Previously, we’ve seen just how important targeting is when it comes to email marketing. However, many online marketers and entrepreneurs aren’t too sure about how to actually implement it as part of their online marketing campaigns. This is understandable, as there are actually few of them which truly segment their subscribers in order to deliver them personalized content when they send out email advertisements and newsletters. Here are some tips that will make it easy for you:

Maintain Separate Lists On Your Website or Different Websites

One of the most common mistake is putting in email submission boxes and capturing the client’s permission to email them on the checkout pages of all your websites, then putting all of these email addresses onto one big list. If you run websites that sell products that are very similar and which all target the exact same type of buyer, then this might be OK. However, it is better to keep separate lists for separate sites. Also, keep the email list that you got from customers that just signed up for your newsletter on your site without buying anything separate from the newsletter that you have for your paying customers.

Keep Track of What Your Customers Buy

If you have an e-commerce website that directly sells products to your customers, then keep track of who buys what. This will allow you to specifically tailor your promotions to them. Buyers who have purchased a specific kind of item are more likely to buy that type of item again, so if you include promotions on your products as part of the emails that you send to your list, you should show them products that are relevant based on their past purchases. This is something that’s already done by the leading e-commerce sites out there and is something you should definitely do as well.

Use Demographic Information

The most basic piece of demographic information that you could collect would be the country where the subscriber lives in. If you include affiliate offers as part of your emails, then this will ensure that you only include offers that accept traffic from that subscribers country. It could also allow you to display prices in the subscribers local currency. As for other demographics such as age, gender, income level, etc. you could include this as part of an optional survey when signing up for your mailing list or making a purchase. To increase the number of visitors that fill it out, you could offer a small discount or promotion of some sort.

Ask What Made Your Visitors Interested in Your Site

This is something else that’s good to include as part of the sign up survey. Ask your visitors what they’re looking for on your site and what they hope to buy in the future. This would allow you to create sub groups in your email list and then include offers and promotions that are relevant to these subscribers, thus making them more likely to actually buy something.

Technical support and customer service

In most cases, you simply won’t need to interact with your hosting provider’s technical support or customer service departments. However, if something goes wrong or if you need help, you will need to make sure that they are responsive and available to help you when you need them. Hosting providers have many ways to contact them, such as phone, email and live chat. Before you sign up for service, try contacting them to see if they are able to respond to your questions in a timely manner and most importantly of all, if they are able to respond correctly to your questions. Naturally, getting an off-topic answer in broken English is not a good sign.

Site building tools and templates

If you don’t already have a site pre-built, these will be very useful to help you set up your new web site in a few minutes. A lot of web hosts have site builder software in the control panel as well as many site templates for you to select from. Not everyone will need those, but obviously they are a big plus and can make building your site go a lot faster.

Additional software

While a lot of site features, such as guest books, can be added quite easily by downloading some free scripts off the web, a good web host will have a number of add-ons that can be instantly added to your site from their control panel. This includes blogs, counters, forums, guest books, form mail scripts, etc. If you think these will be useful on your site, make sure that you go with a web host that offers them.

Email features

While nearly all web hosts will give you a main you@yourdomain.com email address, you may find it useful to have more email addresses at your disposal, in addition to various other email related features. Some things to look for are the number of POP3 email accounts given, web mail access, email aliases, auto responder tools, as well as mail forwarding and mailing list tools. Your web host should also use spam filtering software that is effective, otherwise your inbox risks being filled with dozens of unwanted messages each day.

Website statistics

Do you want to know as much as possible about your visitors, rather than just the number of hits that your website has received? If so, be sure that your host provides you with good web statistics tools such as Webalizer and AWStats. These will let you see exactly where your visitors came from, which country they are from, which pages they have visited on your site and how long they have stayed on each page. Knowing this will allow you to optimize your site better and know how your traffic sources are performing.

Email advertising is just one of the ways for you to get the word out, either about your own business or product, or about an affiliate offer that you are running. Unfortunately, this method of advertising is often associated with unsolicited email (spam) and as such is avoided by many marketers. But there are ways to leverage the power of email advertising and have great results, as long as you follow these tipis outlined below.

Make sure you are allowed to do it: If you are promoting an affiliate or CPA offer, be sure that the offer in question can be promoted by email and what the restrictions or rules are. Certain offers are barred from email promotions, while on certain others the messages and subject lines have to be entered exactly as provided by the merchant. If you fail to follow these instructions, at best you will be warned by your affiliate manager. At worst, you can get banned from the network outright and even lose all of the money that you have accumulated during the month.

Make sure you have permission to email these people: This means that they have opted in, either by entering their email on a dedicated box on your website, or were aware of the fact that they will receive promotional emails when registering for a site that you own. You should always keep the logs which include the timestamp, email and IP address associated with the subscription, as you may be asked for it if you are running affiliate offers.

Be wary of certain “email marketing” providers: Some companies may claim that they are able to send your message to “millions of targeted opt-in subscribers”. Unfortunately, in many cases these email addresses are simply scraped from the web to form a list. If not, they are sent to a list of emails that have opted in on a certain site (usually a contest or freebie site) which had a mention stating that “we may give your email to our promotional partners”. While this may not be against the rules of most offers, you will get poor results, as these lists have been sold and resold and resold again. Chances are your email will just end up in the recipient’s “Junk” folder or simply be deleted.

Don’t waste time with “paid to read” email providers: While all of these people did indeed opt-in to receive these mails, and the provider guarantees that people will click through to your site, you will once again get poor results, meaning little or zero conversions. Why? The people clicking on the link in your mail are earning points or a small sum of about half a cent to do so. They don’t care about what’s on your site and will close it just as soon as the timer runs out. You will indeed get a lot of traffic, but chances are none of it will convert anyways.

Whether you’re involved in email marketing or social media marketing, it can be extremely tempting to buy more friends or subscribers. Resist that temptation. A lot of companies offer thousands of subscribers, or friends for one “low low price”, but the ACTUAL price of those new subscribers and friends is much higher than you want to pay.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you have no way of knowing how those subscribers or friends were obtained. In the case of email addresses, the addresses could have been obtained either illegally, or at the very least, fraudulently. If that’s the case, well, we don’t need to explain to you why you don’t want any parts of that.

Social media friends could also have been obtained through nefarious means. If someone is offering you a lot of friends for a low price, it’s possible that all of these friends are either fake accounts, or accounts that have been hacked, and used as part of this deal. Again, if that’s the case, you don’t want any parts of it.

Let’s assume for a minute that all of the subscribers and friends you buy were obtained legally. If that’s the case, then you have no way of knowing how many of those email addresses, or social media accounts are still active. People abandon both every day, and there’s nothing stopping these companies from selling you inactive users.

Let’s assume that all the accounts were legally obtained, and that they’re all active. There’s still no way to know that all of the new subscribers or friends you’re buying will be interested in your products or services. You might very well be buying subscribers and friends that are just going to mark you as spam, and ignore you.

If enough people flag you as spam, then you’ll have a hard time getting your emails to make it to anyone’s inbox, and your social media accounts could get closed. In short, the price of those cheap friends and subscribers could be an extreme slow down in your online marketing efforts. In the long run, it’s just not worth it.

Starting a successful newsletter is tough, no matter what type of site it’s for. Most people delete the majority of newsletters that hit their inbox without ever even opening them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run an email marketing campaign, it just means you have to follow a few important guidelines while doing so.

First, and probably the most important, is don’t buy subscribers. We’ve all seen the ads that promise tens of thousands of subscribers for one low, low price, but it’s still not worth it. The price might be affordable, but you probably don’t want the subscribers they’re tying to sell you. You can’t be certain how they got a hold of those email addresses, so there’s always a chance they were obtained illegally, or at the very least, by underhanded means. If they were all obtained on the up and up, you still have no way of knowing whether or not they’re active email addresses that get checked by someone regularly. Even if they do get checked regularly, you still don’t want them. There’s no way to guarantee that each email address you bought belongs to someone who is likely to be interested in your newsletter. You might be buying subscribers that are likely to flag your newsletter as spam, and hurt the overall reputation of your newsletter, and by proxy, your site.

Instead of paying for subscribers, ask for them. Put an opt in page on your site, and put an opt in box on the sidebar. Also, if you have a store, give your customers the option to sign up for your newsletter during checkout. By asking your customers to sign up, you won’t get as many subscribers as you would by buying them, but you’ll get subscribers with a genuine interest in your site, and your niche.

Once you have the right subscribers, it’s important to start sending them the right things. Don’t just send out sales emails, try to send out entertaining and informative content as well. If you can entertain your subscribers, they’ll be more likely to open and read all of your emails, including your sales emails.

A successful newsletter just comes down to sending the right information to the right subscribers. If you have subscribers that are interested in what you have to say, and you’re sending them meaningful content, your newsletter will perform well.

A great way to make money with a website is to purchase an established website that you know you can add value to the website and flip it at a later date for a profit.

To give you an example of what i mean i will give you an example of how i once made money buying a website from flippa.com for $1800 and then 3 months later sold it for $15,000 making a tidy profit.  The website i bought was a 6 months old blog that was rarely updated by its owner.  It was in the internet marketing niche which i know alot about so i knew i could add value to the blog.

The blog at the time was receiving 3,000 unique views a month and was a PR2 and was making $500 a month from affiliate sales via clickbank.com and a little on google adsense.

When i took over the blog this is what i did to improve the value of the blog:

1.) Made sure i added at least 2 very informal posts everyday to keep my readers and attract new readers.

2.) I offered a fee ebook download with an optin emails form. (i managed to capture 5,000 email addresses) to which i later emailed offers to bringing in $2,000 in commission, mainly clickbank products.

3.) I changed the theme of the blog to a premium wordpress theme.

4.) I installed a forum which help build a community around the blog.

5.) I submitted alot of articles to article websites and built up some good backlinks

6.) I did alot of blog commenting on other similar blogs helping bringing in more backlinks

7.) I sponsored wordpress themes digital point marketplace also helped bring in more backlinks.

After the first month my traffic had reached 6,700 uniques a month and my revenue went upto $1600 a month from commission from various networks i was using.  Most of my income came from my email list because within the free ebook i was given away had links to affiliate products and was earning money from my readers clicking on links within the ebook and purchasing a product.

By the end of month 3 i was adding 3 new articles a day and my email list had reached 5,000 email readers and was making on average $3,000 a month from affiliate commission mainly from Clickbank.com, Cj.com and Google adsense.

Now i knew i could resell the blog as i had added some very good value to the blog and sold it back on flippa.com for $15,000

So the key to buying and selling websites for profit is to look for a website you know you can add value to it.  Pick a niche you know about and would enjoy working on.