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There’s just no way around it: Marketing online must involve some type of email marketing. And to utilize email correctly, automatic responders work exceptionally well. If you are using your autoresponder to sell a product or service, you must be very careful as to how you approach your potential customer. Few people like a hard sale, and marketers have known for years that in most cases, a prospect must hear your message an average of seven times before they will make a purchase. How do you accomplish this with autoresponders? It’s really quite simple, and in fact, the autoresponders make getting the message to your potential customers those seven times possible. On the Internet, without the use of autoresponders, you probably could not achieve that. Too often, marketers make the mistake of literally slamming the potential customer with a hard sales pitch with the first autoresponder message - this won’t work. You build interest slowly. Start with an informative message - a message that educates the reader in some way on the topic that your product or service is related to. At the bottom of the message, include a link to the sales page for your product. Use that first message to focus on the problem that your product or service can solve, with just a hint of the solution. Build up from there, moving into how your product or service can solve a problem, and then with the next message, ease into the benefits of your product - giving the reader more actual information with each and every message. Your final message should be the sale pitch - not your first one! With each message, make sure that you are giving the customer information pertaining to the topic - free information! This is what will keep them interested in what you have to say. This type of marketing is an art. It may take time to get it exactly right. Use the examples that other marketers have set for you. Pay attention to the messages that you receive from other marketers. Start a "swap" file, and keep those messages. Use some of the better sales copy for your own autoresponder messages - just make sure that yours doesn’t turn out to be an exact copy of someone else’s sales message! Remember not to start with a hard sale. Build your potential customers interest. Keep building on what the problem is, and how your product or service can solve that problem or fill that need. If you are doing this right, by the time the potential customer reads the last message in that series, they will be convinced enough to make a purchase!

Accordingly to this post, having a minimalist blog layout let you maximize your Adsense performances.

Does it really work? Probably it does. In fact, when visitors have very few things to click and read on a single page, they will tend to "understand" better the page, and they will tend to click on more links. If these links are ads, it’s done.

I’ve already talked in this post about newsletters. Assuming that you got one, when should you send out emails?
If you followed my advices (you didn’t? Argh! :) you are sending it once a week. The worst days to send them happen to be the weekend.

In fact many users do not connect to the Internet during the weekend: okay, it depends, if you’re targeting nerds they do, but generally speaking there are less users connected to the Internet on Saturday and Sunday.
Since in the weekend people accumulates mail, do not try to send it on Monday or Tuesday: it won’t be noticed! Wednesday is the climax of the week: better to avoid job peaks.
So, the best time to send a weekly newsletter happens to be the closing of the week, Thursday or Friday (early) morning, since in these days people tend to work less and be more prone to distractions.

A very stupid tip, that may save you some newsletter unsubscriptions.

Many sites on the web have a newsletter where people receives the updated content of the site, the links to the articles or material recently published and so on.

Some blogs (not much) have the same newsletter: through that, owners send their latest news to the visitors, sometimes in the form of a digest.

Should you create one for your blog? It depends. First of all, a newsletter must be well-written, must have nice content well formatted, must be in plain-text and must have a low frequency (e.g., once a week).
A newsletter should be quite short to read: in this case, if you post a lot, make sure to have only the excerpts of the most important news of your blog, and nothing more.
A newsletter must also include a footer and a header, and inside the footer there should be enough information to unsubscribe the newsletter. As of these days, a newsletter must also have a double opt-in/double opt-out mechanism to prevent people being spammed.

So, do you want to comply to these rules? Remember that people subscribing to the newsletter are user that will come to your site if you incentivate them, otherwise they won’t: therefore, in the newsletter always place links to the articles on the site more than to other sites.

To end this post, let me clarify you that writing a good newsletter, once a week, no more than 25-40 text lines may take you up to half an hour/an hour, and therefore it might be heavy to carry on if you blog part-time.

Do you have something very very very important to say? Do you think that the article you are going to write will or could have a strong impact to others? Well, if this is the case you’re very lucky: it happens once in a million. How could you make sure that the article or revelation you’re going to make will have a lasting impact on your blog, on your business, on you?

Here comes in handy preparation and self-promotion. First, take a breath. Then, if you’re ready, write the article in the most perfect manner you could ever imagine. But that is just the beginning. Before publishing it you’ve got to make sure that people will talk of you!

To do this, scan the Internet and look for sites and blogs pertaining the article you’re writing, or that may be interested in publishing a reminder to it. Once you’ve collected them, try sending them the link as soon as you publish the article: if you can, write directly to this sites by sending the article. Or is the article more than sensational? In that case you might also be interested in sending it to newspapers and media agencies, provided that that articles is really, really, really impressive.

Do you want an example? Ok. Several weeks ago Darren Rowse talked about his earnings: in one month he did more than $10,000 with Google Adsense. By that, he was on the mouth of everybody in a very few hours and he was even Slashdotted that day.

This gave him an incredible boost of visitors and subscribers, and I’m pretty sure that this had a lasting effect on his online activities.

He probably didn’t look for such popularity when writing that post: however, if you do, you may achieve sudden popularity if you’re talking on something very significant or very impressive.

In the real world, a competitor is a competitor: I mean, except in very rare cases, nobody would ever dream to ally with a competitor.

The blogosphere is however a bit different: everybody, if he has something to say and has enough credibility and style, has the power to be heard, and the first that hear him are exactly his/her competitors. In this scenery cooperation among bloggers, even if the blogs are related to the same niche, is not impossible.

What a blogger should do is to create relationships with other blogs by trackingback them if they say something you find useful. Comment them, create articles on the posts of the other bloggers. Write, write, write. And be sure also to try exchanging ideas, reciprocal links and such with the other bloggers: being referred by others is the only method to succeed.

Dave Taylor has published on a web-site excerpts of a book he has written, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google.

Excerpts of the book can be found here.

No matter which niche you are in, you are probably not alone: there is certainly somebody out there already doing more or less the same you do. Or, if you’re the first, there will be somebody following your steps.

To be updated on the moves of the other competitors, on interesting posts and so on read them periodically or, better, subscribe their feeds. In this way, if they publish a news you haven’t published, you can always mention it and put a reminder to the competitor’s site: this, in the blogosphere, is a very nice sign, as I’ve already explained in this post.

You’ve built a blog, you’ve been updating for a few months. You have a nice traffic, and your visitors start commenting your posts, and writing you emails. Nice.
Should you worry about anything?

Of course you should! The first rule is to always reply to questions, no matter how dumb they could be! I have run and currently run other sites aside from this, and what I’ve learnt is that people tend to ask nearly the unimaginable. Every 100 mails/comments, only 5 to 10 of them are useful to you: the others are just congratulations, insults, people asking for things they’ve not understood, requests for enhancements and so on.
How would you deal with that? Be polite. No matter what you’re selling or saying always keep well in mind that there is always somebody out there with different ideas, that thinks with a different mind, that may not understand what you say or - worst - may not understand you if you’re doing humor. There may be also somebody that doesn’t fully understand your language!

The rule for all these cases is always the same: don’t ignore them, and be polite, even if it might be stressing. If somebody writes to a blogger or to a site owner and does not get a reply probably doesn’t care too much: however, getting a reply is seen as a very good sign, and people will notice it.

Put in another way, would you be pleased to walk into a store, ask for something and be ignored? Would you return to the store?

Selling to a niche is different than selling to masses: in mass marketing, you are trying to selling to everyone, while in niche marketing you are trying to sell a specific product to a specific group of people.

To understand this better, think to Wal-Mart and to a drug store: who goes to Wal-Mart? Who goes to a drug store?
To a drug store, obviously, you go (or should go) if you are ill; to Wal-Mart, everybody goes to buy nearly everything.
You might thus be fooled into thinking that being generalist is certainly more lucrative than trying to sell a niche product to a niche market.

But that’s FALSE! And this is the secret that many out there do not know! Selling a niche product is far more easier than trying to sell everything: in fact, not only you have to spend less money to buy products, space, personell, etc. but you also know who you are selling to.

This also applies to the Internet and blogs: being generalist is very difficult, since you should cover pratically every topic. Think to Yahoo, for instance. Could you compete with it? Do you have enough money and time to beat them? Obviously not, that is the land of the giant Golias, and we are only small Davids. So go and find your niche, and don’t be afraid that it won’t be profitable: if you specialize enough, it will.