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.

It’s not a big secret that when you’re building a website, if you want to get it to rank well in search engines, then some SEO work is in order. This makes plenty of webmasters do their research on various websites, blogs, forums, etc. dedicated to the topic of search engine optimization. Getting information on the topic is of course the way to go and just like with anything, knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more you will actually be able to apply in a practical context on your website. But when you research information, it’s very important that the SEO tips that you read are actually good information and not some of the myths and misconceptions that keep re appearing on many sites. These actually cause webmasters to make mistakes when it comes to SEO and often make them waste time focusing on things that aren’t important.

The issue of wasting time is definitely one to consider for any webmaster. If you’re working on your site, or on your websites by yourself, then in many cases you only have a few hours a day to make things happen. You definitely don’t want to spend that time doing things that won’t matter and won’t help you achieve your goals as far as search engine rankings will go. Instead, you could be focusing on improving the content of your website or actually using SEO techniques that will work.

There’s also one big problem when it comes to bad SEO advice. If you apply the wrong SEO techniques to your website, this could end up actually hurting your chances of gaining a good position in search engine results rather than helping you. Now if you’re just making this mistake on one of your mini sites and you have 50 more of them, it may not be such a big deal, as you can start all over again. But if this is your main business website we’re talking about, then this would be even more problematic.

So the question is, how do you avoid making mistakes in SEO? The first thing would be to look for quality information. This can come from well reputed sources, such as websites and blogs of SEO experts. If you take advice from a forum or any other website where user generated content is posted, then first evaluate what’s being said and whether other members agree with it or not.

Avoid Black Hat SEO techniques. These are methods that take advantage of loopholes in search engines systems and are mainly designed with the hope of rapidly getting a website to go up on a search engine, even though it wouldn’t normally “deserve” to get to that position. Using such methods will rapidly get your website penalized as search engines catch on to them and close the loopholes that were used. If you want to build a good reputation online for your site, you should seek out techniques that allow legitimate and long term growth, not tricks to try to get ahead too quickly.

We’ve taken a look at how useful having a virtual team of staff members can be for your online business. In theory, everything seems easy, as all you have to do is to find people who are capable of doing what you are looking for. In order for your business to run smoothly, there are a few last things you need to take into consideration. Remember, your reputation will largely depend on the quality of your workers, so these are things to take seriously.

Try Out Your Workers First

When you are recruiting new people, you need to assign them a small project for you to be able to see if their work is of good quality and whether they can deliver on what they promise. For example, if you need 100 articles written and have 5 people interested in doing the work, you will ask each of them to write 1 article. Then, you will split the project up and hire those that did the best job. So if you are left with 2 people who write really well, you will assign each of them 50 articles.

Avoid Getting Scammed

One mistake that people often make is to hire someone based only on work samples that they have provided. While they may be useful in guiding your choice, samples are definitely NOT the only thing you will want to consider. Think of it: anyone could grab someone else work and then claim it as their own. Another thing is all too common with article writers is people who can’t really write in decent English hire someone who can to write sample articles for them and then show it to their clients as examples of their own work. If you are not careful, you will soon realize the hard way that they actually have no clue as to how to write.

To avoid misunderstandings, be sure to tell the staff member exactly what needs to be done and by when you need the work completed. If you have found people on a forum or freelancing site, check their reputation, such as their feedback and the previous posts they made on the forum. If you see that all their posts are nothing but filler such as “Nice share” or “Yes, thanks for the info”, it is probable that they are just increasing their post count in the hopes of getting people to trust them.

Taking Things Further

One of the advantages of online business which I have repeated time and time again is that you have the potential to earn as much, or as little money as you want to. If you are satisfied with this making you only a few dollars a day, then that’s fine. But if you want to expand this into a full time business, it can be done as well. Some people have turned the ideas that I mentioned into an enterprise that earns in excess of six figures a year in profit. These people have started out in exactly the same way than you. All you need to expand is to get more staff and more customers who will pay for your services. If you manage the operation properly, you can definitely turn this into a great money earner.

If you are new to internet marketing, you may be in search of some reasonably priced traffic sources in order to send traffic to your sites and the offers that you promote. After all, if no one clicks on your links, your will not make any sales or earn any commissions from affiliate programs. There are many ways to get traffic to your site. Some are perfectly legitimate and will give you productive and targeted traffic that will result in conversions for you. Some other sites sell you what could be referred to as “garbage traffic”. Allow me to explain a bit more in detail:

Bulk traffic sites

Sites such as BuyHitsCheap offer to sell packages of thousands of visitors for very low prices. They also make claims that this is “real traffic” from “real visitors” and will result in “potential customers”. While the first two statements are technically true, the second one is quite unlikely to occur. Here’s why: these sites use “popunders”, which basically load the website in a popup that goes under the browser’s current window. Few people will actually bother to look at your site and most will simply find the popunder annoying and close it right away. So you definitely won’t get any customers. Now think logically for a second. They sell 10 000 visitors for $12.50. If you promote a product that gets you a $15 commission and you get a conversion rate of 1/2000 (which would be atrociously low in other means of advertising), you would earn $75, more than 5 times what you spent. If this was possible, a lot of us would be millionaires right now.

Paid to click sites

These sites often claim that they can get you “real visitors” at very low costs. Now make no mistake about it, the visitors will probably be quite real. But the problem is, they won’t really care about your site or your product. These sites pay their visitors a fraction of a cent in order to click on a link and keep your site open for a period of time, such as 15 to 30 seconds. Most people on these types of sites won’t even bother looking at the websites that they have clicked through to and will simply end up closing your site after the timer expires, so that they can move on to the next site and possibly end up earning a few pennies a day.

Traffic exchanges

Many of these services claim to give you free traffic and the ability to earn views to your site simply by looking at other people’s sites. Anyone with half a brain will know that this concept is quite flawed. No one will be interested to sign up for anything on your site, much less buy something from you. All they will want is to get visitors to THEIR site as well. Traffic exchanges are simply little more than a waste of time.

E-mail marketing can be extremely difficult. Even if your list contains nothing but high quality subscribers, getting them to read your e-mails can still be a challenge. Converting those readers into sales can be harder still. There are a few common mistakes you might be making that could be turning your readers away, and costing you sales.

Your subject line is your introduction to the reader. Your subscribers decide whether or not to read your e-mail based strictly on that subject line, so you should take some time to make sure it’s right. A lot of people use stiff, boring, or dull subjects for their e-mails, and that only hurts your chances of getting sales. For example, “HTML Programming Course Is Ready For You” is a bad subject line. It delivers the facts, but it doesn’t entice the customer at all. “Learn HTML 5 In Two Weeks!” delivers the message, and gets the customer excited about learning HTML 5 quickly. You can’t just deliver the facts, you have to entice the customer to open the e-mail. If they don’t open it, they won’t click any of your links.

A lot of people make the mistake of sending the same e-mails to everyone on their lists. The problem with that is that everyone on your list might not be interested in the same information. Consider breaking  your list down into several sublists. For example, existing customers should get a different set of e-mails than potential customers. That way, you can offer your potential customers different deals to entice them to sign up for your site, and make a purchase.

Another all too common mistake people make with e-mail marketing is using bad sales copy in their e-mails. You want to keep your e-mails light on text, and easy to read. A lengthy e-mail won’t get read, it will get skimmed, or ignored. Keep your e-mails clear and concise, and they’ll get a lot more attention in the long run.

A lot of people skip one very important step that should never be ignored. It’s important to test every e-mail for compatibility. Your readers are looking at your e-mails in a wide variety of ways, and you should be testing your e-mails to make sure each of your users can read them. What works in Outlook Express might not work in Gmail. Take the time to run a few tests, and it will help you retain your subscribers.

So remember, keep your e-mails clear, and enticing. If you present your e-mails the right way to the right people, you’ll see your sales increase in no time.

One of the most overlooked aspects of working online is hiring a contractor.

Let’s face it, not everyone can do everything online, and if they think they can they are joking themselves or they are taking way to much time to get work done because they are having to learn/struggle with every single aspect of web design, article writing, SEO, or some other area that is outside their expertise and they are spending way to much time on tasks that they are having to learn as they go or just take them a long time because of inexperience.

My niche is article writing. I was never found of writing in school, but I learned very quickly online that I was meant for it. I can write decently fast, not 90 words per minute, but I am able to get my ideas down on the “paper” as fast as I can think of them. I learned that when writing about subjects I enjoy I can write almost all day about them, hence why I write only on my niches I like to work on.

It could be different for you, maybe you love SEO, and playing the search engine game. That’s fine, it’s great even. Or maybe you are an awesome designer and just love creating useful art for websites, etc.

Whatever you do almost can be utilized online, however trying to learn everything else can be a mistake.

If you are a great web designer, why not hire a great copywriter to help you sell your services to potential clients instead of struggling to create website content to showcase your work?

If you are an SEO expert throw up a WordPress blog and hire a designer to create you a temple to showcase your SEO skills.

For me, as an article writer I am a bit SEO (but not all the way) with my keyword density, but I could hire both an SEO expert to get my on page SEO down and a designer to create my website for which I write.

Instead of trying to do things halfway, it is a lot easier and will save you a lot of time by simply hiring an outsourcer to do the work for you. Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of money, because if the contractor is worth their weight, they will provide you with returns long after the work is completed.