Newsletters and ezines are a fantastic way to follow up with your target audience and keep your business on the tip of their tongue… so to speak.

Marketing a business with email newsletters can benefit your business because the people who sign up for your newsletter want to hear your message, they are already familiar with your products and services, and you can build a lot of rapport with your target audience through a newsletter. In addition, a well-written newsletter provides you with a tremendous amount of credibility. It puts them in a warm, ready to buy, frame of mind.

Most important of all, however, is that newsletters and ezines can create the additional benefit of generating revenue for your business, provided that you don’t practice any of these humongous newsletter mistakes!

Read the rest of this entry

When people start analyzing their website traffic, one of the statistics that’s always included is unique visitors. In other words, your traffic statistics always includes the number of people who visit your website for the very first time.

For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.

Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.

I’m betting that you feel the same way.

Read the rest of this entry

Ch…ch…ch…changes! As you have probably noticed, iMarketingWatch.com has a completely new look!

Although several people warned me not to change our look and feel when the blog is soooo new, I just had to do it. I never liked the stuffy corporate/business feel of the old layout… it just wasn’t me.

I wanted something that more accurately captured my personality, showed a little energy, and looked sharp at the same time. Hopefully I’ve managed to accomplish all of that!

Advice I Received…

It really surprised me the other day when I received several comments on Twitter that blog skins and themes really don’t matter. Here’s one comment:

“I spend a lot of time on themes, yet I’m not sure it always matters. Content first baby!”

Although I agree that content is definitely first in a blog, I still think the overall look and feel is important too. In my experience on other blogs and websites, the look and feel of the website contributes significantly to the ROI and conversion rate. In addition, it helps to brand you in your niche, gives your website a distinct personality, and encourages repeat visitors… and who doesn’t want that.

Believe it or not, I had someone else on Twitter suggest that I should just find a blog I liked and copy it!

Obviously, I didn’t follow that one… this blog is completely custom.

More Planned For The Future…

I’ve got lots of plans for the future of this blog… but I’m trying to take it one step at a time, think before I leap into new things here, and take my time to develop it. I’d really like to make this much more of a visitor driven blog. In other words, I’d like to add features you want, add content you’re looking for, and provide the information you really want.

So let me know what you think about the changes I’ve made so far and feel free to tell me what you’d like to see in the future.

I look forward to hearing from you!

I know it’s a bit late, but after two days of no internet access due to storms and power outages I’ve finally been able to post the September edition of Answers eMagazine.

In this month’s issue we’ve discussed sales letters and I’ve given you some tips on how you can increase your conversion rate, we’ve continued our discussion of giveaway events by talking about how to build profit into them, and we’ve explored how you can choose the right subscriber incentive for your market.

In addition, we’ve got an article about the branding power of article marketing and I’ve put together a step-by-step tutorial on how to upsell while using Clickbank.

Subscribers can get their copy anytime in the subscriber area, as well as download all back issues of Answers eMagazine.

If you’re not a subscriber, but you’d like to become one, you can sign up to get your own copy of Answers at:

http://imarketingwatch.com/answers/

You’ve spent the time, energy and money to create a great website.

You may even be offering a gift to help you build a list.

But there’s one problem … NO ONE is visiting your website.

It’s tough to build a list and get clients when no one is visiting, isn’t it?!

Website optimization can be expensive

Paying someone to optimize your website can be very expensive. And doing it on your own can be a hit-or-miss endeavor.

Free online marketing techniques

Marketing techniques such as writing and posting articles, press releases, or posting comments on blogs and forums are all great ways to drive traffic, but they can be time consuming and can take awhile before they really start driving significant traffic to your website.

Pay-per-click advertising

Google Adwords on the other hand are a great way to instantly drive traffic to your website. In fact, you can write an ad and have it on page one of the search results for your primary keywords in less than 15 minutes.

Just in case you’re not familiar with Google Adwords, they are the paid ads or sponsored listings that show up at the top and right-hand-side of every Google search results page. These ads are called “pay-per-click” ads because while your ad may show many times on the page, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.

Read the rest of this entry