Conversion Secrets for Free Downloads to Paid Customers

Do you give web site visitors the opportunity to download a free trial of your product or service with the intention that they will come back and purchase?

How are you following up with these visitors? Asking them to fill out a form and immediately giving them the download on the next page is not the best way to generate a quality opt-in list. Collecting accurate opt-in information from these visitors is essential to follow up education and making the sale.

Download giveaway opt-in conversion is extremely simple when done with the correct process. Unfortunately many businesses are leaving significant profits and subscribers on the table by using the wrong methods.

Wrong Way:

A visitor comes to your site and they fill out a form to request your free download. Upon submission of the form they are taken to your thank you page where you provide the link to download.

This person has been given your download but you have not given them a reason to subscribe to your list. They might have given you a fake email address and in all likelihood did give you a fake email knowing that they just need to get to the next page to receive your information.

Since you can't follow up with them you might have lost a sale.

Correct Way:

Insert the AWeber opt-in form on your site. Within eye site of this form provide information about the importance of subscribing to your list. Add value to your list by giving them compelling reasons to subscribe. Make it clear that the download link will be provided in the email they receive after confirming their subscription.

On your thank you page (or redirect page) they are taken to after they fill out the form you need to provide information on verifying. Verified opt-in allows you to ensure that the person subscribing did so with his or her own email address and didn't provide a fake or malicious email.

Let the visitor know that they should check their email inbox. Tell them what the subject line of the email says so they know what to look for. Convey that they must click on the link inside to verify and receive the download link to your product.

In the autoresponder they receive after verifying, give them the download link. Since they are subscribed to your list and have confirmed that the address they provided is valid you can effectively follow up providing more information about using the free or trial software, training tips, and further benefits or features earned by becoming a customer.

Using these techniques you are sure to increase your sales internet profits when converting free downloads to paid customers.

Sean Cohen, Director of Client Relations & Development of Newtown, PA based AWeber Communications, Inc. an opt-in email service provider. With 7 years managing opt-in autoresponders, automated follow up and newsletters for small businesses.

Learn more: http://www.AWeber.com

5 Strategies to Boost Your Affiliate Sales

Are you promoting affiliate products?

This article will show you 5 strategies to boost your Affiliate Sales, so make sure you read it and put in practice what I'm about to reveal you.

The KEY to affiliate marketing is to take action!

1. STOP joining NEW affiliate programs.

If you really want to generate more sales, then JOIN a reputable affiliate program and focus your marketing and promotion on a single affiliate product or service.

Unless you receive thousands of visitors a day to your affiliate links, there's no reason why you'd want to JOIN more affiliate programs.

Most do it because they think will make more money.

Others promote an affiliate product for a few days or weeks using weak advertising tactics, give up and then JOIN another 'HOT' program due to the fact the commission is a nice attraction.

That's the wrong way to play the affiliate marketing 'game'!

2. Register Your Own Domain Name

People purchase online from those they like and trust, so owning a domain name is the first STEP to building trust with your Web Site visitors.

Try to register a domain name related to the affiliate product you're promoting. If you promote mobile phones you can register newmobilephones.com.

Where to register domain names?

There are lots of places on the Web where you can register domains for less than $10 a year. Just do a search on "register domain names" or "domain name registration" on any search engine.

3. Build Your Own Web Site

You can build your own Web Site using html editors or hire others to build it for you. Just make sure you have a Web Site of your own where you can promote the product you're affiliated with; all TOP affiliate marketers own a Web Site.

If you don't know html, you can use TOOLS that help you create Web Sites by drag-and-drop (WYSIWYG editors).

Having your own Web Site is the second step to building trust with your Web Site visitors and a GREAT Way to boost your Affiliate Sales. The more CONTENT you add to your site, the more FREE targeted traffic you could attract from major search engines like Google.

4. Create Your Own Affiliate Promotion Materials

If you want to boost your Affiliate Sales you must do something different, you must stand out in the crowd.

There are other affiliates promoting the same product like you so you should think of ways to CREATE your own original affiliate promotion materials.

Let me give you 2 examples:

- create your own articles, ads, courses, ebooks, reports, etc.

- offer EXCLUSIVE Bonuses to any order that came from your affiliate link (e.g. a Special Report or ebook)

5. Get more quality TRAFFIC to your Site

You can't generate any Affiliate Sales if you receive ZERO traffic (visitors) to your Web Site.

You can generate ZERO Sales if you receive lots of untargeted visitors (people not interested in your affiliate product or Web Site).

Want more Affiliate Sales? Get more quality TRAFFIC... visitors that are 100% interested in your Web Site content/affiliate product.

Here's how to GET more quality TRAFFIC:

- register a domain name that is a perfect match for the affiliate product you're promoting;

- use a SIG file (a 3-line text description of your Web Site plus your domain name url) to all posts (answers/questions) in some popular online forums related to the topic of your Web Site;

- send testimonials to others who own Web Sites in the same category of yours and let them know that you like their ezine, product, service or Web Site.

Let them know that you appreciate what they are doing and tell them to include your comments as a testimonial on their Web Site with your name & Web Site link included.

Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com FREE Report: Amazingly Simple (Yet Super Powerful) Ways To Skyrocket Your Sales And Build Your Business Into A Tower of Profits! ==>> http://madmarketer.com/diane

The LAST Corey Rudl interview!

Dear online friend,

Today, I'm honored to announce the release of what is, perhaps, the most informative, shocking, and inspiring Corey Rudl audio recording of all time.

For 150 minutes (and 29 seconds) you will be a fly on the wall as the two "GREAT LEGENDS" of Internet marketing and direct marketing -- Corey and the outrageous Dan Kennedy -- discuss...

How you can make MILLIONS of dollars using the Internet teamed up with direct mail, radio, TV, classified ads, Yellow Page ads, infomercials, and MORE!

You'll hear Corey reveal how he made over $40 Million in Internet sales and taught 1,000s of "real people" how to make massive incomes of $100,000.00 to $2.5 MILLION (or more!) per year with the Internet...

You'll hear Dan Kennedy, the legendary GOD of direct (offline) marketing, talk about how he's made hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars for his clients, including companies like Amway and the $200-million-per-year Gunthy-Renker Corporation...

But BEST OF ALL, you'll hear these Millionaire Marketing Geniuses reveal "advanced" profit secrets that -- until now -- were reserved for their "inner circle" of close, personal friends!

For example...

You'll hear the AMAZING true story of two guys who sold almost IDENTICAL products, with the SAME offer, to the SAME audience -- yet one guy made $2 Million MORE... all thanks to just one simple strategy! PLUS, you'll learn which 2 blockbuster marketing ideas Corey got from Dan that made him over $100,000 in profits (that's cash in hand!) -- in less than 24 months!

... And that's just for starters!

You quite simply won't find a recorded interview like this -- anywhere.

A brainstorming session between two marketing geniuses of this caliber has NEVER been recorded before. And that's why, since this recording would have been priceless before Corey passed away, I can't even guess its value now.

Click here to start listening to this 150-minute audio recording right away!

I hope you enjoy it...

P.S. The "special edition" release of this recording will only be available to the first 250 people. After that, it will either be REMOVED, or the price will be raised to $1,499.00 or MORE -- still a bargain when you consider Corey's consultation rates were $2,790.00 per hour -- and Dan's rates are $9,600.00 per day!

To start listening now, visit The last Corey Rudl interview!

E-Mail Append: Opt-In or -Out?

If you do e-mail marketing, chances are you've been approached by a vendor offering e-mail append services. For those unfamiliar with e-mail address appending, The Direct Marketing Association's (DMA's) definition:

E-mail address appending is the process of adding a consumer's e-mail address to that consumer's record. The e-mail address is obtained by matching those records from the marketer's database against a third-party database to produce a corresponding e-mail address.

A few years ago, I wrote a column on e-mail appending. It was a hot topic at the time, and it remains one. I just helped a client evaluate proposals from some e-mail append vendors and was surprised how little had changed from a few years ago.

How appends are marketed has always been one of my pet peeves. The focus is on quantity, not quality. Vendors will quote "match rates," the number of new e-mail addresses you'll get. But they don't talk about how those e-mail addresses will perform, in other words, their quality.

Get explicit opt-in from your appended e-mail addresses. Opt-in assures the people you're sending to want to hear from you and hence boosts list quality. This is a dramatic departure from the opt-out process most append vendors adhere to, in which they assume anyone who doesn't respond wants to hear from you.

Most vendors have different pricing structures for opt-in and -out. Opt-out addresses can cost $0.06 to $0.20 per e-mail address, while opt-ins often run $2.50 to $4.00 per address. The work involved for the append vendor is the same for opt-in and opt-out; the difference is how many e-mail addresses you walk away with and what level of permission you receive from them. An opt-in process provides fewer names with a higher permission level; an opt-out process returns more names with a lower permission level.

It's interesting to see the rates vendors quote. On an opt-out process, most state up to 25 percent of the gross e-mail addresses they match will opt out. For an opt-in process, the standard quote is 2 percent or less will opt in. If these hold true and the initial gross match returns 1 million e-mail addresses, an opt-out process will net at least 750,000 addresses; an opt-in process would net only 20,000.

At $0.20 per name, the appended opt-out list of 750,000 will cost you $150,000; the 20,000 appended opt-in names, at $4.00 per name, would cost $80,000. This is where the quantity argument kicks into high gear. Sure, you pay more than twice as much for opt-out names, but you get more than 30 times as many names.

But wait. Consider how they may perform. If the append vendor is right and only about 2 percent of the gross list will be interested enough to respond to your opt-in, with the rest not responding at all, what makes you think future sends to this list will be any different? Shouldn't we expect that 2 percent to be responsive in the future -- and the other 98 percent to be non-responsive? You can talk about different offers, different creative, and so forth, but the list is a critical factor in any e-mail campaign's success. Even if they're your current customers, they won't necessarily respond to your e-mail.

And there's a cost to each send. If you pay a $5 CPM (define) to your e-mail service provider, mailing the list of 20,000 opt-in e-mail addresses will cost $100; the opt-out list will cost $3,750. A big difference, especially if we assume 98 percent of the large list will be non-responsive. You'd need to get a much larger revenue stream out of the larger list to break even, which is unlikely since the same core of 20,000 are your best bets for response in both cases.

I've seen appended e-mail addresses not respond at all for too many clients. We identify a list segment that's performing poorly or not responding at all, and research shows they're appended names. It doesn't matter whether they're your customers, there's still a good chance they won't respond if they don't opt in.

Using this reasoning, the 20,000 opt-in e-mail addresses are a far better value than the 750,000 opt-out e-mail addresses. But even if you choose the opt-in list, I'm not sure appending makes sense.

That $80,000 isn't an insignificant amount of money. There are other ways to get e-mail addresses. How much would a direct mail postcard to your house list cost? Or a note inviting people to opt in added to a bill, print newsletter, or other direct mail piece you're already sending? Appending isn't the only game in town. It's important to look at other ways to get the e-mail addresses... and the opt-ins. Rarely is appending the most cost-effective way to go.

Why is appending still so popular? It's viewed as a quick fix, a way to instantly start an e-mail marketing program. But as with many quick fixes, something's lost in the process. In this case, it's the response. And an e-mail marketing program without significant return on investment is just an additional expense for your organization.

Jeanne Jennings is an independent consultant with over 12 years of experience in the online, Internet and e-mail realm; she specializes in helping businesses develop an effective and profitable online presence. Areas of expertise include strategy, product development, information/Web site architecture, marketing and e-mail newsletters. Jeanne also publishes The Jennings Report an e-mail newsletter with market research, articles and other resources for e-mail marketing professionals. Visit her site at JeanneJennings.com

54% of Permission Emailers Are Filtered as Spammers

Are you tearing your hair out worrying about filters stopping your email messages to your house opt-in list?

Results from a six-week study conducted by Pivotal Veracity, and released exclusively to MarketingSherpa, reveal that you're in very distinguished company indeed.

Turns out 54 major mailers from AARP to The Wedding Channel can't get their permission email messages past filters at Hotmail, Yahoo, and/or Gmail all the time either. Even AOL's own outgoing email newsletter department couldn't get all of its bulk mailings past other ISPs' filters.

Plus, even worse news, 18% of filtered messages were transactional -- such as Welcome messages to new opt-ins.

For more details on how the study was conducted and findings, scroll down to the end of this story for a link to your PDF copy. In the meantime, here's our quick summary of findings:

Names of 54 mailers whose mail was filtered

Non-profit & Govt
American Red Cross
AARP
Federal Government: Department of Education
Federal Government: FDA
National Geographic

Business-to-Business
ePiphany
IBM
Juniper Networks
Postini (yes, the filtering company)
SAS
WebEx

Retail
1800 Flowers
Academy Sports & Outdoor
Bloomingdales
Buy.com
Coldwater Creek
Crutchfield
Domino's Pizza
DVD (Infinity Resources)
LL Bean
Macy's
Marks & Spencer
Neiman Marcus
Polo
Smart Bargains
Target
The Wedding Channel

Travel
Expedia
Hotwire
Orbitz
Travelocity

Other Business-to-Consumer
American Consumer Opinion (Decision Analyst)
Home Gain
Johnson & Johnson
Nokia
Verizon
Postmaster Direct (double opt-in list)

Media
Agora Publishing
AOL's CityGuide
Businessweek
CNET
Crain's Discovery Networks
HBO
Newsweek
The Motley Fool
The Wall Street Journal

Pivotal Veracity's President & CEO Deirdre Baird confided to us that the mailers with the biggest problem -- folks whose mail almost inevitably went straight to the spam folder -- were Agora Publishing and the US Federal Government. (Your tax dollars hard at work.)

In both of these cases, the mailings were primarily text-only, so the whole avoiding-HTML-to-bypass-filters idea doesn't always work. Do any tactics to avoid filters actually work? Read on...

Does outsourcing to an ESP help you avoid filters?

Admission -- we strongly recommend that mailers outsource to a reputable email service provider (ESP) unless you have a significant (read: six-seven figure) budget for an in-house department. A good ESP helps you with volume-sending controls, list hygiene, and many more factors critical to delivery.

So, we were stunned when this study revealed major mailers using ESPs were just as likely to be filtered as major mailers doing it in-house.

How could this be? Turns out three items affected results:

- 'Major mailers' -- these bigger organizations tend to invest significantly in their email systems, with dedicated staff, servers and excellent software.

- Content filters -- although an ESP can help you with technical filter problems (volume, hygiene, etc.), you're deciding what the graphics and text of your email will be. And content often dictates filtering.

- Shared IP addresses -- did you ask your ESP to send your mail from a dedicated IP address? You may have said "no" because it may cost a little more. But, as we've reported ('til we're blue in the face) if you share an IP address, your filter-risk goes up dramatically. Why? Because if anyone else using that IP address gets in trouble, you're in trouble too because you "look like" the bad mailer to most filters.

So, yes, using an ESP still makes sense for most mailers. But no, don't blithely count on them to get you past filters all by themselves. You've got responsibility too.

Do Bonded Sender or TRUSTe clients get past filters?

As we suspected, although TRUSTe seals may help the public feel safer doing business with you online, filters don't track which mailers have TRUSTe seals. (Nor, to be fair, does TRUSTe claim they do.)

Sadly, according to this study, being an accredited Bonder Sender mailer doesn't help you get through to Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail either (although it may help with other ISPs).

If you're investing in Bonded Sender (or any other certification program) we strongly suggest you track delivery by ISP to see if it's helping you. See below for more details on that...

Does level of permission help you get past filters?

All but one of the mailers studied were opt-in or double opt-in mailers -- meaning an individual had to proactively sign up to get email from them. So, although we've got plenty of anecdotal evidence that opt-out mailers tend to get filtered more (way more), this study doesn't address it.

The good news is double opt-in mailers were 20 points more likely to avoid filters than single opt-in mailers. (Double opt-ins had a 39% filter rate and single had a 59% rate.)

The bad news is filters *did* stop some double opt-in confirmation messages from getting through. So, if you want to require double opt-in, getting new names to take the extra step may be impossible because they'll never get your message asking them to. (Can you say, "Arrrgh!"?)

Does your email delivery report reveal the whole truth about filtering?

The data is incredibly confusing.

- Filter software companies claim they have teensy-weensy false positive rates (under 2%).
- Most email service providers claim delivery rates of 90-98%.
- Multiple industry studies show 20% or more of permission email doesn't reach recipients' in-boxes (and worse for at-work addresses).

Who's telling the truth? As this study reveals (in refreshingly clear language), everyone is. That's because everyone is measuring completely different things. Example, filter companies include all true spam in their data, which is roughly 80% of email.

The key for you as a mailer is to know how much of your own mail is delivered. The problem is, the so-called 'delivery report' most ESPs and email systems provide does *not* track delivery.

The only thing most delivery reports track is mail sent minus bounce messages received in return. So, if you sent an email to 10 people and one of them bounced a "mailbox full" message back, then your email report would tell you that you had a 90% delivery rate.

You probably didn't. Because most filters don't bounce a message back telling your email system that the mail didn't get through ... or if it went into a black hole.

If you require real deliverability data, you have to ask for it. And yes, it will probably cost you extra. You'll need to use a formal delivery tracking service. (And no, the folks at Pivotal Veracity did not pay us to say that.)

If your budget is tight, you can opt for a do-it-yourself program by planting seed names at a bunch of ISP mailboxes, and then check results manually. It's not perfect but better than nothing else.

One other idea -- get your email department to sort open and/or click scores by recipient ISP. It will be awfully obvious if you're not getting any mail through to one of the biggies. But, again that's work.

No matter how you choose to do it, we recommend you budget for a delivery audit on a regular basis if email is important to your organization (or you have a legal obligation to get mail to certain users). Good luck.

Click here to Download Pivotal Veracity's full False Positive Study

E-Mail Composition 101

Ten years ago, most workers didn't have an e-mail address and didn't have to read e-mail. Today, e-mail is an essential work skill—and a survey finds that poorly written messages are a waste of time for the people who have to read them.

According to a recent survey from Information Mapping Inc. (IMI), 80% of today's office workers say e-mail writing skills are "extremely" or "very important" to the effectiveness of doing their jobs.



Not surprisingly, a great deal of time is now spent at work reading and writing e-mails, with 63% of the respondents saying they spent from one to three hours a day writing them, and some 65% of those surveyed claiming that they have to devote between one and three hours per day reading them.



Sloppily written e-mails waste time. When asked how much time during an average day was wasted reading ineffectively written e-mails, more than 40% said the time loss was more than 30 minutes a day.



"It is evident that organizations can greatly improve productivity and performance by helping employees write more effective e-mail communications," said Deborah Kenny of IMI. "E-mail writing is a critical competency for today's business professionals, but too few e-mail messages are organized clearly or effectively. Poorly written e-mails translate into substantial inefficiencies and costs that have a significant impact on an organization's bottom line."

Badly written messages are not the only time leeches in the office. An AOL study found that workers are constantly checking personal e-mail on the job, too.



For information on Internet use — and misuse — in the workplace, dig into the eStat Database for hundreds of charts and articles on the subject.

Article reprinted with permission from eMarketer.com

When And How To Profit With AWeber Autoresponder Service

Many prospective AWeber customers believe that follow up autoresponders are the sole use of our services. This is not the case as every account also includes extensive features to enable the sending of opt-in newsletters to subscribers who have requested them. Newsletter content makes up a significant part of the sales conversion process for many businesses.

In this update we are going to focus on statistics and real world results of thousands of AWeber customer newsletters sent over the past 30 days.

Real World Newsletter Statistics

- 12,561 subscribers in an average customer opt-in newsletter list.

- 4 minutes and 24 seconds is the average amount of time between when a customer queues a newsletter and when AWeber completes delivery.

- 94% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 5 minutes of when they are scheduled.

- 98.4% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 30 minutes of when they are scheduled.

- 99.34% of all email was delivered successfully in the last 30 days.

- 0.66% of all email was undeliverable in the last 30 days. (mailbox closed, non-existent user, etc.)

- Average open rate of HTML and Text/HTML newsletters is 29.7% over the past 30 days.

Sunday generates the highest average open rate of 41.1%, followed by Saturday at 36.7% for newsletter sent date.

Average Open Rate by Sent Date: (higher is better)

Sunday 41.1%
Saturday 36.7%
Wednesday 34.0%
Friday 32.8%
Tuesday 29.6%
Thursday 24.6%
Monday 23.2%

Sunday generates the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.36% fornewsletters sent on that date.

Average Undeliverable Rate by Sent Date: (lower is better)

Sunday 0.36%
Saturday 0.45%
Friday 0.47%
Thursday 0.56%
Wednesday 0.77%
Tuesday 0.83%
Monday 0.88%

Monday is the most popular day of the week for customers to sendtheir newsletters with 17.1% of newsletters being sent.

Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:

Monday 17.1%
Tuesday 17.0%
Thursday 16.2%
Wednesday 15.8%
Friday 14.5%
Saturday 10.3%
Sunday 9.0%

An 8:00 AM EST send time generates the highest open rate of 50.6%. Interestingly sending at 9:00 AM EST has a significantly lower open rate of 33.7% with the worst time to send being 3-4 AM at only 19% open rate.

Plain text messages are the most popular format of sending newsletters with 65.9% of all newsletters sent. Mime format Text/HTML messages follow at 23.8% and a remaining 10.2% of customers still send HTML only messages even though it is strongly recommended to always includea plain text version.

Plain text messages generate the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.46%. Mime format Text/HTML follows at 0.56% and HTML only messages have a whopping 1.09% undeliverable rate. This is a significant reason behind our recommendation to always send a plain text alternative with HTML formatted messages.

Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber's first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average open rates of 28.9%.

17% of customer newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber's first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber's full name or last name generated lower average open rates at 20%.

Article by Tom Kulzer, CEO & Founder AWeber Communications, http://www.aweber.com

The Four Seasons of Publicity: Building an All-Year Publicity Machine

If you’re like most publicity seekers, you probably think one project at a time. You’ve got a new product coming out in April, so you send out a release in March. You’ve hired a new executive, you’ll put out a release when she’s on board, etc.

For hard-core publicity insiders, though, there’s a rhythm to generating coverage, based upon the natural ebb and flow of the seasons. Such an approach can help you score publicity throughout the year, and will help keep your eye on the ball from January through December.

Essentially, a yearlong approach consists of two strategies:

• Timing your existing stories (new product introductions, oddball promotions, business page features, etc.) to fit the needs of the media during particular times of the year.

• Crafting new stories to take advantage of events, holidays and seasonal activities.

Before we run through the four seasons of publicity, a few words about lead time. In this age of immediacy (only a few seconds separate a Matt Drudge or a CNN from writing a story and putting it before millions), it’s easy to forget that, for many print publications and TV shows, it can be weeks -- and sometimes months -- before a completed story sees the light of day.

The phrase lead time simply refers to the amount of time needed for a journalist to complete a story for a particular issue of a magazine or episode of a TV news program. For example, a freelancer for an entertainment magazine may need to turn in a story on Christmas movies by September 15.

That’s a lead time of three months, time needed for the editor to review and change the piece, the issue to be typeset and printed and distributors to place the issues on newsstands before December.

Lead time can range from a day (for hard news pieces in newspapers) to a few days (newspaper features) to a few weeks (weekly magazines) to many months.

The longest leads are the domain of “women’s books” like Good Housekeeping and Better Homes & Gardens. These publications often have a lead time of up to six months, which means they need information for their Christmas issues as early as May!

Here’s a tip to help you discover the lead time of a particular publication you’re targeting: call the advertising department of the publication and request a media kit. Since advertisers need to know when their ads must be submitted, each issue’s lead time is clearly stated in the media kit.

Factor the lead time into your planning as you look over the following sections. If you have a great story idea for Rolling Stone’s summer issues, you need to be on the ball well before Memorial Day.

The Four Seasons of Publicity

First Quarter: January - March

What the Media’s Covering: Early in the year, the media is looking ahead. It’s a great time to pitch trend stories, marketplace predictions, previews of things to expect in the year ahead, etc. If a new President is being inaugurated, you’ll see lots of “Will the new administration be good for the (textile/film/cattle ranching/Internet/...or any other) industry?” types of pieces.

This is a good time to have something provocative, or even controversial, to say about your industry. The media also likes this time of year to run “get your personal house in order” sorts of pieces. Tax planning, home organizing, weight loss, etc. Anything that’s geared toward helping people keep their New Year’s resolutions can work here.

Key Dates and Events: Can you come up with a story angle to tie your business into an event that typically generates lots of coverage? Put on your thinking cap -- I bet you can!

Here are some key events during the First Quarter: Super Bowl, NCAA Tournament, Easter, The Academy Awards.

Second Quarter: April - June

What the Media’s Covering: An “anything goes” time of year. With no major holidays or huge events, April is a good time to try some of your general stories (business features, new product stuff, etc.) Light, fun stories work here, as a sense of “spring fever” takes hold of newsrooms (journalists are human, you know. They’re just as happy winter is over as you are and
it’s often reflected in the kind of stories they choose to run.).

As May rolls around, thoughts turn to summer. Now they’re looking for summer vacation pieces, outdoor toys and gadgets, stories about safety (whether automotive or recreational), leisure activities, things to do for kids and so on.

Key Dates and Events: Baseball opening day, tax day (April 15), spring gardening season, Memorial Day, end of school, summer vacation.

Third Quarter: July - September

What the Media’s Covering: The dog days of summer are when smart publicity seekers really make hay. Folks at PR firms are on vacation, marketing budgets are being conserved for the holidays and reporters are suddenly accessible and open to all sorts of things. Get to work here, with creative, fun angles.

Entertainment-themed pieces do well in the summer, anything with celebrities works, lighter business stories, new products, trend pieces, technology news, back to school education-themed articles, you name it. Reporters are about to get deluged once again come September, so use this window of opportunity wisely.

Key Dates and Events: July 4th, summer movies, summer travel, back to school.

Fourth Quarter: October - December

What the Media’s Covering: The busiest time of the media calendar, the Fourth Quarter is when the business media turns serious and the lifestyle media thinks Holidays, Holidays, Holidays. Business angles need to be hard news. Fluffy trend pieces won’t cut it, as business editors begin to take stock of the state of the economy and the market. It’s a tough time to put out a new product release.

For the non-business media, think Christmas. Christmas travel, Christmas gifts, Christmas cooking, whatever. If you have a product or service that can be given as a holiday gift, get on the stick early.

Nail down lead times for the publications you’re targeting, call to find out who’s handling the holiday gift review article and get your product in the right person’s hands in plenty of time -- along with a pitch letter or release that makes a strong case about how what a novel, unusual or essential gift your product makes. After Christmas, you have a brief window for “Best of the Year”, “Worst of the Year” and “Year in Review” pieces. Be creative -- the media loves these things.

Key Dates and Events: Labor Day, World Series, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve.

Article by Bill Stoller, the "Publicity Insider", has spent two decades as one of America's top publicists. Now, through his website, eZine and subscription newsletter, Free Publicity: The Newsletter for PR-Hungry Businesses http://www.PublicityInsider.com/freepub.asp , he's sharing -- for thscoring big publicity. For free articles, killer publicity tips and much, much more, visit Bill's exclusive new site: http://www.publicityinsider.com/

Into the Blogosphere

Retailers have grappled with the role of their web sites during the Internet’s short history—is it merchant, marketing vehicle, customer research venue or PR tool? By putting their own spin on a new electronic publishing tool initially used by consumers, online marketers have found something that can combine all these functions into one feature: the blog.

Some 62% of Americans still don’t know what a blog is, according to recent data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But if that 62% includes online retailers, they better learn fast. Blogs, personal online diaries or journals and short for “web logs,” have become highly influential in American society and can affect a retailer’s brand faster than the retailer can react. “The power of web logs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them,” notes Technorati, a search engine that specializes in crawling and indexing web logs.

While they were started as ways for individuals to post their rants online for the world to see (see box, p. 37), consumer blogs have given rise to marketers’ own blogs hosted on their own sites. The idea is that the personal diary format provides a forum for conveying the company’s values, attitude, positions and additional content that other communications vehicles don’t. And a blog—reduced to its technology underpinnings, an online publishing tool that easily handles frequent content changes—makes presenting such content simple.

Giving voice

Blogs are being used in business to give a voice and personality to corporations and industry issues, and companies have begun to use blogs for external communication as they would other forms of marketing or public relations, says Dana VanDen Heuvel, CEO of web consultancy BlogSavant.

Take GourmetStation.com, an upscale food and gift site that launched a blog in June. “Before I even knew what a blog was, we were planning to put a feature on the web site where we could post entertaining ideas and food and wine pairings. The blog gave us a vehicle by which we could implement that strategy,” says founder and president Donna Lynes-Miller.

The number of company blogs like GourmetStation.com’s is growing. It’s been estimated that the blog universe, or blogosphere, is doubling every five months. While they represent a fraction of the estimated 10 million blogs created by Americans—92% of them by bloggers under age 30—corporate blogs now number about 5,000.

GourmetStation.com’s “Delicious Destinations” blog, which focuses on travel and entertaining, is a way to entice new and return visits from the kind of shopper the site targets for gourmet food sales. The blog is penned by T. Alexander, a fictitious character who represents the collective writings of Lynes-Miller, Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing, and Cara Barineau of creative partner Blue Marble Media. GourmetStation is upfront about identifying the blog host as the creation of writers, but Lynes-Miller says the concept nevertheless took some heat from blogging purists. The upside, she adds, was that the controversy gained the blog a lot of exposure.

Why do it?

Organic yogurt maker Stoneyfield Farms is another business blogger. A full-time employee writes three of the four web logs at Stoneyfieldfarms.com. The fourth, a chronicle of daily life on an organic farm, is authored by the farmer.

Only about 1.4% of visitors to the site, which sells souvenir items such as T-shirts and alarm clocks but not yogurt, read the blogs, raising the question of why Stoneyfield puts resources into the effort. Chief blogger Christine Halverson, who notes that the company’s New Hampshire location gave founder and CEO Gary Hirshberg an up-close view of how blogs were used during last year’s presidential primary, says it’s a brand-building effort. “We’ve never had the money to put into mainstream advertising. It’s always been guerilla marketing,” she says. “We do this to build relationships and create positive feelings toward the company.”

For a retailer of premium coffees, job one in the marketing arena is to differentiate the offering from that of industry behemoth Starbucks. At Stone Creek Coffee, a nine-store café chain and web site headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., a blog helps to get the job done.

“We wanted to bring out that we are a hands-on company and not a big corporate chain. We are trying to reflect the personal nature of what we do and how we make our coffee,” says Tom Pionek, marketing and technology director. “The blog lets us bring that out by letting our people post information in their own words.” The blog, launched on StoneCreekCoffee.com in June, will eventually let team managers, executives and store managers post content live and for the most part unedited by Pionek, who oversees the initiative.

The company’s bloggers will receive guidelines on what kind of information they can post. Pionek will review the blog posts when they go live and make adjustments if necessary. An RSS feed that pushes the blog out into the online blogosphere sends it to his desktop in real time.

Pionek says Stone Creek Coffee’s primary objective in blogging is to express the voice of the company and that a blog lets the company do that quickly and in a timely manner. For example, the company cups, or evaluates, new coffees and coffee roasts every two weeks. “The blog allows us to cup coffee in the morning and post the results that same day. It reduces any bottleneck about getting content on the web site, just by making the ability to change the web site more accessible to more people,” Pionek says.

The non-blog blog

REI Inc. is putting a different spin on a web log scheduled for a limited rollout in July. REI was looking for technology that would make it easier for local REI stores, which already have their own pages on REI.com, to post content about store news and events and to distribute that content to local e-mail lists. It also wanted to bring a standardized look to the grassroots efforts some stores already had undertaken on their own. It found the solution in blogging technology.

Blogging software developed for the program by Seattle e-mail technology developer What Counts will, in effect, make bloggers out of store personnel who use the tool to post local events and schedules. But while that content reflects the personality of REI as a company to the extent that it supports company values and mission, it’s not, at this point, intended as an extended platform for the personal attitudes of the individual blogger.

“We’re using blogging technology, but it really will not be presented as a blog,” says Meg Reynolds, director of e-mail marketing at REI. “We are not educating the 50 or so users that they are going to be blogging. We’re simply creating a new user interface that makes it incredibly simple to post content.”

Marketers who blog say that with web sites already up and running, it’s time, more than hardware or software, that’s been their primary investment. Even so, whenever new initiatives compete for resources of any kind, consideration quickly moves to the question of ROI. But that’s an answer the pioneers of company blogging are still trying to figure out.

Pionek says that when StoneCreekCoffee.com launched the blog and announced it in the company’s e-mail newsletter, a click-through to the new blog was the top-used link in the newsletter. For now, though, Stone Creek is not applying traditional sales metrics to the blog. “Eventually, we’ll look for standard metrics such as click-through from products mentioned,” says Pionek. “We expect during the course of working with the blog to identify what those metrics should be.”

A new success metric

One such metric is emerging. Google’s algorithm is believed to favor fresh content, and because blog content changes frequently, it’s expected to help boost a web site’s placement in natural search results on Google. Pionek says that’s already happening. “After we started the blog, our search rankings for a couple of terms went up. We were nowhere to be found and then suddenly, we were on page three,” he says. Web analytics packages can capture click-throughs from any products mentioned in the blog to purchases on the site, but sales don’t tell the whole story when the company blog’s objective is to build brands or relationships.

At GourmetStation.com, Lynes-Miller attributes a 5% increase in traffic to the blog launched in April. While she plans eventually to be able to track click-throughs off the blog to purchases on the site, Lynes-Miller isn’t currently looking to sales as the primary measure of the blog’s value. “In the beginning, it can’t be,” she says. “This is a brand extension. It allows GourmetStation to extend itself to being more than just a company that sells food, and that’s what we wanted to be.”

REI planned to initially blog-enable the web pages of 15 of its northern California stores in July; the other stores will be added shortly. Once the stores send the blog content to their subscribed local e-mail lists, REI will employ the same metrics on click-through and conversion for these e-mails as for its other marketing e-mail and it will track through from the blogs to purchase by REI members in stores.

But, as with others using blogging technology in marketing applications, success at this point is less about traditional sales metrics. “We do have some opportunity to look at a dollars per e-mail kind of success mark, but we don’t have the same expectations that we do for our other marketing e-mail,” says REI’s Reynolds. “This is part of our education outreach and what we are hoping to do is increase visibility and attendance at our store clinics and events.”

Engage

Marketers are just starting to probe the marketing applications of web logs. For those who are watching them to see what others are saying about their products and brands, blogs have been called the world’s largest free online focus group. For those who take the next step and enter the dialogue by putting blogs on their sites, they’re an easy way to post fresh and fast-changing content that offers the prospect of conveying corporate attitude and opinion beyond traditional marketing messages—if the blogs are handled transparently, if they’re compelling enough to garner readership, and if the marketer is willing to risk taking some lumps from others who respond with posts of their own.

Either way, “You need to engage,” says VanDen Heuvel of Blog Savant. “If not, a disconnect will form over time. There’s the status quo part of the market, and there is the opportunity segment of the market. If we don’t chase after that with new media and the new ways consumers want to communicate with us, we are going to lose out.”

Article by Mary Wagner

7 Strategic Moves That Boost Your Profits

Work smarter, not harder, by making small but significant shifts in the way you do business. Simple adjustments, clearheaded analysis and two minutes here and there may be all it takes to boost your bottom line. Carefully consider these options, and you should be able to implement at least one or two of them right away.

1. Drop your least profitable offerings and concentrate on your most profitable ones. Note that I said "profitable" - not those bringing in the most or least money overall. You can sort your products and services by their profitability if you analyze your expenses according to which sources of revenue they support.

"Most small business owners lose sight of precisely where they are making money and where they're not," says David Shepherd, author of the book, Your Business or Your Life. By getting rid of the offerings that require the highest percentage of costs in order to deliver them, you can see immediate improvement in profits, says Shepherd.

2. Send "difficult" clients or those you simply don't like to your competitors. In a survey by David Maister, a consultant for top professional firms around the world, only 30-35 percent of respondents said they liked their clients; 50-60 percent said they tolerated their clients; and 5-20 percent didn't like them at all.

"Why spend the majority of [your] life working on tolerable stuff for acceptable clients when, with some effort in (for example) client relations, marketing and selling, you can spend your days working on exciting things for interesting people?" asks Maister. You'll feel more enthusiastic about your work and get more done when you send unpleasant or troublesome clients to get their needs met elsewhere.

3. Pursue customers who can or will pay more. A consultant once told me that she'd come to the conclusion that people starting a small business simply wouldn't pay the fees she felt she should charge. I didn't agree, because I'd had clients ready to spend big on launching their new business.

They were in their forties and fifties and either had a budget to spend from a company that was laying them off, or they were willing to raid the retirement fund they'd accumulated working for a large corporation. It would be possible to target others like them and make multiples of what she'd be earning from those just scraping by, but I think she just didn't believe what I was saying.

Almost always, your existing market includes people who have more money or are willing to spend more of what they have for your stuff, and by marketing to people like them, you earn more for the same effort.

4. Reuse everything you create in different formats or for different purposes. If you've taught a seminar, turn your handouts into an article (that's how what you're reading came about). If you collected industry data to direct your marketing, sell your research to colleagues.

If you regularly interview experts about what's new in the field, incorporate their insights into a product. And so on. "Do once, sell three times" is a shrewd money-making mantra.

5. Create an untiring army of sales reps through an affiliate program. Colleagues who don't have their own products or services, or whose offerings complement yours may be happy to promote your wares in exchange for a commission on the business that they refer.

On the Internet, so-called affiliate programs make that process easy. You decide on the terms, find marketing partners who agree to them and give those partners a link to use that keeps track of leads or sales coming through that link. I use FusionQuest.com for my affiliate program because unlike most such services, they themselves take no commissions from sales coming through the program.

6. Cultivate and reward your referral partners. Two ordinary words work magic when it comes to nurturing relationships with people who regularly send you business: "Thank you." If they send you sales with a particularly high value, a gift, such as a book, a fruit basket or tickets to a how might be appropriate. How do you initiate such relationships in the first place?

This can be as simple as inviting professionals out to lunch and asking them what they do so that you can refer business to them. Only an idiot would not reciprocate by turning the same question back to you.

7. Invest more to get customers who have a high lifetime value. Keep in mind that when done properly, marketing is not an expense but an investment. Correspondingly, you need to know how much you can afford to invest to acquire a customer.

The smart way to think about this question is not in terms of an amount for your marketing budget that you think sounds reasonable but in relation to how much you can earn during the whole time someone remains your customer.

For instance, spending $100 to lure each new customer may sound outrageous until you realize that each one spends $4,000-5,000 with you over the course of three years.

With that profile, it might be smart to spend much more than $100 per customer to lure them into your fold. Why slave away doing things the way you've always done them when you can earn more by using some of these strategies? Please let me know when you try any of these moves, with extraordinary results!

Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books. She runs a private member site, MarketingforMore.com, which supports business owners who are growing their businesses. Learn how to avoid the most common pricing mistakes in her free report, "Charge More & Get It," available from http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm