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In the offline world the company that has a list of loyal customers will inevitably be a profitable one. It has been proven over the years that the cost of finding a new customer far outweighs the cost of keeping a customer.

The same applies in the online world. Finding new customers is very expensive and requires a huge amount of effort and an investment of time. Keeping a bunch of people who are loyal to you is a lot easier.

This customer relationship process is often referred to as building a list or developing an opt-in list. This is a list of people who have allowed you to email them. That means you have a people who will be happy to hear from you and possibly even buy.

How do you get such a list of customers?

It’s the same process as in the real world. You offer value. If you offer value as a business in the offline world you will get customers and keep them. This could be the best mobile phone contract because the cost is reasonable and you have great service and reach.

It could be a clothing shop where the merchandise is reasonably priced and the service is super friendly and accommodating. It’s a place where you know you can take a faulty garment back for a refund without having to get into an argument.

What gets the customers to sign up to the mobile contract or to buy that garment? It’s either advertising or word of mouth referrals. How does this process convert to the online world?

It’s not that different a process. You need to persuade people to come to your site or opt-in page and you need to entice them to sign up to your emails. This means there are several steps that need to be in place.

Firstly you need to be able to drive traffic to your site. You can do this by advertising online through search engines or other sites. You can drive traffic by using search engine optimisation technique and you can post articles on other well read sites in order to get traffic back to you. These are just some of the traffic generating ideas.

The second step is that you need to offer an incentive to your visitors to opt-in to your list. This may be in the form of a promotion. It is the same principle that the supermarkets abide by when they offer loss leader products.

This means it’s a product that they practically give away in order to bring the customer into the store. They are hoping you will buy something else so that they can make up the loss on the other product.

Finally the opt-in page that offers the free enticement needs to be persuasive. It needs to provide information that makes the visitor want to sign up and get the free product. The page has to make the person want to hear from you and get the free product or service that is being offered.

All of these steps you have seen in the offline world. Have a look at the marketing tricks and tips that shops and businesses use to get you into their store and you will be able to use these very same ideas and concepts for your online business.

Headline writing has been the skill of clever copy writers. In fact a slogan or headline can make or break a clever campaign. Nothing is as important. As life speeds up people have less and less time to decide whether they might like to read or watch content. We need to consume our media quickly whether newspapers or magazine, TV or videos. There’s so much of it.

This spreads in particular into the online world where the overload of information forces internet users into tasting and sampling bits of much without spending too much time in one spot. The internet certainly has placed new meaning to the concept of grazing.

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Remember that people go onto the internet in most part to find information. When setting up your blog and while presenting your content, it is important to remember this. Present your content in such a way that your readers are able to learn something.

Of course this is different if your blog is there to entertain. Then you will need to focus on that aspect of the search, although even in the field of entertainment people might be looking just for information.

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There are two ways you can make money with a PPC campaign. You can either create your own landing page and offer or you can send the customer directly to a merchant’s website.

When you decide on creating your own landing page and offering a product for sale via this there are some points to consider. You need to ensure that your visitors go directly to the landing page. This could mean that you might have to carry the costs of a website and the hosting charges involved in that.

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That statement is not entirely true. All niches are profitable. However, some very popular niches are so competitive that it becomes hugely time consuming and expensive to make a mark as an internet marketer.

A great example is the recent introduction of Bing, the new Microsoft developed search engine. This is a competitor against Google, Yahoo and others. For the average business person, developing another search engine that can take on Google head-on is totally out of the question. It’s just too expensive to bring in a competing product against a huge brand such as Google.
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It has taken the people a bit longer to start considering the internet as a way to make money and to develop a career in. Mostly it could be attributed to the fact that the internet runs on a technology fairly foreign to the normal person or non-geek.

Having to cope with technical issues is a frightening concept and many people would have hesitated to try their hand at internet marketing. It’s so much easier to set up a table at a fair and sell goods that are tangible and where one can use a plastic tupperware bowl for the cash register.

Do you know how to create graphics on a computer? How about using HTML to put a web page together, know any of that? Would you know how to set up a shopping cart? Can you check the statistics for your traffic to see what sales campaigns are working? Does that sound like it is all too much for you to try?

What has changed then? It’s the availability of tools such as WordPress that has changed the online environment. This innovative online application was first available in 2003. WordPress allows ordinary people like you and I to easily set up a blog and be ready to publish our words of wisdom for all to read in a matter of moments.

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The online marketing world makes use of some offline tools such as advertising, direct mail and viral campaigns, video and ‘radio’ or more appropriately using the online term of podcasts.

All of these tools are used in digital format. In other words your advert will show on a website, your direct mail campaign might use e-mail or Twitter, your video will show on YouTube or on one of the many competing video sharing sites and your podcasts may be downloaded from iTunes.

The principle is the same though. Every bit of material that you put out into the internet that promotes your products and services is part of your marketing campaign and is similar to what the offline marketers use. It is often just the vehicle used to deliver the message that is different.

It is of course also the case that offline marketers are starting to bring their product offering online. Some companies such as Apple have done this very effectively by offering some of their product range via the web only. These are the songs, movies and videos they sell via iTunes and the third party applications for the iPhone available via the App Store.

Some of the more recognised marketing tools used by internet marketers are article marketing, blog marketing, search engine marketing and social media marketing. Most of these techniques may be used without having to spend any or very little money.

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