Since email marketing has become an integral part of any small business marketing strategy, you do want to follow some simple advice to ensure your email marketing is received well, provides values and increases your revenues!

Plan Early & Send Early

When it comes to email campaigns, you may not realize this, but the sooner you get on your clients’ and/or customers’ minds, the better off you are. You better believe your competition is planning and sending out early campaigns. If you plan your campaigns in advance, you will be better prepared to change course if need be.

Be Consistent in Your Frequency

As you know the rule of thumb is 7 times exposed before a prospect becomes a customer. That guideline is certainly still viable and valid. If you only take the time to send 2 or 3 messages in your email marketing campaign, then you are leaving money on the table, no doubt about it. Keep your frequency going, use similar, if not the same template with different content.

Use Calls to Action and Incentives

People like getting stuff, and in their core, they like taking action, when they perceive true value. If you don’t provide an incentive or call to action, you will NEVER be able to tap that intrinsic desire to get something or take action. There are limitless possibilities for incentives and calls to action – they can simply be value add services and offerings, or limited time offers, contests and giveaways.

For Goodness Sakes, Use HTML

The only time this would not apply, is if the majority of your email list has opted out of HTML emails, or rather chosen plain text for their delivery method. But why, you ask? HTML is far prettier than plain text or even rich text and people like pretty! You also have more control over how your email marketing content is delivered. NOTE: always provide a link to the “hosted” HTML version of your email marketing piece, so users that want to see your HTML without compromising their email client can experience the full HTML email effect.

Send Holiday & Special Occasion Emails

People all have egos, if you stroke them at least 7 times a year, you stand a far greater chance of them receiving your messages, reading them in their entirety and also interacting with your organization. People like to know that others care about them, so make sure these emails are geared toward the client and NOT your offers. Of course, include a call to action, just like with every email, but keep your promotional copy to the bare minimum on these emails.

If you keep these email marketing tips in mind, you stand to blow your competition out of the water moving forward.

In order to tap any particular niche, you’re going to need to know something about it.

It helps is you can pick a niche related to something you like, as that will drive you to learn more and you will enjoy it. Picking your niche can be rough, but make sure you know it.

When you present your opportunity to your target audience, they want to know you have your head on right and aren’t just trying to scam them for money. Since the typical internet user today is being bombarded with marketing messages at all waking hours, you need to make sure you hit on the pain for your niche.

What should you know about your niche?

1. Who the top competitors are
2. What products and services are being sold
3. How much volume is in your niche
4. Where are the trends headed in your niche

If you don’t have any idea about this information, be sure to go back to square one and research your niche. Document your findings and reposition your product or service to dominate that niche.

One of the best marketing strategies ever has been the use of websites to serve information and transact business or lead prospects and clients through a guided, and often automated, process.

Setting up a website, though, can be a daunting task for most.  Not so with WordPress.

WordPress is a blogging framework that gives you a real website with a database to store information. The framework allows you to scale your online presence and content on the fly, without having to be a webmaster or html expert.  The beauty of this framework is the fact that open source and free for use on any scale.

Because of how WordPress is built, you can utilize this framework to setup a blog, website, landing page or any other web presence you can imagine.  It is a fully extensible platform allowing savvy developers to make massive applications in record time and amateurs to create money making websites on the fly.

Take a moment to visualize your website before you begin this process.  In terms of strategy – be sure to research your market and search trends before you get started.  See how you will deliver your content to your audience and plan ways to leverage that traffic (ie: newsletter signup, affiliate promotions, advertising, etc.).

Having a clear picture in advance makes this process a lot smoother!
Don’t forget to write your thoughts down.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Have your web hosting setup ahead of time.
2. Purchase your domain name.
3. Setup your MySQL database on your web hosting.
4. Get over to WordPress and download the latest release.
5. Unpack the contents into your website root directory.
6. Run the installation.
7. Locate, download and unpack the theme you want to use.
8. Install the plugins you want to use.
9. Edit the settings for your site, theme and plugins.
10. Organize your categories, pages and links.
11. Start writing content!

There is a lot more we can fill into these steps and even some steps you need to have done beforehand.