Before You Begin

First off, let me explain what I'm NOT talking about. I'm not talking about blasing spam emails to 10s of thousands of email addresses.

That's ain't email-marketing to me...that's sheer idiocy. It reeks of spam (perhaps because it is) and can get your account shut down.

Here are some more resources regarding that:

TechTarget

Taming The Beast

What is eMail Spam?

Instead, I want to focus on marketing via a series of emails...otherwise known as building a relationship with your contacts. Thus! Let's begin with the following tips, some of them taken directly from The Beginners Make Money Cookbook:

Tip 1 - It's relationship building.

People generally tend to buy from folks they know, folks they trust...folks who have become a living breathing person to them.

And an email blast-out just really can't accomplish that.

The best way to approach email marketing is to sequence it as a series of email communications. Two easy ways of achieving this are optin ezines and optin classes.

With an optin ezine, you can use an autoresponder and craft 52 messages that get sent out once a week....each message building upon the prior one. The result? People begin to know the quality of your expertise...and start to view you as someone knows what they're talking about. After awhile, you can review and promote an affiliate product to your list... and chances are, you'll make some money via that broadcast.

Have trouble thinking about ezine content? Check out Instant Niche eMails - that software helps you create 52 weeks of content that's flavored by your own style.

Next, you can consider:

Tip 2 - Creating a squeeze page

Let's say that you want to promote a product via email...but you want to increase the ability to followup at a later date.

Instead of sending people directly to a product, you can send them thru a squeeze page instead that is designed for people to submit email addresses and names. That form would have its backend tied into a followup autoresponder sequence which would automatically send additional information over the coming days.

Here's my Squeeze Page for Book 3, the Money Making Cookbook. Instead of a followup AR in this case, I send back a free report that dispels all the hype and froth regarding Internet marketing.

But by far, the best tip I can give you regarding email marketing it to:

Tip 3 - Cloak your links!!

I have lost count as to how many soliciations I receive...that has the person's affiliate ID tacked onto the destination URL.

Were I interested in buying that product, I could simply replace their affiliate ID with mine! Voila - their affiliate commission would then be hijacked. For a marketer, that's suicide!

Whenever sending out offers in eMail, always make certain to cloak your links. Affiliate Link Cloaker is one way to do that should you not want to tweak with the actual html yourself.

Above and beyond

Did you know your email could be caught by spam filters if you include certain words? Check out these tips:

Spam Filter Triggers

Avoid Spam Filters

Words That Trigger

I hope you've found the above useful! Please feel free to share it with your friends.

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