“I rarely encourage clients to sell via one-step, because leads; people who’ve raised their hands can have so much value worked well over time.” - Dan Kennedy.

There’s an absolute wealth of marketing wisdom in Dan’s statement. It’s impossible to do justice to all of it in this short space. So lets get into it and give you some important food for thought…

You’ll decide to either market to a list, or not. And I know that some marketers just don’t want to be bothered with list generation, for a variety of reasons. That’s fine. So if you’re sitting on the fence about it… just understand that you can be walking away from a LOT of money if you don’t have a list.

If you take your business seriously, then you already know the life-time value of your customers. How much revenue the average customer will bring to you over the time they’re doing business with you.

Armed with that knowledge, you’re able to know exactly how much you can spend to acquire new leads. The smartest marketers know how to break-even to build their lists. And they also know how much that new lead will be worth over time.

Notice how Dan worded his statement; ’so much value worked well over time.’

The key phrase there is, ‘worked well.’ I’ll tell you something. Many businesses flat out do not get it in that area. When their lists either die from attrition, or become unresponsive, it becomes the business kiss of death. And then they wonder what happened.

Simply no excuse for it because it’s SO easy to prevent. You just need to know how to do that.

I’m sure many of you know about the Law of Reciprocity. Simply stated, giving someone something… or doing something for another person, will compel them to feel obligated to do something for you. Of course, that ’something’ for you is giving you business.

But stop and think about this for a moment…

People online have come to expect the freebie. The free report, white paper, short ebook… whatever, in exchange for contact information and your continued marketing efforts. It has become a standard for doing business online. Unfortunately this expectation has only served to dilute, if not eliminate, the power of reciprocity. And if your freebie is poor, then you can almost forget any compelling feelings to give you something in return. You’ll immediately become bland and boring because you’ll be lumped in that vague group of online businesses that all look the same. Or worse…

People will label you as a scam, or just someone who wants to make a fast buck. But…

All is certainly not lost… IF you provide good quality information. And you can still harness reciprocity’s power in your marketing. How?

By continuing to provide information of high perceived value in your follow-up emails. But do it with a twist and some common sense. Just think about human nature and it’ll become clear.

First… spark intrigue. Create some suspense and the desire for more. One way to do that is by NOT revealing everything. Don’t give the farm away in your free reports and ebooks. Now this isn’t anything new. But I’ll tell you something I’ve seen a lot.

I’ve seen free reports and ebooks that offered lots of good information. But they failed to create any burning desire. There was no sense of intrigue. No sense of, “I gotta know more about this NOW!”

Let me ask you… when you see a newspaper ad selling whatever, and there’s a picture of an attractive woman wearing a bikini… does that picture make you want to buy?

NO! Probably doesn’t. You see that so much people become blind to it… for the most part. It has no selling value. Or, for lots of guys maybe it might catch their attention. They might check out the hot girl and then move on.

You can be regarded as a respectful, professional marketer simply by treating your list with respect. That means NOT bombarding with a constant stream of, “You Gotta Check This Out NOW!” Don’t beat them up with constant, hard selling.

Keep a continuous rapport with them. Talk to them. Give them substance and good information while sparking an intense desire to know more. Share your self with them and they’ll come to think of you as something more than a marketer.

I’ve been marketing to lists for many years. And I’ve had subscribers stay with me for almost as long. It’s a skill you can learn and develop. And done right, with the right backend offers… you’ll take your bottom line to whole new levels.

By Dan Lok
A former college dropout, Dan “The Man” Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test-drive Dan’s Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to:

http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html

Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:-

1. Optimize Your Website’s Content:
First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a Content Development Strategy for Your Website:
In addition to optimizing the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimized for the search engines.

3. Invest in a Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign:
When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicize Your Website Through Article Marketing:
Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicize your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.

5. Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy:
Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online.

6. Create a Company Blog:
In the past, corporates have focused marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changed significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realize the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment With Video Marketing:
There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage Your Audiences With Web Widget Marketing:
Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity to quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the Benefits of Mobile Media Marketing:
Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognize the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones that can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy:
Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!

By Gillian Meier
Blue Magnet is an Internet Marketing Training & Consulting company in South Africa. Visit http://www.bluemagnet.co.za for more information.

Every business relies on effective communication with its customers. Communication doesn’t just convey information, it inspires trust, builds credibility, stimulates involvement and generates loyalty. But in today’s global, hi-tech, rapidly changing business environment, how do you ensure you’re communicating effectively?

The Benchmark - Face-To-Face
There’s no doubt that face-to-face communication is the most effective method for most people. Why? Because of its two-way nature. It’s about dialogue. Listeners are not passive participants. When someone talks to us, we send a continuous stream of responses back to them. Some are verbal, but many/most are not. These responses have the power to actually change the message being disseminated by the talker. What’s more, they have the power to change how other listeners’ interpret that message. (Similarly, other listeners have the power to change your interpretation.)

Unfortunately, however, the global nature of business makes it impossible to conduct face-to-face meetings for every communication. So what are the alternatives? Specifically, what are the alternatives offered by technology?

Email - The Starting Point
The benefits of email are numerous and well known, and include (but are not limited to):

• Email is an excellent mechanism for distributing information to people. It is fast and cost effective.
• It is incredibly convenient - you can readily communicate across time zones.
• It provides a useful electronic paper trail.
• It can save a great deal of time because most of the fluff surrounding a phone call (the social niceties) are seen as unnecessary in email.
• It allows recipients to read and respond to messages in their own time.
• The wording, grammar and punctuation in an email can be considered and edited before finally sending.

But email does have its limitations:

• Its lack of social niceties is a double-edged sword. Without the benefit of other communication cues, it’s sometimes hard to interpret the tone of an email, and this can make some messages ambiguous.
• It isn’t ideal for critical communication. For many people, emails are not ‘real-time’ communication. We all have that unaddressed email sitting at the bottom of the list. Because emails are so easy to ignore, they’re also easy to forget. 
• Ironically, email’s dissemination effectiveness has been one of the major impediments to its communication effectiveness. It’s so easy to send emails - and they’re so anonymous - that our inboxes are now flooded with Spam. Consequently, emails are viewed with some suspicion. It’s sometimes hard to identify legitimate emails, but it’s very easy to just hit Delete.
• Because email senders are typically geographically (and often culturally) distant from their recipients, they have no immediate visual and aural cues to help them tailor the message as they type.

But there’s no need to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’. Email is an excellent solution to many communication needs. And for those it is ill-equipped to handle, there are newer, more appropriate technologies that are built for the job…

Web 2.0 Technologies - The Perfect Supplement
Web 2.0, a term coined by O’Reilly Media (an American media company) in 2004 refers to a second-generation of internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in new ways.

Web 2.0 technologies are well defined in www.wikipaedia.org, which suggests that these sites allow the users of the sites (members) to create and share content, including exploring and discussing ideas, opinions, initiatives and issues. Web 2.0 is all about communication. It is the evolution of the internet from an endless library of static pages to an endless world of conversations. These pages can be restricted to particular individuals (eg the executive), or open to all members. The only difference is that the interaction takes place in cyberspace, and those taking part can be sitting behind a keyboard just about anywhere on the planet.

Importantly, a reader’s understanding of the message in a Web 2.0 communication is determined, not just by the publisher, but also by the responses (e.g. comments) of the audience. What’s more, the publisher’s actual message tends to be far more fluid as it, too, is informed by the responses of the audience. In other words, Web 2.0 services are far more like face-to-face conversations than any communication technology before them.

So what are these emerging technologies that we should be keeping an eye on? The two most notable are ‘Wikis’ and ‘Blogs’. The following definitions are from wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia developed as a wiki.

• Wikis - A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove or otherwise edit and change content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. Examples include Wikipedia and wikiwikiweb.
• Blogs - A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of online diary or journal which allows one to voice their opinion on something. Blogs often provide commentary or news and information on a particular subject. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media. Blogs are usually text based, but they can include photographs, videos or audio (podcasting). Blogs can be presented in a way that creates a conversation between users. As an example, see the Sydney Morning Herald travel blog.
   

The Uses Of Web 2.0
As with face-to-face social gatherings and forums, online get togethers attract a broad spectrum of participants eager to engage, entertain, befriend, advise and lecture.

It was reported in The Australian (Tuesday 8 August 2006) that the social computing element of Web 2.0 has recently been embraced by the US Government. The US State Department has started including blogs and other Web 2.0 concepts to deliver public information to citizens. It is also using wiki style services to improve information by permitting small expert communities to improve advisory services.

The same article advised that Australia’s leading information advisory body, the Australian Government Information Management Office, had begun experimenting with the use of blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies.

As new online social networks mushroom, they are becoming increasingly focused on niches, ideally suited to membership based organizations and the NFP sector. Examples of general public social networks include My Space, Classmates and Bikely.

Other Useful Technologies

•  SMS - Short Message Service (SMS) is a service available on most digital mobile phones (and other mobile devices, e.g. a Pocket PC, or occasionally even desktop computers) that permits the sending of short messages between mobile phones, other handheld devices and even landline telephones.
• Podcast - Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, over the internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.
• Webinars - Web conferencing is used to hold group meetings or live presentations over the internet. In the early years of the internet, the terms “web conferencing” and “computer conferencing” were often used to refer to group discussions conducted within a message board (via posted text messages), but the term has evolved to refer specifically to “live” or “synchronous” meetings, while the posted message variety of discussion is called a “forum”, “message board”, or “bulletin board”. A webinar is a seminar which is conducted over the World Wide Web. It is a type of web conferencing. In contrast to a Webcast, which is transmission of information in one direction only, a webinar is designed to be interactive between the presenter and audience. A webinar is ‘live’ in the sense that information is conveyed according to an agenda, with a starting and ending time. In most cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, pointing out information being presented on screen, and the audience can respond over their own telephones, preferably a speakerphone. Whilst not necessarily considered Web 2.0, Webinars can also be a useful mechanism for information distribution and discussion amongst membership based organizations and SMS can provide important or urgent confirmations.

Conclusion
Email is - and will continue to be - an incredibly useful and convenient communication tool. In fact, with the emergence of new technologies that are either more direct, more immediate, or more like face-to-face communication, email is improved. As businesses supplement their email usage with other communication technologies, email will be increasingly reserved for those communications to which it is ideally suited.

By Gerald Chait