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I guess people are not interested in this thread.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details. This especially holds true in the world of marketing. All of the changes, advice, and information out there can be overwhelming. But marketing doesn’t have to be so complicated. Take email marketing for example—it’s effective, affordable, and time efficient. Let’s take a step back to understand the fundamentals to achieve great results with your email marketing efforts.



1. Always market with permission

People open email from people they know, and they delete or mark as spam email from people they don’t recognize. This is why it’s critical that you always ask for permission before adding a new contact to your email list. Permission-based email marketing is the best route to developing long-lasting customer relationships that drive repeat sales and valuable word-of-mouth for your business. These practices also keep you in compliance with legislation such the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-Spam) and the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

2. Set expectations

When someone signs up to receive your email communications, they do so with the expectation of receiving something of value. If you don’t communicate clearly what that value is, your audience might lose interest quickly. The best way to set expectations for your audience is to use your email sign-up page. Make sure your audience understands the value of signing up right from the start. What can they expect to receive? How often will they hear from you? What have other people enjoyed about receiving your emails? You can customize your sign-up form to demonstrate the value of joining your list.

3. Build relationships the right way

When someone joins your email list, they are opting-in to learn more about your business. Some of these people will be completely new to your business and want to learn more about what you have to offer. Others may be repeat customers who joined your list to make sure they’re staying up-to-date with everything you have going on. Don’t miss the opportunity to build these relationships the right way. For new customers, you could send emails with additional information about your business and the different products and services you have to offer. For long-time customers, you can focus on generating repeat sales and reward them with a special offer.


4. Send relevant and valuable content

Remember that email marketing isn’t just about getting your information in front of current and potential customers. It’s also about listening to what your audience is interested in and providing an experience that’s relevant and valuable to them. When you provide content that’s helpful to your readers, you’ll have more people opening and acting on the content you send out. One of the easiest ways to tell what type of content your audience is interested in is to look at your email reports. Within your email reports, you can see how many people are opening your emails and which pieces of content are generating the most clicks. You can also use a tool like an online survey to collect feedback from your audience and see what they want to hear about.

5. Engage your audience

Once you’ve figured out what your email contacts are looking for in your email marketing, you need to create content that they will find engaging. Creating great content can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to become a full-time job. Great content starts with having a well thought-out content plan, a list of reliable content sources, and a commitment to knowing your audience. When creating a plan, it’s helpful to look at the calendar and think about the different activities you have going on and the ways you can help your customers throughout the year. Your customers will be your best source for content ideas. Pay attention to what they are saying and the questions they are asking in-person and online.

6. Maximize your delivery rate

There are steps you can take to maximize your email delivery and make sure your emails get to where they need to go. One of the best ways to tell if your emails are getting delivered is to look at your bounce reports. Emails can bounce for a number of reasons, including invalid email addresses, a full inbox, or out of office statuses. Keeping an eye on your bounces will help you to remove any addresses with ongoing issues and maintain high deliverability rates. In addition to bounces, you can also look at your spam reports. If an individual on your email list reports your email as unwanted or unsolicited, it will be marked as spam. If you consistently have a high number of spam reports it may be time to review the content you’re sending.

7. Respect privacy: Never share a list

If you’re a business that respects the trust and privacy of your customers, you should never share your email list. Sharing your list could damage your reputation, hurt customer relationships, and ruin the trust you’ve worked hard to build. You should also avoid purchasing a list from a third-party vendor. These lists are full of people who don’t know your business, didn’t sign up to receive updates from you, and will likely ignore your emails or mark them as spam when they show up in their inbox. Rather than sharing or buying lists, look for ways to partner with other local businesses or organizations to extend your reach. You can ask a non-competitive business to help you promote an upcoming sale or event, and in exchange, you can feature them in a future email campaign. Look to partner with trusted businesses that can provide additional value to your customer base.

8. Make use of metrics

Your open and click-through rates will be the most effective metrics to determine how your emails are performing. These metrics can be influenced by the content you include, the frequency that you send, and whether or not people recognize your emails in their inbox.

Along with opens and clicks, you should also pay attention to metrics like bounces and unsubscribes. These metrics allow you to determine potential problem areas. If you’re consistently seeing a large number of people unsubscribe each time you send (it’s normal to see some unsubscribes as your subscribers’ interests change), you may need to revisit your email marketing strategy and look for ways to make improvements. Beyond your basic email metrics, you should also pay attention to other business results including traffic to your website, sales, foot traffic, event registrations, coupon redemptions, donations, and more.

9. Integrate email with other marketing channels

You’re likely already using a number of other channels to market your small business. Email marketing works best when it’s integrated with these other communication channels. Use sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to reach new customers and extend those relationships by encouraging them to join your email list. You can also use email to drive traffic to different social media platforms and generate engagement on these sites. It’s a great idea to add social media buttons in your emails so that people can connect with your social media pages.

HOW TO GET EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS?

Wondering how to get new email subscribers for your newsletter campaigns? Well, there are lots of ways to get email subscribers, just get creative. While some tactics are easier to implement or are more cost effective than others, you should definitely start from your website.

WEBSITE
In most cases, your website will be the starting point for collecting your user emails through a form ideally placed strategically across your site. The form can also act as an autoresponder (gist for another day) and help help you retain the contact information for your website visitors for further contact.

FORM
You can embed a form on a dedicated landing page as a part of the sidebar or a blog post, inside a pop-up or a “side-bar pop-up”. If you have a blog on WordPress, you can consider implementing list builder plugins, but be careful with these tools so you won’t annoy your audience and potential prospects. You can also motivate your fans and non-fans on Facebook and get them to jump on your email list through a form on a tab as part of your Facebook page.

APPLICATION
Third party applications can also be use to source for email subscribers. You can embed a sign up form inside a Facebook application canvas. The best way to do this is to put a sign up form when the user enters the contest. You can usually put a box which invites the user to start receiving the newsletter. This is a common practice in various online contests.

INCENTIVE
You can include a call to action for email sign-up almost everywhere in order to increase your email sign-up conversion rates. Call to action can be effective, but it works best if you have some incentive to motivate users to join your list via interesting and useful content like ebook, white papers, discount or information which provide your customers with additional value. Of course, it’s best to offer highly relevant incentive connected to the company or brand so you don’t end up with low quality subscribers on your list. You want to reach relevant users and potential buyers, not “prize hunters”.


Offline methods

Not all people are aware that offline can also play a big part in collecting subscribers. Some examples of offline sources for collecting new subscribers inside your stores or shops or office, offline events, trade fairs, seminars, loyalty programs
Offline sources can be a great addition for getting new subscribers. Be sure to include them as an addition to your online efforts in order to boost the growth of email subscribers.

****IMPORTANT NOTE****
ASK FOR PERMISSION
It’s important to understand that you need to ask your subscribers for permission to receive newsletters. If you skip this step, there’s a risk of getting bad reputation for your email marketing. If you buy or sell emails, you can get into serious trouble with the legislation and worldwide spam systems( i know my naija boiz are happy this does not apply here). You can also reduce spam complaints by providing users with an easy way to unsubscribe from your list if they lose interest for your service or product.

Please any news on what time the curfew would begin on Friday because some of us still need to go out regards of the upcoming election. If you have credible information please drop it with associated source if possible. I am sure a lot of people would need this information.

EMAIL MARKETING VS NEWSLETTER MARKETING

Email marketing is basically a message marketed to a broader audience using email as a medium. It is a wider concept which includes terms like transactional emails, promotional emails, triggered emails, crm emails, newsletter email etc.

Email newsletters are often mistaken for email marketing, but it’s actually a part of an email marketing strategy. Newsletters are based on creating the “right” and most relevant content in order to give your subscribers additional value and build the foundation for the long lasting relationship based on trust.

IMPORTANCE OF EMAIL MARKETING AND NEWSLETTERS

There are many market researches which confirm the importance of email marketing and newsletters. One such example is the research from Econsultancy which reveals that marketers still rate email as one of the best channel for return on investment with 66% of respondents rating email as “excellent” or “good”. Generally, most researches and studies find that email marketing is an important part of marketing strategies which has a positive impact on sales, ROI (return on investment) and ROMI (return on marketing investment).

To sum it up, email marketing and email newsletters are important because they provide:

1) Excellent ROI
2) Increase in income and sales
3) And all that at a low cost.

Emails provide great return of investment because you are communicating the right message at the right time which leads to new customer aquisitions, increased sales and income through cross-selling and/or up-selling. They also help to maximize customer lifetime value, drive offline sales and lead to repeated purchases.

Email is less time consuming than traditional direct marketing, and most important – more than 60% of users prefer to receive promotional content and messages through email. Of course, keep in mind that every campaign differs in approach and results so use this as a guideline and adjust to your specific situation. That’s why you always have to TEST, TEST and TEST your marketing activities and tactics.

Additional to that, users love email, especially on their mobile devices. Even though users use email across various devices, most of them use the same email address on desktop and mobile. While desktop usage is important, most exciting prospect of email definitely happens on mobile.

Basic Terminology Of Email Marketing
The "List" - Your "list" is a compilation of email addresses you collect through your email signup form and other methods.
Bounce Rate - the proportion of emails rejected by your lists' recipients' email servers
Whitelist - A whitelist includes IP addresses that have been approved to deliver email to a recipient.
"Permission-based" marketing -- your list receives messages from you because they've asked to be on your list.
The Multipart/Alternative MIME format -- offering recipients a choice of email formats, HTML or plain text.
Email applications -- customers will get your messages in all sorts of different email applications, such as desktop clients like Apple Mail and Outlook, webmail clients like Yahoo and Gmail, and mobile interfaces.
Double Opt-In -- A prospective customer not only signs up on your site but also confirms their interest in your list through a subsequent email. This is the recommended method of building an email list.
Open Rate -- The percentage of emails opened in an email marketing campaign, or the percentage opened of the total number of emails sent.
Conversion Rate -- The percentage of recipients who respond to your call-to-action in an email marketing campaign or promotion. This is one measure of your email campaign's success.
Clicks Per Open -- A percentage measure of the number of clicks divided by the number of opens.
List Segmentation -- Selecting a target audience or group of individuals for whom your email message is relevant. A segmented list means a more targeted and relevant email campaign, thus a higher response rate and less unsubscribes and spam reports.

Email marketing -- if you're not doing it, you should. There are few other tactics for acquiring and converting customers that are so effective and cost-conscious. But if you've never done email previously, the options might seem daunting. In this three-part series, we'll look at the basics of email (including key terminology), how to setup and manage your first email campaign, and how to grow a list through great content.

Why Email?
When you try to acquire customers for your business, you have a lot of different marketing tactics at your disposal -- print advertisements, press releases, events, partnership, social media. The list is virtually endless. But among the tactics you can choose, email marketing might be the one most worth your investment of time and attention.Consider the following:
1) Email sells -- in a recent DMA study (2012), 67% of respondents identified email as providing the best ROI of any tactic (more than twice the response of any other tactic).
2) Email is opt-in -- Building a strong list of subscribers who actually want to receive your offers is a hugely worthy investment in your business you can capitalize on over and over again.
3)Email is targeted -- Craft and serve offers to specific groups and watch your response rate shoot up. Serve irresistable content to targeted groups that really want it and see your list grow.
4)Email is optimizable -- you can create list segments, A/B test offers and subjects, and study your performance each time to improve.

Having an effective and easy-to-use email marketing service is a critical element for nearly every small business website. Incorporating email marketing into your site provides an opportunity to turn website visitors into subscribers and prospects and eventually into customers.

The introduction of internet cafe business in Nigeria brought about the exploration of various email provider service. Yahoomail used to be the favourite of everyone then, for some it was hotmail while others go the extra mile of using mail.com and the rest. But most of us did not know the huge opportunity such a medium possess outside of sending a message or receiving one from friends and family in distant location.
Recent happenings (mind you am talking about Nigeria) has made us exposed to what effect email can have outside of our personal lives and most especially in our businesses.
You've heard email marketing is a good thing, but you're not sure it's right for you. You still need to be convinced it's a good channel for your business. But even if you're convinced, you don't know how to grow your list or develop an effective email marketing strategy. And you've no idea what to write about. This series will show you why email marketing is an essential tool for almost every business. It will also help you develop an email marketing strategy, showing you how to get attention with your emails, while giving you ideas for what to write about.

P.s: I would try to do a post at least once every weekday, so stay glued. Contents would be aggregated from other sources online.

Putting your business out there via digital channels can be done making use of different strategies depending on your organisational goals and objectives. This would also impact on the channels that would be utilized for your campaign and the kind of marketing messages that would be crafted for the individual channels to help pass across your message. Online marketing done wrong can be a total disaster( loss of marketing funds and even confusing your target audience) which is why it requires careful planning. Below is an infographic detailing ways in which you can possibly move your business forward and achieve the maximum ROI you expect.

P.S: If you are not well versed in the world of digital marketing, it is usually advisable to get someone more experienced to show you the ropes.

Using social media to promote your business is rarely effective without some type of organized, deliberate strategy. Short term, haphazard approaches just use up valuable time. You need to make it a specific part of your marketing plans by designing long-term campaigns with concrete goals.

Here are a few tips for running a social media campaign that will be effective at impacting the success of your business.

Tip #1: Set short and long range goals

What do you want to accomplish with your social media marketing? Each social network can help you achieve different goals, so it’s important to identify these before you go a step further. You should have separate goals for the short term and long term.

When you set your goals, make sure they are measurable in terms of the return on your investment (ROI). A social media campaign isn’t about gaining a certain number of followers on Facebook. It should involve metrics around building your business, such as the number of people who visit your site from your Facebook page and then go on to buy something.

Tip #2: Choose the right network for your needs

Just because everyone else is focusing on building a Facebook page doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best venue for achieving your business goals. Look at the strengths and weaknesses of each one and decide which to concentrate on. Your customers may not even be hanging out on Facebook!

Use dedicated social media management tools for tracking the results you get from each network. Then you’ll be able to make an informed decision on which is giving you the best bang for your buck. Be sure to measure the time you are spending on each one as part of your tracking efforts.

Tip #3: Assign responsibility for social media management

Make it clear who is responsible for each network and campaign. If you are part of a large company, you may have multiple people responsible for your social media. Each person needs to know what the other is doing as part of your overall strategy. At the same time, you should always be keeping abreast of new developments in the field of social media and on each network.

Tip #4: Create a blueprint of your strategy

An effective social media campaign requires a clear map that details every step. Lay out your goals and strategy first. Determine the key measures you will use along with the different phases of the campaign. What are the exact steps that need to be implemented? What content will you need? Set up your timeline and share the entire blueprint with everyone involved.

Social media may have started out as a fun way to share with friends, but it is now a powerful marketing tool that should be treated as such. While it can still be confusing for businesses that have relied on traditional marketing in the past, using social media to successfully promote your business doesn’t have to be any more complicated. Just use the same structured approach you would use for any marketing campaign.

Pinterest may have started out as a place for women to share product images, but its meteoric rise as a social network makes it a great place for businesses too. Think of it as a place to share ideas in a visual way and be creative about how you can profit from that. Users on Pinterest love to share and repin images from a whole range of categories. As with any social network you just need to find a balance between self-promotion, social networking, and making money.

Here are just a few ways you can use Pinterest both for profit and promotion.

Promote Your Blog

If you have an image on your blog, it’s pinnable. For that reason alone, you should always add an image on each of your blog posts along with a “Pin it” button under each. Aside from that, readers are drawn to images and an interesting one encourages them to go on and read your article.

When you or a reader pins your image to Pinterest, it creates a direct link back to your blog. This not only adds to your link-building efforts, it can bring a whole new type of traffic to your site. Create themed boards on Pinterest that are based on the categories on your website, and make sure that you always pin your own blog post images to those boards.

Involve Your Customers

Having Pinterest boards is a new way to engage your customers online. Not only can they pin their favorite images to your boards, but they can comment on them and share them with their friends and followers. When people enjoy interacting with your website, they’ll come back more often. This not only builds your relationship with website visitors, but it gives you far greater opportunities to showcase your products and services.

Inspire Your Customers

Often people only see your products in one way and for one purpose. Pinterest boards give you the chance to inspire different ways to use your products through visuals. For example, if you sell wedding favors, you can show pictures of them at the table settings of customers’ weddings. That’s far more inspiring than a simple product image in your store.

Show That You’re a Real Person

It’s always difficult to make a personal connection with people online vs. face-to-face. By including both business boards and personal boards in your Pinterest account, prospects and customers get to see some of your own interests. They start to see the real person behind the business persona. Even if you are representing a large company, remember that customers are eager to know the real people behind the corporate face. If you’re a small business or entrepreneur, this is even more critical.

Add Affiliate Links

You may not realize it, but you can also insert your own affiliate links on your pins. It’s a whole new way of doing affiliate marketing. You can create boards that are just product oriented and earn cash when people click those links and buy something. Just go into the “edit” button for a specific pin and replace the direct link to the product with your affiliate link.

Pinterest isn’t going anywhere any time soon and it is incredibly active. Make the most of it as a place to engage your customers and prospects. At the same time, it presents a new opportunity to earn income online from a completely different source.

Many businesses are not taking full benefit of Facebook’s cover page and timeline features. However, there is more opportunity there to drive more traffic to your website than ever before. Instead of just doing your regular status updates, try using some of these tips to give your page a boost in both traffic and image.
1. Change your cover photo often

Each time you change your cover, an update appears in your timeline. Your followers see that in their newsfeed and are more likely to click it to see what has changed. If you keep your images interesting they’ll be eager to see what’s new. Some ideas include sharing images from customers, collages of products, a funny photo, or a dramatic representation. Think about it. Some people go daily to the Google search page just to see how they’ve redesigned the Google image for that day. Also, the more you show up in their newsfeed, the more likely they are to visit your page.

2. Use the “pin-to-top” feature regularly

You can pin your most important posts to the top of your timeline every day. Whenever you have a special offer or event you want to promote, make sure you have it pinned at the top where visitors can see it.

3. Share images as much as possible

Statistics show that people share images more than text. Try using a mix of your own images and those from other interesting sites. Ask customers to upload or share their own as well. You could even have a contest where followers upload their favorite product images and see who gets the most likes.

4. Add items to your historical timeline periodically

Every time you add an event to your historical timeline those updates will also show up in followerss news feeds. Just don’t update your history all at once and flood their feeds. They won’t thank you for it and may just “unlike” you.

5. Avoid using third-party publishing platforms for your posting

With some of these outside posting services, the share button will not show up on your post. That defeats the whole point of using a social network! It’s okay to post a few things automatically, but do the bulk of it directly on Facebook

If you’re not making the most of Facebook’s Timeline at the moment, consider using some of these tips to drive more traffic to your page and ultimately to your site. At the very least, make sure you update your cover image!

Social media presents an opportunity to build your subscriber base with a wide range of different people and cross-promote your business from different traffic sources. If you integrate your social media marketing with your email list, you can harness the power of both of these sources for even more traffic and engagement.

Let Your Social Networks Know

On all of your social networks, let everyone know about your email sign-up page and tell them about the exclusive promotions you're offering there. Your social media profiles work as a great entry point into your sales funnel. Absolutely any social network can be used to qualify prospects and get them to your sign-up page.

On social networking sites, there are tools that allow users to share content they like. Features such as Facebook's 'likes', Twitter's ‘re-tweets’, and Pinterest’s ‘repins’ allow people to help spread the word for you. Encourage visitors to share and consider creating a reward system for those who share the most.

The Facebook Sign-up Tab

On your Facebook page, you can create a custom tab with a sign-up form so that your fans can sign up directly on your page. The best place to put this tab is on one of the visible 'squares' just below your cover photo. This is a prime area of Internet real estate that is visible as soon as people arrive on your main cover page.

Promoting on Your Blog

Your blog is also part of your social profile. Make sure you're promoting your email list there prominently. Put something on your blog's sidebar that's visible on each post and page so that it gets as much exposure as possible. Consider placing forms at the bottom of each post, or even in your header. Just like in your social networks, make sure that your offer or freebie is mentioned on your blog’s opt-in form.

Getting Subscribers to Social Media

Integrating social media and your email list means sending traffic both ways, so get your list members to connect with you on social media. One way to do this is to add social media buttons to your emails. These are buttons like Facebook's 'Like This' and Twitter's 'Tweet This.' Using these buttons, your readers can share your content or comment on it without leaving the email message.

Some email services, such as AWeber, have social icons for networks like Facebook and Twitter that you can simply drag and drop into your emails. Then people can click on the icon to connect with you on those networks.

One of the best ways to encourage list members to connect with you on social media is by offering exclusive content there. Offer something different in each place so they have a reason to visit you there.

Going Mobile

An increasing number of people read their emails and socialize online using mobile devices, so make sure that everything is mobile-friendly. Send emails in both text and HTML. Test any templates that you're using. Make text large and images easy to view with short loading times. Typing on mobiles is difficult so make your opt-in form easy to fill out. Also make sure that your landing pages are optimized for mobile.

The more touch points you have with your audience, the more valuable a relationship you can build with them. This is why it's essential to communicate with them on as many channels as possible, and to not rely primarily on one platform. It also helps to find out what social networking and other sites your target market is using so that you can focus your email integration and interaction in those places. You should be online wherever your prospects and customers are.

You forgot to include the word "Properly Filtered" in your search for email leads. That would save you getting a load of emails that are bad would keep bouncing, even leading to your email provider suspending your account and amounting to a total waste of money.

If you're a natural introvert, there's no reason at all to shy away from social media. Don't let the word 'social' throw you. Social media sites offer a great platform for introverts to be social on their own terms. You get to interact with other, but keep control at the same time. Many introverts get in touch with their extrovert side online.

Don't Be a Hermit

If you're using social media for your marketing, consistency is important. But if you're a true introvert, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of people out there. All marketers need to schedule regular social media time and this is especially important for introverts. Check in to your social media account at least twice a day to see what's going on and interact with your friends and followers.

Personal vs. Professional

For introverts who are uncomfortable with sharing a great deal publicly, it helps to keep personal and professional life separated. This is actually a good idea for all marketers. Only reveal to your fans what you want them to know or what's relevant to your marketing (for example, your experience in your niche, etc.). While it helps to show a little bit of your personal side in order to connect with others online, you can keep it to a minimum. How personal you need to get will also depend on the nature of your market and niche.

Ease into It

If the idea of interacting with people online is frightening to you, dip your toes in first rather than diving in head first. Like all uncomfortable tasks, it takes practice to get good at socializing online. Practice commenting, asking questions, engaging in conversation, and so on. Set a goal for yourself to do X number of interactions each day. The more you socialize online on a regular schedule, the easier it will get.

Don't Force It

There's no reason to pretend you're an extrovert. You'll connect much better to your audience by being yourself. Some introverts feel pressured to come out of their shell online because that's how everyone else appears, but it's easier to build connections when you're being real.

Find Your People

Join groups that you're interested in and that are relevant to your niche. When you do this, you'll find that there are others online with similar interests and you'll make connections with them. This makes it much easier to relate to your audience. You'll also build important business relationships in a relaxed and casual way.

Find the Best Fit

Some things just don't feel right. There may be a social network that just doesn't fit with your introverted nature. For example, Twitter, which is all about real-time updates, can push you too far out of your comfort zone. If so, skip it and use a different site. While everyone needs to push beyond their comfort zone to grow, it doesn’t mean you need to tackle all the boundaries of that zone at once!

Coming out of Your Shell

Interactions on social media often don't feel 'real.' Even though you're interacting with people, the face-to-face element isn't there. Sometimes what helps introverts come out of their shell is to connect with social media friends and followers outside of the social media site. Meet with them in person or even talk to them on chat or Skype. Then, when you “see” them online, you’ll find it easier to engage in conversation.

If you're still wary of getting involved in social media, here's a good confidence-booster. Whatever you're doing on the site, make sure that you're adding value. If you don't feel that you're adding enough value, find a way to give more. Be overly generous and you'll find it easy to make friends and gain followers.

Forum marketing is one of the world's easiest traffic strategies. It involves joining a forum related to your target market and then posting content and interacting with other readers.

In many forums, you are able to create a signature with a link to your site. Every time you participate in a discussion, your “sig” with your link appears at the bottom of your post. When people are interested in you or what you say, they click the link and you get traffic.

In order to get traffic from forum posting, you have to do it regularly. It involves logging into the forum for a set amount of time each day to interact. The more you do this, the more you'll see traffic. It could be only as much as ten minutes, but that's ten more minutes most of us don't have to spare.

One way around this is to outsource your forum posting, but this is risky. Exactly how risky this is depends on your specific purpose in posting on forums.

Two Reasons to Post in Forums

There are two main reasons you may want to post in forums. One is just to build backlinks. The other is to drive traffic to your site and build authority, the two of which are closely related.

The link-building approach involves posting in forums to show Google and other search engines that you’re worth ranking. Their spiders will crawl your backlinks and if the forum is a high-traffic authority site, the links will add SEO juice to your site.

If you're trying to drive traffic and build authority, you're aiming for human eyes. This more personal approach can be extremely effective in building traffic in the long run, but it won't work if your posts don't provide enough value that people want to learn more about you.

Outsourcing Forum Posting for Backlinks

If you're posting for backlinks, what you say in your posts isn't as important as making sure you are able to put a link in your signature file. It's the backlink you're going for. The worst that could happen is that your posts get deleted. If backlinking is your purpose, you can hire someone to post for you without worrying about it (although keep in mind that this goes against most forums' terms of service).

Driving Traffic and Building Authority

If you're posting for human beings, it's a different story. Think of it from the other forum members' point of view. If you leave a comment that says something like, 'Good point, thanks,' why would anyone click on your link? People will only get curious about you if you’re saying something of value that adds to the discussion. You're building your authority right there in the forum with your posts.

In other words, if you're posting for traffic and authority, you need to give them your best. Part of what you're doing is networking and building relationships. When you outsource, you may or may not get this. In the end it could be a complete waste of money and effort. At the worst, your reputation can be damaged.

This isn't to say that it's impossible to outsource forum posting for traffic and authority. But if you do, your staff or VA needs to be a great writer who is knowledgeable about your subject and can write naturally with your voice. They need to be able to build relationships with other forum members and you need to know what they're doing on the forum. In the end if it's quality you're going for, it's probably worth it to just spend the ten minutes necessary each day to do it yourself.

Just doing my bit

tempem:
Thanks, man......



It's a reminder...





Techpays.

While there are still many bloggers who just blog because they like to write and express their ideas online, most people want someone to read it. If you want someone to read your blog, you need traffic. And you don’t just want a little traffic, you want as many people as possible to share your blog with. The best way to reach these people is through the search engines. And the best way to show up in the search engine results is to optimize each of your blog posts for a specific keyword phrase.

Step 1: Find a keyword phrase

Don’t just sit down and write about any subject that enters your head. If you really want to appeal to people, you need to write about things that they want answers to. Start by finding a good keyword phrase to use in your post. This means it should be a phrase that a decent number of people are searching for, but which has a relatively low number of competing websites. Keywords tools such as Market Samurai and Wordtracker will help you identify these phrases.

Step 2: Create your post outline

Once you know what you want to write about, you can start to outline your post. Make sure your title contains your keyword and that your post itself will deliver on the promise of that title. Some people like to also include their keyword in at least one of their header tags (H1,H2), but you need to make sure that you won’t have so many instances of your phrase that Google sees you as a spammer.

Step 3: Write high quality content

With a good outline in place, you should be able to sit down and write your post quickly. At this point, don’t even think about your keyword phrase, except to make sure that you’re sticking to your topic. You’re writing for people first and search engines second. Once you’re done writing, go back and make sure that you do have the keyword phrase 2 to 3 times in your post, depending on the post length. The last think you want to do is “stuff” your article with a specific keyword. If you find you’ve done that by accident, just go back and vary the phrase a bit or use other words as a substitution.

Step 4: Add images

Always add at least one image to your blog post. It should be something relevant to the content, naturally, but it should also have your keyword in the alt image tag and image description. You’ll be able to see the places to input these when you click on the button to edit the image in Wordpress. Another reason to add a description and tag is that Google can read text, but it cannot read images. By adding a description and alt image tag, you’ve give the search engine something to read.

Step 5: Add links

By creating links within your post to other posts in your site, you create a natural structure that the search engines love. At the same time you add value for you readers by pointing them to other information that they’ll benefit from. However, you shouldn’t limit your links to internal ones. That looks suspicious to Google and could even get you pushed down in search results. Link to one or two other sites that add value for your reader and they may even link back to you, bringing in even more traffic.

If you really want people to read your blog content, you should always try to start with a keyword phrase that your target readers are looking for. Longtail keywords are the best and they will help you be more specific about what you write. In addition, by using a keyword in the title of the post and strategically throughout it, you’ll be far more likely to rank highly in the search engine results.

Whether you are an internet marketer or an offline business going online, you are going to hear about search engine optimization (SEO) very early on. SEO is the term online marketers use to refer to the process of getting as much traffic as possible from search engines like Google. It can be confusing to try to understand this new foreign language that everyone online seems to feel so comfortable with. So rather than struggling to translate everything, learn a few of the basic terms to give yourself a head start.

Here are some of the most common SEO terms that you’ll hear.

SERPS: This stands for “search engine results pages”. These are the pages you see after you type in a search phrase into Google or other search engines. They’re the results of your search. For anyone with a business online, your goal is to be as high up in the SERPS as possible for any search phrases associated with your business.

Meta tags: Meta tags are words that appear in the html code for a page, but do not appear on the page itself. They tell search engines specific information about that page. The most common meta tags are for description (of the page), keywords, and author.

Title tags: These are the words that appear in the tab or bar at the very top of your web browser. They are the “title” of the page that a user will see when they look at the top of their browser.

Alt image tags: The alt image tag provides the “alternative text” for an image. Since search engines can’t read an image, you should always provide some text that describes the image as well. It will show up if the image can’t be displayed and will also show if someone mouses over it.

Hyperlinks: A hyperlink is simply a link you can click on that connects one place to another either on the web or even within a document, such as a slide show. Hyperlinks can be attached to text or images.

Anchor text: This is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Marketers typically use keywords that describe the linked page as their anchor text, which can help in ranking higher in the SERPS.

Internal links: These are links from one page on a site or domain to another. The opposite is an “external link” which involves linking to a page on another website. Both types of links are important for SEO.

Longtail keywords: A longtail keyword is a search phrase that consists of 2 or more words. Usually, the longer the keyword phrase the more specific the information is that the searcher is looking for. In general, it is easier to rank for a longtail keyword since it will have less competition.

Keyword density: Keyword density is a measure of how many times a specific keyword appears on a page in relation to the number of words on the page. If the keyword density is a high percentage, it can be a warning sign to Google that the page is low quality or spam.

Organic traffic: The free traffic you get naturally from search engines and other directory listings is referred to as organic traffic. The opposite is paid traffic, such as the people who arrive at your site by clicking on one of your ads on another site.

Spider: Also referred to as a “crawler” or “robot”, spiders are software programs that the search engines use for locating and indexing all the pages and websites on the internet. Spiders follow links from one page to another and will revisit sites, indexing new pages as it goes.

There are many more SEO terms that you’ll hear as you learn more about getting traffic from search engines. Don’t be afraid to ask for definitions and explanations of a term you don’t understand. Even the most seasoned internet marketer comes across terms they are unfamiliar with. It’s all part of the learning process for getting more traffic.

Want to promote your brand or business using digital channels? Here are a few words about the concept of digital marketing and how it can be to your assistance.

Digital marketing is the advancement of your organization or brand using one or more of the various digital channels, such as email, cellular phones, social networks and the like. This could be a classy birthday greeting sent to the customer's smartphone, a personally relevant coupon sent by SMS to the customer or a weekly newsletter than includes updates and specials. Customers and affiliates are interested in receiving these good news messages from you, and we're here to help you deliver the messages to them and advance your business simply and effectively - no prior knowledge required.

The Advantages of Digital Marketing
The advantages of digital marketing are astronomical. First of all, this is a type of direct marketing, with all of the advantages that come with it: personal attention to the customer, motivation to action and more. Second, it's possible to create uniform messages which are personally formatted for each recipient with great ease, for example, by addressing the recipient by his first name or referring to activities performed by the customer in the past. In addition, the use of digital marketing allows you to measure quantitative results, giving you information about exactly who was exposed to your message and when, and which actions the viewer performed as a result. In addition, anyone can launch successful campaigns with digital marketing without any prior knowledge and without hiring special professionals. With so many significant advantages, digital marketing is a valuable addition to your business and helps you achieve more for less.

Digital vs. Traditional Marketing
Until just a few years ago, the methods of advancing a brand were pretty limited. However, since the communication and internet revolution, the ways you can reach your customer have multiplied. Cellular coupons, a well-developed email campaign or a customer survey on Facebook reach your customers in various situations and give a new light to your business, thus complementing one another to strengthen your business.



To find the most appropriate digital marketing channel for you, I would be pleased to examine the needs and resources of your business or organization. Whether it's mobile, email or social marketing, or perhaps several channels that incorporate the different types.
I invite you to read more about digital marketing, receive professional tips and learn how you can strengthen your marketing efforts with ease.