Secrets of the "Email 50,000,000 Targeted Prospects
a Month" Gig Revealed.
This article talks
about both effective and none effective ways of email
advertising.
It's my guess that if you are a serious marketer, you
look for the best means to have your ad seen by qualified
prospects. Time and time again, gurus have told us that
the most effective and fastest way to get your ad seen is
through email.
Now, there's many different avenues to email advertising
and not all of them are very effective. In fact, some of
them are a complete waste of time & money. We've all
heard of ezine advertising, bulk email advertising and
opt-in advertising. These are all email based advertising
techniques. Lets take a look at each one separately:
Ezine Advertising
Firstly, what are ezines? Ezines are simply electronic
magazines that contain content on certain topics such as
cars, houses, dogs etc. They mostly contain articles in
relation to what the ezine is about. For example, an
ezine about cars would have articles related to cars and
so on. But ezines are also filled with advertising. These
ads contain content that is related to that particular
ezine. For example, if I have a pet grooming service, I'd
place an ad in an ezine about home pets or something.
This form of advertising eliminates all possibilities of
targeting the wrong crowd and most importantly increases
the response rate to my ad. Responses to an ad could
happen as quickly as only a couple of hours after being
published. So why do they work so quickly? The answer to
that is CREDIBILITY. People that subscribe to an ezine do
this because they trust that the content in it and
believe it to be valuable to them. They get something out
of it and not a load of hogwash. So advertisers use that
credibility to thier advantage because they know that a
good ezine would only accept ads that complimented it's
value and credibility. Therefore, people who've
subscribed to an ezine did this because they wanted to
reciece the VALUABLE CONTENT from that ezine. They put
their trust in the publisher to send them content that is
valuable to them, inluding advertisements. This is
probably the BEST way to get your ad seen if you've got a
CREDIBLE website.
Bulk Email Advertising
This involves sending email messages to 1000s of people
who didn't necessarily ask to receive these messages.
This form of advertising usually occurs when someone
harvests your email address from the internet, loads into
a powerful emailing software and blasts away. They don't
care who's email address it is either. This form of
advertising has been labelled as Sending Unsolicited Mail
or commonly know as SPAM. Alot of companies have been
fined and some even shut down for using this method of
advertising. Terms like "Using Bulk Email
Legally" could be splashed all over the net, but I
would be extremely wary of this. No doubt that you'll get
your ad seen in most cases, but at a HEFTY price.
Unmoderated Opt-In Advertising
This is probably the worst method of advertising to use.
Talking from experience, you'd probably have a better
chance having your ad seen in a FFA links page than you
would in an unmoderated opt-In list. Why? Well here's
why....
Ever seen these words somewhere on the internet; "Email
50,000,000 TARGETED Prospects Every Month" My
guess is that you've seen it dozens of times and like me,
you probably thought this was finally the answer to your
prayers. I was almost drawm to tears of joy when I first
came across these words. I was a struggling marketer and
I thought, this is exactly what my website needed,
TRAFFIC and lots of it. Little did I know that it was all
a LIE. Here is how it works. A certain site, lets call it
jondoe.com as an example, will charge you for access to a
list of maybe 400 unmoderated lists. You pay for the
access and get to the webpage that has the 400
unmoderated lists listed on it. Your job is to subscribe
to these lists using a certain emailing software, recieve
confirmations from the lists, reply to the confirmations
saying that you wanted to be added to these lists and
shortly after that, begin blasting away. Thats all pretty
easy right. Now imagine that 1000s of people did exactly
what you did. They subscribed to a these lists the same
way as you did and they began blasting away. You'd
receive 100s of ads from other subscribers just as they
are receiving 100s of ads from you and other
subscribers....right? Well, jondoe.com gives you a very
helpful tip.
To avoid receiving
100s of ads and jamming up your mailbox, why not open
another email account that automatically deletes incoming
emails. All you have to do is forward all emails to
another account that automatically deletes incoming
emails. There, your problem is solved. Now imagine if 50%
of subscribers in these lists did the exact same thing as
you did. You wouldn't receive ads from other people and
neither will they receive your ad. Sometimes subscribers
begin to use AUTORESPONDERS in these lists.
Majority of the time if don't forward incoming email and
decide to receive all of them, you'll come across emails
with these subject lines: "Yahoo Response" or
"RE: then the subject line of every email in your
inbox". People use autoresponders in lists so that
they can automate the whole posting process. They don't
want to have to fire up their emailing software day in
and day out and blast away because it's too much of a
hustle. Or sometimes they do not want to use their ISP's
mail server because they'll be shut down for using up too
much of its resources.
So where is the value in this kind of advertising? There
is none because it's purely ad based. The contents in
these lists are not limitted. They can be about anything
and everything. You could receive all kinds of emails.
Some could be scams and others legite. But who's there to
review these ads before their published? Nobody! Because
it's a free for all. I'm only telling you this because
I've used this form of advertising for about a year and I
did not get 1 single click to my website. I had to face
the bitter truth sooner or later.
My advice to you would be, don't get sucked into ANY form
of unmoderated opt-in advertising. Especially if you've
paid for access to the same lists that you could find
yourself if you looked hard enough. This would probably
be the worst investment you'd ever make. Not only of your
money, but also of your time.
I wrote this article to warn other average marketers to
watch out of such sites. It's vital that you research a
website THOROUGHLY before you can make
any form of investment. Even if they offer testimonials
on their website, ask to contact these so called
testimonials that rave about their site because often
enough, they could be the same people from jondoe.com
who've written these testimonies.
By Charles
Muchai
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