9 Techniques to Writing Interesting Email

People do not want to be bored with your content. It is very important that you write your emails from the heart and in a manner that is not boring. People do not want to get an email that sounds like it was spit out of a robots mouth each week, so add a personal touch to your emails. Here are some ideas of things you can communicate with your list to achieve great results:

1. Holiday Celebrations
   Many people like to celebrate holidays, and even more people spend money during these holiday periods. What about sending your dieting list a New Years Celebration regarding a resolution about losing weight. How about reminding your dating list that you are thinking of them on Valentine’s day? Keep the line of communication open and take advantage of every holiday as possible. Emotional connections are easiest during these times of the year.
2. Industry News / Insight
   You can obtain industry news quite easily by doing a simple search within Google News or picking up the latest magazine or newspaper that would contain industry-related information. If you can continually deliver current information to your list, they will be inclined to open up your emails regularly, thus improving your chances of more conversions.
3. Related Industry Info
   People that are interested in one thing are probably interested in many similar things. People who are interested in dog training dogs are likely interested in dog supplies. People who are interested in dieting may also be interested in quitting smoking. People interested in dating may also be interested in looking better. There are many connections that you can make between different industries and this gives you the ability to cross-promote to your lists. Do not limit your options!
4. Expert Interviews
   Lining up Interviews with industry experts can be a great way to increase your credibility with your list. People love to learn information from experts. Other than the time it takes to line up an interview, the work on your part is very little. Many experts like to get their name out to as many people as possible and would be more than happy to do text, audio, or video interview for you.
5. Personal Testimonials/Review
   Ready to recommend a product/service to your list? Give them some value and a reason to take a further look into what you are offering. There is nothing better than giving a candid review of a product, create a short little review page that outlines what you liked and did not like, or even put up a video review for your list to take a look at. The personal approach will be well received by your subscribers and they will be much more inclined to buy from you if you are honest and not overly “salesy”.
6. Reach Out by Asking a Question
   Remember, often times people will see you as an imaginary figure and do not see that there is a real person behind the email. If you open a line of communication with your lists, it will give them the opportunity to contact you and will give you the opportunity to open up the dialogue with your potential customers. This will benefit you in many ways. If someone contacts you they are interested and are usually the easiest people to convert into paying customers. You will also gain valuable insight into the things that your consumers are looking for and you can in turn use this information as part of your marketing campaigns.
7. Tips & Techniques
   People love to receive free tips & techniques, especially if they contain good information. If you prepare a “Top 10” list of industry tips, your list will be very responsive. How about delivering the Top 10 ways to create, improve, enhance, start, stop, remove, prevent, choose, select, run, reduce, make ___________.” This should give you ample ideas to get up and running with a Top 10 list.
8. Guides
   Whip together a free guide or course and your list will love you! Looking for some information on what you could write on, just look through some of the article engines like ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com, take a few articles and put them together, re-write the content, and package it in a PDF. This is a great way to offer bonuses to your customers as well.
9. Competition Hack
   Most people that would sign-up to your list have industry intelligence. By this we mean that they have an understanding of other products and chances are they have tried some of the other ones before. When a product has a lot of hype, it will be on people’s minds when they are contemplating buying yours. If you can give them reasons to buy yours instead with a real (and fair) comparison, you are likely to earn yourself a customer. Worst case scenario is that you earn a commission from the other product if they offer an affiliate program.
   
   

Profiting with Your Article

Now we are going to answer the big question – “How do I make money article marketing?” Some of you may already have article marketing experience and will know the answer. But for those who are new to the process we are going to suggest four different methods of generating value from an article:

1. Promote affiliate product directly
   
   Sending your traffic directly to an affiliate URL is one of the most commonly used techniques associated with article marketing. You simply write a review, testimonial, or story about a product and link to the affiliate URL within or at the bottom of the article. How well your article converts to sales will depend on how captivating it is. Note that not all article engines will let you "direct link" to the merchant pages. In situations where a direct link is not allowed, you will need to create a webpage to send your traffic to.
   
   
2. Send them to your own product website
   
   If you own your own product you will obviously want to create articles to drive additional traffic to your website. You could write an unbiased review, an article full of useful information, or an article on a particular subject relevant to your product. If you have a product that shows people how to make money on eBay, you may want to write an article outlining the steps that someone should take to become successful on eBay, or some tips on how to set up an eBay account.
   
   
3. Send them to a squeeze page
   
   If you have a squeeze page, you may want to drive your article traffic to it. You can do this by writing articles that would attract visitors who would be interested in your mailing list, and then redirect them to your squeeze page. Make sure your offer is worthwhile or people will not subscribe to your list. Magazines, newsletters, reports, guides, and books are great giveaways.
   
   
4. Send them to a review site
   
   In the same way as you promote an affiliate product, you can write articles about particular products that you are comparing on your website and then send the visitors to your review website. By the time they get to your website they will be interested in one or several of the products and will be more likely to buy. If you have five products on your review site, you could write an article about each of them.

The "Side Job" Technique

If you look around the Internet it is very apparent that many (if not most) companies out there are lacking something on their website or are not up to par with the advertising techniques. It's very likely they are aware of their shortcomings and would be more than happy to get help if someone offered their services.

Many businesses do not know how to get their company website to show up within the natural search engines. You could offer your services in exchange for some cash. There are also a lot of companies that do not know how to create relevant advertising campaigns, or the importance of having multiple landing pages. There are a TON of companies that have loads of spelling mistakes on their sites! Etc..etc..

You can offer to help these companies with their graphics, site navigation, proof-read/editing, marketing etc. Many people will jump at this offer because they have been “meaning to” get it done, but haven’t had the time or resources (but often have the money). This is also a great way to create a business relationship and could easily result in long-term income.

If you’re browsing a website and find a spelling mistake or grammatical error, send the owner a quick email saying that you’ll proof-read their sales page for $25. Now that’s easy cash!

We have had people contact us in the past to do jobs such as these and have been willing to pay them. Don’t think that just because you do not own a big consulting company or a web design firm companies will not take you on board. It is quite the opposite actually, especially if the price is right. They are often used to being “taken to the cleaners” and overcharged for such services.

Selling T-Shirts (and other items)

Selling shirts… that is right. There are many people out there making a full-time living online simply creating t-shirt designs. There are now sites available to the public such as Cafépress and Zazzle that allow you to open up your own t-shirt store and create your own unique t-shirts.

What you can do is pick a hot topic such as a political campaign, a hot news event, or a world event that is taking place and create funny, motivating, rude, or just cool shirts with a message that is highly relevant to the subject matter. You can then promote your t-shirt and other items via forums, a blog, your web page, or the marketplace within Cafepress or Zazzle and earn money on each item you sell. People will be very inclined to buy these for gifts, pranks, or timeless items.

Here are some sites that you should use to get started:

Cafepress.com
Zazzle.com

You do not need a huge budget in order to make money online, and quite often you are better off learning marketing using free techniques before you move into PPC marketing. Use the strategies within this tutorial to start earning money online today!

Choosing a Direction

This is probably the most difficult decision starting out as an Internet marketer, so please pay full attention here. You have now been exposed to many Internet marketing techniques, some of them paid, some of them free. You do not need to know all of these in order to succeed. Actually, if you are just starting out, it is better that you don’t.

Choose your direction. We recommend that if you have a limited budget that you start off by becoming an article marketer. This is probably the best free technique, and requires much less work than creating 100’s of web pages that are SEO friendly. Writing articles will give you a solid understanding of different niches, how to find niches, copywriting skills, and how to target different demographics & audiences. These are all essential Internet marketing skills and can be incorporated into any Internet marketing technique.

If you do have a budget available to invest into getting your business up and running, you may want to start off with PPC marketing. This will allow you to get instant results as you can dictate exactly where your ads are in the search engines, what your web pages look like, and what keywords your ads will show up under in the search results. Is this more risky? Well, the fact that you have to outlay your own money for advertising is the only risky part. If you follow the techniques that we outline in the coming chapters focusing on consumer research, marketing, and the use of landing pages, you will be well on your way to creating a successful PPC campaign. The biggest risk involved with PPC is for people who RUSH into things before they know what they are doing. Take your time to learn PPC marketing techniques before you even consider writing your first ad!

It is much better off to become an expert at one thing than to be a “jack of all trades” within the Internet marketing realm, especially if you are just getting started. We like to use the “doctor” analogy for this.

There are many different types of doctors in the world, and guess what doctors make the most money? Specialists! If you become a brain surgeon or an anesthesiologist you will make much more money than a general practitioner. The same goes for Internet marketing. It is much better to be great at one thing (such as Google Adwords or article marketing), then to just “ok” in both.

So, as a rule of thumb become good at one thing before you become good at many.

The same goes for your marketing campaigns. Before you tackle multiple industries, figure out how to create a successful campaign within one. It is easy to duplicate campaigns once you have created one, but it is difficult to become successful if you spread your resources thin by setting up many average or failing campaigns. Think about it. If you try to be the Wal-Mart of the online world (the generalist), then you are going to need a budget like Wal-Mart. Start with a focus, and diversify once you have mastered one thing. Diversification can be very harmful if you are not ready for it just yet!

Now here is the cool part. If you fail at the first thing, you can always move onto something else. There are endless amounts of opportunity and if one thing does not work out, the next one might. Everything you do in your “online career” should be considered a learning experience, especially failure as it is very important to the success of any business. Thomas Edison failed 1000’s of times while inventing the light bulb before he got a working prototype! We (Kyle & Carson) have also experienced many failures along the way, but this made us better marketers.

Remember, if you become good at one thing, other Internet marketing strategies will come to you easily. Look at athletes; most of them are very good at more than one sport, even though they specialize in ONE. The same goes for marketers.

We started off by using strictly PPC techniques, and then evolved into much more diverse marketers. Now have a very complex understanding of Internet marketing, and implement almost every Internet marketing tactic you can think of, but we started out by specializing in one thing… PPC marketing.

Internet Marketing Basics

Introduction

Well, before we start we should introduce ourselves and the way we approach Internet marketing. Putting things into perspective like this will help you because you will discover that you are no different than us and success within Internet marketing is 100% possible by everyone at Wealthy Affiliate! Our names are Kyle and Carson and we have been Internet marketers since 2002. We first started out in the Internet marketing (IM) industry because we were starving students taking computer science at school! We needed to make some money in our spare time, but with homework and labs at school we didn’t have the time to get a job. At that point, we decided to use the skills that we had and do some research into making money online. We quickly figured out how it was possible to make money online without having your own product. Even better, we found out that we didn’t necessarily need a website.

Now let's go forward a few years to the present. We're now full-time Internet marketers and have developed a lot of our own techniques. We went to college together and started at about the same time, and now have decided to merge our talents and form our own company and help others build successful businesses online.

We started WealthyAffiliate.com (WA) because we wanted to provide something that no other site offers. At WA you have access to support from us as well as the opportunity to "mingle" with other aspiring and very successful Internet marketers. Some members here are making upwards of $3000/day, and guess what, they started with nothing! We are not saying you will get to this level, however it is possible if you set this as your goal. We continue to build new resources, tools, and services into Wealthy Affiliate so everything you need to run a business online can be found here!

Without coaching of some sort, it could take years and thousands of wasted dollars to "see the light", and in most cases this is too long to wait. Internet marketing sounds like a great idea, but unless you know what you are doing it can be very easy to waste money. This is what happens to many people. Not you though - because here at WA you’re in safe hands!

Now that you know more about us and our motives in creating Wealthy Affiliate, we’re going to describe what Internet marketing is and help you understand many of the concepts and processes involved.

Internet Marketing Background

What is Internet marketing? IM has been around for years (since 1996), but has recently gained more exposure because of the huge opportunity it provides for anyone who wants to start an online business. People like you and us! If you could make some money from the comfort of your home, perhaps just bring in a little bit extra that would help pay the bills, this would be great wouldn't it? Internet marketing allows you to do this. IM is a growing occupation as more and more people take it up full time and earn $100,000's every year advertising other people’s products and services online. The concept is similar to any regular job. You go to work and make money for the company that you work for. It’s exactly the same with IM, but you are your own boss, you get to choose your own hours, work as much (or as little) as you want to, and the company you are working for is yourself. This way you get to keep all the money and not just make someone else rich!

There are 10,000's of companies online that are willing to pay you a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to the websites promoting their products and services. To do this you join the "affiliate programs" run by these companies. Your job as an "affiliate" is to align online consumers with the products that they are looking for. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic opportunity because billions of dollars are spent online each year and a large percentage of that goes to affiliates.

Internet marketing is a broad term and there are many different ways of making money online. Some methods are free, some are paid, some require more work, some require less; but the fact of the matter is that anyone can make money online and there are hundreds of different ways you can accomplish this. The majority of these methods are covered here at Wealthy Affiliate and, as we learn of new opportunities online, we will continue to reveal them to our members.

Your office is the Internet, and you can do whatever your mind will allow you to! There are unlimited opportunities and the amount of money you can make within the Internet marketing world is endless.

Affiliates

We're sure you’ve heard the term "Affiliate" before and many of you probably know what it means, but for those who don't we are going to explain exactly what an affiliate is.

In the Internet marketing world, you will likely take on the role of an Affiliate unless you own a product, in which case you would be called the Merchant. Affiliates and merchants have a direct relationship and it is very important that the relationship is a good one. The term "affiliate" stems from the fact that you are "affiliated" with a company, and are working for them, though you don’t usually have a contract. At any one tim

e, you may be working as an affiliate for many companies, promoting a large number of different products.

Affiliates work for merchants by bringing customers to the merchant’s front door (in this case the website) and earning money in the process. If you are an affiliate of a company and you send a visitor to the merchant website through your special link, you are now eligible to be credited for anything that the visitor buys while at the merchant website. When a visitor buys something, the merchant will pay you a commission ...sometimes up to 75% of what the item costs. So, it’s simple; as an affiliate, it is your job to get web surfers (traffic) to visit the merchant site.

Why are affiliates important to merchants? If y

ou are a merchant and have a product that you want to sell online, you may not have the expertise to advertise the product online, so you have partnerships with affiliates who will do this for you. You pay your affiliates a percentage for every sale that they generate. As a merchant, you’ll get less overall return on investment (ROI), but you will reach potential customers you wouldn’t have been able to attract otherwise. Many companies rely completely on their affiliates to bring them business and they are more than happy to pay them for that service.

The relationship between affiliate and merchant i

s very important. As a merchant, you must provide your affiliates with as much support and as many promotional resources as you can to help them publicize your product. You must also be sure to send out your payments on time. The fastest way to lose affiliates is to not pay on time.

Advertising

Now you know what it means to be an affiliate and how an affiliate relates to a merchant. Since you are likely to start your business as an affiliate, you are probably wondering what your main role is. It must be simple to just send traffic to a we

bsite and make money from it- right? WRONG! This is the role of Wealthy Affiliate: to help affiliates learn how to send traffic to their merchant websites and how to turn this traffic into buyers.

There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise. When you visit www.google.com, and do a search for something, you’ll most likely see a list of boxes on the right-hand side of the screen. These boxes are called sponsored listings, and advertisers are paying Google to put their ads there. There isn’t a set cost to have an ad placed, as your cost depends on how many people click on your ad and the quality of your ad campaigns. This is called "paid traffic", and is also known as "

Pay-Per-Click advertising" (PPC).

When a web surfer does a search and clicks on a sponsored listing, it costs the advertiser money. How much depends on the amount the advertiser is bidding on the term that the surfer typed into the Google search box.

Wait a minute, so what do sponsored listings have to do with me, the affiliate? As an affiliate, it is your responsibility to get people to visit the merchant site. Advertising in Google is a great way to do this. This is the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. You sign up with Google Adwords (their advertising network), and create ads that wil

l be shown in the search listings. You will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to the web page of your choice (usually a page that you create, and in turn links to the merchant site).

Google Adwords isn’t the only place that you can advertise online. It isn’t the only search engine out there. Another big PPC network is Yahoo! Search Marketing. It works in a similar way to Google Adwords in that you pay for your ads to be displayed within the Yahoo search results. We’re not going to get into the specifics of Google and Yahoo advertising here because both techniques need more explanation than we can give in an introduction.

Although there are paid advertising techniques, you should be aware that there are also free advertising techniques. We offer tutorials and exp

lain many of these here at Wealthy Affiliate. The main ones include Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Forum Marketing. As with PPC, we are not going to elaborate on these here, but you should definitely be aware that there are free marketing techniques that you can use to earn money online.

Conclusion

If you are starting out and wanting to become a successful Internet marketer then you need to understand the basics. You need to understand how IM works and the nature of the affiliate/merchant relationship. The role of an a

ffiliate is to sell the products/services that are offered by the merchants. When a purchase is made by the traffic that you generate, you will get a commission (anywhere between 1-75% of the sale)! Most companies pay commissions every 2 weeks, some instantly and some once per month.

You now understand that to sell products for merchants, you need to send traffic to the merchant website. Pay-Per-Click advertising is the most popular form of generating traffic as you can start attracting potential customers in very little time (usually a day or so). Google Adwords is a popular PPC advertising network as is Yahoo! Search Marketing, both having many similarities and differences. There are also many fre

e marketing techniques that can be implemented to generate traffic as well, and these are also explained here at Wealthy Affiliate.

This is just the start of your Internet marketing career and if you set goals and push yourself to achieve them, you will become a highly successful Internet marketer!

WA Forum

The forum is probably the most overlooked aspect at Wealthy Affiliate, yet there is so much great information within it that you would be very foolish not to spend a significant amount of time reading past posts. We recommend that all members go over at the very least some of the posts that have been labeled Sticky. The $500 Challenge has also proven to be a highly valuable forum as well, and this is one that you want to spend hours reading through.

So what makes the forum so valuable? Wealthy Affiliate is a “community” where we are all working together to create mutual success online. We share, we learn, and we help each other using the forum as a medium to ultimately create success. There is enough room for all of us to make large sums of money online, so by sharing something in the forum. Whether it is a mistake, a success story, something you learned, or a question you have, you are going to be bettering your position within the community. Other members are ALWAYS more than willing to help fellow WA’ers out.

If you are new to using forums, that's OK! You are going to find that our forum is very easy to use and navigate. It'll be that "thing" that you read while you have your breakfast, or before you go to bed at night. The Wealthy Affiliate forum is just a great place to learn about making money online. We have a full tutorial dedicated to learning how to use the forum. In the main menu to the left, click "Forum", then "WA Forum Help".

Go Ahead and Get Started in the Forum Here!

The power of building relationships is 100% important in this business. Trading skills and knowledge is something that we have "promoted" here at WA since day one, and we fully support a shared knowledge community. There are no secrets, and you are only limiting your own potential by holding back. Offer value, and it will come back to you 10 times over.

The WA Community

We truly believe that a community of people are working together is much more powerful and will lead into much greater success than people who working alone. In a community we can not only learn from each other’s mistakes, we can help others. In turn, someone will help you. This philosophy is one reason why Wealthy Affiliate is so valuable.

We provide you with several mediums where you can interact with us (Kyle & Carson), as well as fellow members of the Wealthy Affiliate community. You can leverage these mediums to not only improve your own Internet Marketing skills, but as channels to build long term business relationships and friends all over the world!

WA Spaces

Every member at Wealthy Affiliate has access to their own WA Space. Here you can create your profile, and essentially your own space within Wealthy Affiliate. This will allow you to connect with people at Wealthy Affiliate by building lists of “buddies”, create your own blog outlining your progress, as well as giving people insight into who you are with your mission statement and the addition of photos.

We highly suggest that if you have not already created your space that you do so by visiting the following link. This is going to tie into many advancements that will take place at Wealthy Affiliate in the future and you will need a WA Space to take part in these.

What Exactly is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing is a variety of things to many different people as there are many ways you can “market” on the Internet. In saying this, Internet marketing is very similar to other forms of offline marketing in that you have two different entities: a consumer and a product.

The job you have as an Internet marketer is to align these two entities in efforts to drive sales to either your website or an affiliate website. You do not need your own product to succeed as an Internet marketer as there are 10,000’s of companies that are literally begging for people like yourself to promote their products/services online in exchange for a commission. The reason why companies are so eager to have you promote their product is because they are much better off having 1000 affiliates spending their own time and advertising money then it would be to spend the company time and money on promotions in house. Not to mention that having 1000 affiliates promoting a product gives a company a LOT more reach to connect with potential customers.

There are different types of payment structures which we will get into more detail later, but typically companies will either give you a percentage of the sale (sometimes up to 90%) or a flat-fee kickback for any sale or lead that you generate (these range into the $100’s).

So How Is All of This Tracked?

Companies have something called affiliate programs that they use to track your sales. When you sign-up to an affiliate program or a network you are given a unique sales link which you will then use to refer people to the company web page. This link will uniquely identify you as the affiliate who referred that visitor to their site. If the visitor ends up making a purchase, you will get a commission.

There are many Internet marketers that are earning $1000’s each and every day promoting other peoples products. This may seem crazy, but it is the truth! We have many members here at Wealthy Affiliate who earn this much! You are not required to have any prerequisite knowledge to do this, and everything you are going to need to succeed is provided for you here at Wealthy Affiliate.

There are many different avenues you can take as an Internet marketer, and there are many different techniques you can use to make money online. Before we get started here, you need to know that you DO NOT need to know everything in order to succeed. As you get started, you will be much better off focusing on one Internet marketing technique and becoming an expert in that area than to diversify as a generalist. Look at many different professions and you will see that the specialists always get paid more (a general practitioner does not get paid what a brain surgeon gets). You will understand this in grave detail by the time you have completed the 8-week action plan.