Email Marketing

If you want to build a successful online business building an email list is essential.

You may have heard the money is in the list, and this statement is certainly true.  Traffic comes and goes, a list is yours to keep, grow, and profit from.

I make it my personal goal to share with my list the very best resources I know of.  I try and give as much value as possible to my list for free and this way when I occasionally recommend a product to my list they are very responsive.

Whatever your goal is online, effective email marketing can help you achieve it by driving traffic with the click of a button!

List Building

Make sure your website has a highly visible opt-in form and a free gift for those who join.  When I first started out I just had a simple form, but no gift, and even thoughI had hundreds of daily visitors at the time I still had hardly anyone subscribe.

Once I offered a free .pdf to people who joined the number of people I had join my list skyrocketed.

For those who want to take their list building efforts to the next level a powerful list building product that I recommend is PopupDomination which can help you triple the amount of new subscribers you are able to capture on your email list.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are especially powerful for setting up automatic emails that are sent a specific number of days after a new subscriber joins your list.

Making Sales

To make sales you will need products to sell.  You can sell your own products and earn 100% comission.  If you want to refer products of others and earn an affiliate income the best affiliate network that I have found is Clickbank.

Effective Email Marketing begins with a solid email service provider, or ESP.  Formerly I worked for the email review website The Email Guide and while there I became very familiar with a number of different Email Service Providers.

Below are my favorite ESP’s from my experience in the industry.

Choosing An Email Service Provider

 iContact

iContact has great customer service, and although their technology and templates are not as cool as constant contact, they are still worth considering.

iContact is cheaper than constant contact and Aweber, and they are more lenient when it comes to approving existing email lists.

You can try iContact for free for fifteen days, and after that if you decide to sign up for a plan you can get one for as cheap as under $10 a month.

Aweber

I use Aweber, and I highly recommend them.

In my view, Aweber has the best technology.

My favorite part of Aweber is their form tool, which makes it easy to build a great looking email capture form, like the form you see in the right hand of this blog.

If you have an existing email list you will only be able to migrate it over to Aweber by having all of your contacts opt-in again.  This may put a dent in your email list, but it will be worth it in the long run since Aweber has one of the best deliver ability reputations in the industry.

Aweber makes advanced email marketing techniques like split testing emails, segmenting your list, and organizing your autoresponder a breeze.

Aweber has a cool email marketing blog with helpful tips that are worth checking out.

Free Aweber Video Tutorials

A cool Internet Marketer named Eric Holmlund also loves Aweber, and has created several great videos showing exactly how to use different features of this powerful tool.

Here are some of his tutorials:

Getting Subscribers to Read Your Email and Take Action

List Segmentation

Building a Relationship with Your List

List Building Strategies

Capturing Subscribers from “Non-Squeeze” Pages

Building a Squeeze Page

Introduction to List Building

Awesome Email Marketing Advice

Here is a video about email marketing from the legendary internet marketer Frank Kern called: “Stuff Nobody Tells you About Email Marketing (…That can Make you a Bunch of Money)”

And here’s another cool video from Frank called: How to make lots of money forever.

The eMail Guide

The eMail Guide is the search engine for email marketing.

For a few months in 2010 I worked with the eMail guide team at their office in Toronto.

Here are a few posts that I wrote while working with the team:

The Top 10 Twitter Email Tools

15 innovative ways to get more subscribers

Integrate social media and your inbox with xobni

How to: Add anyone to a safe senders list