Work At Home Business Opportunities Weblog
Autoresponders and Email List Building
by Dave Lovelace
Everyone has received an email. Everyone has also received unsolicited emails. That makes it all the more important to build a list of subscribers who won’t mind you communicating with them this way.
One of the most common ways that online business owners connect with their potential customers is through email. You can reach people easier that way than you can by ringing them up on the phone. Email can be accessed from laptops in Wi-Fi hotspots, cellular phones and WebTV to name a few. So, you could say that it is pretty important to manage this marketing tool just right.
Email Lists
Here’s how it usually works, you include an opt-in page on your website. It could be for free stuff, discounted merchandise, or additional information on something they read on your site. Readers are asked to become subscribers in some way to your website by providing their name and email address.
Along with that address you also include a disclaimer to put them at ease. Anyone who signs up knows that you won’t sell their information to a third party or send them unwanted spamming emails.
Your initial list will be mixed with those who are in your target market and people who are interested in more general information. If you are trying to reach people who are into dog accessories, you may reach those who are seeking information on pet accessories in general. They will soon be weeded out and hopefully they won’t make up the bulk of your list.
Autoresponders
Now, it’s time to contact those people. You have the list and something has to be done with it. Your subscribers are waiting.
You can use a series of emails that highlight your product offerings as a way to transition subscribers into the realm of customers. The goal of these emails is to provide additional information on the topic of your website business and not to necessarily sell a product directly.
The emails can be set up automatically to go out on a pre-set schedule using autoresponder programs and services. These services give you a way to distribute those emails. You can even add the personal touch of addressing your list by name instead of a blanket greeting with certain autoresponder services.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. You need something to load into the autoresponder program. Create a series of emails that speak directly to each list member as if they were the only one on your list. You can even outsource the autoresponder emails if you need to.
Now that you have a list of subscribers, your next step is keeping them your number one priority. Use autoresponder emails to contact them on a regular basis with the purpose of building a solid relationship for future business.
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A New Study claims to have discovered the “secret” of being a successful entrepreneur. It’s from the Kauffman Foundation a resource I trust on the matter.
In other words, the successful entrepreneurs built on what they already possessed or had acquired through life experience, work experience, and combined it with a willingness to take a calculated risk.
Here are some bullet points from the report:
Nearly all of the company founders surveyed – 98 percent – ranked prior work experience as an important success factor, and 58 percent ranked it as extremely important. Learning from both successes (88 percent) and failures (78 percent) also played a key role in respondents’ current successes. In fact, 40 percent cited lessons learned from failures as extremely important – the second-highest “extremely important” rating.
The company’s management team contributed to success for 82 percent of those surveyed, with 35 percent ranking this factor as extremely important. For 73 percent of the entrepreneurs surveyed, luck was an important factor in success; 22 percent ranked good fortune as extremely important.
The survey also found that:
- Professional networks were important to the success of their current businesses for 73 percent of the entrepreneurs. In comparison, 62 percent felt the same way about personal networks. University or alumni networks, on the other hand, were important to only 19 percent of the respondents. Among Ivy-League graduates, 29 percent placed importance on alumni networks.
- Only 11 percent of the first-time entrepreneurs received venture capital, and 9 percent received private/angel financing. Of the overall sample, 68 percent considered availability of financing/capital as important. Of the entrepreneurs who had raised venture capital for their most recent businesses, 96 percent considered financing important.
- Eighty-six percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as important, as compared with 70 percent of the overall sample. Only 20 percent of entrepreneurs and 18 percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as extremely important.
- Most company founders (86 percent) ranked state or regional assistance as slightly or not at all important.
- In identifying barriers to entrepreneurial success, the most commonly named factor – by 98 percent of respondents – was lack of willingness or ability to take risks. Other barriers cited by respondents were the time and effort required (93 percent), difficulty raising capital (91 percent), business management skills (89 percent), knowledge about how to start a business (84 percent), industry and market knowledge (83 percent), and family/financial pressures to keep a traditional, steady job (73 percent).
Eight years ago, I started this blog to separate the wheat from the chaff of the business opportunities I found online.
It’s been a fun ride and one that I couldn’t have kept up this long without my loyal readers. Over 100,000 of you subscribe to this blog and read it daily in your email, via RSS or in your browser. Thousands more stumble onto it every day as they search the internet for legitimate business ideas and opportunities.
This blog has allowed me to work for myself, from home and to meet thousands of other entrepreneurs and opportunity seekers. It’s been a an incredible blessing and I look forward to doing it for many more years to come.
Thank you!
From Dane’s blog
Jonathan Leger is the creator of Niche Horde. Here’s his latest report on how the product helped people achieve “Top 10″ rankings in Google in 2-5 days.
A customer of mine posted some incredible results on the Niche Horde forum yesterday, and I had to share it with you. In case you aren’t aware, Niche Horde is my instant niche market analysis tool that has over 3.7 million keywords pre-analyzed in its database.
The title of the was post:
“Thank You Jonathan For Making NicheHorde”
The body:
“I bought 80 domains that I found with nichehorde. I have put up a lot of them and at least half of the ones I have checked are ranking on the first page and they have only been up about 2-5 days. I am ranking 7 of 60,700,000 for one of the keywords. I never would have even looked at those keywords before [Niche Horde]. So thank you for helping me see there are a lot more wide open markets then I thought there were.”
I responded to his post, asking for permission to send his experience out to you. He responded with more awesome details:
“I was really surprised when I saw the results. I have looked at a bunch more and I have at least 5 others like this that I am in the top 10 with over 20,000,000 results.”
What can I say? His experience is exactly what I designed Niche Horde to do.
As the headline on my sales page says:
“FINALLY, An Easy Way to Discover Hot Niches You Can Easily Dominate In Google!”
If you’re interested, I hope you’ll use my affiliate like to review Niche Horde
I do have one caveat. So called “on page” SEO is a good exercise, but you need “off page” SEO for maximum results. That means in bound links. For that I recommend a product from the same company: 1 Way Links(affiliate link).
Article Marketing and List Building
by Dave Lovelace
Article marketing is one of the best ways to gain traffic for free. Using your expertise in the niche market, you can attract the kind of readership that would be interested in the product or service that you are marketing. Use it to build a money-making list.
The goal of business is to make money. If you aren’t successful, then you won’t be in business for long. The goal of list building is to create a network of people who will play into that success over and over again. The money will come if you cultivate the relationship first.
Article Marketing
Most people choose niches that appeal to them because they already know something about it. Use this to your advantage with article marketing.
Article marketing involves writing stirring content that can be highlighted on your website as well as other places. If you aren’t great in the writing department you can hire a ghostwriter or a ghostwriting service to handle the hard work for you. All you need to do is provide them with the information you want included in the articles.
Don’t forget to include keywords. They are still important. The fabulous things that you write won’t get read if no one can find it. Using keywords relevant to your niche can assure you a place on the first page of search results (or close to it once you get the hang of it). Then, others will learn that you have something important to say.
You can market your articles in several places. In fact there are quite a few directories that are in search of good articles. Quality is still the name of the game. Once you submit your work to these sites, they are reviewed by their experts before they are accepted. Appearing on popular sites like EzineArticles.com and Buzzle can increase your visibility and credibility.
Growing Your List
What you want to build your list are subscribers – people who will opt-in for newsletters, reports, email marketing campaigns and the like. If you are bent on selling them something at every turn, then your list will remain puny and ineffective. Concentrate on giving the readers what they want before you think about making the sale.
Provide information that is relevant to the target market. For example, for someone who wants to sell fishing equipment, write content that touts the benefits of fishing (relaxation, family activities, etc.) to them. After that, you can build up to how-to articles on different types of equipment or fishing tips.
When you give your readers what they want, they will come back for more. As they become comfortable with you, you can ask for their information and they will give it freely. These readers are now ready to hear more about you and your products.
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Here’s a fact filled article from USA Today on how a home based wedding photographer turned $600 to $40,000 using highly targeted Facebook ads.
How’d he do that?
He targeted males aged 24-30 in his target marketing area who showed their profile as “engaged”… these are the only people who saw his advertising. And they were the people who were most likely to contact him and do business.
To put it another way, he turned $100 per month of advertising into $6,667 of gross revenues for that same 6 month period. Not too shabby.
But there’s more you could be doing with Facebook. Click through and read!
Get more unique marketing tips here for your business – absolutely free!
I’ve been thinking about this a good deal since I just destroyed my last credit card after paying off the account. My first thought was… “will I ever go on vacation again?” And panic gripped me. Yes, I’ll be going on vacation again, just not paying it off over the next 20 years. So my wife and I began discussing vacation rentals. It just so happens that we wondered if we’d be able to sneak out of town for a day or two this coming Thanksgiving.
For that we were thinking about Tennessee vacation rentals, specifically Pigeon Forge TN vacation rentals. We normally stay in one of the myriad motels there, but my brother got a mountain cabin once and it was spectacular, except I felt like my car was parked at a 45 degree angle! The cabin looked something like the image I’ve uploaded below. It was part of a “cabin community” of sorts… very quiet and peaceful, no college students (sorry college students, but you know who you are!) getting drunk and shouting all night off the next balcony. The pool and wifi likewise were great. Though the cabin my brother had was in what felt like a secluded area, it wasn’t really that far from all the attractions.
If only he hadn’t had to be on call for his employer! Maybe he could have had some fun too!
Note: Thank you VacationRental.org for asking me to ponder this out loud and sponsoring this small post. I enjoyed viewing your site and linking to it. It was relaxing just seeing the many options and reviving some fond memories!
Remember the post on “One Penny Sales”? It was about an Amish merchant found a way to build a profitable in house mailing list that generated almost a 15% response from every mailing by selling products valued at $5 to $15 for one penny and how he got those items to sell for free. It was also about how he got the mailings done for free too! 100% profit at no cost to the merchant!
If you liked that story, you’re going to LOVE Markus Allen’s Retail Marketing Insider ezine.
It’s free! And he’s already posted a handful of tips you’ll want to grab today!
Here’s an interesting trend… could you find a way to be an intermediary between companies getting rid of used DVD’s and companies wanting to sell used DVD’s? Could you set up a system of racks in local businesses with good traffic to make money for both of you?
If that’s a thought you like, you may want to read more about Used DVDs a growing business. There appears to be a constantly growing supply of used DVD’s flooding the market and seeking out entrepreneurs who can make money selling them before they become so plentiful they become unprofitable to market.
Why does RedBox work? That’s what I asked myself tonight when I rented a RedBox movie for the very first time. I’d just left a Blockbuster where you know you’re going to pay almost $5 for a new movie and $3 for an older movie. Plus tax of course.
RedBox compared to Blockbuster is Aldi’s compared to Kroger. You’re there to look through a limited but generally popular selection of DVD’s and you’re there to pay $1 plus tax. You tell yourself you’re going to get the movie back by 9pm the next night so you only have to pay a dollar plus tax.
There’s no customer service staff, there’s no printing receipts – you get your receipt by email, there’s no cash changing hands, there’s not much rent involved in a few square feet of space required, there’s no running to the bank, one employee services a whole “route” of locations.
Also, their velocity of transaction is quicker. Blockbuster assumes they won’t see their DVD’s for a few days. RedBox has a completely different assumption, but if they’re wrong you’re paying extra so they don’t care.
So in a sense, their formula is classic:
1. Good location (they started at McDonald’s locations)
2. Limited selection with
3. Constant turnover
4. Expenses cut to the bone
5. Minimal number of employees
6. “Virtual” cash handling
7. Automatic email listbuilding (that’s how they send receipts)
They started out with an investment from McDonald’s… they’ve repaid that venture capital and they’re expanding. Of course, even with a good model, they can make the whole thing implode. But you can see how their model does equip them to cut expense to the bone while serving a high volume of customers.
It’s vending taken to a whole new level.
I wonder how these lessons could apply to a home based business? Certainly many home based businesses were started from “old style” vending.
I’d like to hear your thoughts…
