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Blog Contest – Win Free 2k Business Cards from UPrinting

Mar 5

Posted by admin in Contests | 2 Comments

Hello readers, time for another blog contest on ProBlogineer after a long time. Our Sponsor for this contest is U-Printing

business card printing

A little about our sponsors. U-Printing is a trusted online printing company committed to providing a high quality printing experience at affordable prices. You can get brochures, business cards, canvas prints, labels, postcards, posters etc. printed at U-Printing online printing site.

For over 25 years, U-Printing has been a trusted leader in online printing, featuring its signature easy-to-use website and the famous Free File Review, a complimentary proofing service which requires no upfront payment. Get cheap business card printing at U-Printing to promote your business, blog or services.

Prize

business cards2000 free standard size business cards ( 2 readers, 1k cards each ) You can choose any of their great business cards, including the eco-friendly cover stock (13 pt. Cover Uncoated – Recycled) or the the 14 pt. family in Matte, AQ, or UV at any custom size they offer such as square cards, odd sizes like 3×3, 2×2. I am sure you would really benefit from getting these free business cards to promote your design, coding or web services.

How to Enter?

1) Follow @meethere on twitter and make a twit saying “Win Free 2k business cards on www.problogineer.com “

2. Leave a comment at the end of the blog post, describing what you would use the free business cards for.

There it is. Get these postcards and advertise locally or at major events.

Rules

Contest ends 31st March 2009 00:00 GMT. 2 Winners will be declared on the blog.

Winning entry is not decided on the length of the comment alone. Most creative and unique entry that catches our attention wins.

Winners in the United States and Canada qualify for free shipping. Shipping fees will apply to winners outside these areas.

Once again thanks to Uprinting for sponsoring this contest. Hurry up and get it over with.

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Video Marketing Tips

Feb 11

Posted by admin in Internet Marketing | 2 Comments

video marketingWhen it comes to marketing your affiliate offers or products, video marketing has become the new way to promote anything and everything. With tons of new video networks joining the internet daily, the amount of viewership your offers can receive is countless. Most people are no strangers to the world of YouTube since it’s the most watched video sharing website on the net. With a gripping video, all you need to do is upload the video onto any video platform and you’re on your way.

The question that needs to be answered regarding video is this: How do I get enough viewership to these offers to generate a profit? There are several tips when it comes to creating your video for the correct amount of promotion.

Here are your video marketing tips:

      Video length is important: You want to have your videos be around 2-3 minutes since most viewers don’t concentrate on videos much longer than that. If you have an advertisement based video then make it around 15-30 seconds. The attention span of your audience should last at these time limits.

      Content is the key: An attractive video is nothing if it’s not quality rich content. If you can offer answers to people’s concerns and questions you should be able to gain their trust. People love step-by-step tutorials.

      Do research on videos in your niche: You’re going to need to watch videos in the same niche. See what your competition is doing in order to capture the audience’s attention.

Look for these key elements in the video:

  • What products or service are they advertising?
  • How many viewers have seen the video?
  • How many comments have been made about the video?
  • Is the product/service website they’re promoting appealing?

Note: These same questions should be applied to the video you submit.

Checkout this video for more such marketing tips :

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Promoting Email Submits With Free Traffic

Jan 23

Posted by admin in Affiliate Marketing | 8 Comments

Here are some nice tips on promoting email submit offers from one of my favorite blog Melvin Blog – This is a contest entry to the previous “Secret Is Out” Affiliate marketing contest. Will be posting more such secrets in the coming days. If you find the article useful, head over to Melvin Blog to find more such interesting tips and updates. Much said, here we go :

Note: This targets newbies more than anything else. One thing Im sure of is this works because I’ve tried it and it went well for me.

So not everyone has the cash when starting out affiliate marketing, as you know affiliate marketing requires some hefty cash from our side even when starting out. Although, there are free coupons from Adwords, yahoo and MSN occasionally, the truth is its hard to time it because all the coupons are already used up even before you know there’s a coupon available. Here is what I normally do with it. I utilize easy converting email submit offers and use free traffic. Let me explain.

First, take a look at the Market Leverage Offers.You see there are over 10 offers of this kind. For those who do not know, email submits are offers that you get paid for a valid email from customers. It costs nothing to consumers and the pixel is fired on the first page of an offer. Easy money eh?

affiliate marketing

Now we head on to the landing page. Basically we cannot direct link here because we’re not using payperclick. Now I know building a landing page seems to be frightful experience for newbies but here’s a tip that I think will make sense. In some point of time last January, I used it and I can say it worked and is definitely working. First let’s use the ipod nano email submit offer. Take a look:

email campaign

So read the description of the campaigns properly because some offers are strict and most are not. Do also take note of what country does the offer accepts traffic from. In this case its United States. Now back to the landing page. Most people don’t use this and i am sure others will find it silly to do it but one easy way of building a landing page is just getting the email creative for that and putting it into your site. Take a look at this:

html code

What I do is just try to copy the email html content and putting it into my site. Again most people will find it silly but actually if you look at the codes its actually SE-optimized and you just need to do a little tweaking in it. You can basically add a title to the title tag and such stuffs. Looking with what it looks like here it goes:

apple ipod

Not bad eh? I believe the site looks good enough to attract readers. Of course, you can do your own landing page if you have more skills but again for those who know virtually nothing, that is definitely a quick way.

So we’re now in getting free traffic. At the start we said we’re not gonna use pay per click and we will try to squeeze anything using free methods. Although the income potential are definitely lower with free traffic, its still possible to make money from it. Anyway first make sure you install Google Analytics to your site so you could split test your pages, see the data and make adjustments. Now how do I promote it? Here it goes:

1. Forum Marketing –everyone knows exactly the power of forums but how do they utilize it? It depends. Now I assume you are a quality member of a certain forum, meaning you’re not just signed up yesterday. In my case, im a big fan of basketball and I am a member of some famous forums about basketball for a long time which means I have the reputation. So I try to put the landing page url in my siggy and of course I try to use an attractive anchor to attract clicks. Another secret I do is I pawn the offtopic section of forums with the offer itself. In the offtopic section I post something like “I heard this site gives nanos upon completion of surveys so I signed up, what do you guys think?” Be careful though with this because it can get you banned! Freebies forum tend to also do well with it. Want some freebies forum, then here’s the list of sites that normally have 2000 uniques a day.

http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/freebies/

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/free-stuff/

http://www.bobsfreestuffforum.co.uk/

http://www.totallyfreestuff.com/submit.asp?m=0

2. Blog Catalog – now this has got to be something most people don’t do. Blogcatalog is a known directory for blogs and while its known to be site that has some serious 100,000 visitors a day traffic, I don’t see a lot marketer using the discussion page for it. The discussion page is hell with traffic as well. But the main key here is putting up a discussion that can intrigue a lot of people. People posts here as often as they can and if your discussion page doesn’t make sense, then in 2 minutes your discussion is in page 10 instantly. One for example is when I tried promoting the “cokeorpepsi” offer from ML before. Look:

social networking

The discussion got about 110 replies, 50% of them clicked the link and 7 have actually made conversions. So you see really it makes sense considering all you need to do is type. It varies depending on the type of offer though as some tend to perform really well as opposed to others

3. Incentivizing – Now here it depends on the offer. Most likely there are few offers that allow incentivization of their offers. How do you incentivized then? The sky is the limit actually! I give entrecard credits, I give free stuffs, I tell them they will get a free domain for this and that and etc. Incentivizing is like “bribing” them to do something in your favor. At the end it benefits you both. Again you must first contact your affiliate manager with regards to these matters.

That’s it. I would like to share this tip more to beginners but sure experts can also use it and they can very well duplicate their incomes more because they are expert. Now if it builds you up a small hundred dollars, then maybe you could jump into bigger waters now and start doing pay per click w/o worrying the money to spend. Hope this helps… :)

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Affiliate Marketing “Secret Is Out” Winner !

Jan 5

Posted by admin in Misc | 16 Comments

So it’s time to announce the winner of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” Contest – Win iPod or Flip Mino

We received a wonderful response and lots of entries from people all round the world. Some were one liners (you can see the comments on that contest post), some were usual known tricks, some were lengthy & informative while some were short & sweet. It was tough to decide the winning entry, but after going through each entry, I found the below entry a clear winner.

And the winner is Hetal (mailfast****yahoo dot com ) Congratulations Hetal for winning the “Secret Is out” contest sponsored by MarketLeverage. Please contact me with your prize option ( Ipod nano 8GB or Flip MinoHD ) and shipping details.

Also winning entries will go for nomination into the final step where every participating blog will vote for their favorite 3 winning entries (not including their own blog’s winning entry). And top 3 entries with maximum votes will win Amazon Kindle, $100 reward card and $50 iTunes card –>

Update: Hetal’s entry won the 2nd prize in the grand prize voting.. Congrats again for $100 ML Reward card.

Ok, below is the winning entry and you will some really helpful tips. I will post the other entries too one by one after few days so that everyone can learn those affiliate marketing tips and secrets. ;)

Making Money from Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to make money from your websites, but to maximize on their earning potential you will need to spend of bit of time and effort on making them work, and learning all of the little affiliate tricks to choosing the right programs, and integrating them into your website successfully. Most of the people who claim that they know all about affiliate marketing actually do not even know the initials well.

No matter how hard you try, sometimes your website fails to drive the required amount of traffic. The same thing is applicable in the case of marketing as well. It is here where the affiliate marketing business tips act as a savior.

Here are a few tips to help you cash in on affiliate programs:

1. Integration – there is nothing worse then following a link to a website you think sounds interesting, only to find it has a lot of blatant and overwhelming advertising that has nothing to do with the topics being discussed. To avoid annoying your visitors you will need to take a bit of time to choose affiliate marketing programs that can blend in easily into your existing website theme, and choosing programs that are advertising products/services that are relevant is a good start. For example if you have a website all about pets, then you need to select affiliate programs that are advertising pet related products like dog food, kennels, animal treatments or pet insurance. There is no point running affiliate programs for beauty products or the latest gadgets as it is unlikely that these will be of much interest to your visitors, and you will be just wasting time and resources.

So first and foremost analyze your landing page. Make sure it looks well as this would determine your future profits. People never tend to buy from a site which is clumsy in appearance. Never even dare to copy the landing page of someone else as this can ruin your chances of attracting visitors who might also turn out to be probable customers. Also, place the affiliate links/banner above the fold and at the end of the landing page. Make them stick out of the page and keep some space around them.

2. Keywords – keywords are important to attaining high rankings on search engine results (which is vital for attracting visitors), so sit down and write a good keyword list that is relevant to your website theme and chosen affiliate programs, and make sure you incorporate them often throughout the content of your website, ensuring they are included in titles and HTML tags (yes, you can gain some direct FREE search engine traffic if your site ranks well ) . Start with lower bids and increase the bid in small succession to know what brings the best ROI. Try campaigns with different ad groups and different keywords. Keep working and keep researching into this. Make sure that you are not bidding on trademarks or other objectionable keywords.

Various keyword suggestion tools are available on net – including free and paid ones. Long tailed keywords are better converting and costs less CPC – but requires lot of research regarding this.. It’s not a one day task.

Here are few Free keyword tools
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

3. Offers – First question by every newbie – which offers to promote, which offers work best ? This depends on various factors and your interested field. Zip/email submit offers can be easy to start with but don’t bring much in a short time. Free trial offers would be a next step, but you will find lots of competition here. Also, some are masters in incentive based programs. Promote what is hot and also which have less competition. Remember, there are millions of people like you who are sitting there to make money online. Don’t forget to take advantage of seasonal and festive promotions.

4. Direct linking is another essential tip which can help you strike the chord of success in affiliate marketing. It often happens that your visitors move away from your site even before they glance through the offers listed down there. It is here that the direct links work wonder and eliminating them might purge your future prospects completely. Though Google and yahoo don’t allow direct linking, but I have ran many email/zip submit offers via direct link on Yahoo Search Network without any problems.

5. Tracking & Research – Make sure your check out your traffic and conversion rates from time to time. Sometimes it happens that the users are not at all interested in the products listed on your site. In this case use Google Analytics and examine the keywords which are drawing traffic to your site and then proceed to place relevant ads. You will also find sub id tracking in MarketLeverage campaigns which will help you in researching the top performing keywords.

6. Free Traffic – Here free traffic means, traffic outside PPC campaigns. Keep participating in various social networking sites, forums, blogs and so on. Viral Marketing, link baiting, Facebook Ads, Youtube video marketing, Craigslist/classified posting, SEO etc are some more cost effective ways for a massive affiliate marketing. Though singly they will not bring a lot of traffic, but collectively they can surpass PPC traffic. ;-)

7. Website publications – newsletters and special competitions/giveaways are a great way to advertise your website, and get visitors to leave valuable contact details to help push future advertising campaigns. A newsletter only needs to include two or three main articles of around 300 -600 words each, and can be sent out either every fortnight or once a month, so they should be easy to fit into a busy schedule. Try and think of a theme for each newsletter, and include articles that refer back to content on your website, to encourage people to visit there for more information. Competitions and giveaways also create a good ‘lure’ to get people to visit and sign up on your website, and they are simple and easy to set up, with small prizes and offers working well as long as you make it straightforward for people to apply. Once you have a good list of member contact details you can also send out emails regarding new items on your website or upcoming promotions and offers.

8. Content – if an affiliate program is to be successful you need to have sufficient site traffic, and the key to this is providing interesting and constantly updated (at least three times a week if possible) content. Think about the sort of visitors you hope to attract, and write articles with them in mind. For example if you have a website that is all about herbal supplements and over the counter medicines, then visitors will expect well written, concise articles that include plenty of facts and figures. However if you are running a website that is about arts and crafts then visitors will expect plenty of demonstration articles and pictures, and personal, friendly anecdotes about crafts projects. The key is to target your audience and cater to their needs, providing relevant, easy to read content that will interest them and encourage them to return, and also recommend your site to friends.

9. Keep Learning – Yes, keep learning what’s new in the internet and affiliate marketing world. Participate in various affiliate marketing forums and learn/share with the fellow members. Keep reading tips and updates on various blogs and sites. Know what’s hot, what is in demand, promotional methods, new networks and so on. Here are some helpful resources:

• http://forums.digitalpoint.com
• http://www.sitepoint.com
• http://www.wickedfire.com
• http://www.associateprograms.com
• http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.com
• http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
• http://www.shoemoney.com
• http://www.zacjohnson.com
• http://www.here.org.uk/
• http://uberaffiliate.com/
• http://www.johnchow.com

If you are a beginner at running affiliate marketing programs that it is best if you stick to just two or three to start with, and work at maximizing these before you move on. It is important that you devote enough time to each of your affiliate schemes, in order to maximize their potential, and successful affiliate users can make more money from one good scheme that is run efficiently, than some users can from six or seven schemes that are poorly managed.

market leverage10 – Friendship with the network – Last but not the least, create a friendship with your affiliate network and affiliate managers. Ask them for various promotional offers, marketing tactics, special commission, banners/landing pages, keywords and so on. Ask them which offers are converting best. There are various dedicated AM’s out there on Market Leverage to help you out.

I think I have written a lot and would have made an e-book of this, lol. Hope you will find these tips interesting and useful. Happy Money Making from affiliate marketing on Market Leverage. :)

Hetal Bidasaria

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Email Marketing Software From Interspire

Jan 2

Posted by admin in Internet Marketing | 6 Comments

Email marketing is a powerful promotional tool, and can be used to communicate with new and existing customers quickly and easily, with very little overall costs. Industry studies have shown that the response rates from email marketing campaigns are higher than other direct marketing methods, such as paper based postal schemes, and a strong email campaign can expect to have an effective 5% response rate.

To help you build and manage a successful email marketing campaign it is recommended that webmasters utilize one of the many online email marketing services, who can provide you with the necessary software to enable you to create, send and track all of your campaigns. One of the leading email marketing software companies is Interspire, who cater to over 15,000 different businesses needs, from individual webmasters to global digital advertising agencies.

Interspire provides one of the industries most robust and dynamic web based email marketing software solutions, which can offer you access either through the host services, or installation on your own private servers.

Interspire Email Marketer Benefits

The Interspire email marketing packages include many features to help you contact your customers such as newsletters, welcome and promotional emails and autoresponders. The software is straightforward and easy to use, with plenty of excellent customer support to help guide you through setting up and managing successful marketing campaigns.

email marketing softwareThe installation takes only 10 -20 minutes to complete from start to finish, giving you immediate access to over 35 industry specific templates to begin setting up your campaigns, which enables you to get started quickly without the additional task of designing the layout of your campaigns from scratch. You can also customize each template to create a more individual look, including logos, colors and basic layout and the Interspire email marketing software also has some other excellent features including:

  • Multiple user accounts to run target specific campaigns, with separate contact lists and statistical reports.
  • Easy integration with existing ecommerce billing systems.
  • Straightforward, browser-based contact management.
  • Personalized auto-responders and emails.
  • Split test software to run small sample email campaigns before selecting the most successful to issue to your main contact list.
  • Bulk email marketing to save time and costs.

Another key benefit of Interspire email marketing is that you only pay an initial one-time set up fee, which means you will not have to pay any further costs like monthly or ‘per email’ charges. This enables you to reduce overall costs on your email marketing campaigns and is ideal for those webmasters new to this type of advertising. There is also a 100% money back guarantee offered just in case you are unsatisfied with Interspire’s software, which can be claimed up to 60 days after the initial purchase.

You will also find various tutorials related to this product on their blog. For example, checkout this tutorial on “How You Can Quickly Design an HTML Email Using Interspire Email Marketer 5.5″

Interspire have an excellent security reputation, and only the account holder has access to subscriber lists and details of email campaigns via the secure log in procedure. To find out more about Interspire’s email marketing software you can visit the official website and watch this helpful online demo (with some restricted features). :cool:

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