Wednesday 22 December 2010

Ever thought about using affiliates?

This post is about how to using affiliates to increase your online sales.

What is an affiliate?

An affiliate is somebody who will advertise your products or services via their marketing channel, such as a blog or website. The best thing about using affiliates, they only get paid a certain percentage if they generate a sale or lead. Also affiliates are responsible for their own marketing costs.
Using affiliates for your online marketing is another way of getting your brand out to the masses, which in turn generating traffics, sales or leads.

What does a Affiliate Marketeer bring to the party?

In short a affiliate marketeer brings sales, lead generation and traffic generation to the party. Also a good affiliate marketeer understands how to use social networks, have web designing skills, an email marketing database and the ability to get your brand to the masses very quickly.

Consider this, how much would it cost you to employ a web designer, SEO specialist, an e-marketing specialist and a brand awarness specialist?

It would cost you a fortune, but this are the qualities you should be looking for in a affiliate marketeer and this are the skills an affiliate marketeer brings to the party as well as sales, traffic and lead generation.

Where to find affiliates

An affiliate network can be defined as an body that manages the affiliates and manages the companies looking for affilaites. In marketing terms an affiliate is also known as a advertiser and the company looking for affiliates is called the publisher.

The publisher will also pay a percentage of sales to the affiliate network, as well as to the affiliate / advertiser.

There are many affiliate networks out their, but the main ones are:
Tradedoubler, Commission Junction, Buy at, Click Bank, Google merchant network. If you want to find more affiliate networks just Google affiliate networks

Does Affiliate marketing work?

In short, Affiliate marketing works. The way to justify the cost of affiliate marketing against other marketing channels is to go ask yourself this question -"How much would it cost me to employ a sales person to be able to generate at least £100,000 plus sales and to generate a e-mareting database of about 30,000 plus subscribers". Another question you need to ask yourself -"How much would it cost me to get my brand out to the masses?".

Considering most retail publishers pay affiliates between 3 to 5 % of sales generated and some publishers pay £50 per lead. This may seem a lot of money to pay somebody who is generating traffic, sales and leads to your website, but again how much would it cost you to employ a sales person to get the same or better results?

If you want to find out more about affiliate marketing, I recommend the following book:

A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Quick Reference for Affiliate Managers and Merchants

Tuesday 21 December 2010

List of web hosting providers

This gives a list of different web hosting providers and web packages, which tries to help you finding the right one that meets your business needs. The web hosting packages offer anything from purchasing your web domain to leasing your own web server.

123-reg.co.uk web hosting provider

123-reg.co.uk is the UK’s largest domain name registrar, web hosting and email provider. We've registered over 2 million domains. Their success is built on providing a wide range of products all under one roof combined with market leading low prices and offers the following services:

  • Web domain name registration
  • Email registration and provider
  • Web hosting
  • The ability to create your own websites
  • Your own web control panel
  • DNS management
  • Email forwarding
  • Website forwarding

Click here to find out more about the offers from 123 reg.

Dotster web hosting and domain name provider

With nearly three million domains, Dotster Inc., is one of the world's largest ICANN-accredited domain name registrars. Launched in 2000, Dotster are well known for their ability to deliver hard-to-find domains and unique domain extensions. They are also a major global provider of reliable and affordable web hosting.

Dotster provide the following services:

  • Web domain name registration
  • Web hosting
  • Email provider
  • Business solutions
  • Web security
  • VPS
  • Web design

Click here to find out more about Dotster.

GoDaddy.com web hosting provider

GoDaddy.com are a web hosting provider and offer the following services:

  • Web domain registration
  • Web hosting
  • Email provider
  • Website builder

Click here if you want to find out more about GoDaddy.com

Web Design and Development in Aylesbury

Attica Services in Aylesbury for Web Design and development

Smart business owners know that a web presence is vital to the success of a company. You will establish customer trust, necessary to gaining customers, with a well designed, reliable website. In Aylesbury, let us provide your business with web design and development services. Get the website you need. Contact Attica Services today on 0845 680 875 for additional information.

Power of Web Design and Development Services in Aylesbury

Web presence is vital for today's businesses. Businesses that don't have a website are potentially losing millions of customers. Websites give customers the opportunity to obtain product and service information without any time restrictions. With a website, your business is always open. An experienced web design and development company in Aylesbury can build the perfect business site.

Marketing Using Web Design and Development in Aylesbury

Your offer great products and services. How do you express that to others? You let others know through advertising. However, you may have a very limited budget. A knowledgeable web design and development business in Aylesbury can show you cost-effective ways to market your business.

Web Design and Development Company in Aylesbury for website Solution

You are well aware of the impact not having a website has on your company's bottom line. Yet where do you begin? A web design and development company in Aylesbury has the solution. Put their design talents to action to create and build an impressive and effective online presence. Keep website visitors engaged with a well established web presence.

Web Design and Development Companies in Aylesbury Know SEO

A well designed and developed website is a good start; but with traffic it's useless. Search engines play a significant role in driving traffic to your website. Websites that rank high among the major search engines generate more traffic. A strategy to address search engines should be in place before any other website development. Attica Services in Aylesbury can advice on search engine optimisation (SEO) and help to get your website ranked.

Website Services in Aylesbury By Attica Services

Attica Services offer the following services:

Contact Attica Services in Aylesbury for Information on Web Design and Development.

Smart business owners know the significance a website has on the success of a company. With a well designed, reliable website, you will can establish trust and ultimately gain customers. We can help your business in Aylesbury with web design and development services. Get a web presence. For further information, contact Attica Services today on 0845 680 875.

Service Areas

Attica Services cover the following areas:

Amersham, Aylesbury, Beaconsfield, Bellingdon, Brill, Chalfont, Chesham, Chinnor, Great Missenden, High Wycombe, Lewknor, Little Chalfont, Princes Risborough, Thame, Wendover, Oxford, Bicester, Banbury, Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Beaconsfield, Berkhamstead.

Review: Atomic Mail Sender

Today I want to review a newsletter email marketing application - Atomic Mail Sender from http://www.massmailsoftware.com. Is it worth buying or even downloading a free trial?

What is it?

It is quite clear from the title that this in an email marketing application and the description on the website says "Atomic Mail Sender (AMS) is a program with built-in tracking facilities to design, send and monitor bulk personalized messages".

What is it for?

The email marketing application is ideal for newsletters, targeted email marketing and keeping in touch with customers.

Downloadable application, not a web service

This is an important thing and it has both advantages and disadvantages. Let me explain. Mass mail applications send mail through your personal SMTP server (hosted on your website), your ISP's SMTP server or a third-party SMTP. When a certain number of users mark emails from you as spam your server becomes blacklisted, which is not good and usually means you can no longer use the server. So I would highly recommend only using an application like this for campaigns where the users have actually stated that they wish to receive emails from you.

Ready to Google for a web-based email marketing service? Wait just yet... Before you can start using a web service you will have to ask for permission from the people in your mailing list to send emails to them. Basically you need to send a short note asking them to click the subscribe link if they want to receive newsletters from you. How many of them will click the link? Almost none!

So a stand-alone app is the way to go if you do not want to lose a part of your subscribers because of the double-optin procedure imposed by web services.

Focus on tracking

All too often one sees good mass email solutions that offer no or little tracking functionality. Atomic Mail Sender promises that the level of tracking available allows you "compare the effectiveness of your email campaigns by monitoring who, from what country and when opens your email, clicks links or loads images".

Download free trial

Basically the application costs $79.85 but you can get a limited functionality trial for free (download it here).

Tweak the settings

The email marketing application has a built-in SMTP server but if you use it most of your emails will be filtered as spam and nobody will even see them. So you need to use an external SMTP. I use Gmail so I entered Gmail's SMTP credentials and sent a test email without any problem. I used the settings shown below.

Gmail mass email settings

The good thing is that you can rotate SMTP servers so you can send more emails if you have several accounts.



Getting used to user interface


This software is novice-friendly with large icons that resemble the functions that they perform.

Start creating an email by selecting the new email icon at the top of the screen. Then you are able to add images, hyperlinks, lines and tables. This product has all the basic editing features to create an attractive and functional email.

Mass Email Sender

List management

You always should give users an easy way to unsubscribe from your mailings and this email sender has this function. When you are sending a letter using an HTML template the unsubscribe links is there on top of the page and if you prefer text format you can instruct recipients to reply to your email with "unsubscribe", "remove" or any other word in the subject line.

Email List Unsubscribe


Conclusion

The basic purpose of a mass emailer is mailing, and this is what is well developed in Atomic Mail Sender. It gets the messages out fast using a multi-threaded internal SMTP engine or multiple third-party SMTP servers.

Another strong part of the application is the message editor, which offers solid HTML editing support and useful newsletter templates.

The weak side of Atomic Mail Sender is that its list management functions are limited to unsubscribing users. But these functions can be found in Atomic List Manager which integrates with the mail sender. Further integration with Atomic Mail Tracker brings tracking options to Atomic Mail Sender. You can analyze how your messages are opened, and whether people click.

I think Atomic Mail Sender is a good buy, you get an efficient and easy-to-use application for a reasonable price, but if you need more functions you probably better check out their all-in-one application, Email Studio.

Visit Atomic Email Sender Website

Atomic email studio review

Is it Really a Perfect Mass Email Solution?

Website: http://www.massemailsoft.com

Price: varies, click here for current price

Support: email, phone, chat

Video Presentation: Running time: 06:05. Click here to watch.

What is Atomic Email Studio?

Atomic Email Studio is an all-in-one solution for Internet marketing. From one place you can control all your email campaigns, create and send newsletters, manage mailing lists, find new prospects. Also, you have a convenient access to the statistics provided by their on-line services (newsletter tracking, survey generator etc).

Atomic Email Studio is a 9-in-1 software package and here’s the main modules:

Mailer: create and send newsletters (editable HTML templates included);

Autoresponder: send replies to the incoming mail automatically;

List Manager: edit mailing lists on your PC (your lists are secure and not uploaded to any on-line service);

Subscription Manager: process users adding / removal requests automatically;

Extractor: find new target prospects for your business;

Verifier: validate e-mail addresses.







Installation

Atomic Email Studio is very easy to install. System requirements are very basic, works on any Windows computer.

Adding Emails into the Application

The software offers a lot of ways to add email addresses:
  1. From text files - *.txt, *.csv, *.lst, *.html and others
  2. From email clients (Outlook, Windows Mail, Eudora, IncrediMail and The Bat ), compressed PST files, archives (ZIP, RAR and ACE)
  3. From the Web (websites, newsgroups, WHOIS, cached Internet browser files)

As you will see Atomic Email Studio makes adding emails into the application very easy, all popular data storage formats are supported.

Working with the list of emails

List Manager is used to delete duplicates and spam traps, fix common typos, split and merge lists and other operations.

Email Verification

When your mailing list is not up-to-date or of poor quality you are likely to have issues with your ISP. Here’s a likely scenario: you send mass emails and get lots of bounces, your ISP notes lots of email coming to their server, thinks it is getting spammed and starts to investigate the reasons of this surge in email traffic. You can avoid this type of problem when you verify the email addresses in your list. The application lets you verify the syntax and check if the mailbox exists. This is a must-do process for any list you have not used for a while and Atomic Email Studio has this function out of the box.

Mass Emailing

First I want to say that Atomic Email Studio is fully CAN-SPAM compliant. When you use HTML you can add an unsubscribe link to your email and the user will be unsubscribed from your list. If you prefer plain text messages you should add instructions at the bottom saying to click the reply button and type UNSUBSCRIBE into the subject field. Atomic Email Studio checks your POP3/IMAP server and when this email is received it unsubscribes the user from the mailing list. That said, Atomic Email Studio puts you in control over your actions and does let you use proxies, custom headers, rotating SMTP servers, etc. The program has everything you may need to send mass emails, I especially like the way they implemented HTML support – it’s not just regular HTML templates, you can edit every bit of code to make your letter look exactly like you want it.

Tracking open and click-through rates

Atomic Email Studio is not just about sending emails, it lets you track how many emails are opened, what links are clicked, compare email campaigns and much more.

Ease of Use

The software is very intuitive, when you open it you see a dozen of buttons but only "New Project" and "Open Project" are active. After creating a new project you see a very user-friendly wizard that walks you through the whole process from importing addresses to sending emails and comparing results of your campaigns. But a good video is worth a thousand words, сlick here to view the video presentation. It’s a short (6 minutes) no-nonsense video, I highly recommend to watch it in order to get a good idea of how the application works.

Advantages

It is a desktop software, not a subscription-based online service, so users don't have to recurringly pay high prices for every single message they send out; their activities remain private and safe - they are not giving away their valuable data to any third party.

Summary:

Atomic Email Studio is a good investment. This feature-packed application will help you put together and mail an unlimited number of promotional emails, newsletters or regular text emails to an unlimited number of recipients.

Email Harvesting - Is it right or wrong?

Email marketing

Email harvesting is right if it is done in the right context. For example, if you have a product that you think another business would be intrested in, the only options you have to contact them normally is:

  • Telephone them
  • Post them a flyer
  • Do a cold visit at their premisis

All the above options are about cold calling a business about your product services, which most businesses except and expect. In this context, if that business has a website and an email address, there is no harm in emailing that business about your products and services. In this context, it is just the same as sending them a flyer in the post or cold calling them.

There are ways of sending an email to a harvested list of emails. You must make it clear:

  • How you find thier email address.
  • How to opt in to your newsletter, if they want to receive further information from you.
  • How to opt out and never receive anymore communication from you.
  • To give your own business contact details, so that they can contact you to stop receiving emails from your business

Email Harvesting is wrong and can be categorised as spamming if you purchase an email list very cheaply and you don't know how that list has been generated, or the email list provider can not provide the opt in details of the email addresses. If you go down this avenue, your online business could suffer and get a reputation of being a spammer. If this happens, you could lose the following:

  • Your ISP.
  • Your Domain host.
  • Your Domain.
  • Your name will be added to the spam list.
  • Your business will be blacklisted.
  • You will gain a very bad reputation as a spammer.

If this happens, any online business that you try to start up will always have an reputation of being a spammer

In conclusion, Email harvesting is right if it is done:

  • In context and only done to business to business
  • You have harvested the email addresses yourself and you know which websites they have come from.
  • You make that clear in your opening email about how you found their email address.

Email harvesting is wrong if you have purchased a list of emails blindly and you don't know the origins of how those emails were generated or found. As it has been made aware in this, blog the consequences of being classed as a spammer can bring your online business to an abrupt end.

Email marketing tips from Aweber

Please find below some email marketing tips from Aweber






Can You Have More Sales, Too?

Helping over 90,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber's opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.




Take a Free Test Drive today!



Email List Building

Email marketing
Email list building is the most difficult thing to do. There is no easy way in building your email list. There are several ways to build your email list, such as:

Using a blog to build your email list

Blogging is a very powerful way of getting your site noticed in google and other search engines. The main purpose of a blog is to be informative about a particluar subject or about your products and services, this way you will attract people who interested in your subject, products or services. Once people have visited your blog, they have to register to be able to leave comments on your blog, which enables you to build up a targeted email list.

The trick is to get your blog ranked in google or other search engines, so that potential customers will find your blog. The best way to do this is to write targeted posts or articles that relate to your business / subject area or your products / services. With blog posts, you can localise your posts by town, subject or anything else that is relevant to our blog.

Another great feature is that they offer RSS feeds, which you can link to twitter, facebook, digg, delicious, technorati or even furl. This way you can attract people from other social networks to sign up to your blog.

Like anything in business, to build your contacts and email lists, you can not just rely on one thing such as SEO. You have to work at marketing your blog, to get it noticed and to build up your email list.

In conclusion, google and other search engines love blogs, because of the freshness of the content. To stay ranked in google or other search engines, you have to keep blogging about relevant subjects that relate to your blog. In short it may take time to build up your email list by blogging, but the results will speak for themselves.

Designing a forum / social network website

Another way to build up your email list to put together your own forum or social network. In my opinion there is not much difference between the two, except a social network gives you a chat facility. The both have the same purpose and that is to let people to sign up, create their own profile page and add their RSS feeds into it from their own blog.

The diffrence between a forum and a blog, is that with a frorum you leave discussions where people can post their replies, whilst with a blog you write an article or post and people leave their comments.

The main purpose to have you own forum is data collection, because you will gather more information about a person by having a forum than by having a blog. You still need to drive traffic to your forum or socail network. If your members a pro active on your forum, you will always be on top of google for your forums subject area. Forums can be used in business for people to post reviews about products or opinions about customer service of your business. Also its a chance for you to communicate to your customers.

With forums, you can also generate your own RSS feed which you can post in twitter and other social networks. Some forum platforms are more powerful than others, which I will review in another post.

With your forum you still have to be proactive in pushing your own forum via inviting friends to join, using SEO techniques to get up the rankings in google and using your own blog to write about it.

In conclusion a forum is better at data gathering, but a blog is a powerful platform to advertise your business from. Once you have somebody email address, you can start emailing them about your products, invite them to join your forum and increase your after sales.

How to submit your website to Yahoo

This article explains how to submit your website to Yahoo and how to create a sitemap for your website. Most web hosting companies and blog platforms such as wordpress have the facility to create your website sitemap and submit it automatically.

Your sitemap needs to be regenerated every time you add a new web page to your website or add a new article to your blog. This way Yahoo will know which pages are new to your website and how often your website or blog needs to be crawled. Idealy, especialy with blogs, you need to be adding new content everyday. The more frequent Yahoo crawls your website, increases your chance in getting ranked higher in Yahoo search results based on your selected search terms and keywords.

If you wish to know how to manually submit your website or blog to Yahoo, just follow the following steps:

  1. Generate your sitemap and this can be done at XML sitemaps
  2. Download the sitemap file from XML sitemaps and upload it into the domain root folder of your site.
  3. Create a Yahoo Webmaster account and submit your website / blog.

Once you have created your Yahoo Webmaster account and submiited your sitemap, it will take approximately a few weeks for your website to appear in yahoo. Sometimes it can be quicker depending on how big your website is.

In conclusion, everytime you create a new web page or article, you need to create a new sitemap and submit to yahoo as soon as possible. This way you are staying ahead of your competitors and your yahoo listings will be current.

How to submit your website to Google

This article explains how to submit your website to Google and how to create a sitemap for your website. Most web hosting companies and blog platforms such as wordpress have the facility to create your website sitemap and submit it automatically to Google.

Your sitemap needs to be regenerated every time you add a new web page to your website or add a article to your blog. This way Google will know which pages are new to your website and how often your website or blog needs to be crawled. Idealy, especialy with blogs, you need to be adding new content everyday. The more frequent Google crawls your website increases your chance in getting ranked higher in Google search results for your selected search terms and keywords.

If you wish to know how to manually submit your website or blog sitemap to Google, just follow the following steps:

  1. Generate your sitemap and this can be done at XML sitemaps
  2. Download the sitemap file from XML sitemaps and upload it into the domain root folder of your site.
  3. Create a Google Webmaster account and add your sitemap URL.

Once you have created your Google Webmaster account and submiited your sitemap, it will take approximately 48 hours for your website to appear in google. Sometimes it can be quicker depending on how big your website is.

In conclusion, everytime you create a new web page or article, you need to create a new sitemap and submit to google as soon as possible. This way you are staying ahead of your competitors and your google listings will be current.

How to use social networking

This post explains how to use social networking to get traffic to your website, build your social network follower lists and increase sales.

What is Social Networking?

Social networking can be defined as linking your website / blog to relevant forums and social platforms, which will create away of getting your message or brand seen by the masses. Doing this, you will start creating a list of followers who are interested in your brand and the masses will find you. Eventually, who will have a database of followers who are linking to your blog feed / website, which will enable you to market your product instantly.

Social networking and link popularity

Social networking also helps in link popularity, which helps to get your website / blog up the rankings of google. By having link backs from your social networking profile page to your blog / website helps to boast your google rankings and this is defined as closed loop networking. Ideally, you want to get your followers linking to your website / blog, which will also increase your linking popularity. To do this, you must give them a reason to link to you and that is why blogs and social networking go hand in hand.

Blogs and Social Networking

A blog is a powerful tool to use for social networking, but you must give a reason for a social network follower to link to or visit your blog. That is why your blog must be informative, useful and gives relevant information. A blog is a powerful entity on its own as long as the search engine optimizartion(SEO) is managed well for each post. When you start linking your blog to other social networks gives you a massive marketing platform. For example, by submitting your posts to twitter or to Digg, gets your brand in front of the social masses.

To find out more about social networking and how to get your message or brand seen by the masses, I recommend the following book:

33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking

Twitter | Linkedin | Digg | Delicious

Email marketing database management

Increasingly business leaders are recognising good E-mail Marketing as a useful contributor to company success as technology boosts the effectiveness of conventional Marketing techniques and approaches.

E-mail Marketing has the capability of cost effectively bringing your business offering, be it product or service, to a vast national or global audience in a structured and targeted manner.

Effective E-mail Marketing could be capable of a demonstrable bottom-line profit impact through a winning combination of significantly improved sales volumes at a reduced cost of sales.

Emailing to your database

Once you have built up your email database, you will need some form of email marketing database management application. This section looks at the different email database management applications that are available on the market.

Campaigner

Campaigner email marketing enables businesses to easily create and send highly personalized one-to-one email communications to subscribers and customers to build better relationships that result in increased sales and business growth. Campaigner is reliable and online so it can be accessed from anywhere. Campaigner provides exceptional value, a great low monthly price, and 24/7 coaching and customer support.

Campaigner Benefits are as follows:


Email Marketing for Small Business

  • Easy-to-build personal, professional emails - 450+ templates!
  • Easy to monitor tracking reports.
  • Tips to start and quickly build an email mailing list.
  • 24/7 coaching and support.

Campaigner is perfect for small business owners new to email marketing. Try our no risk FREE 30 day trial.

StreamSend

StreamSend is the most comprehensive and cost-effective permission based e-mail marketing suite available, and it is our honor to provide this powerful email marketing suite to marketers, entrepreneurs and online retailers around the world.

Why email marketing? Generate new sales leads Increase website traffic Retain customers Build your company brand Educate an audience Other communication needs.

Why StreamSend.com? Manage lists and subscribers Create and send emails Track Report & Analyze Cost effective!!!

When selecting an email marketing provider, price is always a factor in the decision-making process. StreamSend offers greater value and a greater variety of pricing packages than many other services. Each package can support an unlimited number of email addresses, so users can choose the appropriate plan based upon the total number of email messages they plan to send.

This has some fantastic features such as:

  • Customizable sign-up forms - easily set up, launch and manage multiple lead capture forms
  • Simple list importing and exporting - import lists or export to Excel with just a click
  • Subscribe/unsubscribe management - automatically ensure your list is accurate
  • Opt-in confirmation option - make sure subscribers really want to hear from you
  • List segmentation - send relevant emails based on specific subscriber information

StreamSend is a web-based application that allows you to simply log-in to your account and create and send email campaigns.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is the software that small businesses and entrepreneurs use to grow their business and automate their workflow. Infusionsoft is web-based software that combines CRM, email marketing, and ecommerce into one system. But the real magic is in our automatic follow-up engine, because it finally makes it easy for entrepreneurs to achieve amazing follow-up. When this happens, more prospects become customers...and sales explode. That's why we're the only software company that guarantees to double your sales.

Finally...Infusionsoft gives entrepreneurs the all-in-one system they need to grow their business fast.

Infusionsoft has some outstanding features, such as:

  • Permission-Based Email Marketing
  • Fully Integrated CRM
  • Smart Automation That Works For You
  • More Than Just Email

Aweber Email Marketing tool

Below is a video about Aweber Email Marketing tool, it is worth a watch..






Can You Have More Sales, Too?

Helping over 90,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber's opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.




Take a Free Test Drive today!



Constant Contact

Constant Contact helps you to connect with your customers and build your business. Try our no risk FREE 60-Day Trial.

Constant Contact offers the following services, which helps you to manage your email marketing database:

  • Email marketing
  • Event marketing
  • Online surveys
  • Social media

VerticalResponse

Whether you're an email marketing pro or just starting out, VerticalResponse lets you create, send and track professional-looking emails quickly and affordably.

VerticalResponse has the following features:

  • Grow your email list
  • Share your email on Facebook & Twitter
  • Get your email delivered to your customer's inbox
  • Send online surveys
  • Pay your way – flexible pricing options
  • Simple to use, but advanced for power users too

Grow Your Business Big and Strong with Email Marketing!