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Web Development

Use Opt-In E-mail Newsletters to Drive Traffic

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Despite the scourge of spam and viruses that have hit e-mail users in the past years, e-mail remains the killer application. E-mail newsletters are undeniably powerful tools to build audience and encourage real relationships between you and your site visitors and customers.

The key to avoiding guerrilla tactics in e-mail advertising is to make all e-mail newsletters optional. You will have people opt in mostly via your Web site, which means they have to get to your Web site in the first place. Once visitors do opt in, you can start building a personal mailing list, which in turn encourages return visits to your site.

Here are numerous directories to which you can post announcements about new e-mail lists. These directories can be helpful because they grant a means of getting interested readers and promoters collectively.

Some of the vital factors to deliberate when initiating opt-in e-mail newsletters are as follows:

• What are the specific results you want from the e-mail? (Sales? More eyes on your site?)
• Do you want to offer HTML e-mail? Many e-mail experts say that HTML e-mail is the only way to go, but HTML e-mail may be problematic or undesirable for certain audiences.
• What kind of content are you vacant to offer (such as articles, reviews of products, tips and tricks, interviews, and polls)?
• How long will your newsletter be? Most e-mail experts say that keeping content small and to the point wins the day.
• How often will you send the newsletter out to subscribers?

Most e-mail newsletter services offer reasonably priced help for administration HTML versus text e-mail, tracking e-mail responses, data, demographics, and additional helpful tools that you can use to increase your awareness of how well your e-mail campaign is working.

Experts do recommend that you waste time making a plot to start e-mail newsletters, and also build in a way to assess how effective your plot is working. This way, you can adjust to the needs of your audience as time goes on.

Generally speaking, you must send your e-mails during the week. Some studies recommend that most people open newsletters between Tuesday and Thursday. While weekends are often considered terrible era to send newsletters, it really will depend upon your audience. If you are selling sports products, movies, or other recreational products, the weekend might be the perfect time to grab some attention.

I have an opt-in newsletter on my site, and I have several thousand people on that list. One of the things I do regularly is to focus special promotions and giveaways to those readers as a means of rewarding their ongoing loyalty and interest in my work. Figure not more than shows a significant spike in site visits after a newsletter campaign.

Deliberate Affiliate Programs

If it’s appropriate for your site, you may wish to deliberate affiliate programs. Amazon. com offers the most well-known of these programs. Here’s how affiliate programs work. You start coded links on your own site of recommended products, sign up for the affiliate program to get the various coded links you’llneed, and then you will receive a percentage of money from any affiliate sales.

The better you manage to drive people to hold products via your affiliate program, the more money you can make.

For example, for computer book authors, affiliate programs can make a lot of sense. All books I’ve written can be linked from my site to an affiliate such as Amazon. Therefore, not only do I get the royalties I’mdue from each sale, but I also make a percentage, boosting my earnings a small bit. Here are pros and cons to affiliate programs, just as with anything. I used to manage an affiliate program on my Web site, but eventually took it off because I was getting far too many queries personally. Amazon is better equipped to grant wide-scale customer benefit and keep information up-to-date than I am without a concentrated effort. For me, the cons outweighed the pros.

Table not more than shows some of the pros and cons to deliberate before jumping into an affiliate program.

Pros	Cons
You have very small overhead in day-to-day management of business logistics and inventory	No hands-on control over product quality, shipping and delivery, and other logistics, yet you may be held accountable by your clients anyway
You can focus on one thing—marketing your product via your Web site	Affiliates do not grant any marketing help for the most part. You have to sell the commodities. So, except you are a born salesperson or have a excellent one on your team, an affiliate program might not be in your best interest
You’ll learn a lot about selling products online! This makes affiliate programs a excellent way for many folks to get ongoing in e-commerce	You may become so locked in to the culture curve caught up with administration your program and Web site that you neglect other vital aspects of Web site and product promotion
You make money	You could make more money in some instances by not relying on an affiliate, who may take as much of 50 percent of your yucky sales
You have autonomy to design and develop your site and show your products as you see fit. If you do this very well, you may end up with fantastic leverage against your competitors	You are relying on another company to pay you. Payments can take time, rates can change, and you don’t have much recourse apart from to stop the affiliate program

The most vital issue is to be sure the affiliate program with which you are working is on the up-and-up. Check with other people who have used the benefit, and you can even find out everywhere the company resides, whether it is licensed, and so on.

You may be able to check with the local consumer office or chamber of commerce to see if any complaints have been lodged against the company.