In our last article, we took a look at how you can start an internet home business by selling a skill that you have, or performing a service like writing or babysitting. In this article on Internet Home Business Success Tips, we’ll take a look at the other side of the internet home business success coin – selling actual products. The decision of how you will sell your products will play a key part in developing your Internet marketing strategy.

Getting Prepared

Unlike selling services and applying your skills to make money from home, selling an actual product requires a little bit more planning. This is because in order to make something, you have to have something! Even if you plan on selling baked goods at the local farmer’s market, you’re still going to need a variety of baking supplies.

With this in mind, begin keeping a list of all of the tasks that you will need. While the way that you organize your list is up to you, we recommend that it contain at least the following for each ingredient or item: the name of the item, the quantity or length of the item needed, and how much it costs per unit. As you develop your list, keep an eye on your running expense total, because in order to make money, you’re going to have to charge more money than it item cost you to make.

Lists to Help Cut Costs

This means that while you can use high-quality ingredients and items in your process, you should do so as inexpensively as possible. Even small but unnecessary additions can quickly pile up in expenses and losses.

Repeat this process for each item that you plan to attempt to sell from home. Once you have completed a series of lists for each item, determine how much it will cost you to run an initial batch of the item with average prices. In our next article on internet home business success tips, we’ll be going over exactly what to do with these lists.

One of the most difficult things about building an email list is that the raw number of your subscribers isn’t the most important part – it’s how many of those subscribers actually visit your website and purchase your products. If you have 10,000 subscribers, but only one or two of them actually clicks links in your emails and visits your websites, then what’s the point? In this article, we’ll focus on a couple of ways to make sure that all of your subscribers are quality contenders.

Only Email People That Want Email

While we’ve gone over this point in previous articles, it’s pretty key when building an email list. Simply put, don’t send emails or add email addresses of people that haven’t specifically asked to be a part of your email list. This way, you can be sure that every person that sees your emails is actually interested in your message, and is much more likely to click links and actually visit your website.

Provide as Many Special Offers as You Can Afford

The more frequently and the better your special offers, the more likely your subscribers are to actually click on the links and purchase items or services. However, you certainly shouldn’t be offering discounts so deep that you’re actually losing money. While this can be an effective way to get subscribers early on, it’s a habit that should be phased out as quickly as possible. As always, keep in mind that you’re here to make money – not lose it.

When building your email list, make sure that you’re giving people great reasons to be a part of it. Send them unique content, offer exclusive and email list-only deals, or any number of great reasons to subscribe. By following the mantra of, “Only send an email that I would want to receive,” you’re practically guaranteed to only send great emails that people will look forward to receiving. So long as you continue to practice great email list habits, your Internet marketing strategy is bound to succeed.

Since the dawn of snail mail marketing, one of the best ways to find a great deal from a business is to be a part of their mailing campaigns.  Often, the only way to get the best deals and coupons are if you’re a part of a list like this.  With the Internet and the transition to email marketing lists, this has not changed – and you should be on board. These types of offers are important to be aware of when learning how to build an email list, and a key part of any Internet marketing strategy.

Promotions as Signup Incentive

One of the best ways to encourage people to sign up for your email list is to offer a variety of incentives for doing so.  For example, you could offer a 10% off their first order coupon, or explain that there will be exclusive coupons and discounts found only in your emails.  This can be a great way to not only build an email list for your website, but also to keep traffic to your website high.

Giveaways as a Reason to Keep Getting Your Emails

One of the problems that some email marketing campaigns have is that they don’t seem to offer much to their subscribers.  Eventually, many people will grow tired of this and request to be removed from email lists.  You can avoid this by having contests in your emails.  An easy way to handle a contest like this is to provide a link inside of your email to a contest form.  It would be best if you consulted a program designed to build mass-market emails before you sent this, but if you’re comfortable writing the code yourself, then jump on it.

By giving people a great reason to sign up and stay on board of your email lists, you will ensure not only the longevity of their presence, but also drive even more traffic to your website.

Regardless of how great you think your emails and your website are and how much you believe everyone in the world will want to view them, the simple truth of the matter is that some people will not.  It’s possible that even those people that signed up for it on their own will decide, in the future, that being on your list is just not for them.  While this can be disheartening, it’s important to allow for them to remove themselves from your list rather than continuing to send them unwanted emails. While difficult, this is an important lesson to learn when finding out how to build email lists. If your Internet marketing strategy depends on a large and active email list, then opt-outs are critical.

Provide a Opt-Out Link in Every Email

In every email you send, you should include a link that will allow them to exit your email list.  You can place this just about anywhere you like, but these are generally placed at the very bottom of sent emails.  However, that doesn’t mean the link should be hard to find.  This link should always take readers directly to your website, where all they have to do is enter their email address to have themselves removed from your list.  Anything short of this is dishonest and best avoided whenever possible.

Ask for Addition Details and Feedback

Once your soon-to-be former subscribers get to the link you have provided to exit your email list, you should create a form that allows them to explain why they no longer wish to receive emails from you.  This can be either a blank box or a series of options.  You are much more likely to actually receive feedback if you allow them to simply click their reason, but you may also not be getting their actual reasoning, so make sure to allow them to fill that reason in regardless.

The main idea behind placing this feedback form is so that you yourself can figure out why people don’t want to receive your emails, and how you can fix this problem.  While you have probably lost that email address forever, you can help to retain those you still have.

Although nobody likes losing email addresses from their list, and this may even seem like the opposite of building an email list, it is a necessary function if you wish to keep your email list robust.  As an added benefit, it only makes you look more honest and like a legitimate business person.

When many people receive unsolicited marketing snail mail, they become irritated – not only did they not ask for the mail, but they also didn’t give away their address.  This can be even more galling if their names are printed on the marketing mail!  These feelings of revulsion and disgust are things that should be avoided at all times if you want your emails sent as a part of building your email list to go over well.  Below, we’ll go over a key method of ensuring this doesn’t happen: a privacy guarantee, and why it can mean only good things for your Internet Home Business.

What a Privacy Guarantee Means

A privacy guarantee is fairly self-explanatory: it guarantees privacy.  This means that you won’t give away your subscribers name, email address, or any other personal information.

If you wish to follow this tact, you need to be aware that while you may be asked by solicitors for your email list in exchange for money, you must never give that list away.  A privacy guarantee is one of the best ways to assure your subscribers that their personal information is safe, and those websites that lack a guarantee like this will have far fewer subscribers on their email list than those that don’t.

What a Privacy Guarantee Does

A privacy guarantee affixed to your email list signup form will assure your potential subscribers that their data and personal information is safe with you.  This will mean that they are far more likely to sign up for your email list, which will directly translate into you making more money.  How?  Simply put, if your message is reaching more interested eyes, then more people will click through to your website.

While it isn’t absolutely necessary to have a guarantee like this next to your email signup form, it’s a great idea to help you build your email list.  However, if you are planning on selling these email addresses, then you probably shouldn’t even bother placing a guarantee like this.

If you’re working steadily towards building a respectable and profitable email list, you’re probably already using a couple of tools to make the process easier.  For example, you’re probably not sending those emails out to one person at a time, right?  In the same way that compiling a large carbon copy list can drastically improve your email marketing speed, some of the tools below can drastically improve your efficiency and profitability when learning how to build an email list.

Campaign Monitoring

Although you don’t necessarily have to use this particular version of an email campaign monitoring tool, we’ve found that AWeber is the most intuitive and easiest to use of the bunch.  Capable of sending standard email newsletters, generating signup forms on your website, creating autoresponders, and turning your blog’s RSS feed into an email, AWeber can do just about everything.  However, the one thing that AWeber has that is absolutely critical is a built-in analytics function, which will allow you to see just how many people are clicking the links you embed into your emails.

Easy Email Customization

Another great tool that has found a lot of success in recent years is Bronto.  While it functions similarly to AWeber and many other email list tools, Bronto really stands out due to its functionality with spreadsheets and WYSIWYG email editing.  What this means is that you can export all of your data to an easy-to-use spreadsheet format (Excel), and that you can create beautiful emails to send out using a painless and straightforward editor.

While there are many, many more tools out there, we have found these two to be among the best due to their range of options and flexibility, and they can make conducting your Internet marketing strategy much more efficient.  While it’s generally best to pick one tool and to stick with it, playing around with a variety of them is in your best interest in order to find the one that best suits the needs of your business’ email list.

Sometimes, when both building and learning how to build an email list, you’re going to need help.  You might have a decent number of web hits, but for whatever reason, people just aren’t signing up for your email list.  One of the ways that you can change this is by working with other email marketers, and combining your email lists.

Stick to Your Niche

The fact that many email marketers have access to tremendous numbers of email addresses does not mean that you should be emailing all of them.  In fact, this is probably a bad idea – sending unsolicited, unwanted email to people is a surefire way to make sure that they never visit your website.  However, if another website in your target demographic has an established and voluntary email list they are willing to share with you, then you should definitely take advantage of it.

Ask Other Websites for Opt-In Links

When your readers sign up for email lists on other websites, there are very often options to receive offers from similar vendors.  Whenever signing up for an account with a website like Amazon, their subscribers are offered a wide variety of partner email list offers, and you can work with other websites in your niche to do just this.  This works especially well if you are willing to allow your visitors to sign up for the website of your partners as well.

Actual Paid Email Lists

It’s also possible to buy large lists of email addresses from a variety of places on the web.  However, this method should probably best be avoided – simply put, it’s spam.  Because of this, and because of the questionable legality of spamming these days, we will not be providing the names of any services you can use to this end.  That said, it’s important to note that this is always an option.

Regardless of how you go about building your email list, having partners that help you along in the process is a great idea.  Each of you will directly benefit from the cooperation, and just because you’re competing with each other certainly doesn’t mean that you won’t both be getting web hits. On occasions like these, it’s best to cooperate with other web administrators as part of your Internet Home Business.

Email lists are an evolution of one of the oldest and most successful methods of marketing and making money around on the Internet.  Descending directly from snail mail marketing lists, email lists retain all of the advantages of a snail mail list, like direct contact with customers and a high level of exposure, as well as dramatically cutting down the costs.  Below, we’ll go over how to build an email list in great detail, and why it can be a critical part of any Internet marketing strategy.

Huge Audience Capability …

When you’re relying on your website or a product sold via your website, or even just trying to sell a product, an email list is one of the best ways to reach a very large number of people with a minimum of effort and expense.  By participating with other people using email lists, having your subscribers sign up to email lists, or even just buying large lists of email addresses from distributors, you’ll get your message across like never before.

In future articles, we’ll go over the various things you should and should not do with an email list, but for now, there’s just one thing you need to be aware of: to get to as many people as possible, you need a large email list.

… At A Tiny Cost

Building an email list can actually be very inexpensive, and in many cases, it can cost you nothing except for the server space and your time.  While there are many different ways that you can build your email list, most of them are very reasonably priced.

Unlike that old behemoth of generating massive revenue and in-store traffic, you will never actually have to pay any shipping or postage fees to send out emails to thousands, if not millions, of people.

While there are a great many more advantages to building an email list, these are the two biggest ones.  And could there possibly be anything better for your business than generating huge revenue and traffic while costing you almost nothing?

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Just as YouTube is the major player in video content on the Internet right now, social networking websites are the major player in generating web traffic and grabbing the attention of people.  As explained in our other articles on making money with YouTube, the name of the game is web traffic.  If most of the web traffic and attention of people lies with social networking, then that’s where you should be too.

What Kind of Videos to Post

Broadly speaking, you’re going to want to showcase your best videos on those networks in which you have the broadest audience.  This, obviously, is going to vary based on your individual social networking status.  However, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Reddit are rather large right now, and they are great places to start.  Ideally, your videos should be clever, funny, or interesting, and if you’re trying to generate traffic to your website, they need to provide some sort of hook to get people heading to your blog or website.  This hook can be just about anything, but it should focus on creating a need for the viewer to visit your blog or website.

Where to Post Videos

As explained above, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Stumble Upon are all great places to start, and each has its own advantages.  Facebook tends to be about people sharing their days and feelings with each other, and if you can find a way to shoehorn your video content directly into impacting people’s lives, then great.  Twitter has such a broad variety of uses that you can tailor your content to just about any medium to find success there.  Alternatively, Stumble Upon and Reddit are link-sharing websites, so provided that your video is catchy, it should do quite well there.

Above all else, make sure to spread your message far and wide.  Simply put, placing your video up just on Facebook for your Internet marketing strategy won’t do you any good if you have only thirty followers.  Regardless of the fact that new accounts will start off with very few initial viewers, if you are able to consistently generate great content, this number will balloon and take off.  Just like with your blog, getting more people paying attention to you is the secret to making money on YouTube.

Happy Friday Everyone!

Today I’d like to take a second and record another LIVE ANSWER to one of YOUR Questions!

Today’s question comes from Rod.

Rod says:
“Devon,

Just wanted to hear your comment about a statement I received from another ‘Internet Marketer’ about 98% of the ‘stuff’ I receive daily e-mail-wise.

“If someone promises you 500/day by this weekend, they are full of bull donkey. If someone promises to share their secret, super duper, never before been revealed million maker, it’s rehashed rubbish at best.”

It’s my desire to earn money online. I am growing weary of the so-called ‘Fluff’ other marketers are sending to me.”

Check Out My Answer Here:

So…

Hopefully you can identify with Rod’s question and hopefully my answer helps you deal with this issue

YES, I know that the amount of hype in the internet marketing industry gets overwhelming. But just remember 2 things

1. Hype sells…so (to a certain degree) marketers will ALWAYS continue to use it. Just accept this fact and don’t lose any sleep over it!
2. No matter how good the offer sounds, you MUST put in the effort! This assumes of course that the product isn’t pure garbage!

Also..

Be sure to check out the #1 Program For Internet Marketing Beginners ==> CLICK HERE

And…

Feel free to leave a comment below and tell us what you think…

To YOUR Success,
Devon Brown