As you go about developing a marketing plan for your Net based business enterprise (or, for that matter, for a venture that exists in the brick and mortar world) you will want to make certain that you consider all of your promotional alternatives. In this regard, you will want to consider frankly the value of direct email marketing. There are a number of benefits that you can realize through direct email marketing. In fact, when all is said and done — when you consider the pros and cons associated with direct email marketing — you will be able to determine whether this type of promotional approach is worth it, whether it will be valuable to your own business venture.

The first principle of business email marketing is to use a list server, or what is commonly known as an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an efficient way to collect email addresses into your database as well as follow up with them automatically. There are a few scripts online that allow you to host an autoresponder on your server or website. An important thing to note is that a third party autoresponder company is probably the safest route to go, due to the spam issue. In order to safeguard yourself from being accused of sending spam, it is good to use a third party autoresponder service like Aweber or Getresponse for your business email marketing.

Business to business email marketing is a very big part of the telemarketing industry. Prospect lists are the driving force behind B2B email marketing; one company provides another with a targeted list of email contacts that would be most interested in investing in their service. On one side of the business to business email marketing equation there is the so-called buying center, the buying center is a group of company employees specifically dispatched to making sensitive purchases for their employer. Such purchases might include information systems, software, the cheapest conference calling rates and prospect lists that will likely be receptive to targeted marketing.

Web server based B2B email marketing is a no fuss approach to this form of marketing. B2B email marketing marks the new age of no fuss conference calling, and you’d better believe that this approach to business conferencing offers the cheapest conference calling rates. After all, what’s cheaper than email? Communicate with other businesses in a hassle free way with a little help from messages that are easily forwarded, messages that can be pre-scheduled, tracking reports, and the ability to review the status of mailings. You can even download “click-thrus” for further follow-up.

Contact old, inactive clients and offer them something new or freebies to convince them to do business with you again. Let them know what they have missed and why they shouldn’t miss the next product you are offering.

Source: Email Marketing

Ebay may very well be one of the best list building and traffic generation tools available on the Internet.  So many marketers underestimate its potential and really drop the ball when it comes to incorporating it into their overall marketing strategy.  It is not just about selling old trinkets around the house and video games that you no longer play.  Ebay is a very powerful web site that can be used very effectively for market research, keyword research, lead generation, product sales and Internet traffic generation, all either for free or for significantly less than what you would pay from other sources.

One way to use Ebay is as a market research and keyword research tool. By simply creating a free account with them, you get the ability to search through all items that are available for sale.  By doing an “advanced search” you can do a search only for items in which the auction has already ended.  To do this, simply check off the option “completed items only.”

To do market research and keyword research on Ebay, simply do a search for all the completed items with some of the keywords in your target market.  This search will reveal to you what prospects are paying right now for items in your market as well as what keywords successful sellers are using to drive traffic to their auctions.  As you can probably imagine, this type of information is incredibly valuable to those who actually use such information to their advantage … which, by the way, is highly recommended.

Ebay can also be used for effective list building by making product sales. If you offer a low priced product (i.e. under $20) using their “Buy It Now” feature may very well work for you.  Even if you offer a higher priced product, you can still make money selling the product with their service.  However, you might be better off using their Classified Ads feature.  Please note that a new policy has come into effect that if you sell downloadable products online through Ebay, you MUST list that item as a classified ad.  Therefore, if you want to sell your downloadable products, make sure you either list it as a classified ad, or make it a physical product by putting it on a CD.

Ebay is also one of the most underutilized traffic generation web sites on the Internet today. Think about how much keywords in your target market go for on Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search.  By utilizing the power of Ebay to your advantage, you can generate targeted prospects for significantly less than what it would cost using a pay per click search engine.  For example, one common strategy for traffic generation is to offer a low cost downloadable report.  When your prospects purchase that report, you then send them to a download page where they download the report that they purchased and also provide them with an offer for the main product that you want to sell.

This is a great marketing strategy because you have already gotten the prospect to buy something from you. It is much easier to get a prospect that has already spent money with you to spend more money, than it is to get a prospect who has never spent money with you (and has joined your list for free) to spend money with you for the first time.  A certain percentage of prospects who buy your low cost report will also purchase your main item.  In addition, on your listing page, you can refer your prospects to check out your “About Me” page on Ebay.  On your About Me page, you can make an offer for anything you like, even a link to the main product you promote.

Keep in mind that Ebay is one of the HIGHEST visited web sites on the internet today boasting hundreds of millions of users from all across the world — ALL on that web site looking to BUY stuff.  Where else can you go to find a congregation of BUYERS for the products and services that you offer?  This is why if you are not using Ebay as part of your Internet marketing strategy, you need to strongly consider using it.

If you are interested in learning more highly effective ways to drive traffic to your websites than you should definitely consider The Analyzed Marketing website traffic generation program.  It will open your eyes to numerous off line and Internet marketing techniques available that can increase website traffic free and at a low cost!

Increase Website Traffic Using Free And Low Cost Internet Marketing Techniques!

I hope you have found this article informative.  I would love to hear your comments.

To Your Success,
Mark Garland

P.S. If you did indeed enjoy this post, than I would appreciate a digg to the top right, or possibly pass this on to friends who might like it?

Google Trends is definitely one feature that the statistic loving Internet marketer is going to love.

While Google Trends is currently still in testing mode, it looks as though Google Trends is basically very close to completion. Of course, everything that Google releases is generally in beta for a long time.

Providing a search term receives or has received enough searches in the past, visitors can enter this term into the Google Trends page and be presented with a graphical representation of the number of searches that have been conducted over the past 24 months or so.

While this gives some very useful information on the patterns of particular terms, it unfortunately doesn?t provide any actual figures. Whether this will change when Google Trends goes live or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, though, there is some relatively useful information to be found.

Pick a topic relevant to your own site and look at the search trends. If you find that the topic you searched for is depleting in searches then look for alternatives. Of course, be careful to use another tool to ensure that changing is the sensible thing to do.

You can also compare search terms to see which ones are more popular.

You can view how the time of year affect the search volume that certain keywords have.

Alternatively, if you?re just interested in discovering the rise or fall in popularity of specific terms then go to http://trends.google.com and give it a try.

Whether this will become one of Google?s biggest successes remains to be seen. This is unlikely because the information is mostly used by webmasters and there are many tools out there already that provide more comprehensive information. The good point about this information is that it is probably the most accurate there is.Aviva recommends that you promote your website by submitting it to AvivaDirectory.com

Source: Business Goals