Proceed with Caution – When Your Online Marketing Can Get You in Trouble

Online marketing is a great way to make money in your spare time. Using the existing structure that the Internet provides is the new Gold Rush for many people.

But you have to be careful. Although the Internet is still largely unregulated – that is changing –there are still ways you can get in hot water.

For example, if enough people mark your unsolicited emails as spam, you will eventually get banned on some of the biggest email providers … such as Yahoo and Gmail. If that happens, you are going to have to shut down your website and start over with a new one.

That’s not going to put you out of business, but it is a pain in the butt and will delay your efforts to get your business up and running. Plus there will be the additional expense of buying new domains, setting up new pages, re-establishing your autoresponder, not to mention the opportunity costs associated with being offline.

Laws Regulating Internet Commerce

Another thing to consider is that if you send emails to people who haven’t invited you to do so, you could be breaking the law.

There’s a law called the CAN-SPAM Act … it stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003 … that regulates commercial emails. This is the law that gives people the right to unsubscribe to any emails they don’t want.

So if somebody asks you to take them off your list, you not only want to do that because it’s good business, but because you may be subject to fines if you don’t do it. And the fines are per email violation, so they can add up fast.

This law also explains the requirements for what you can put in the subject line of your email, the “to” line and the “from” line, and other elements of email.

So buying leads may seem like a quick way to build your list, but in reality it can be expensive, leads to lower conversion rates, can be harmful to your reputation, and can even subject you to being banned or paying fines.

Be Careful Buying Leads

On many of the autoresponder programs, when you try to plug in the leads that you have purchased, you are going to discover that you can’t easily plug them in. So you may have to enter them manually, which is time-consuming and … given the low conversion rate … probably not worth the effort.

There are some email companies, however, that do let you import leads that you have purchased. These include MailChimp and Imnicamail. Both require you to have the relevant opt-in data, however.

When you import leads using these services and others like them, you have to make sure that the people have given the person you bought the leads permission to sell or give them to third parties.

In other words, you have to be able to prove that the leads have opted in to receive third party information. So that means in addition to the email address you also need to have the opt-in date, the website it was opted-in from, and so on.

Companies that sell leads legitimately are going to be able to provide you with all this information. Those that are less reliable are not.

So if the leads you buy are accompanied by this critical information, that’s one indicator that you are getting high-value, legitimate sales leads for your money.

Being careful and working within the law is important for any business, whether it’s online or in the real world. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

Essential Elements of Email Swipes and How to Put Them to Work for You

When you promote affiliate products, in many cases the person actually selling the product is going to provide you with the text you can simply copy and paste into your email. But sooner or later you probably are going to have to create some emails yourself. And even if you don’t, it’s important that you understand why the emails you send out are structured the way they are.

As an affiliate marketer, you are sending an email to the people on your list because you want them to do something: In most cases, purchase your products.

Given the quantity of emails most people receive, it is unlikely that your recipients are going to be willing to spend much time reading all the way to the end of your email. In fact, in most cases you will be lucky if they open it at all.

Getting to the Point

In a sales letter, for example, you have the luxury of several pages to build excitement for your product.

In contrast, with a print ad you have only a moment to use images and tag lines to grab your viewer’s attention. A marketing email falls somewhere in between.

Like a sales letter, the purpose of your marketing email is to drive your reader toward a Call to Action … or the CTA. In other words what it is you want them to do. Unlike a sales letter, you don’t have much time to get them there before their attention wanes. As a result, in many ways a marketing email is like an abbreviated sales letter.

Elements of an Email Swipe

The elements of a sales letter and marketing email are the same:

• Greeting
• Presenting a Problem
• Offering Your Product as a Solution
• Listing Your Product’s Benefits
• Special Offers and Bonuses
• Call to Action
• Link to Product Web Page

The greeting should be simple and straight-forward. If your target audience is a specific group, feel free to reference the group in your greeting:

Dear Internet Marketer:

Your autoresponder program will let you automatically include your recipient’s first name in the greeting, such as:

To: Alice Walker

or

Dear Alice,

If your autoresponder offers this option, use it because it makes the email more personal.

Keep It Simple

You also want to always make sure the content of your email is interesting and on point. Don’t digress or swerve off onto other subjects. Remember that your recipient is receiving dozens, even hundreds of emails per day and they probably are only going to send a few moments on yours, if they open it at all.

Grab their attention early … starting with the subject line … then set up the problem that is relevant to your affiliate product niche and keep the email moving briskly toward the CTA. Your goal is to grab their attention and hold onto it throughout the body of the email so they will keep reading.

In most cases, the email should be no more than one page or a page and a half at most. Try to limit your content to less than a dozen paragraphs, if possible.

So know you know how to create an effective promotional email that is going to convert your customers to buy the affiliate products you are promoting.

Knowing how to effectively use email swipes to keep pushing your customers past the buying point is critical to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.