Online courses, or email courses are becoming an increasingly popular way for savvy Internet marketers to promote their products and services. Online courses or email courses essentially include short online presentations or emails which include insightful information on a particular niche subject. These courses are usually offered in multiple, short segments to keep the students interested in the topic. This type of advertising serves a useful purpose and many of the participants do not even realize they are being subjected to a marketing campaign. This article will discuss creating and distributing an online or email course for the purposes of advertising your business.

The creation of an online course of an email course should begin with a solid idea for a series of educational articles which pertain to your business and will be of interest to your potential customers. Educational email courses can sometimes be sold for profit themselves but if you are interested in using the courses as marketing tools you will most likely be offering these courses free of charge in an effort to entice potential customers to purchase your products or services.

Determining the topic of your courses is very important because it can dictate the success of your marketing effort. Consider an online retailer of running shoes. This business owner may want to develop a series of email courses on subjects such as training for a marathon, preventing injuries, increasing speed and running for fun. Each of these courses may contain a few segments which offer different perspectives on the subject. These courses are ideal for this business because they are subjects which are likely to be of interest to the customers of the business. Likewise a real estate agent may opt to offer email courses on subjects such as understanding mortgage options, finding a lender or house hunting. Again these are all subjects which are likely to be of interest to the real estate agents clients.

The distribution list for your online or email courses should mostly include members of your target audience. This can be achieved by either offering the course as a download online where only interested Internet users will partake in the course or only emailing the course to recipients who have specifically expressed an interest in receiving more information about your products and services and have submitted their email address for this purpose.

Once you decide on a subject for your online or email course, seek out a qualified writer to create the content for your online or email course. This will help to give your copy a more professional appearance. The writer can assist you by creating copy which is informative and useful to your readers but is also well written, clear, concise and easy to understand. If your niche topic is highly specialized you might have to provide the writer with product information as well as research materials to ensure the content is informative and accurate. Additionally, you should review the content once it is completed to verify the accuracy.

When distributing your email course or launching your online course, it is helpful to request feedback from the users as the conclusion of the course. This is completely voluntary but when users respond they can provide you with useful feedback which will be extremely helpful if you intend to launch a similar marketing campaign in the future.

Personal branding your affiliate marketing campaigns can help you succeed in affiliate marketing. The market will recognize you among other players in the business. Connection is also properly established with customers with personal branding.

Why You Should Use Personal Branding

Personal branding adds your touch to the business. Personal branding goes well beyond a sleek logo or a perfect tag line. It is a way of sharing your expertise and own set of values with your target market.

Personal branding helps a lot in establishing rapport with your clients. A sense of connection is formed leading to trust and confidence of your market to get what they need from you.

In a business world where competition is very stiff, other marketers can steal your concept, your tools, and your system. There will also come a time when your patent for your product will expire. Personal branding attaches your identity with the goods or services that you sell.

People will know it is you when they see something on the market. If they trust you, they trust what you offer them.

Tips on Building your Personal Brand

Building a personal brand is not an easy task. It does not come in a package nor is it achieved overnight.

Here are some tips to get you started in building your brand:

• Run your own blog – If you want to be seen as an authority in the business, you should have a site devoted to it. You can also receive important feedback from your followers and potential clients.
• Distribute information online- You can write free ebooks or newsletter and distribute this to your list or potential customers. This can help you as an affiliate marketer in building trust with your market.
• Publish write-ups on trade publications- Print is still a very powerful medium. People can get their ideas and business sources by reading magazines and journals. You will develop the authority in your field through this effort.
• Give seminars and webinars- These talking engagements put the spotlight on you and serve as a good venue to show your expertise. You can also push for your services or products during these events.

Affiliate marketing is like standing in a crowded room where everyone is wearing a black suit, donning the same shoes, and sporting the same smile. It is a crowded business and people will have a hard time seeing you. Personal branding magnets the attention of the market to you and puts a spotlight on what you can give them.

Off site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are not performed on your website itself, but are influenced by external factors.

When it comes to off-site SEO, it’s all about generating solid back links to your website from relevant authority websites.

There are many different ways of establishing quality back links to your website, including:

Link Exchanges
Blog Commenting
Forum Marketing
Directory Listings
Social Bookmarking

Place emphasis on the quality of your incoming backlinks rather than the quantity of backlinks you have. While the more backlinks in circulation, the better, if you have more backlinks coming in from solid, established and authority websites, they WILL carry more weight than those pointing to your site from start-up websites and blogs.

You also want to try to create a backlink campaign that has ONE WAY backlinks, where you are not required to provide a reciprocal link, as it will add more value to the backlinks pointing to your site.

One easy way of creating a back link strategy is by analyzing existing competition in your market, and determining who is linking to them, and what anchor keywords they are using so you can obtain a link from the same source, using alternative keyword phrases.

Directories

With online directories, you can add your website into specific categories and instantly establish back links to your website, just be careful not to over-do it!

You want to develop a natural back link campaign!  Do NOT create thousands of backlinks using automated software or services, otherwise you run the risk of being penalized by the search engines.

A few directories to consider are:

http://www.DMOZ.org

http://www.Lii.org

http://www.Info-Listings.com

http://www.Buzzle.com

http://www.MasterMOZ.com

http://www.maxpromo.com

Social Bookmarking

Here are the top 20 social bookmarking websites for generating fresh back links to your site. All of these contain DO follow, ensuring links leading to your website will count within the search engines as a valid back link:

1 – http://slashdot.org (PR9)

2 – http://digg.com (PR8)

3 – http://technorati.com (PR8)

4- http://www.furl.net (PR7)

5 – http://www.backflip.com (PR7)

6 – http://www.hugg.com (PR7)

7 – http://www.mixx.com (PR7)

8 – http://ma.gnolia.com (PR7)

9 – http://www.connotea.org (PR7)

10 – http://mystuff.ask.com (PR7)

If you are using article marketing as one of your traffic building strategies, then there’s one important element you need to understand and master.

Your author’s resource box is the ONLY element of your article that allows for promotion, so it’s vital that you create a compelling resource box that invokes a call to action and entices every reader to follow through by clicking on your links.

With sites like Ezine Articles, you are able to create multiple resource boxes, choosing one that compliments each article that you write. You can also create multiple author’s accounts so that you can cover a large number of topics, all within one account.

Use your resource boxes wisely, and make sure that you offer your reader with an incentive to click through.

One way of doing this is by offering a free giveaway in your author’s resource box that is relevant to the topic or market that your article is focused on.

If you are not sure what you can offer within your resource box, here are a few things I have used successfully for over a year now:

• Free Report
• Newsletter or Ezine subscription
• Free ebook
• Free sample of a paid product
• Free Trial Membership

When creating your author’s resource box, make sure to use anchor text whenever possible. This will help you rank for specific keyword phrases within the search engines.

If you have a brick and mortar store, and rely on walk-in traffic for your survival, you may be wondering what the Internet can do for your business. Believe it or not, a lot – and you don’t even need a website.

In the “old days”, the bulk of businesses relied on the Yellow Pages to get the phone ringing. The majority of marketing dollars were spent getting listed in this ten pound paperweight. With the popularity of the Net, less people let “their fingers do the walking” when they need something, and more are letting their mouse do the talking.

Online search has gone mainstream when it comes to searching for local businesses. Google states that 73% of searches are done for local content. Another study by BIA/Kelsey and Constat report that 97% of consumers use online resources when doing research for products/services in their local area. See www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr100310.asp.

Google has always understood the power of local search, and years ago launched its Local Business Center where any business can get a listing for free. Recently, they’ve done a major overhaul and have re-launched with a new name of “Google Places”, showcasing a host of new features. The name change was done to tie in with Google’s Place Pages which were launched over a year ago and include over 50 million places worldwide. Official Google Blog

If you want customers to be able to find you, and haven’t listed your offline store here yet, you need to get with the program. You are missing out on the chance to reach millions of Google users, including Google Map users, Google’s 800 Voice Directory Search and even Google Earth. And all of this exposure won’t cost you a dime. It’s totally free.

Now that I have your attention, let’s go over the steps for inclusion. As with all things Google, you’ll need to sign into Google Places with your Google Account. Up to 100 single locations can be added but, if you have more than ten to list you’ll need to use their “Bulk Upload Tool”.

There is a verification process that must be done to prove you’re the owner of the business being listed. The choice is yours, it’s by phone or mail. Once this is done, your listing goes live.

Now in case you’re thinking all that’s included in a listing is an address and phone number, hold onto your hat. Here are some of the listing options.

1) Show the geographic area you service.

2) Photos: Upload yours, up to ten images per listing, in JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP. A professional photo shoot can also be requested for your business.

3) Place Page Posts: You can post real time updates here, up to 160 characters, announcing special sales, events, and new products. One post appears at a time.

4) Custom QR Codes: For use with smart phones to take users to your mobile website.

5) Advertise: They do have a “Tags Program” in select cities for $25.00 a month where your business will be highlighted on Google.com and Google Maps.

6) List your operating hours. Biz description and even reviews.

7) Post Videos: Up to five videos can be posted, but you’ll need to publish them to YouTube first, then include the URL’s on your Place Page.

Payment Types Taken

9) Coupons: Create online coupons to give people incentive to visit your site. There’s a separate “coupon tab” that appears on your listing page.

10) Privacy: If you work at home and have no storefront you can choose to make your address private in your listing.

At this point you should be realizing how important being listed in Google Places is to your business. If you’d like to see what your listing looks like to a searcher, log into Google Places and click on “see your listing on Google Maps”.

Now remember, search results are based on relevance and “geographic distance”, so you can’t buy your way to the top of the list as with pay-per-click advertising. As previously mentioned, the “tags program”, if available in your area, can be utilized for having your business show up highlighted for $25.00 a month.

If you’re interested in paying for your links to show up on the Google Maps search results page, if related to the search terms and location searched, that can be done using Google’s Adwords program with what’s called “Local Targeted Ads”.

By the way, Google also includes a “Reporting Dashboard” that will tell you how people find you, and what keywords they used to search. It’s powerful stuff that can also be used in your local search engine optimization work.

Do yourself a favor – if you’re not listed with “Google Places”, now is a good time. It’s targeted, free traffic. Now where else can you say that when it comes to marketing on the Internet. People are looking for your business online and with Google Places you can make it easier for them to find you. Website or not – it simply doesn’t matter – but getting people in the door does, and Google is there to help.

About The Author
Merle’s Mission Blog – “Rants, Raves and Random Acts of Kindness”. A self-proclaimed “Internet Junkie” with a passion for net marketing, affiliate marketing, and social networking. An avid Blogger and writer with several niche sites. Find out more at merlesworld.blogspot.com . Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/msmerle

An interested visitor who has been strolling through your site has finally come to just what she is looking for and is about to make a purchase. It’s a sunny afternoon, and her cat, who happens to be sitting on the moss under the visitor’s large fifty-year-old snow-rose bonsai tree, suddenly jumps down, and the priceless tree topples over.

In the blink of an eye, your visitor exits your site, and your sale is dust – unless you have had the foresight to utilize an autoresponder that has captured her email address. If you have installed an autoresponder, you can then follow-up with her, and in all probability, make the sale when the poor woman has finished repotting her precious bonsai.

Autoresponders are remarkable, versatile programs that do so much more than just automatically answer your email.
Here are a few ideas that will help you to creatively and productively use your autoresponder to transform the casual
visitor into a profitable customer. Use your autoresponder to:

1. Publish a newsletter. Certain quality autoresponders will manage subscriptions and follow-up with interested
prospects. Your newsletter can keep your visitors informed about your services or products, while building your
reputation as a credible expert in your particular business.

2. Publish a newsletter only for your affiliates. Inform them of current sales you are running and of promotional material that your affiliates can use themselves to increase their commissions. Include tips, advice, and techniques that your affiliates can use to successfully go out and promote your business.

3. Write reviews. Cover books, software, music, e-books, movies, etc., and put each review in an autoresponder. Review your affiliate programs, using a link to your affiliate’s page in your autoresponder.

4. Distribute your articles. Writing and distributing targeted articles is a powerful tool to build your business
credibility, bring traffic to your site, and increase your sales potential. If your articles contain valuable information, many editors will print what is known as a resource box for you. A resource box contains your bio and a brief description of your service or product. It can also contain your autoresponder address. Let’s say you’ve written fifty articles. Put them on separate autoresponder accounts and create a master list that contains the titles of each article, the autoresponder address, and a brief abstract. Then promote your master list. Additionally, include your publishing guidelines so your affiliates can add their articles to your list, increasing the number of writers who are represented in your article list.

5. Create mailing lists. Inform subscribers to your articles when you’ve written new ones that they may want to publish in their own newsletter or website.

6. Automate your sales process. Use an ad to insure repeated exposure of your message, which has been proven to
effectively increase sales. In your ad, put your autoresponder address where a visitor will be exposed to numerous marketing materials. This multiplies the chances of converting visitors into customers. For example, if you’re selling a particular product, put testimonials about how spectacular it is on your autoresponder, and add a detailed, enticing description of your product.

7. Distribute advertising. Let’s say you sell advertising on your website or in your newsletter or e-zine. Set your autoresponder to send the information about rates and how to place an ad automatically to all prospects’ email addresses. Then have your autoresponder follow-up. It can also send notification of any special deals you are currently offering.

8. Distribute an email course. Each day, have yourm autoresponder send out another lesson. Just be sure that
each lesson has quality content – not a sales pitch. Your content will do the selling for you, and will do it much more effectively. You can include tips centered on a different topic for each lesson, illustrating how your product will benefit the reader. Include the tangible benefits the visitor will reap by purchasing your product. Make sure to include a paragraph or two at the end of each lesson enticing your prospect to consider making a purchase.

9. Automate a reminder about your service or product after a visitor has completed your course. This will increase the possibility of sales from visitors who have taken your course but are dragging their feet about actually making a purchase. You can also use these reminders to promote new products or services, and the products and  services of your affiliate programs.

10. Distribute free reports. This gives your visitor an idea of the type of information you can provide and the quality of your product or service. Make sure these reports are not sales letters or you will more than likely lose a
potential customer than gain a sale.

11. Create trivia quizzes on your site and place the answers in an autoresponder. Your visitor will then be
motivated to request your autoresponder, and you will have a record of the visitors’ email addresses who took your
quiz. Or create a contest and have any visitors that enter send their responses to your autoresponder. Your autoresponder can be set-up to send them a confirmation of their entry.

12. Offer a trial version of your product. Give your prospects a sample of your ebook, course, software, membership, etc. People who are exposed to a little taste often end up wanting the whole pie. You can also capture their email addresses when you offer them a free trial from your website. Set up your autoresponder to give instructions on how to obtain their free trial, and then make sure to follow-up to try and close the sale.

13. Link to hidden pages on your autoresponder. For example, a hidden page could be your affiliate page that
contains graphics, promotional articles, and text links that interested affiliates can make use of. Inform visitors that they may have free access to your affiliate page by simply requesting your autoresponder. You will then gather a list of visitors who may be interested in becoming your affiliates.

14. Use an autoresponder on your order page. Post a request form for visitors to be notified of special offers or
discounts in the future. This creates a very effective mailing list that contains the names of people who are already  your customers.

15. Put your links page on your autoresponder. It should contain up to fifty links that would be of particular
interest to your visitors. Make sure to add your own promotional copy at the top or bottom of this page.

Now that you have proof that autoresponders can be used creatively, see if you can come up with some brilliant
ideas of your own!

A really great way to build your prospect list is to find similar companies in your niche or industry that target the same customers and partner up with them also referred to as joint venture. If the company sells related products, you can both get together and form a joint venture. By forming this joint venture, you can offer a special promotion involving products from you and your joint partner which can bring great benefits to your customer as well as their customers. You will promote the new product along with your product to your customers which adds that extra value to your site.  And of course, your joint venture partner returns the favor! It’s a great way to generate traffic and definitely a win-win situation for both partners.

Unless you have a straight sales site that you are getting traffic to with paid advertising, you will need to create some
content to help get traffic to your website.

If you don’t know by now, the search engines (especially Google) love fresh relevant content. By adding articles and information focused on good keywords that are specific to the theme of your website you will get better listing results. The better the keywords you generate the less competition you will have.

If you can’t or do not want to write the content yourself you can hire a ghost writer to do it for you. Or you can purchase ready made private label right that will allow you to sign your name to it as the author. Just make sure you are getting what you pay for. You can expected to pay more for original content that is written for you and less for ready made content.

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Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google which notifies you by email, or as a feed, about the latest web and news pages of your choice.  It  allows you to register words or phrases that you want to track. So your probably wondering what does Google Alert have to do with Internet Marketing and my business? Lots buddy…

Here’s how you can use Google Alerts as a powerful Internet Marketing tool. You can use it as follows:

• To keep an eye on your competition by tracking their press releases, blog posts and product posts
• To stay current in your particular business industry news
• To know what your consumers are saying about your products or service (really important for tracking your online reputation)
• To track if your marketing efforts like your articles and blog posts show up in the Google top page results
• To participate in topic discussions by leaving comments which is good for backlinking to your site

Few people are using Google Alerts and it has proven to be an invaluable internet marketing tool for my virtual assistant business.  This free tool is a great way to stay connected to what is going on across your specific industry and to read about what leaders  in your market are saying. It’s important to stay ahead of the competition as much as you can to be a thriving business.

Set up your free Google Alerts account here now:  www.google.com/alerts

Are you tracking your site’s traffic?  Do you know which of your marketing strategies are paying off?  One tool to help you answer those questions and more is by using a site tracking tool like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed site statistics about the visitors that arrive to your website.  When you open a Google Analytics account, it generates special code to place on your website to begin tracking your websites traffic.  With Google Analytics monitoring your site, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted advertising, strengthen your marketing efforts and create higher converting websites and landing pages.

If you want to be successful online, you ought to know where your traffic is coming from. With that said, sign up for Google Analytics today.  Heck it’s free…why not? =)

http://www.google.com/analytics/