Assuming you have a website, you can make a squeeze page that will have something attractive for your visitor to want to be on your list. It has a web form, through which your auto responder can subscribe them automatically and send them further information.

 First, it is important to recognize that all successful marketers use squeeze pages. If you plan to sell a product over the Internet, you will want to use one, too, rather than relying on sidebar opt-in forms and unfocused pages that do not convey a single point and a single call to action.

 Why to use a squeeze page?

Squeeze pages let you get your visitor’s contact information so that you can send them information at their email id. They are a prelude to your main website, almost like an advertisement – with an eye-catching headline, good content that is relative to your main website along with a sign up form through which the visitors can give you their email address, permitting you to send them more information regarding your products or offers. The content should preferably bulleted points so that your visitor can quickly decide to sign up. 

 Every Squeeze Page contains the same parts and is focused on a SINGLE goal – getting the visitor to become a subscriber or buyer. These parts are as follows: 

1. An eye catching Headline
2. An opt-in form (or sales prompt).
3. A brief or lengthy introduction.
4. A picture of the list/product owner.
5. The benefits bullet points.
6. The signature of the list owner,
7. A call to action. 

Determining which model will work best for you can simply only be done through testing. While many boast a conversion and attribute it to the shortness of their introduction (many will be one short paragraph), otherwise will boast a high conversion rate because they use lengthy, thorough, and compelling copy. 

The entire idea here is to tempt your visitor to want to know more about what you have written on your squeeze page, and therefore sign up with their contact details to receive that information. The advantage here is, even if they don’t end up buying something during the first visit, you’ve got their email addresses – so you can remind them again. 

Many marketers suggest that your Squeeze Page should always be an opt-in form. Others will suggest that it should simply be a sales page. Whether it’s a free newsletter or a product for sale, the Squeeze Page system you create should always include a “one time offer,” which will compel them to take action – subscribe, buy, etc.

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In terms of performance, the main thing to consider while getting an auto responder is delivery of email. The higher the ability to deliver emails the better.  The provider of the auto responder must support you with prompt customer service that knows what it is talking about. Just imagine getting stuck half way through your campaign! So look for one that is accessible easily and responds quickly. 

 Features are only as useful as you find them for your business. It is possible that you may not use all the features your auto responder provides. But you can have it working efficiently for you when you are clear about what you want and set it accordingly. Next, you want to check that what you are paying to use your auto responder does not cut into your profits. After all, you are trying to find ways to build your lists, not incur losses. So check what it will cost you in service, set up, monthly expenditure and other costs that may not have been mentioned. There is no use getting an auto responder that you can’t afford.

 Even though there are quite some free auto responders or newsletter service available online, we suggest you get a quality paid service like either http://www.getresponse.com  or http://www.aweber.com  The free ones are not reliable and moreover they also send ads in your emails. You will be losing out on valuable advertising space and moreover it is not good for your credibility as an Internet Marketer.

 I personally prefer Getresponse because it is cheaper and can have up till 10,000 subscribers for 17$ a month, but Aweber has more advanced features than get response for the advanced users.

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 To summarize, your auto responder can help you build massive lists depending on what you use it for. It helps in building an impression of your reliability, makes your customers have more faith in you and keeps them thinking about you. This will lead to more profits through frequent sales.

1. You might need to be on a Vps Hosting, because most Linux servers have a set number of emails that that be send in one hour. A VPS hosting starts at 40$ a month which can work out expensive to those who are starting off.

2. So if you are using a professional auto responder service you can get a yearly account for about 100$ and take up a 20$ a year hosting account, so you can save about $280 yearly.

3. If your website goes down due to whatever reason all your emailing also will go down. It might even skip some of your follow-up emails during that period. So it is better to use a professional service.

4. If your host closes your account due you spam complains by people who don’t remember that they have subscribed then it could be a problem.

5. The email send from your own webhosting account may not have the kind of deliverability like these paid services due to the fact that you might be on a shared IP address which might be blocked by the large email providers due to previous spam complaints.

6. You would be using the same auto responder service for all your websites, so having a paid service can be like a central area where all your email data for your multiple websites will be safe. You don’t have to worry about them ever going down.

7. Professional auto responder services follows the can spam act, so you can rest assured that no one can complain spam against you.

8. Using a professional service will build more credibility to your emails. A professional auto responder is one of the most important tools that you need to have ready upfront along with your webhosting account. Later down the line if you would like to import your list created by your auto responder script into the pro auto responder service it will be very difficult as it will require a confirmation mail to be clicked by your subscribers before being added to the list. So you will lose a lot of subscribers here.

You might find it easy to keep in touch with, say 200 or 300 people, but when the list runs to thousands, just imagine the amount of time you’ll spend, time that you can devote to more creative activities. Instead, a good Auto responder can help you tremendously in keeping up with your reminding and emailing.

You can use a follow up auto responder that can keep the follow up work ongoing with your contacts. You only have to keep your messages ready, decide on a sending schedule and your auto responder takes care of the rest for as long as you have set it. This will mean that you can concentrate on other equally important issues while your sales keep coming in, thanks to your auto responder’s faithful follow up. In fact, it even lets you go on holiday while it keeps your office practically running!

Auto responders save time and time is money while building your lists. If you send promotional emails from your ISP, you will be reported as a spammer. The next thing you know, you website will go down. Auto responders can be exclusively used to send these routine follow up emails to the thousands of contacts on the list.

You can plan and keep your emails ready, and set the auto responder to send it at the specific intervals you want. It can keep track of subscribers signing in and even respond to let them know they have been signed in. Practically every single routine emailing activity can be handled by the auto responder, which is why no online marketing can do without it.

 Most Linux hosting will also have something called Fantastico scripts. Using that you can install with just one click several content management scripts, blogs, and other readymade website scripts.  One of the extra benefits of Fantastico is that you can keep your forums, blog scripts, and contact forms updated to the latest version and you do NOT have to use a programmer.

 You can either go for a single site webhosting or go for a reseller account. The benefit of a Reseller or Bulk Hosting account is the cost. Why would you pay $20 to host a website when you can host 50 websites for just a few dollars more?

 There are many hosting companies that offer Bulk hosting or Reseller accounts. Just type in reseller hosing and you will be surprised by the results.  Many of them even have training videos to help you get started.

 To learn more about managing various aspects of your website  from the Admin panel you could have a look at this link where t hey have put up some excellent how-to videos:  http://www.towerhost.com/support/video_tutorials.php 

 In short with a single domain hosting account you will get a control panel called C-panel. And with a reseller hosting you will get a control panel called WHM panel. That’s where you add the new domains names that you will be adding to your network of websites and allotting a C-panel for that particular domain.

 Activating your Domain name.

Once you create your webhosting account you will get a name server address.  In order to activate your new domain, you will need to go to your domain registrar’s account and then change the name server address and put in what your webhosting provider will give you. The name server address will be something like this: ns1.e-mag.in, ns2.e-mag.in.

 Once you have added the name server addresses, give it a 2-6 hour period and after that when you type in the domain name it will take you to your hosting account. The first time you access the domain name you will only see some files which are there in your web folder. This is because you have not uploaded the home page file to your web folder. The home page file can be of any of these extensions example: index.html, index.htm, index.shtml, index.php etc.

 Creating your first website

Once you have your domain name and hosting setup, the next thing you need to do is create your website. It is now time to start thinking about how your first site or webpage should look. Your website is practically your main and first point of contact with your users. So make sure you build a site that is good to look at. That does not mean graphics rich and jazzy, but something that is designed to be professional and effective. Understand that web surfers are impatient. They do not like to get stuck on slow loading pages, so make your webpage graphic designs are minimum or fast loading.

 There are quite a number of options in regards to how to find your own “look”. Nowadays you don’t have to design a template from Scratch, you could just download some free templates and edit them and use it.  Just do a search for free templates on Google and you will get many sites where you can download them.

 Other Option is to join a template membership site – This is not a good idea unless you are comfortable editing PHOTOSHOP files or HTML.  Many template sites are affordable and they do have a nice selection. Unfortunately, the membership is almost worthless if you can’t edit the templates or pay someone to do it for you.

 Assuming that you have selected the template by now, it is time to edit and add pages with content on it. To do that you could use various HTML editors. My favorite is Dreamweaver.

 Get Dreamweaver or FrontPage – FrontPage  has a low learning curve, but Dreamweaver gives you a lot more room to grow.  There are dozens of books and on-line tutorials to help you learn Dreamweaver. These are a few that I found for you: The latest version is Dreamweaver CS3

 Free Dreamweaver tutorials

Free Frontpage Tutorials

 If you don’t want to spend the cash? Try Kompozer:  http://www.kompozer.net/ it’s free!

 You can also hire someone to make your website – although this may workout expensive as you add more and more sites.  You could visit freelance websites like http://www.e-guru.in, scriptlance.com, elance.com etc. to hire freelance programmers cheaply. E-guru.in is my website, where you can get a lot of Indian programmers for a good price, do check it out.

 Last and not least you can code the sites yourself.  It’s not that hard to learn HTML. There are literally thousands of on-line tutorials.  Using a WYSIWYG editor may be the easiest option for new learners.  If you are willing to get started, but don’t want to put the funds out for expensive software, tools, or editors – go back up to the link to Kompozer and download it.  You will need to learn a little, but Kompozer is a great alternative to hand coding a website.

 Uploading files using FTP

Once you create your website templates now comes the time when you will have to upload the pages to the website: You can use any FTP software to do that. My Favorite is FileZilla as you can carry it on a pen drive and connect to your hosting account from any computer without having to install it. Alternatively there are many more like Smart FTP, Cute Ftp etc. Do a search on Google to find many more free ones. Here is the link for these three.

 On any FTP software you will have to enter your website address, the username and the password to connect to your web folder. Once it connects it will display a set of folders and files. You will have to open the folder called “public_html” and upload your files there. That is your internet website directory. Don’t delete any files from this directory or the parent directory.

 Once you upload the Index page and the rest of the pages, it will be instantaneously reflected on the website.

 A point to bear in mind here is that even after you’ve drawn the visitor to your site, there is no fixed rule that says they will purchase from you the very first time they go by your site. Which means we must make sure there is some way by which they can leave their contact information behind before they go?  You do need to remind them and follow up, don’t you?

 By getting your visitor’s email id and name as they browse through your site by offering them something of value will let you plan a frequency at which you can remind them of the main product and also keep them updated about current offers to keep the sales coming in.

 Also when sending an email you need to make sure that the list of email id’s you are sending an offer to, is your target niche market for that particular offer. You can’t send some internet marketing offers of some info product to increase traffic tips to someone who has signed up for a pet lover’s niche list of yours.

 Sure you may have built a huge database of contacts, but unless each one is a qualified niche contact, there is no guarantee that they will take any purchase-related action when they visit.

 This is the absolute and most important guideline that you should follow, if you send marketing email to the wrong niche, you can be sure of your unsubscribe rates going through the roof.

 By maintaining niche opt-in lists across various niches, you can use it to promote various kinds of products across the various niche markets.

 They are always looking for new and innovative ways to build their lists to keep visitors coming to their sites continuously. They offer various things to the prospective customer like free reports, eBooks, software, memberships, services etc, just to get their email address and other identifiable information.

 It is very essential to keep following up with people who might be interested in what you are offering. Only when you have a growing list can you facilitate your users to visit your site.

 Having an opt-in list gives you the power of directing traffic to any of your offer pages.  Affiliate marketers know that sending just one well crafted email to their list can generate a good amount of sales.  In fact some Internet marketers create info products only to market to their email list.

 Remember the most important fact is that these subscribers have double opted to be on your mailing list, because they want to hear from you, which in turn means they are the ones who are the most susceptible towards your offers.

Gone are the days when you just buy off a list of email address and send an email with your offer on it. Your webhosting account and also your domain name will get closed down when people complain about SPAM. In fact they don’t even have to complain, all they have to do is, add your email to their spam folder. 

Understand that list building is actually building relationships, which in turn encourages prospects to visit your website, sign up and get closer to buying your offer. 

People are not just going to flock to a website and leave their contact information! In order to attract them, they must perceive some value in your offer.  The first thing they are going to think about is how they will benefit from giving you their contact details.  

In this section we will talk about all the ways you can give value to your clients for them to sign up and build subscribers targeted to specific niches. 

I will reveal to you the various tips and tricks that you could use to build your niche group of opt in subscribers.

 I will also show you how to monetize your list to generate a consistent income for you.

 List Building is time consuming. You have to work really hard. But in the end, building your email list it is a lot fun and you will directly enjoy the fruits of your efforts.

Article marketing is a very effective way to build your online presence if done the right way. By publishing your article to multiple article directories on the internet your business will reap the benefits of building your brand name on the Internet along with gaining a steady flow of traffic to your websites. It is a simple process but very effective for search engine rankings if done the right way.

One of the most powerful factors that affect your SEO rankings is the number of back links that is pointing to your website. Article marketing helps your website in building your back links.

There are four steps in article marketing. These are namely keyword research, article writing, article distribution, tracking article for results. I will talk about each of these steps in details so that you can maximize your article marketing efforts.

Keyword research

The first step is to find out keywords that are in demand. There are various ways to do that. I will explain a few options here:

OPTION ONE: You can use Google Trends to find out highly searched keywords and place into your articles.

google.com/trends

google.com/trends/hottrends

OPTION TWO: Use Google’s own keyword tool and type in keywords there to check. Whichever keywords that have high search volumes and the advertiser competition is good are pretty much in demand. Articles revolving around those keywords can pull in traffic.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can further narrow down to more profitable niches by searching for that particular keyword in quotes on Google:  example “article writing” and look for keywords that have fewer number of competing websites.

OPTION THREE: Go to www.ezinearticles.com and click on any category that you’re planning to target. Let’s say your niche is “Writing and speaking / writing” Click on any of the articles and scroll down the page till you reach the “Most Viewed Ezine Articles in the Writing-and-Speaking: Writing Category (90 Days)”

Write articles on similar subjects revolving around those keywords.

OPTION FOUR: You could go to goarticles.com/top-rated.html and look for the top rated articles for ideas.

OPTION FIVE: You could visit social news websites such as Digg.com, Yahoobuzz.com, and Propeller.com etc and look for the articles that receive a high score or diggs from readers. Articles on similar topics would be better to draw traffic.

Article writing

Now that you have got your keywords in place, it is time to start preparing the article. Your article should be helping the reader. This is not a place for a sales pitch as it will turn readers off. If you are writing a how to article don’t be afraid of giving away your best stuff. The better and more useful content you give away to your audience free, the more interested they will be to listen to you and ultimately buy what you are selling.

The article Body: You will want to optimize your article for long tailed keywords as this helps them show up in the search engines. Once you have your long tail keyword, choose a topic specifically related to that keyword.

It is also important to evenly distribute the targeted keywords and keyword phrases throughout the article in the right density. Keyword density is defined as the keyword frequency divided by the total number of words being analyzed. This number can be used as a factor to determine whether a Web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

Although there is no specific formula for the optimum amount of keywords to use on a page, as a general rule, we recommend using 2 to 3 usages of a keyword or keyword phrase on a page unless the amount of content exceeds 600 words. 

When writing content, don’t force your keywords into your content. Use the keyword phrases only where it make sense when reading the copy. You want it to sound natural.

Try these free tools to check your articles keyword density:

http://www.addme.com/keyword-density.htm

http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php

The article Title: The title of the article plays a very important role. The title is what your visitors would see first. The title should be catchy enough to prompt your visitors to click on it and reveal the entire article. The number of clicks received depends on this title and the summarry.

Here are some ideas for writing compelling titles:

·         Whenever possible, include your three or four letter keyword in the title.

·         Move your keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

·         Questions make great article titles. People will be drawn to do whatever it takes, to get their question answered, which can include reading your article to find out the answer and then clicking through to your link at the bottom.

You could also visit social news websites such as Ezinearticles.com Digg.com, Yahoobuzz.com, and Propeller.com and look for the titles of the articles that receive a high score or page views from readers. To get an idea of the titles that make people want to click.

The byline: The next most important part is writing a compelling byline. The whole point of you submitting the articles to these directories is for visitors to read your byline and click on the link that is provided by you.  It is very critical to your promotion efforts, which means; you should give it a lot of thought and come up with an effective byline. Here are some tips to write a compelling byline:

·         Write your byline in third person. Even if you are writing about yourself, be sure to write it using third person pronouns.

·         Do give a short bio of yourself as a third person speaking.

·         The byline should not be hard selling anything, but simply pre-selling or recommending only.

·         Give the reader a way to contact you or the company. This would most commonly be a website or an email address.

Once your article is written, create three separate versions of it so that it is easier for you when you start submitting them.

1.       The original version that you wrote with few live links

2.      The Limited HTML version of it as permitted by the sites.

3.      The HTML version with Anchor keywords.

Now that your article is all ready, its time to start distributing it.

Article distribution strategy.

Don’t think that article submission is limited to article directories alone. Think of it as a process of submitting your article to any place that allows you to submit an article. This includes article directories, blogs like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Msn live pages, forums, Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Facebook, Myspace and other web20 sites out there.

In fact you could also submit it to any web20 or high page rank websites that allow you to have your blog or forum or a community within their site.

The ideal way to submit is; if you have a self hosted Wordpress blog, then first post the article to your blog and then book mark that blog article to all the bookmarking websites out there like Digg.com, Propeller.com, Yahoobuzz.com, Twitter.com, stumbledupon.com etc. You will find many once you start searching for it.

The next step is to submit the same article to all the article marketing sites out there. This way the search engines will rank your blog well for those particular keywords.

If you don’t have your own blog with a decent PR or if you are looking for some quick results; then, you could bookmark or back link the article of yours that gets accepted on any PR 5 or above sites. That way you can rank very high for those targeted keywords. Articles submitted on Ezinearticles.com or Goarticles.com is known to have good results with this back linking technique.

Now let us look at some ways to filter the article submitting sites in a way that would benefit you most.

First make an entire list of sites that you find online to submit your article. Then classify each of these sites according to these factors:

·         Arrange and submit articles to sites according to their page rank:

It would benefit you more to start submitting articles to those directories that have a high page rank. The link on an article directory that has page rank 6 or 7 is valued more by the search engines than compared to one with a page rank 1 or 2. To find out the page rank of any site you can install Google toolbar which is available here. toolbar.google.com/

Start submitting to the article directories that have a page rank of 7 then 6, then 5, the 4 and so forth. The directories that have less than a page rank two is not worth the effort. But if you can still go ahead and submit if they offer you a do follow link for page rank benefits.

·         Find out sites which allow anchor links or html:

When you first begin registering with the websites / directories, it is important for you to check what format each directory will accept links. If they accept only the URL format then use that format in your articles. If the directory accepts text anchor links, you will need to use HTML code in order to create a text anchor.

Anchor links is a very powerful way to target your keywords. Anchor links is a good way to let the search engines know, what keywords your website is targeting. Anchor links are when you add keywords with a live link to your website: This is how you create a simple anchor link text. Replace the domain name with your and replace it with the keywords you are targeting.

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>Your Keywords</a> 

·         Find out the sites that gives you do follow back links:

The third and final criteria is to weed out the sites that offer you a do follow link. Do follow links are the ones that will actually give you page rank value by posting a link there. If you have many do follow back links are pointing to your website, not only will your website rank high in the search results for your keywords but also the page rank of your website will increase.

A do follow link is any link that is crawled by Google, and will show up in the html code like this:

<a href=’http://www.yourwebsite.com>Your keyword </a>

A no follow link is any link that is not crawled by Google, and it will show up in html like this:

<a href=’http://www.yourwebsite.com’ rel=’nofollow’ >Your keyword </a>

Did you notice the difference? If a website is giving you a no follow back link the attribute rel=”nofollow” will show up within the link.  If you can’t see the difference here then you can view the html of your back links by hitting view source, or page source in your view tab, and if any of them are no follow, you should see this tag in the html code. “rel=’nofollow’”

Tracking your articles and eliminating non productive sites

There are thousands of sites out there where you can submit your article. But one just can’t keep submitting to all of them without knowing which ones are bringing in results. So it becomes very important to track your articles.

Now the final step is finding out what sites are giving you results and removing the ones that don’t produce results. I will talk about some ways to do that.

Check page views on the article directory: Most article directories would show you some kind of stats where you can view the number of “pageviews” to your article. That will give you an indication on how many clicks your article has got.

Google alerts: Google alerts is a good way to find out about all the external links pointing to your website that is indexed by Google. You can sign up to Google alerts and set it up in such a way so that it searches for your domain name. So whenever it finds any of your articles with your domain name on it, it will send you alerts informing you the link, where the article can be viewed.

google.com/alerts

The whole point is that; there might be other article directories where your article is submitted and displayed, but if Google cannot index it because the article is so deep in the site, then again it is not worth submitting to those directories. Make note of these article directories that google has sent you alerts..

Awstats on your C panel: AWStats is without a doubt the most preferred website statistics tool. It is a free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. AWStats graphically generates advanced web, streaming, ftp, or mail server statistics. Awstats is a part of the Linux hosted Control panel.

Here you can see exactly what external links is driving traffic to your website and how many clicks you have received to your website.

The difference in both is this: On “awstats”  it will start displaying only if anybody has reached your website by clicking on the external link. Whereas with “Google alerts” you will also see websites where your article is published and has been indexed on Google but not received any clicks to your website yet.

You can also download here a simple access database that I have created using which you can organize your article marketing activities. Just keep entering the data into the preset database fields as and when you submit an article or find out about a new article directory into the required main table and you can query results to track your articles. Once you add your data, you should set a password to it.

http://www.buynsellcontent.com/download/article_marketing.mdb

Byline: Jason Thomas is an Internet marketer who devotes his free time in educating others on various ways to earn online. He has launched a new marketplace to buy and sell content for web. Content writers can buy / sell articles related to any subject here while automatically building their feedbacks and customer base. All new submitted articles will go through an auction period so that the market can decide the true value of their content: Visit to signup free:

http://www.buynsellcontent.com