Having an effective marketing campaign that highlights the benefits of your product and not the features is the key to having a successful promotion. Repeating this marketing strategy on a consistent basis will only help your business reap the rewards over and over. If you aren’t sure what the difference is between the two, then keep reading…

Features Describe Qualities

Here are a few quick examples:

• The Widget 5000 is made from 100% recycled products
• Our ladder is made from lightweight titanium alloy
• Our glue is protected by a world wide patent

What’s In It For ME?

The easiest way to define benefits is to remember “WIIFM” or “what’s in it for me”. When looking at it from the point of a view of a potential buyer, benefits are what those features mean to your prospects, for example:

1) You’ll save time and money and cut down on environmental pollutants when you use our energy saving Widget 5000. Plus, you’ll have the peace of mind to sleep at night knowing you’ve done your part to cut down on pollution.

2) Lightweight durable titanium-alloy frame means no more aching back muscles in the morning, and the best part? You’ll be able to maneuver it with ease. Even better, it comes with a lifetime guarantee, so you’ll never need to buy another ladder again!

3) Our world wide patent-protected glue ensures you can use it on any surface material. Be it wood, plastic, metal, ceramic, glass, even tile. No messy cleanup, and no hazardous fumes to inhale. Plus it comes with our “never re-glue it again-guaranteed!”

Take a look at the words in blue. Those highlight the benefits of each sample product.

In the first product example, the consumer will “save time and money” and have “peace of mind”. Notice how these benefits fit right into a persons interest and desires?

Ask yourself, who doesn’t want to save time and money or have peace of mind?

Continuing with the first example, if a person is socially conscious, peace of mind will fit right into their desires. Remember that benefits are what those features mean to your prospects.

These are just a few made up examples, but I think you can see the big picture here.

Conclusion

The goal of your promotions is to address the benefits of the product, and not its features. People are searching for solutions to their problems. For example, save more time, make more money, and gain more confidence.

If you remember to focus on your readers interests and desires, you are sure to put forward an effective marketing campaign. The trick is to highlight the specific benefits that will push your reader’s emotional hot buttons.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Building the biggest opt-in list around isn’t always the best thing for your business. There are a number of factors to consider such as quality of the list versus the quantity. Of course, if you combine the two, the results will be very positive to your business. If you consider a list of 500 that brings in 30 sales, while a list of 3000 brings the same.

Which is more valuable?

The quality of your list is much more important than quantity. Sometimes as an Internet marketers, we can lose sight of the object of building an opt-in list.

Here are three list building strategies to help you build your business.

Rule #1: Ask. To find out what your list members want, ask. Ask them what kind of information will better serve their online business needs. This fits right into our nature as humans,…asking our opinion makes us feel validated. When it comes to your online business, nothing is more valuable than your list members opinion.

Rule #2: Don’t go over-board! Although staying in touch with your opt-in list is important, you don’t want to irritate them either with too many announcements and promotions. For example, don’t send out three emails in a day, as this made distract, interrupt or even bother some of your members.

One email per day should be enough, unless special circumstances arise requiring more. Have a good balance between quality information and promotions.

Rule #3: Know who your members are. Are your list members single mothers, or senior citizens? Are they newbie Internet marketer or are they golf enthusiast? By knowing who your members are, you can better provide them with right information and products. More than likely you want to build a list of like-minded individuals. Also, don’t hesitate to ask your list to recommend you to their friends and co-workers, or to others who share their passion for your niche.

Conclusion

As you can see, asking your list what they want is essential to your business. You can accomplish this by using such services as SurveyMonkey, or a script by Mark Hendricks. When contacting your list, the frequency of your emails will depend on the relationship you’ve built with them or are establishing. If you are unsure, have them take a survey. Using these list building strategies will better serve their online business needs, which in turn will build your business.

Building an opt-in list is essential to any online business, but keeping them engaged week after week while building your relationship with them is also important to your bottom line. Never take your subscriber for granted and make certain that you respect what you are establishing with them.

Here’s are some proven tips to help you make the most of your list:

1. Provide high-quality content.

Make certain that your articles are highly informative and user friendly. This will keep them engaged and will want to be contacted by you.

2. Keep your emails simple and user friendly.

Write in a conversational manner, and stick to small paragraphs, and make certain your contact email is accessible. Remember that we live in a society that is constantly giving us information around the clock. Don’t use big paragraphs and use bullet points when necessary. Keep each point in a different paragraph and then spare a line between each paragraph.

3. Keep your customers updated and informed.

After all, they’ve subscribe to your list for a reason. Right? Updated them about new products, or blog posts. A weekly newsletter would help even more.

4. Don’t babble, just get to the point and quick.

Of course, this will highly depend on the relationship you have with your subscribers. Keep it real and don’t make false promises. Always be honest and truthful.

5. Experiment, with different means of communication

Use audio, video and anything that can help you to reach out to your customers. This will help them get to know you better, as it provides personalization.

6. Don’t promote everything under the sun.

To put it bluntly, don’t be an affiliate harlot, just because there’s money to be made with the latest launch of “John Q. Guru”…

Please note, there’s nothing wrong with promoting high quality affiliate products, just keep a nice balance between providing high-quality content and affiliate promotions.

7. Update your autoresponder list regularly.

Keep your list clean by removing any and all fake names and email addresses.

8. Use a spell checker.

You don’t want to turn off one of your subscriber just because you were to lazy to check your spelling. Taking this extra step will keep your emails free of spelling errors, and will help you avoid getting flagged as spam email.

9. Test your emails more than once.

Subscribe to your own email list as this will provide you with the opportunity to see what your subscribers see. Check your headline and see if it fits the AIDA model of attention, interest, desire and action.

Conclusion

Never forget why your building your opt-in list, and understand what your motivations are.

Is your primary goal to make money?

If so, it will show in the content you provide as well as the emails you send out. However, if your goal is provide excellent content to your subscribers along with great customer service, then you’ll reap the rewards of your hard work.

Remember, there is nothing wrong with selling, after all, you are running a business and not a charity. You’re building this opt-in list for a reason. The key is to establish, build and nurture your subscribers and find the right balance that is right for you - between promotions and content.

One of the most important aspects to your Internet marketing business should be - getting targeted traffic and list building. Little or no traffic to your website will result in a low opt-in list. There a various methods to generating traffic to your sites, like PPC, article marketing, Ad exchanges as well as joint ventures. Although these are excellent methods to building your opt-in list, many overlook the effectiveness of blogging.

Blogging is the Key

Generating traffic and building an opt-in list all rely on advertising in one form or another. Some may not call it advertising, and regardless of what label you give it, people HATE advertising. Nevertheless, it is the life source of Internet marketing and without it, your business won’t survive. The key is to disguise it so it doesn’t look like advertising, and that’s where blogging comes in.

For some reason, Internet surfers are attracted to blogs! The need for every human to feel validated, provides the Internet surfer with a way to give their opinion or their two cents worth on any topic they choose to discuss. People are naturally curious, and they love to post to blogs but they also like to read posts made by others as well. This is where you use blogging for the sole purpose of driving traffic and building your opt-in list.

Join Other Bloggers

Go join blogging communities like My Blog Log and Blog Catalog, and get to know other regular bloggers by visiting their sites. Take you time and post relevant and helpful information that pertains to the topic. Don’t forget to include your website URL, as well as your signature tag at the bottom of every post. If you make educated comments, other bloggers will click on your sig tag and visit your website where they then become part of the “traffic”. If you repeat this process enough times, this will provide your visitors with an opportunity to join your newsletter or RSS feed - thus building your opt-in list.

Conclusion

Starting a blog is not as difficult and technical as it once was. Today’s cPanel provide a simple push-button system to creating your blog through Fantastico. If you haven’t started your blog, your missing out on a grand opportunity to building your opt-in list through blogging.

Building a profitable opt-in list is essential to the success of your Internet business. Opt-in lists will fall under two categories; a responsive opt-in list that brings in profits and a unresponsive opt-in list, which brings in little or no profits. Anybody who has been in Internet marketing game for any significant amount of time knows that. What many don’t know is that JUST an opt-in list can be nothing but a lot of work. What you really need is a profitable opt-in list. One that will produce sales and even better, repeated sales.

Basic Principles

Building a profitable opt-in list is based on several basic principles of selling in any medium. Long before the Internet was even a twinkle in Bill Gate’s eye, people were selling things to other people. This selling often took place, as it does today, in brick and mortar stores. There were (and maybe still are) door-to-door salesmen as well that sold everything from pots and pans and hair brushes to encyclopedias and burial insurance. These door-to-door salesmen went from city to city and house to house selling their wares.

Internet Marketing Like Door-to-Door Salesmen?

Internet marketing is very much like the door-to-door salesmen of old. We build our good and faithful customer base one customer at a time by collecting names and email addresses of those who are our best prospects. The door-to-door salesmen of old knew that they could waste a lot of time (not to mention shoe leather) trying to sell to those that would never be interested in their products so they concentrated on those that were their most likely customers. Encyclopedia salesmen concentrated on households that had school age children. Door-to-door salesmen who sold pots and pans concentrated on housewives.

Conclusion

Internet marketers need to take note of that bit of wisdom and make sure that they aren’t just collecting a long list of email addresses that will never produce any sales. Opt-in lists are built from your traffic – PROFITABLE opt-in lists are built from your TARGETED traffic. Never waste time trying to build your traffic – and your list – by any and all means. Stick to the proven methods of driving targeted traffic, like article marketing, blogging, etc. After all, it’s the only way to get the maximum return for all the hard work you’re putting into your online business – and the profits you so richly deserve!

Just like the cold virus spreads from person to person, so does a marketing campaign when done correctly. Viral marketing uses techniques that exploit existing social networks to increase awareness of a business or product. Viral marketing is a technique that has been used in the offline advertising word for a long time and has recently made its way to the Internet.

How Viral Marketing Works

Viral marketing is accomplished when a website or program facilitates and encourages people to spread marketing information along voluntarily. Viral marketing tactics include:

• ebooks
• branded software
• flash games
• the use of video clips
• images and even text messages

Viral marketing is very different from network marketing and multi-level marketing schemes. Viral marketing is essentially a separate activity all by itself and has little in common with either of these things. It does not involve participants signing-up or paying for anything during the marketing process.

Early Examples

A classic example of early viral marketing techniques was when companies placed links at the bottom of users free e-mail accounts so the recipients of the e-mail could follow the link to sign-up for a free account. Many people use this technique within their own e-mails now to advertise links to their business website. Additionally, many of the web based free e-mails services allow companies to place their link at the bottom of their users e-mails.

Word of mouth and other tactics have been used to spread information since the beginning of time. Using new technologies like the internet has made this method of exchanging information much faster. Increasingly people are spending more time online and they are creating online identities and communities. Viral marketing takes advantage of the power of having these communities easily accessible by connecting with people in the online communities, so they can connect to other people.

Spreading The Word

If a company creates a marketing material through a blog, video or article they can begin the viral marketing campaign by starting the spread of that marketing material using an RSS feed. They would place the item on a website other than their own using the RSS feed and other people will see it and spread it elsewhere. Thus, the marketing material takes on the characteristics of a virus.

When people see the blog, video or article they may become interested in its origins and use the information they obtained from it to seek out information about the company that created it. That is why it is important to discreetly brand you viral marketing promotions with your companies information. You don’t want to be overt about branding your content, but it is important to slip it in there.

Conclusion

There are many reasons people choose to participate in viral marketing. A successful viral marketing campaign will spread like wildfire all over the internet and generate a great deal of interest in what your business has to offer. It is the Internet equivalent of creating product buzz on the streets. Viral marketing is also relatively inexpensive as well because you are not paying for the message to be spread. The idea is that your potential customers are spreading the message for you.

Traffic generation using Web 2.0 linking strategies and Web 1.0, still share a one thing in common, which is a visitor to your site. Regardless, of whether they came from one of your articles (a 1.0 linking strategy), or a post from your Hub pages (a 2.0 linking strategy), the end result was the same. Implementing Web 2.0 linking strategies, does require work on your part, but as you will see, some automation is available.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Bookmarking sites are a way for other to share things of interest with others. Due to their high traffic, you can easily get a flood of visitors to your site within minutes. However, care must be taken as to how you submit your blog post and websites, as you can easily be banned and blacklisted.

Here are some of the more popular ones:

StumbleUpon: Allows user to share their websites, videos and pictures. They have a toolbar available, which you can download to your web browser, which simplifies the process for URL submissions.

Digg: Is a community driven and news aggregator. People submit their stories and people vote or “digg” the story. The more diggs a story gets, the higher it ranks. Diggs are basically just votes.

Mixx: A news, video and photo sharing site.

Reddit: A source to what is news and popular online. You can also submit your URL’s here.

Onlywire: Bookmarking site that allows you to submit your URL posts with one click; however, you do have to register with each website that’s on the Onlywire list.

Recommended Method Of Submission

Before submitting your blog post or URL, submit 4-5 other blog post from other website before you do yours. Do try to pick high quality posts or stories, and not just junk links. If you only submit your links, you will get banned and blacklisted. Understand that this is a recommendation, so post responsibly.

Social Networking Sites

Ever since their inception, social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and Ning continue to grow. The concept behind these sites, was to facilitate the process of socializing online. All social networking sites offer a “personal page” where you can upload your photo and “about me” section. When done correctly, social networking sites can prove useful to your niche marketing efforts. If you plan on using any of these sites for your promotions, be sure to read and follow the rules in place. On Facebook for example, your are only allowed to have one profile, but you are allowed to add the URL’s to your sites within your profile. Facebook also has a strict policy regarding advertising. MySpace on the other hand allows you to create multiple profiles, but also have a strict rules regarding promotions.

Other Sources

• BlinkList
• Furl
• Bebo
• Yahoo Groups

Video Sites

If you have the technical-know-how, and are creative, you can create and submit your work to the video sites. The great thing about video submissions, is you don’t have to worry about hosting the content yourself. Even if you don’t have the technical know-how, you can always hire someone to do it for you. Some of the popular video sites are:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• MetaCafe
• Revver
• Grouper
• Guba
• Vidmax

If you create a video that goes viral, this method can easily bring you thousands of visitors. To automate the process, you can use submission software like VideoTrafficAssistant or UploadVideoPro.

Information Sites

If you have a yahoo account, you’ve more than likely have come across their own research site called Yahoo Answers. Sites like these allow anyone to post a question on any topic. Here are some the topics covered:

• Business & Finance
• Cars & Transportation
• Computers & Internet
• Consumer Electronics

The nice thing about Yahoo Answers, is they allow anyone to post a response to the questions made by others. In a nut shell, individuals are scored on the quality of their response and activity. If you build up your credibility by actively participating, over the course of time, you’d be able to bring some incoming traffic to your sites. Understand that this method is more of a long term strategy.

Free Blog Sites

Free blog sites are a cost effective method to traffic generation, since they cost you nothing to implement. The idea here is to post content, with “long-tail” keywords, which you then link to your website or main blog. An example of long “tail-tail” keyword, would be “dog-training-tips-for-bloodhounds”.

Examples of free blog sites:

HubPages

HubPages allows you to place two self serving links within your post or hub, but your post must also point to authoritative sites, such a wiki page for example, or a major news page. They also have strict rules about having different hubs pointing to the same website. On a side note, HubPages doesn’t allow any spam, adult, or gambling posts.

Squidoo

Squidoo is another free blog type site, which allows you to make posts or lens. The more unique your content the better, especially if you’re an expert on a particular subject. Google also loves Squidoo and frequently crawls the site and also has a high page rank.

Blogger and Wordpress allow you to post articles at no cost to you; however, there are drawbacks to not hosting the content yourself.

Some of the Pros:

• Easy to set up and maintain - no installation necessary

• Free to use and newbie friendly for the most part

• Easy to monetize for adsense

The Cons

• Lack of customization

• URL not very friendly - for example your URL is
  alwasy www.yourdomain.blogiste.com

• Not as professional as a self-hosted site

If you have to decide between the two, always go with a self hosted wordpress blog.

Final Notes

There you have it, implementing Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 linking strategies can easily bring you a steady flood of traffic over time, which can pay dividends to your email list and bank account. Not to mention that these are cost effective, which means, more money in your wallet. If you put into action these techniques, you can easily create a funnel of traffic to your site.

To better make use of your time, you can always hire someone to assist you with the process, if your business budget allows it. Most important of all…is to take action.

Recommended Resources

Here are some recommended resources to help you implement the web 2.0 linking strategies:

Web 2.0 Wealth System

This, in my opinion is ONE the most complete, and affordable blogging course on the net today, and is a great blogging course for beginners. Alex Sysoef is the creator of this system and provides a complete step-by-step video tutorial to get your blog started right away. The Web 2.0 Wealth System provides you with a pre-packaged word press blog (version 2.5) along with the necessary plug-ins to make your blog seo friendly. Go check ahead and check out the Web 2.0 Wealth System by going here.

Space Bankers

SpaceBankers, is a complete PDF guide that shows you how to profit from social media sites as MySpace and FaceBook. The creator of the course, Ryan Moran also provides video tutorials, which you can gain access to for free. Some of the topics covered on the free video tutorials include:

• MySpace Video Tutorial

• FaceBook Video Tutorial

• HubPages Video Tutorial

To make the most of your web 2.0 linking strategies with MySpace and Facebook, go check out SpaceBankers.