to realize that you can't just do something and suddenly be at the top of the search engines and stay there. Search engine optimization is a long-term way of doing things. The goal is to make every page so that it will be clearly understood by search engine robots. These robots are software programs that roam around the entire Web to index all of the content on the Web. When you do search engine optimization, you are working on trying to move up the search engine results pages over the course of time. This process usually will take several months before you even begin to notice results. Even if you do everything right in your search engine optimization, it could take you one to two years before you have pages ranked consistently near the top of search results pages. Your search engine optimization doesn't stop here as someone is always drooling over your spot in the search results.

We need to develop a more clear definition of what search engine optimization is. Search engine optimization is the continual utilization of all of the tools and methods available to you on each of your Web pages to convince the search engines that your site belongs near the top of search results for the keywords that best describe your site. If you already have a site, there may be many aspects of the site you need to change for the purpose of search engine optimization. Whenever you are building new pages, they should be structured from the ground up with search engines in mind.

You may be wondering what exactly you can do to optimize your pages for search engines. Search engine optimization has actually become a deep study. Listing all of the available knowledge of search engines here would require hundreds of pages of text. However, the basic ides of search engine optimization are simple. You make your page code simple so that search engines do not become confused. You include plenty of keywords in the text on your pages in key locations on your pages. You give your pages meaningful URLs, link names, and titles. You trade links with sites similar to yours to help the search engines categorize your site and to let the search engines know that other sites consider your site a credible resource. That's really all there is to search engine optimization in the broader sense.

To get a more detailed description of search engine optimization, go to a search engine and enter "SEO" in the search box. Take the time to consider all of the different recommendations. Search engine optimization is a science, but not an exact one. Search engines constantly change the way they evaluate pages, so the best in the search engine optimization business are those that keep up with these changes. The best way to learn search engine optimization is to take time each week to read new information on the topic. Learn from as many sources as possible, as no one has a monopoly on the best search engine optimization information.

Get Targeted Traffic Using Google AdWords

It is no longer a secret that the best method of obtaining targeted traffic on the Internet is Google AdWords. Plenty of money and person-hours are put into most sites. It takes a lot of effort to get the site branding just right and to make all of the technical aspects of the site function fluently. The purpose of most sites is to be viewed by as many people who have an interest in the site content as possible. If the site does not get this traffic, all of the money and work that have gone into the site is wasted. This is why Google AdWords has had such a huge impact on e-commerce.

Each interested site visitor brought by Google AdWords brings with it the potential for the site to accomplish the site's core mission. However, you must be careful that you do not grab a visitor interested in a specific thing and bring that visitor to a site with too general of a topic or too broad of a topic coverage. You need to showcase whatever product you have that is right on topic with the one that person was searching for when that person came to your site. This specific topic is sometimes referred to as a niche. Always drive the visitors from Google AdWords straight to the niche for which they are looking. Otherwise they may continue right on to the next promising site. However, if they buy something in the specific niche they were looking for, they will keep you in mind when they are buying the other things you may provide in the same general category.

Make Your Money Grow Itself

It is well-known that you have to make your business known to others or they will never do business with your business. One of the most common ways of doing this is by running advertising campaigns. For smaller businesses, advertising is a way of educating customers about the existence of the business and how the business can serve their wants or needs. Good advertising conveys the message that your business has what your target customer wants. Great advertising conveys the message that your business has what your target customer wants to your target customers. In other words, using something like Google AdWords to advertise specifically to your target customers increases the efficiency of your advertising budget, but only if you convey your message well.

If you can come up with a good estimate of how much profit the average, well-targeted visitor generates for your site, it is very easy to know how much you are willing to bid on each Google AdWords click. Your site and business customer capacity should then be the only limit on your Google AdWords budget if you want to make your money grow itself. After all, each customer coming to your site will be someone who was searching for a keyword or key phrase that identifies that person as a target customer. There is no better way to match advertising budgets to target markets.

Google is a very large advertising provider that not only leads the Internet in most measurements of usage, but also contracts out to provide their services for many of the other top search portals on the Web, such as Ask, AOL, and Netscape. It also provides search scripts that Google AdSense members can put on their pages to earn revenue when someone searches for and clicks on the keywords and key phrases on which you bid.

More to Google AdWords Than Just Targeted Traffic

You will not only get targeted traffic using Google AdWords, but you will also get tools to help you improve your ad campaign. As mentioned before, a big part of your advertising campaign is conveying the right message to your customers. Google AdWords gives you very precise, in-depth statistics on how well you are conveying your message compared to other sites. For example, they tell you what percentage of people searching for the keywords you bid on are actually clicking on your link as opposed to one of the other links on the page. You can change your advertisement a little and see exactly how this effects your click rate. If you have sales statistics packages on your own site you can compare the changes in click rates from Google AdWords statistics to your sales statistics.

So don't be afraid to combine your statistics on getting targeted traffic using Google AdWords with other online tools and statistics packages. An example of a popular tool many people use to improve their results are keywords selection tools. Google AdWords itself has keyword selection tools to help you choose keywords related to your site, but there are other keyword tools available for use on the Web and for download that will give you additional tracking information and evaluation of those keywords. Just do whatever it takes to improve the targeting of your advertising campaigns and you'll find you get targeted traffic using Google AdWords to an extent beyond your imagination.

Profiting From Product Reviews

Doing occasional positive product reviews, or product recommendations, related to your website's niche can be a lucrative addition to your website. Profiting from product reviews is not a new marketing technique, but it is one of the least talked about. This is because it gives opportunities for dishonesty by those recommending products that aren't good just to make money. However, if you are profiting from product reviews that are honest and you give you reasons why your product recommendations are being made, you can further your website's credibility and usefulness. If you give a product recommendation and someone reads it and buys the product and finds everything you said about it to be true, they are very likely to come back and look through your product reviews in the future. This means continually profiting from product reviews is dependent on honesty.

What makes product recommendations profitable is the widespread availability of affiliate programs selling every imaginable type of product. So you go find products that you particularly like related to your site's niche, write up a little product review and accompany it with your affiliate link. Before you know it you're making commissions off the product and your website visitors are enjoying the product. Product reviews are one of the highest conversion methods of making sales, with one of the strongest customer appreciation indexes. It all comes down to how well you establish website visitor trust in your website and how carefully you manage it.

How far should you go in your honesty? Well, in most cases saying a few negative things about the product you are recommending will result in higher sales conversion ratios than just saying positive things. Saying only positive things will give website visitors the impression you're making a sales pitch. Saying a few things you would change about the product gives your product review credibility. To really close the sale, you can just make it appear that you are giving a product recommendation because even with the little annoyances the product has, the positive features of the product are too good to be ignored. If one of the negatives of the product is a feature the website visitor really wanted, then that visitor probably won't buy. But they will be grateful and more likely to return to your website. If you failed to mention a crucial negative and the person bought, they would possibly return the product and likely resent your site.

To be successful with product recommendations the whole of your website must establish your credibility as an expert in your website niche. People will be willing to pay a premium and buy nearly anything from you if they are highly interested in the niche and they have complete faith in your evaluations. So make providing expert, honest, unbiased information on your niche topic the primary goal of your website if you want to profit from product reviews on your website.

Always maintain a sense of professionalism on your site, but with a tinge of deep concern for your website visitors. Make it look like you are one of them and out there fighting for them. But never lose your calm or cool in your forums or website content. And, when you take up an issue, do not take a side on the issue itself but rather take a side on how the issue is being handled by those involved. This is how news mediums give off the impression that they are a high-quality, expert resource that can be trusted. You need this same type of trust to profit from product reviews.

But while you are portraying yourself in a certain light, do not go overboard and exaggerate or minimize truth. You need to remember that many people will see right through any falsehood. In fact, they are at your site because they are interested in the niche of your site. Many of your website visitors may themselves be among the foremost experts in that niche field. Don't give people a chance to doubt your honesty and credibility.

Finally, don't give product recommendations for products you don't personally know anything about. Not only can it make you look like an idiot, but it can damage your reputation as a reliable source of information on the niche in which you specialize. It takes a long time to build up your website visitors' trust in your credibility, but only a dumb mistake or two to rip their trust away.