They are a great tool if you want something to seem more personalized. Something that is coming from you. And it is probably a better sales tool than your standard squeeze(landing) page.

I started looking at this because of an email I got from many of the mass newsletters I receive for internet marketing. So I did a little research on this and found this blog post on how to create your own video optin page.

The great thing about this is that all of the tools you really need are either free or already on your computer. You could even use WordPress.

Build your email list. Sell your product. Create traffic.

Usually, U.S. retailers earn 20-80% of their entire yearly gross during the holiday season. But this year, things are different. The sluggish US economy has prompted Deloitte Research’s Carl Steidtmann to fear “the worst Christmas ever” in the retail sector.

Short of going door to door in a Santa suit, how can businesses increase profits and prevent a blue Christmas? Despite economic gloom, industry leaders have found that an e-mail follow up strategy can increase sales by a cheery 35%! To weather the ailing economy, use a follow up autoresponder during your holiday campaigns.

What Does It Do?

Follow up autoresponders follow up with your leads for you. You create a series of messages, and decide when they should be sent, (daily, weekly, etc.). Your autoresponder will send the messages to each new lead automatically. With no further intervention from you, your leads will remember you throughout the winter chill. And this regular reminding will mean more sales during the all-important holiday shopping season.

Give yourself the gift of a higher conversion rate! Follow up automatically using these simple steps:

* Offer Useful Information
* Personalize Your Messages
* Track Your Leads
* Broadcast Tailor-Made Offers

Offer Useful Information

Write your follow up messages for your leads – not for yourself. You want to talk about your great service, but your leads just want to know what they’ll get out of it!

At some point, you must have purchased something like your product. What were you looking for then? Was it information about pricing, styles, or holiday gift wrapping? Maybe just a clearer explanation of the product? Figure that out, and put the answer in your follow up messages. That’s what your leads want to know.

Personalize Your Messages

You don’t open postal mail addressed to “Current Resident”, and your leads aren’t going to read e-mail addressed to “Dear Internet Friend.” People are simply more likely to read messages that address them by name.

Autoresponders let you use variables to personalize your messages. This way, you write just one message, but Lenny Lead reads “Happy Holidays, Lenny!” while Kate Customer reads “Happy Holidays, Kate!”

Names are only the beginning of the personalization features available, though. In addition to full, first, and last names, some autoresponders let you add e-mail addresses, dates, or an ad category. The best even correct the capitalization in your leads’ names, giving your messages a much more professional look.

Track Your Leads

Get even better results from your snowballing list of leads by experimenting with follow up content and timing. Your experimentation will be much more successful if you have access to proper statistics.

Only use a follow up autoresponder that offers detailed lead statistics. Look for live, graphical stats that show your incoming leads broken down by day / week / month, all of your active leads, and leads who have requested removal from your list.

Broadcast Tailor-Made Offers

To get more bang for your holiday buck, look for an autoresponder that also lets you broadcast extra e-mails to all of your leads. Some even allow you to send tailor-made offers only to leads who meet certain criteria.

For instance, send everyone who’s been on your list for a month a special discount. Or, notify all leads interested in a certain product when a new shipment comes in.

Follow up messages keep leads warm. Use periodic broadcasts to convert them to sales!
Prevent a Crummy Christmas

Businesses of all sizes have seen their sales grow by leaps and bounds because of automated follow up. Implement your follow up strategy now to make the best use of holiday leads! Then, enjoy the season – your autoresponder is following up for you!

Test Drive Aweber today!

What you might not know is it is also one of the largest sources of traffic available as well.

Many marketers out there are using YouTube to create “how to” videos and bring people to their websites. It is a great free tool that will increase your traffic if used properly.

Make a video explaining how to do something that is related to your website. Post it on YouTube after creating an account. Don’t forget to put your URL into the video and your profile.

It is that simple. Just another Bum Marketing technique that you can use.

What exactly did Google do?

They increased the fees of advertising in the Adwords program to the point that it wasn’t really profitable to use the advertising if all you were doing was pushing people to a splash page and then redirecting them to the actual sales page.

Yep. That’s right. They penalized affiliate marketers for doing what they do best. Creating traffic for a product where they gained a commission.

It would be nice if Google actually penalized other forms of marketing in the same manner but they didn’t.

It also affected may other legitimate websites. Some to the point that it made advertising with Google extremely difficult and expensive.

A new tool, Google Goggles, tries to help SEO Specialists and website owners by providing a tool to mimic what Google sees and rank your pages accordingly. Hopefully increasing your chances of lower advertising fees by showing you what to improve or change.

Not only does it allow you to know in advance if your campaign will be a stinker, or a goose that lays golden egg. It even makes specific suggestions as to what to tweak, in case it determines that your campaign won’t fare as well as you had hoped to, so you can, in actuality, still make it profitable right there and then! – Google Goggles

I can’t say for certain that this tool will be the end of “Google Slaps”, but it definitely can’t hurt to give it a try if you are using Click Bank for your affiliate marketing.

What exactly is this you ask?

Look to the right of the blog here. The advertisements you see are from the Google Adsense program.

You will need a website for you to be able to use the program. Almost any website will do. Check the terms and agreements for more details on this. But even if you just have a Blog, chances are you will qualify for the program.

Now how much you earn with Google Adsense is quite dependent on the number of visitors you have and how many click on the links as well as the quality of the links.

Not all links are created equal. Some services are much more valuable than others. This means that the advetisers for these services will pay more for the more valuable ones. You can earn anywhere from 1cent per click or, I have seen, $12.00 per click.

This used to be quite a bit more profitable.

Placement of the links is also important. The closer to the top of the page on your website the better chance you have of someone actually clicking on a link. Studies have shown that visitors will make up their mind in just a few seconds about whether or not they want to remain on your site. So you only have a few seconds for most of those visitors to click on a link. Hopefully they will remain longer than that but if not and your banner is visible they may help you generate some money through clicks on something they found interesting.

One of the nice things about the program is the links will pertain to the content of your website. This will make clicking on the links more appealing to your visitors since they were more than likely drawn to your website for some reason which may be similiar to the links.

You can also add google searching to your website.  This will provide search results and produce some clicks through the google adsense as well.

Google Adsense accounts also offer refferal fees for several different program such as Adsense, Adwords, Firefox with Google toolbar, Google Pack(software similiar to office) and Picasa(photo organizing software).  When people download and install or register for these services you may get some cash from them as well.  The adsense and adwords both will gain you.  $100 for the adsense and $20 for the adwords.   The others are about $1 for each installation.  Of course those may change but that is the current pricing.
If you can get into the Google Adsense progam, you may find that it will proved a small income that you can sock away for vacation. I dont’ know that I would depend on it for a sole source income unless you found some content which generated some really good revenue with click throughs.

So, in conclusion, get yourself a website. They are pretty cheap. Put some content on the website and apply to the Google Adsense program. Once in the program, create either a banner to place at the top of your page or one to sit on the side of your page that people can see when they visit your website without scrolling down.