"Goodness is the only investment that never fails." - Henry David Thoreau
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Improve Your Online Small Business Profits
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Years ago a very effective TV commercial said “When E.F. Hutton talks . . . people listen.” E.F. Hutton was a stock brokerage firm. Implicit in the message was that everyone wants to know what the brokerage firm was doing.
Welcome to today E.F. Hutton – Google. For the past few weeks the buzz from internet marketers is all bemoaning the latest Google change!
What change?
Google changed their "Quality Score" standards. The change effects people who point their AdWords campaigns to simple sales pages and lead capture pages. These marketers have lost a lot of impressions and have seen escalating per click costs.
Whether or not you’ve ever heard the term "Quality Score" pay attention. You are about to learn a very important business lesson. I just hope you haven’t learned this lesson the hard way.
Your business should always have multiple sources of revenue and business services necessary to stay in operation. The more the better.
A man I once heard of created a product. His only customer was Sears. The first year he made a killing. What do you suppose Sears did the following year? Drastically dropped the price they would pay. (Sears wanted to make a killing.) Could this man say no? He was out of business in two years.
This lesson is directly applicable to online marketers and the current Google saga. You need multiple sources of traffic. The more the better.
This principle holds true for email marketers as well. You should always have in place several sources for generating leads to your business.
What sources are available to email marketers to maintain a continuous stream of leads?
Let’s review 5 lead generation strategies:
1) Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
(Yes, I know you didn’t expect me to start with this;-)
However, running pay-per-click ads and driving traffic to a lead opt in page works. If you’ve been using Google AdWords as your only source of traffic your first step is to branch out.
Run pay-per-click campaigns with Yahoo! and MSN and other smaller search engines.
You may also want to continue to work with Google AdWords. The reports I’ve read indicate that strategies exist to use Google AdWords and drive low cost traffic to your lead generation pages.
The recommendations boil down to more of the same advice. You need content on your site. Lots of it. The content will generate traffic in a number of ways beyond AdWords.
I'll discuss this traffic in a minute. First though, I'll highlight some test results from the report "The Google Slap . . . And How To Slap Back" by Dan Raine. You can access this report for free at –
http://wuranga.com/reports/googleslap/
The report’s initial test findings show if you want to continue to use Google Adwords to drive traffic to a lead capture page you need to change your site a bit. Here are the updates he recommends –
* Add content to your site and link to a content page from the landing page. Sites with considerable content pages have been less effected by the Google AdWords change.
* Add a Privacy Policy page and Contact Us page to your site and link to these pages from the landing page.
* Build a Site Map and link to all your content pages from the site map. In addition, the content page you’ve linked to from the landing page, should link to the site map.
* Acquire incoming links to your site. For ideas on how to do this see the article from our last issue:
Everything You Need to Know About Linking
The goal of these updates is to improve the quality of your site for Google’s visiting bots. If you appease the bots by showing you have a quality site with lots of content, i.e. this is the reason you link to content from the landing page, your site is more likely to make the cut.
2) Create content
Having content available like articles, reports, ebooks, survey statistics, commentary, etc. will get you subscribers. It helps with Google AdWords and it helps pull in subscribers in the following ways:
a) Through your web site.
Content rich web sites rank well in organic search engine listings. Through the placement of your site in the search engines you will attract visitors who subscribe to your list.
Content rich sites are also more likely to obtain incoming links from outside sites. These links will bring in traffic directly who then subscribe to your list and the links help with search engine position.
b) Syndicate your content to others.
If your site does not have much traffic, then find sites that do have traffic. Offer your content to these sites for free so long as they agree to include your tag line. In your tag line be sure to have instructions on how to subscribe to your list. Who can you syndicate your content to:
* Look for email publications, such as DEMC. A good source to look for ezine is the Directory of Ezines.
* Look for article directories, such as IdeaMarketers
* Look for businesses not in competition with your own who would appreciate valuable content.
3) Join Co-registration networks
Co-registration occurs when visitors on your site sign-up to your list and they then are shown offers of other businesses. These visitors can then check-off if they’d like to get email from one or more of the other businesses.
When you are part of a co-registration network every time one of your site visitors sees the co-registration form, you then get your offer shown on one of the other businesses’ sites. Studies show that over 60% of marketers say co-registration leads are well worth acquiring.
(If you need a co-registration network to join, be sure to consider our own SendFree.com. SendFree has over 15,000 members as part of our network. Learn more at - http://www.sendfree.com/newexchange.htm
4) Do Joint Ventures
Joint Ventures are similar to co-registration networks in that they allow you to capitalize on the traffic of others.
If you agree to provide a product / service or resource to another businesses’ customers, that business will give you access to their prospects and customers. You typically structure a joint venture to pay a large percentage of all sales to the other business. The key with the joint venture is to drive the traffic from your promotion to a lead capture landing page on your site so you can build your list.
Once the joint venture promotion is complete you pay your joint venture partner. However, you now have a quality list you created from the joint venture promotion that you can promote additional offers to.
If you are unable to attract joint venture partners another option available is to purchase advertising to others’ email lists. Again, be sure to use a lead capture landing page with your promotion so you build your own list.
5) Purchase Leads
Yes, you can purchase leads to grow your list. The key to buying leads is to make sure the leads register for your specific offer. A lead that signs-up to receive more information from you can be added to your email list and followed-up with just as if he/she signed up on your web site.
You essentially want to buy co-registration leads. When you buy co-registration leads you get the advantage of getting quality leads without having to be part of a co-registration network.
If you’d like purchase your own list of responsive co-registration leads check out our services at CustomLead.com.
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The above are 5 tactics that will build your list. If you are only using one of these 5 methods it’s time to re-evaluate your marketing plan. You do not want to be caught as some marketers were relying on just one source of traffic. If you read some of the Google AdWords horror stories you see how easily it can shut your business down.
Good Luck With Your List Building!
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Abbie Drew
DEMC Editor
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