After you sign up with Aweber, or the Email Marketing Campaign software of your choice, the very first thing that you must do is set some specifice measurable goals; both short term and long term. For example:

* Number of subscribers (short term) to your mailing list (e.g. 100)
* Set date to reach 100 subscribers (e.g. 15 days or perhaps 30 days)
* Number of subscribers (long term) to your mailing list (e.g. 5000, 10,000 etc.)
* Set date to reach 5000 subscribers to your mailing list (e.g. 6 months, 12 months etc)

You should also develop certain tactics and strategies that will help you realize these goals. For example:

* Targeted Article Marketing to drive trafic to your sign up page
* Provide targeted report, ebook, video, DVD, CD or other free material for enticement to sign up
* On line and off line advertising

Although the above examples are just a few ideas, they should trigger your “brainstorming tool” into coming up with additional goals, tatics and strategies. To help you do this and get a better handle on your email marketing campaign, you need to understand certain terms and functioning of your email marketing campaign software.

Non responders are people that you target to your website but they don’t buy. It is your job to turn them into paying and repeat clients. First, make sure that everyone is receiving your emails and then begin to phase out any that have no potential.

Always confirm and then re-confirm email addresses. You should come up with a system for reconfirming your regular subscribers email addresses over time so you don’t lose anyone. Awebers automated processes can be a life saver indeed. To optimize your email marketing software efforts you should use these automated services for such things as subscriptions, unsubscribe, monthly or weekly newsletters and more.

Easy to Manage.  When you are looking for an email software in order to launch your campaign, look for one that is easy to manage. If a customer asks to subscribe or unsubscribe from your list, this should be automated and as quick and easy as possible.  You need to be able to add messages to your marketing campaign quickly and easily. You need to be able to change the order that the messages are sent out if necessary. Designing your own message format is a good idea but it’s always useful to have a pre-designed template to work with, if only for ideas.  Aweber has all these features and more!

Choose your words carefully.  Make sure you don’t use words in your emails that would result in your email being flagged as SPAM. Words such as free, money and porn will get your emails sent to the recipients junk mail folders. Replace those words with words that mean the same or change the spelling so that they look the same when reading them.  Aweber will show you the spam rating for each email message as well as give you tips and ideas for reducing a high rating.

Examine your email marketing campaign.  Be sure that all aspects of your business are in sync with your email campaign. Are you ready to answer questions and meet your customer’s needs in a timely manner?   There’s no point in sending out an email boasting about your products if people can’t get any questions answered or place an order with you. Just be sure that all systems are in place before you send out that email. Otherwise, your attempts at furthering your reputation and profits; will likely be futile.

Email marketing  can be a viable and effective way to connect with existing and potential customers, as long as you respect people’s time and privacy. People lead busy lives and as much as they may want your information, you have to be precise with the quantity. Your email marketing campaign can signal the beginning of a long period of online profitability.

Research is going to be the key to developing a good marketing strategy. Finding out as much as you can about your clients, their tendencies on the web, where they look for information about your particular service is important. It is also important to know as much about their demographics as possible to custom tailor a marketing strategy to suit their needs, interests and capture their attention. Once you find out these things as well as every other bit of information that is pertinent to your industry, you should find out what ways are being used to attract them. What are your competitors doing? Is it working? How can it be improved. Also look at where they are doing their advertising and find ways to do it better in those locations, or if it’s even a good place to advertise in the first place.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel.  A lot of the work has been done by others in your field to develop a marketing strategy that takes advantage of the web. Build on their strengths, strengthen their weaknesses, and avoid the failures.

There will be those around you who say that you are wasting your time, that you don’t have what it takes to market effectively on the web or that your strategy will not be effective. Don’t listen to those voices, especially if you are one of those, doubting that you have what it takes to make it.  The knowledge is out there for you to take advantage of.  It will show you how to get it done, and how to get it done right.

There are plenty of people to outsource parts of your marketing campaign to, whether it is doing graphics work for you or doing research on your potential customers. There are even those that can make your website optimized for search engines so that you are easier to find. There are so many resources available to you, many of which are actually affordable, that can help make you a success of your business. Seek them out and find out how they can help you. There are also those who can make websites for you at a very affordable rate and can help you get your web presence up and running.

The web is a great place to conduct business and developing a marketing strategy that will bring you customers is easy and affordable. It will take some research and learning and a little bit of time but once you finally get the right marketing strategy in place, the web will have your customers caught in no time.

But, that’s only half the story. Bear with me because I’m going to answer a few of the most common questions surrounding how to increase your web search engine ranking.

Listen up…

What is the best way to handle search engine optimization?

At this point, you can do one of two things. On one hand, you can hire a company to handle all of your search engine optimization needs. On the other hand, you can learn how to do it yourself by reading articles on the Internet. 

In addition to that, you will need to learn some html, and gain a decent understanding of keyword analysis. It is important that your site is associated with the right category. This is the only way you will be able to make sales.

What is the importance of keywords and back-links?

Here’s the real kicker: ranking high in Google has nothing to do with the style of your website. Truth be told, your web search engine ranking is based on how well you rank for your keywords and the number of relevant links coming to your site from other websites with high rankings. 

Stated differently, your goal is to out score the competition for the keywords you are targeting. In addition to that, you need to have more links coming to your site from other websites with high page ranks. 

Quite simply, search engine optimization centers around getting incoming links to your site. 

It is also important to make sure your content is keyword rich before you submit it to search engines. Oh yeah, one more thing…paying close attention to Meta tags and adding a Google sitemap is the key to your success. 

What’s all this worth to you? Incoming links to your site from a website that has a high page rank will help shoot your website to the top.  Let’s take a closer look. If you are able to secure links from a site that has a page rank of at least 7 pointing back to your site – every 24 hours, Google’s algorithm will crawl your site.   

Is there anything negative that can affect my web search engine ranking?

One thing I want to stress is that black hat SEO tactics can cause you more headaches than they are worth. Make no mistake about it; some black hat techniques can get your site black listed in the search engines.  Up until recently, SEO companies as well as seasoned webmasters used techniques that allowed them to hide text, hide links, and set up link malls and link farms to catapult their site to the top of the search engines. The search engines have gotten wise and now frown on that technique.  They will now de-index your site in the blink of an eye if you try the same thing.

Let’s face it. Getting a high web search engine ranking will put you in the position to receive high quality traffic to your site. Plus, optimizing your site is essential to making sales.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account with some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life alot easier.

Once you have your accounts set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are very aware of this and so they pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks to a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  However, the money will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  By adding a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realize what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn’t worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from contacts on social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

Many marketers don’t use video marketing simply because they don’t know how to get started with it.  It isn’t actually that difficult and you will find it remarkably easy with a little training.

Videos can very easily go viral and you will find yourself getting a lot of traffic from them.  Plus, the search engines love video because it is very popular at the moment.  You can often see a selection of videos in the top five ranking for any search term in Google.

Creating a video doesn’t have to be difficult.  You can create a live action video using your mobile phone or digital camera, or if you live in the dark ages, a webcam.

By using a tool such as Camtastia or Camstudio, you can capture the screen and demonstrate some software or a website or your MLM product.  These are very effective videos because people can see what they are buying or what they need to do.

Promotional videos can be created by using Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or on a website such as Jing or Animoto.  These websites create some fantastic videos which you can use as advertisements.

Your video needs to be concise, to the point and entertaining.  You want your viewers to see your video, have their interest captured and leave them wanting to know more.

Before you start submitting your video, you need to know which keywords to use as tags.  This means doing some keyword research.  The Google External Keyword Tool will tell you everything you need to know, or you can use your own favorite tool.

You could manually submit your video to various video directories, but this takes a lot of time.  You could outsource it, which can get expensive, or you could use a tool to do it.  Alternatively, you can use the TubeMogul website, which is free to use.

This allows you to submit your video articles to a handful of video directories automatically.  Once you have produced a few videos and are established on their site, you can increase the number of video directories your video is submitted to.

Once the videos are approved (and some sites will turn them down) you can then sit back and watch your videos spread all over the Internet.  They will be picked up by websites and other directories that feed off these main sites, giving you more of an audience.

Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you will be surprised to see how far a single video will get you.  So long as you have put your URL in the description and in the video itself, then you will get a good amount of traffic from this.

Video marketing is emerging as a very powerful and effective method of getting traffic back to your website.  While it is still an underused marketing technique, I highly suggest you give it a try.  You will be amazed at how it will further boost your sites in the search engines.