A few weeks ago I was talking to a client about his website and had agreed to take a brief look at it to give my overall opinion.  I happened to be on my Mac and using the Safari browser at the time, and when I clicked on to the site it was a complete mess!

Tables were skewed, pictures half covered up, the drop down navigation didn’t work, etc.

I actually thought this guy was playing a trick on me — no one would EVER take this site seriously. Read the rest of this entry

One of the most difficult challenges you’ll face as an online entrepreneur is pricing your products.  It’s difficult to strike a balance between pricing it high enough to make a good profit and low enough to make sales.

Lowering Your Price To Compete

This is a strategy that a lot of product owners mistakenly try in order to increase sales and gain more customers.  It sounds right — lower your price so that your product is less expensive than your competition.

Unfortunately, this strategy almost never works and will actually result in fewer sales, not more.
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Just a quick note today about something really surprising that I discovered this morning when I was looking over my tracking logs.

My purpose was to determine if I’m send out my email messages at the best times for each of my niches. To figure this out, I decided to start by taking a look at my website logs to see what time of day the most people actually visited my website from day to day.

As I started pouring over the statistics for each of my niches, I noticed an interesting and surprising trend…

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As you probably already know, personalizing the email subject line with a name increases the response tremendously. It’s something I’ve been doing for years with all my autoresponder messages.

Well, that got me to wondering if it makes a difference exactly where that personalization is placed in the email subject line… so I decided to do some testing.

I tested several of my lists and kept the subject line exactly the same except for the placement of the [firstname]. In other words, I split tested like this: Read the rest of this entry

When Aweber first posed the question, “Can you get more readers by displaying your subscriber count,” on their blog, it got me to thinking about some of my niche businesses. I use email marketing extensively in my business, so anything that will increase my subscribers is a good thing.

The general idea here is that you may be able to turn more of your website visitors into subscribers if you can prove to them that many other website visitors have made the same choice. Marc Kline puts it like this:

Just because someone else does something, doesn’t mean you should, does it? Maybe not, but from infancy all the way through adulthood, we take cues from others on what is worth our attention.

To test the theory, Aweber makes it possible to display a chicklet that shows your website visitors how many others are benefiting from your email newsletter… in other words, the chicklet shows your current subscriber count under your subscription form.

It’s a nice little setup because all you have to do is insert the code and Aweber keeps track and maintains your subscriber count for you. No fuss, no hassle.

So I decided to test out the whole social proof theory with a couple of my niche websites that offer newsletters.

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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!

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