Article Submissions

Remember that opt-in newsletter? Remember how discouraging it was to write articles for it when you only had a handful of subscribers? Take a break. Add a form to your site allowing visitors to submit articles. Promise them that you'll be sure to give credit. Many will be willing to submit an article just to see their name in your newsletter. If your newsletter has a really small subscriber list, offer to post articles on your site as well. Offer a free link to webmasters who submit articles. This will give you a chance to take a break from writing everything for your own newsletter.

It also gives you someone else to email. You should ask for an email address on your article submission form. The same rules apply here. If you can use article, send them an email and tell them when you plan to use it. In this case, you can feel more than comfortable to ask them to sign-up for your newsletter. They will want to see their own article; right?

Newsletter Publishers In Your Market

Speaking of your newsletter, let's strike out a little bit. So far we've been emailing people who have come to our site for some reason or another. That's great. Everything have been 100% opt-in and only by invitation.

Let's take next step. Let's send someone an email who has never filled out a form on our site, nor sent us an email. Wait! Isn't that spam? Isn't it wrong to sent unsolicited email? No; what I am about to discuss is NOT spam, nor is it unsolicited. Let's turn tables around. In last section, we talked about sending email to people who submit articles to your newsletter. That's OK, because we were responding to an email.

Was it spam when they sent you article submission? No; of course not. You invited them to submit an article to your newsletter. Guess what? You aren't alone. There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of other newsletters out there who want article submissions. Remember those articles you wrote for your own newsletter? Share them. You will be sending an email to newsletter publisher (which could lead to other possibilities). You will also have potential of being published in their newsletter. Now you have reached a whole new group of people.

Websites In Your Market With Link Directories

It doesn't stop there. If there are dozens or hundreds of newsletter publishers in your market, there are even more websites with link directories. They are easy to find. Search for your topic along with words "submit", "add url", "links" and other similar words. So if you have a site about "horses", do a search on your favority search engine for:

Horses submit Horses add url Horses links

Then either fill out their form (if they have one) or send them an email proposing a link trade. Either way, they will respond to your email. This is time to send a "thank you" note. Remember all of above tips about not being pushy and leaping for sale. Instead, remember that they are a fellow webmaster in your market. After thanking them for link exchange, mention same things you would mention to a webmaster who filled out your own form for a link exchange.

Affiliates

Don't have an affiliate program yet? You need to start one. This is where you pay other webmasters for selling your product/service. You need to have a form where they can signup.

You know rest. Ask them for their email address. When they make a sale, send them an email and tell them about it. I guarantee you that no affiliate will resent that email. Most affiliates will also be grateful for an occasional email offering tips on improving their sales.

Others

I think you have idea. There are literally dozens of groups of people you can and should email regularly. When you receive an email from anyone, you should be asking yourself how you can help that person. Then do it. If you can help that person by answering a question... do it. If you can help them by adding a link to their site... do that. Then drop them an email and let them know you did it. You never need to be afraid of spam complaints if you keep these tips in mind. You never need to be discouraged about not having enough opt-in subscribers for your newsletter either. There are plenty of people who want to hear from you. Reach out and help them.

Ezine advertising is a great method of building business, but this too is very risky depending on your type of business. Knowing where to place your ads is always greatest challenge. Some ezines are great and some are dogs. Some are expensive and some are inexpensive. Determining strength of your ad copy is tantamount to your success before spending a single dime on advertising in ezines.

There are ezines offering free ads, but they are not worth much to your advertising bottom line. Most of these ezines don't have a solid buyers base to them at all. Rather, they are mostly comprised of sellers who were searching for freebie advertisements. Just same, you can use these to test your ads before taking your money to paid ezines. This is just one of hundreds of ways to test your ads before purchasing expensive ad space.

Other ways to test your ads is to place them in classified ad websites, in safe-lists, in general advertising or niche mailing lists. You could run them in low-cost ezines. You can also set them up as independent doorway pages which are submitted to search engines.

There are also FFA pages that can be used for testing, but I generally recommend against FFA pages because return is so very, vary low by nature of how FFA pages are operated and used. In my mind, FFA pages simply are not worth time or money that you invest in them.

Sites like http://SubmitAds.net permit you to place your ads in their directory and then send your message to people who will place their advertisements through your replicated SubmitAds website. If you were adventurous, SubmitAds actually sports a nice pay program to enable you to send email to everyone in their network at intervals you decide. You may even earn a few additional dollars by participating in their program.

No matter what approach you take to place and test your advertising and ad copy, you should be running some type of tracking to determine effectiveness of your advertising in circulation. Without some method of tracking being employed, your test results are based only upon guess work. In real world of business, guess work just does not cut it. You need to know precisely what is working for you and what is not working for you.

There is no better way to determine what works and what does not than to employ some type of ad tracking software. There are a few companies employing such services, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, and each with very different pricing structures.

Shop around and see which ad tracking software is best for you and then use it to make a realistic determination as to what is working and what is not. Test your ads and your advertising mediums and track results produced by each. And when day is done, move forward with what has proven successful and then discard rest.