5 Basics of Marketing
There are 5 basic areas involved in marketing online, more if you consider all of the sub-categories that are possible. These are: Product, Promotion, Fulfillment, Customer List, and Training. To be really successful online you need to actively address all 5, although not necessarily in that order.
In this Blog I will be addressing all 5 aspects. Sometimes I will be giving you training, like in this email. At other times I will be discussing Products that I feel you could sell profitably or that I recommend purchasing to add to your Marketing Toolkit. I will be talking a lot about Promotion, how do you attract buyers? This is probably the hardest part of selling online and certainly can be the most expensive. I will be showing you lots of different ways and ideas on how to promote your products. I will also be spending a lot of time talking about List Building, this is possibly the most important aspect of selling online. Like the old saying goes, it is 10 times harder to sell to a new customer as it is to sell to an existing customer. That is why so many stores have customer loyalty programs (think the discount cards at grocery and convenience stores).
I will be mixing it up a bit to keep things interesting, but I will always tell you which part of the selling cycle any newsletter topic falls into. This email is of course Training. The last email on Fiverr falls under the category of Promotion, but you can also use their service for List Building, and Product Creation as well.
The first thing I recommend you do is to get a new email address just for joining lists. Most of the services I will be talking about will be sending you information by email, so it is useful to have a separate email just for that stuff, one that you can ignore if you want to and only check on weekends or when it is convenient. My personal choice is Google Gmail, but there are lots of other free services as well.
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Products
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I will be reviewing a lot of products in the future and I will give specifics at that time, but to get you started here is where I find most of my new product offerings:
ClickBank. This is the #1 source for Affiliate Products that you can either link to on your web site or that you can promote through other techniques, such as emails and classified ads. Next email I will be talking in greater depth about ClickBank, but if you haven't already done so you should go here and sign up for a Free account.
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Promotion
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When you begin to develop your Client List you will want an easy way to communicate with them. You could just send emails to each person on your list, but that could take forever. You could use an email list service like ConstantContact, or AWeber, or GetResponse, or any of a dozen others, which would allow you to set up different lists and broadcast emails out to a whole list easily. Some email list services also can be used as an Autoresponder service. If you follow me at How To Gurus you will be seeing emails sent through GetResponse. All of my promotions to that list are Broadcast emails, in other words, I write the email and then Broadcast it out to my list. This works great for certain types of lists, such as existing customer lists.
Most list services have a free trial period.
Here is a $30 credit for Constant Contact if you start using their service, just use this link:
http://www.constantcontact.com/features/signup
But lets say that you are building an Affiliate Marketing list, which I recommend. This is a different type of list.You may want to send different people on your list different emails at different times. This is where an Autoresponder service comes in. The email you are reading right now is sent through an Autoresponder, for a very good reason. Since this is a training newsletter I want all new subscribers to start with the first email, and then get each email in the correct order. It would drive me crazy to try and figure that out myself, and to keep track of who gets which email, when. So instead I use an Autoresponder service, I am currently using both GetResponse and AWeber.
With both services I am able to set up a whole series of emails, then as people sign up to my Affiliate Marketing list they will begin receiving each email spaced a few days apart in the correct order: #1 (welcome email), #2 (my quick Fiverr email), #3 (this post as an email), etc. AWeber keeps track of when each new subscriber signs up and sends them all of the emails in the correct order. This also allows me to spend a day creating several emails, then add them into the sequence to be sent over a period of a few days or weeks, so that I don't have to write a new email each time I want to send one out. This is a great way to keep things properly organized and to make sure everyone receives every email. Plus I still have the ability to send out Broadcast emails to my entire list at any time for any time sensitive information that I come across or want to discuss.
So, there is my second recommendation, sign up for an Autoresponder service. You can try AWeber out for only $1 for a month, if you like the service the basic price is only $19 per month. http://aweber.com/?401498
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And finally, I am always open to questions and requests for specific training ideas. So just post a comment and tell me what you want to learn about, I will work it into the blog.
Till next time:
George Peirson