Using Autoresponder as a Prospecting Software

November 24th, 2006

If you have a great product to sell or a valuable service to render, I am sure you must be looking for a ways to get the continuous stream of customers to visit your website and show interest in your service / buy products from your website.  They say, that for a business to grow, you should never stop marketing. But unless you have a good search engine position, or great free traffic source, you would always have to spend  some money for getting traffic to your website.  And more you spend, more traffic you will get.

Wouldn’t it be great that out of this traffic, you can get a few people who raise their hands and show interest in what you have to offer? This is where the prospecting comes into the scene. You capture the name and email addresses of your visitors and in return offer them a free incentive. It could be any thing, like a Free Report, or a free online study course, a free ebook or some free membership. People love free stuff, so you would get a good percentage of people who would show their interest getting the free incentive you have to offer.

Now you have a list of prospects. Your customers are within these prospects, its now up to you how effectively you use this list. How effective are your follow-up messages. And how effective is the tool you use to send emails to your prospects.

The tool that is usually used for creating a list of prospects is called Autoresponder. Through an autoresponder, you can not only capture names and emails, you can also setup a batch of sequence messages that will automatically go out to the prospects starting from the day they subscribe, with the difference of interval you specify between the messages. These messages are an incredible way of preparing the mind of your prospects to buy your products.

Although autoresponders are an incredible way of growing your prospects lists, you must select the right tool. There are dozens of autoresponder software in the market. While selecting which tool works best for you, keep the following points in mind:

  1. What is the Email Delivery rate of your autoresponder service? No matter how cool the autoresponder software may be, it is of no use if it can not deliver the emails in the inbox of maximum of your prospects. Your prospects must see the message, or autoresponder is useless.

  1. Autoresponder must be CAN-SPAM compliant. This will keep your list legally safe and you would have more confidence about the purity of your list.

  1. Your Autoresponder must be easy to use and highly customizable. It should allow you to customize your sequence messages, send broadcast messages and personalize the verification messages.

  1. Your autoresponder must be quick (in terms of sending out your mails), reliable and efficient.

  1. You should be able to plug-in your autoresponder to your shopping cart system so that you can take advantage of different kind of sequence messages that should go out to your buyers.

At GoldbarOne, we have created one of the email industry’s best autoresponder software. Its quick, reliable and fully compliant with CAN-SPAM law. Due to our strong relationship with major ISPs and Email Services, we maintain email delivery rate higher than the industry standard. Thanks to our strong email technology implementation and advanced email delivery algorithms, this software is capable of sending out hundreds of thousands of mails in matter of few minutes, thus ensuring your message reaches your customers inbox as soon as you schedule them instead of waiting in queue for hours. The autoresponder can be plugged in to GoldbarOne shopping cart, making it a perfect selling engine.

To take a Free Trial of GoldbarOne simply Click Here

Posted in Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Google Revenues Keep Climbing. Google Announces 3rd quarter results for 2006

October 20th, 2006

 

Good news for Google IPO holders.

Google today announced 3rd Quarter results for 2006, that show company’s revenues keep increasing. Here is a part of Google press release announcement:

“Google reported revenues of $2.69 billion for the quarter ended
September 30, 2006, an increase of 70% compared to the third quarter of
2005 and an increase of 10% compared to the second quarter of 2006.
Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis
without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC.  In the third
quarter of 2006, TAC totaled $825 million, or 31% of advertising
revenues.”

The climbing revenue is a result of new joint ventures company has done over the last quarter. Google revenues are expected to further climb specially after Google acquired YouTube. Google Video Ads are going to be huge profit center for company for the coming quarters.

A huge part of these revenues (approximately $780 million) will go to TAC (Traffic Acquisition Cost) that Google pays to its Adsense Partners. This shows how big Adsense publishing has become over the last couple of years.

After describing all expenses company incurred during 3rd quarter, here is what announcement says about Net Income:

“Net Income - GAAP net income for the third quarter of 2006 was $733
million as compared to $721 million in the second quarter.  Non-GAAP
net income was $812 million in the third quarter, compared to $772
million in the second quarter.  GAAP EPS for the third quarter was
$2.36 on 311 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $2.33 for
the second quarter, on 310 million diluted shares outstanding.
Non-GAAP EPS for the third quarter was $2.62, compared to $2.49 in the
second quarter.”

So we expect Google to produce more profits in future and introduce new technologies / Trends in Search Marketing.

 

Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »

How Would Google Index Your Website First Time?

October 18th, 2006

If you have just started a new website, that has 0 page rank right now, you would be concerned about getting indexed by Google and all other search engines. By indexing, we mean how soon your site will be visited by web spider of a search engine. This is important that you get visited by spider, in order to save your pages inside Google’s database.

 

Some people would tell you to submit your site to search engines. Believe me or not, this is not the best way to get indexed. Although it can work, it can take weeks, or may be months to get your pages indexed by Google crawler.

 

The best way to get your website indexed quickly is to put your website link on a more popular website that is visited by crawler more often. Next time Google web crawler will visit that site, it will find your link. Google will immediately recognize it as a new link and schedule its crawler to visit this site in near future. In the next scheduled crawling, hopefully, Google crawler will visit your site and capture all the text on your pages to save in its database.

 

Another quick way to get yourself indexed could be to submit your site to suitable categories of web directories. This way, you can also get help in Page Rank if the page rank of that page of directory is good where you are placing your link.

 

You don’t need to take any additional measure to index your website for other search engines. The techniques that work for Google also work for all other search engines, with minor exceptions.

 

 

Posted in Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website. Traffic Techniques That Work Today.

October 13th, 2006

If you are in the online business world, this must be the most important question in your mind all the times. How do I bring traffic to my website?

Whether you are operating a small website for lead generation or running a large internet portal, traffic is the life blood of your online business. No online business can survive for too long without a non stop stream of ongoing fresh traffic. Because, more visitors mean more prospects for your business, and more prospects mean more sales. It is therefore important for you to determine the channels you want to use to bring in traffic for your website.

In the following post, I will be discussing the most popular Traffic Techniques that work Today.

 Make a Traffic Generation Plan

  Just like any important thing in your life, you need to do planning about website traffic. Before doing planning, ask yourself these questions:

 

i)                    How much time can I dedicate for my website traffic?
ii)                  How much budget do I have for my website traffic?
 
No matter what the nature of your online business may be, there are same channels used for traffic generation. The most popular channels of the traffic generation can be divided in to 2 categories. 

 

i)                  Free Traffic Sources
ii)                  Paid Traffic Source
 
We will briefly describe each of these sources here.

In coming weeks and months, I will be explaining each and every source in a great detail. We will understand inside out techniques of all these channels.  
 
Free traffic sources that work today
 
Everyone loves free traffic. There are more websites today that still get all their traffic free.  How do they do that? Well, you would find out shortly. Free traffic techniques require time and patience. The longer you are doing business online, the more reputation you must have built, and more free traffic you will be getting. So have patience. Some of these sources can take time, they require a consistently and regular work out,  but they ultimately work if you use the ethical and legal means to work them out. Following are the free traffic generation techniques that work today.  

Search Engines
 
By far, Search Engines dominate all the free traffic sources. If you have a Search Engine Optimized website, your site can appear on the organic search results, when users type in the certain keywords. This is the biggest source of traffic on the internet. Search Engines contribute to more than 80% of total traffic on the internet. There are 91 million searches performed on Google alone every single day. This gives you some idea of how many people are there searching on search engines every day. And there may be many who can be your prospects or customers, if you appear on top results of organic search results. In coming days, our major focus will be on discussing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in a great detail
 
 

Internet Directories
Internet Directories remain another important source of free traffic to your site. There are 2 important reasons to use them.

 

a)      Get More Traffic
b)      Get more links to help your SEO effortsThere are hundreds of Internet directories, but one directory you can not miss is DMOZ. It is first human edited directory that provides information to Google and many other search engines. Find a suitable directory for yourself and submit your site there.

 

Blogs
 
In last few years, Blogs have become another important way to bring in traffic to your site. Blog is nothing but an online journal that you regularly update. Like I am updating this blog so I can login often and discuss my Internet Marketing ideas, and have people come and comment on my ideas. Why Blogs are so popular     

  • The reason blogs are so popular is that they get more hits in short period of time.
  •  They can get quickly indexed by search engines, as Search Engines love them.
  • More over, you can ping many blog services like WebLog to get noticed when you update your blog. I never forget to do that myself, when I update my blog.
  • You can use RSS with Blogs to notify other Ping services and Search Engines that you have updated the blog, this will alert them and they will schedule their crawlers to index your updated content soon.

Forums
Spending few hours a week on your most popular forums can help you bring some good free traffic. Just don’t forget to use your “Signature with link to your website”. This can also help your link popularity.

One Way Links
 
If you have a very popular website with lot of quality content, or a high value product, you would get a lot of links to your website by people referring others to your website by placing your link in the articles on their website. Adobe.com is a good example. Almost every one refers people to their site to download Acrobat Reader software. It doesn’t mean you have to be as popular as Adobe to make this technique work, but you can get a lot of traffic to your site if others recommend you in their articles on their sites.

Tell a Friends via Word of Mouth Marketing
 
Tell a Friend form on your website can boom your internet traffic in a big way. This technique is also called Viral Marketing, since your message spreads like a virus from one person to another. This is how Hotmail gained over 30 million (and growing) subscribers over a short period of time, by placing a small at the end of every message that was sent through hotmail.

Email Signature
 
We all send mail every day, some time our mails get forwarded to other people. Using your website URL inside your email signature can be another nice way to get traffic to your website. Putting a small link of our website in our email signature can not hurt any body, but it can certainly bring more traffic for your website.
Affiliate Marketing
 
I wouldn’t be wrong, if I say that Affiliate Marketing is now the 2nd biggest source of website traffic. In fact, there are a majority of businesses who depend ONLY on affiliate marketing and it brings them enough traffic to sell their products or services. Main problem with affiliate marketing is that we need to dedicate time and effort to:

 

a)      Setup a fully organized affiliate program
b)      Recruit new energetic affiliates (which is most difficult part of it)
c)      Keep these affiliates interested in your website promotionWe will discuss this topic in a great detail in coming days.

 

Social Book Marking
 
This is a relatively new technique, but slowly getting more and more popular. There are several sites called “Social book marking networks ” where you can go and suggest your URL yourself. There can be others who can recommend you too. You can appear on their search results if their users type the keyword you compete on. One example of such sites is Simpy.com

Paid Traffic Techniques
 
All the free traffic techniques that we discussed above only work for the websites that have been there for a while. What about the people starting new website? A new website cant wait for all those free sources to work, it must produce results quickly. In that case, you would be looking for paid traffic sources for quick results. They really provide quick results because you can start bringing traffic from TODAY.Here are the most popular Paid traffic TechniquesPPC
PPC Stands for Pay-Per-Click. There are many PPC engines where you can bid on certain keywords and you would be charged on per click basis. The cost of traffic depends on what is your maximum bid for the keywords you are competing for. Most popular PPC programs are Google AdWords and Overture (a Yahoo company).

Ezine Ads
 
Not as popular as they used to be, but some Ezines can still bring you good quality traffic at a very low cost. You can buy classified ad space inside an ezine. These ads will be published with the message that goes out to subscribers every week or month. Some Ezines can also offer you solo ads, that are relatively expensive and are sent out ONLY to promote your product/service.
 
 Printed Media
 
Over the time, this is becoming lesser popular way of attracting people to your website. As Print Media are offline methods of advertisement, you would only get visitors who are really keen to visit you. Most of the times, you would get very targeted traffic, but you have to make sure you publish your ad in the right magazine that circulates with in your potential target market.

Press Release
 
Press Releases are getting more and more popular every day. There are services like prweb.com that send out your press release to thousands of journalists for as low as $80. Plus your Press Release will be shown on hundreds of network journalism sites, that would not only bring you handsome traffic but also good number of links to increase your link popularity.

Paid One Way Links
 
This method is mostly used for gaining Link Popularity but it can also bring some traffic to your site. Idea is to find a website of relevant industry as yours, with good page rank and pay them to put your website link on their site. This can give big boost to your page rank when next time Google indexes the page containing your link.

 

Traffic Techniques that don’t work
 
Now lets discuss some of the techniques that don’t work to drive traffic.  These are not worth wasting your valuable time and you can use the same time on more constructive techniques discussed above and get better results.
 
Unsolicited emails
 
Nah!, don’t ever try it. Not only does it not work, it will badly effect your reputation. Banner Advertisement
 
Banners once used to be huge traffic source, but they are no longer are. Its estimated that per 1000 Impressions, you get only 3 visitors. And it costs you $15 to $25 to show your ads on yahoo for 1000 times. That is damn low .03% click thru rate.

Reciprocal Linking
 
Reciprocal Linking was once great, specially for SEO, but it is no longer. Search Engines ignore reciprocal links, and they bring little traffic to your site, so just forget that idea. Well, that’s all for now. We I will be updating this blog regularly and you will get TONs of  ideas, tips and techniques to read. Please make sure to book mark this blog.Bobby Shahzad
Chief Technology Officer
Goldbar Enterprises LLC.
http://www.goldbar.net    

 

Posted in Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

Finding the right Freelance SEO

August 29th, 2006

Why do I need SEO? This is the most important question published on almost every search engine forum and blog. Of course , you need it if you want to expand your business reaching new customers.

In simple terms, if you are not doing an SEO campaign on your website you are losing money. A well planned SEO campaign can result higher numbers of buyers to your site every day. 

If you do not have the time or seo experties for internet marketing, make sure you hire a freelance seo consultant that can perform quality optimization for you remotely and economically. Working with a qualified SEO work well for the your business. Before choosing an seo consultant, look into following matters:

  1. Project experience and clients, find out how long the SEO Consultant has been in business.
  2. Ethical SEO strategies, used by the person. Avoid seo firms and consultant that practice unethical tactics including but not limited to keywords stuffing, page swapping, irrelevant keywords, invisible text, content duplication heavy use of flash & graphic design. 
  3. Don’t go for highly expensive or too cheap solutions if you are doing it for first time.
  4. Analytics, a serious SEO consultant should provide detailed reports to you of your website’s performance.
  5. Presense of effective and fast communication between you and your SEO.

Choosing the right SEO consultant is critical to the success of your online business. Following guidelines above and you will be starting on the right path to making your business profitable.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

Influential authorities on “Business Blogging”

July 28th, 2006

Imagine how indirect influence/authority/relevance counts when it comes to business blogging.
 
Onalytica, a UK-based analytics firm, illustrates that popularity is not always in line with influence, either. It lists top 25 influencers on the topic of “business blogging” including Corante, Business Week and Forbes, Neville Hobson, BBC and many more.
 
Added Marketing viewers can download complete report here (pdf 0.1 MB)

 Technorati: internet marketing  

Posted in Blog Marketing | 4 Comments »