aWebBiz Internet Marketing Blog

There are some common errors that people who are new to list building tend to make. In fact, some of these are mistakes that experienced marketers make time and time again. Correcting these mistakes can mean the difference between having a solid, unbreakable relationship with your list and having a list full of people who simply delete your e-mails and unsubscribe.

Pay close attention to these do’s and don’ts to ensure your list is a success.

Don’t Buy Leads

If you’re just getting started online, buying leads can be very tempting. Don’t get lured, though, into the seemingly easy strategy of buying leads. While this can work to a certain point, it is not going to give you the responsive list that you want.

When you buy leads, the people who you get on your list have likely never heard of you and most of them probably don’t want to hear from you.

On the other hand, when you build your own list from scratch, you’re talking to people who are warmed up to you already and who are a lot more likely to buy. Buying leads, for the most part, is a waste of money.

Don’t Spam People!

It can seem awfully enticing that all you need to to make money is send an e-mail. This leads certain people to the dark side. Of course I’m talking about spamming. Even if their intentions started off good, spamming is highly tempting, and the laws can be confusing.

Spam is when you send unsolicited e-mails to people, and is actually against the law to do. The spam law states that you must make sure that you make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your list (a link at the bottom of the message is best) and that they have subscribed in the first place. You are also required by law to include your postal address with all messages that you send.

You can read the law here:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/business.htm

Building a relationship may take longer than spamming, but the profits will be far greater in the long run.

Don’t Put Off Building a List

Many people think that they can put off building a list until they are more “established” or until [enter your excuse reason here]. This is a mistake. Even if your traffic is low and you’re brand new to online business, you need to build those relationships from the very start.

If you ask established Internet entrepreneurs what their biggest regret is, many of them will tell you their regret is that they did not build a list sooner. It doesn’t matter what your online business is – selling ebooks, offering a service, affiliate marketing, creating adsense sites, ecommerce, blogging, or direct selling – you need to build a list.

Build a Relationship First, Think Of Money Later

We’ll dig into this tip in a lot more detail later on, but it’s important to understand it right now as well. You need to focus on the relationship building part of your list first, and think about the monetary aspect later.

Sure, you want to make money, but if all you do is hit up your list for money, you’re going to get a lot of unsubscribes and make some people angry. The chances are good that they signed up for your list in order to get something out of it. Whether it was an e-course, a free e-book, information, coupons, notices, an audio, or something else, they expect to receive a lot of value for being a part of your e-mail list.

If you provide this relationship first, the money will come.

Be Consistent

There are many business owners who build a list and then don’t do anything with it. They allow their leads to get neglected. All this does is cause your list members to forget they’ve joined your list in the first place, and it causes you to lose potential income.

When you do decide to send a mailing to your neglected lists, a much higher number of people will choose not to open your e-mails, mark your emails as spam, and unsubscribe. You don’t need to e-mail them every day (that’s actually a bad idea) but consistent effort is what will build the results you’re looking for.

Do you want to improve your email marketing skills? If so then register for the free webinars below.

Free, Live Email Marketing Webinars ~ Become an Email Marketing Master

One of the most important article marketing tips you can follow is to focus on your author’s resource box. This is your “take” for your site, whereas the actual article body is your “give” to the directory.

Your author’s resource box should contain a compelling reason for people to continue on to your website. You may talk a little about yourself, but it really has to be more about the reader and what he/she wants.

For example, if your website is offering a solution for people who want to make money online, you want to give them a reason to visit. Clearly, you need to let them know that you have the answer they are looking for in order to get them to visit your website.

A huge part of crafting a great resource box is including one or more links to your website. Different directories have different rules about this, but the standard is to allow you to include two links. You want to surround these links in what is called “anchor text.” This is simply a way for you to name the link to let the search engines know exactly what your site is about.

Here is an example of anchor text:
If you want the search engines to know your site is about Internet Marketing  you would type:

<a href=http://awebbiz.com>Internet marketing</a>

This would help boost your rankings for the keyword “Internet marketing.”

By Barry Stein

One of the most important things you can do to make sure your articles do well is keyword research.

Since people use keywords to search for information in the search engines like Google, you’ll want to target appropriate keywords if you wish to show up at the top of the results pages.

You can find relevant keywords in many different ways, but the easiest way is to use Word Tracker’s research tool.

You can find it at: www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Simply type in a keyword for your website and Word Tracker will give you many keyword ideas.

Example: If you’ve got a website about pet recipes, you would enter terms like “cooking pet food”, “homemade pet food”, “natural pet food’, “cook dog food”, etc.

Try to use keyword phrase that conatain two or three words. Single keywords are too broad and too general.

Word Tracker also gives you the numbers that tell you how often people search for each term. That way you know the keywords you’re targeting are worth your efforts.

Another important piece of the puzzle is figuring out how much competition there is for each keyword. If you are targeting words that have too much competition it’s going to be harder for you to reach the top of the search engine results pages.

Don’t worry about that happening, because it’s easy to figure out how much competition there is.

Simply go to Google and type in your keyword surrounded by quote marks. The results that pop up are the other sites that are specifically targeting that term.

Example: When I search for “Pet recipes” I see there are 184,000 web pages that are listed for that term. I would say that any keyword term that has less than one million pages in a Google search results is a worthwhile targeting.

Now that you have these keywords you can use them to give you a basis for your articles.

It’s easiest to choose one keyword phrase per article and focus the topic around that keyword phrase.

And remember to put the same keyword term in your title as well.

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Barry Stein is the owner of aWebBiz.com where he offers cutting-edge tips on all aspects of business and a Free Newsletter on Internet Marketing.  To find more advice, tools and resources to help you succeed in your business, visit: www.aWebBiz.com

You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your e-book or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included with an active hyperlink to the aWebBiz.com web site.