Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, but it’s long time to get serious about your marketing efforts here. Just like the retailers offline figuring this is their time to make 40% of their sales, in essence the same is true for us online.

This time of year there are probably more “Giveaways” than any other time of the year. This is the time that you truly can build your list. One Giveaway I joined has 100 contributors. If they promote to each of their lists and each list only has 10 subscribers, that’s 1000 people getting notification that this is going on. Now just between you and me, we know that these people have more than 10 subscribers, so imagine how much free advertising that can be. Each giveaway usually has their own rules. Some run contests with prizes for the most referrals. Others pay cash, etc. Any way you go, it’s a worthwhile venture.

The first thing you need is a product. If you don’t have something of your own you have put together, such as an ebook, etc., there are plenty on the web. A lot of them are free. Just make sure they have Private Label Rights and or Master Resell Rights so you are free to give the item away, brand it your own, etc. You need to read the rights of each product as the licenses sometimes differ from product to product, but for the most part you’re pretty safe with Private Label Rights.

Once you have your product, the next thing you need is an autoresponder if you don’t have one already. I personally use Aweber, but there are a few good ones. Some others are Response Marketing, Constant Contact. Just google “autoresponders” and compare services and prices. Also be sure to check reliability.

You need to set up your autoresponder with a “webform” for getting people’s names and email addresses. Once you get this set up in your autoresponder, you can get the html code to put on a landing page, or sales page. People see your product, click it, go to your landing page that tells them about your product, they enter their name and email, it bounces back to your autoresponder. Your autoresponder sends out a link for them to click on in their email to verify the email address. When they do that, it should take them to a Thank you page that you have created that has a link for the free gift download they signed up for, or your autoresponder sends a link to their email where they can recover their gift.

This is the first time I have ever done this. It took me 2 full days to get it set up. I pretty much let everything else slide but I figure the time was well spent. The product I offered is valuable to all kinds of people, not just internet marketers and I’m confident my list will start growing soon. For the people who sign up for this particular product, I know what I need to send them in the future. A much more targeted market which will be a lot easier to market to.

If you want to check it out, this is the one I joined. This lady is super helpful and has a whole pdf you can download that gives all sorts of pointers, etc. along with the rules. Just click on the banner below.

If you would like to contribute, it’s not too late. Just click on the link and you’ll go to the contributer part.

http://www.myladywebsgiftgiveaway.com/go/ldbeams/jv/

I as well as the next one believe in Holiday promotion, tying into what ever’s going on to help you promote your stuff, but don’t fire off some warm and fuzzy email to me on Thanksgiving Day, telling me how much you love me and appreciate my business, and then try and sell me something. If you want to send me a “Happy Thanksgiving” and thank me for my business, that’s fine. In fact that’s good business etiquette. I know the big dept. stores are sending out their ads, etc on Thanksgiving Day, but you’re not them.

They are not wanting a “personal relationship” with me. They are not wanting me to believe that they can teach me how to make millions of dollars running another store just like them. They are not trying to convince me that the products in their stores are going to change my life because they did it. If you are just sending me another affiliate link or link to one of your products to buy on a holiday, don’t bother.

This is how your email affected me. On Thanksgiving Day, I am not interested in buying anything to do with work. On Thanksgiving Day if you have to spend your time sending emails trying to get me to buy just one more product from you instead of spending time with family and friends, you need to go find a “guru” that can help you. You obviously aren’t doing very well and if that’s the case, I probably can’t learn a whole lot from you anymore. Thus the unsubscribe button. Oh and by the way, if your unsubscribe button takes me to an error page or another sales page and I can’t opt out, I’m reporting you.

So if you are an Internet Marketing Newbie, don’t make this mistake. People will want to buy, but they don’t want to be insulted, which is what you do when you try to make it sound like you really care about them and then jam a product in their wallet.

Well, we’re on a downhill slide to Christmas from here, gang. It will be here and gone before we know it. I’ve taken the Halloween and Thanksgiving freebies down and will add all the new ones for Christmas as I get them. These are a great way to build up your library. Just don’t get too carried away. LOL.

Your potential customers can’t hear you. With the average person exposed to anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand ads a day, you need to make sure you stand out. You can’t be vague in your messages to your customers. You must make sure you are reaching your target audience, and then make sure you are communicating the benefits of your product to them. You need to get potential customers interested enough in your message and your product to reach out to you. To visit your store or Web site. Then you can develop a relationship with the customer, which is the first step in the selling process.

How do you effectively communicate with your potential customers and make sure that you are heard, seen and read above your competitors and other advertisers? Target your market. Decide who you want to reach with your marketing efforts. Define as much about your target customer as possible. Is this person (or people) men or women? What age group do they fall into? Do you want to narrow it down further by occupation or lifestyle? What about the area they live in? If you have a clear idea of who you are trying to connect with, you’ll have a better chance of actually connecting with them while you create your marketing messages.

Market to a broad audience. Act as a specialist by targeting your market, but deliver your message broadly. If you are marketing a dermatologist’s office, yes, you want people with skin problems so you market to their general doctors, but who else could use a dermatologist’s expertise? You could use postcard marketing and mail some informational full color postcards pieces to a cancer center. With skin cancer on the rise, market to cancer centers, supermarkets that sell sunblock and you can get more generalized from there.

Speak directly to the customer. Tell your prospects their needs and wants. Tell them how you can fulfill their needs and wants, but focus on them, not you. Focus on how you can help them with a solution. Show how you’ve helped others just like them with similar problems or wants.

Talk about your benefits, not just your features. People don’t care about the newest technology. They care about how the newest technology will help them. How will it be a benefit in their lives? Meticulously define your benefits and the best way to communicate them to your customers. Will you save them money? How? Give an example of how your product or service benefitted someone else.

Complexity does not impress. Don’t convolute your message with big words, industry jargon or long sentences. People understand simple words in simple formats. Don’t try to impress by throwing in words they’ll have to look up – no one will. You could “complicate” things by mailing out full color postcards – the color is enough interest to draw the customer in. Your simple message will do the rest of the work.

Come up with a catchy slogan. A slogan is a phrase that expresses something about a benefit or feature of a product or service. Burger King for example uses “Have it your way.” This clearly states that you can have your food any way you want it. They exist to accommodate you.

Get feedback. Show your ads or copy to friends, family or co-workers before you let the world take a look at them. These people are part of your world, and could be in your target audience. Getting their opinions can make your ads so much better. If you have the resources, use a focus group of your target market and use their feedback to make changes for the better.

Provide easy-to-understand information. Use words that your target market will understand. This applies to everything from your postcard marketing campaign to your Web site. Clearly label your Web site address, your business address and phone number, and any other information the customer needs to know. Include any instructions needed, like directions to get to your store. If your store is online, sometimes people need instructions to get there also.

A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is excellent news for those companies who use self-propelling word-of-mouse” e-mail techniques to sell their products.

The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded, as well.  The most popular content is humorous material.

The second most popular category is news, (this year is was probably political news), followed by healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies… in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.

Not long ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle.  The title of the picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it works.

I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture… and thus the advertisement for Disneyland.  The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.

One particular way to  build your list is to join a Give Away event. In a real sense, it’s a huge way of conducting an “ad swap”.  If you have joined any of the Give Away events I’ve listed on the “freebies” page, you might have an idea of how it works in general. If you have no idea of what a Give Away event is and how it works, let me explain.

Give Away Event Explained

Basically, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event. Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass, or a product he is already selling (if he is

kind enough to offer it into the event). The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list. When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then send an announcement about the Giveaway event to their own mailing lists. The result? Lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners! With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list! Many times these gifts come with some form of resale rights that let you give it away, sell it or whatever the rights stipulate.
There Can Be Some Problems

For starters, a lot of Give Away events often require the potential Joint Venture partner to have a minimum of at least 1,000 subscribers in order to participate. Therefore, if you do not have that amount of subscribers or

more, there will be a lot of giveaway events you will be excluded from. You could set up your own Give Away event. You should probably have the idea of paying your Joint Venture (JV) Partners a decent percentage of commissions for every successful One Time Offer sale. You might also want to know which partner is doing well in referring subscribers to your event and who isn’t, so you’ll want a way to track.

Usually, the one who runs the Give Away event wins the most in terms of subscribers and One Time Offer sales, if any. However, this is where the second problem is: if you don’t have any programming skills, you can kiss this idea “goodbye”!

A third problem is that big time Give Away event runners often suffer these throughout the start, run and end of the event: sleep deprivation, stress and lots of hard work! In fact, in some ways, being a participating partner can be even more appealing to most list owners even though the reward is proportionally smaller in terms of success, new subscriber counts and sales, if any.

If you have a decent gift to give away, and you’re set up right, and the giveaway has a lot of partners mailing to their mailing lists, you have a good chance of getting a good targeted audience to your mailing list.  This is especially true if you have a specialty niche that your gift is connected to, so when people want to download your gift you know they are interested in what you have to offer.

Put that website up, and they will come… NOT! And even if they were to come looking for you, standing on the street corner, shouting your name, will you be ready to respond? If you’re starting a business on the internet, you better fall in love with Internet Marketing.

Bill Gates has been quoted in 2000 saying “There are 2 kinds of businesses going forward: Those who have an internet presence and those who are out of business.”

Let’s face it, you must become knowledgeable about the internet. There is so much to learn and it seems like you’re just getting a handle on it, when something new comes along. In fact, unless you already enjoy having marketing experts on your team, you will need to make marketing your new love.

Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is much more. It’s who you are in the marketplace. It’s what you represent. It’s what folks think when they think of you. Marketing is