Come on, admit it: Whether you’re a professional writer or not we all draw a blank when we want to write an ezine article.

I’ve found an answer to that dilemma that will get you writing in no time so that you can publish your ezine article and begin to receive that new wave of subscribers you’ve been hoping for. Here’s how to get the lead out if you draw a blank:

1. Write your action steps first. Forget about the catchy headline and attractive lead paragraph for now. There’s no use in cleverly leading a reader into an article that has no real value to them. So start where you build your credibility, right in the action steps. Of course you want to identify your subject and then tell them how to make their lives easier. For instance, plumbers are always going to have to fix pipes, it’s the nature of their business. If you have an ezine to others in the plumbing industry, write about a new technique in the industry on sealing pipes or preparing them for the winter, etc.

2. Save the best for last. There’s something called takeaway or take-home that should be in every one of your articles. It’s your last chance to tell your audience, “I know my stuff.” Try to put that key piece of information in the last paragraph of your article and you’ll want it to be something your reader can do as soon as he or she finishes reading your article. If you’re writing to accounts payable clerks, you’d tell them ways to get each department to get approvals on all purchase orders before submitting them. A/P clerks would just eat that up. It’s their number one gripe. Bottom line: Give your audience something they can do immediately at the very end of your article.

They’ll remember your name and become devotees for life- hanging from your every word.

3. Get excited about the benefits. After you’ve taken care of the credibility building portion of your article, you have to draw the reader in and whet their appetite for all this great information. By the way, if you write the action steps and take-home first, this part will be easier because you’ll be so excited about the information you’ll see the benefits of it. And that’s what writing lead paragraphs and headlines is all about: benefits to your readers.

Your final take-home advice No matter what you do, when you’re writing to an ezine audience, always include an “About the Author” blurb (some call this a sig file, short for signature file) and a plug for anything new you’re into. To do this, determine what you want the reader to do after he or she is finished reading. Do you want the to subscribe to your ezine? Buy your new ebook? Or just visit or site? Whatever the benefit to you is, identify it before you write your “About the Author” section. And you can write this at any time because it’s separate from the article and you can use the same “About the Author” blurb for multiple articles. As a matter of fact, you could write one right now. Check out the one I’m using at the bottom of this article.

For more info and tips on Ezines visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/ezine/

There are thousands of business opportunities online. Most of
them require some capital to start with. Not affiliate programs!

Here are 7 reasons why you should consider joining an affiliate
program as your home based business.

1. Joining an affiliate program requires no outlay of capital.
That’s right, none! You can join an affiliate program for free
and start promoting the product immediately.

2. The internet marketing tools are already provided for you.
A ‘top’ affiliate program will supply you with lots of
affiliate marketing tools that are ‘ready to go’. You just
copy and paste and put your affiliate code in. Then you start
selling.

3. You do not need a product. It takes a LOT of time to develop
your own product to sell online. With affiliate programs, the
product is already there. Someone else spent all the time
developing it so you do not have to.

4. Affiliate statistics are already provided as part of joining
an affiliate program. You do not have to go out and buy
expensive software to track your sales because the product
owner is doing that for you. You don’t even have to pay for it,
it’s free!

5. You do not have any ‘time lag’. With most businesses it
takes a certain amount of time in the ‘start up’ phase. With
affiliate programs there is no such thing. Once you join you
can start selling.

6. You do not have to worry about sales administration and
technical support. The product owner takes care of the sales
process and all the after sales service. All you have to worry
about is receiving your affiliate check!

7. You do not have to worry about direct contact with the
customer. In an affiliate program you are a re-seller so if the
customer has a complaint they contact the product owner,
not you.

Affiliate programs are simple to join, easy to start promoting
and best of all they have no downside. If one affiliate program
does not work out, you can leave and join a different one.

For more help and info on Email Marketing visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/email%20marketing/

You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big family. Right off, let’s be clear – there are lots of ways to do business on the internet. And lots of ways to both make and lose money. Successful eCommerce websites come in all shapes, kinds and colors and while I can’t cover every type of site in this series, I will present the basics you need to consider and apply for an eCommerce web site to be successful.

Let’s begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I’m not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We’re beyond those basics. The basics here are the factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success your eCommerce web site experiences.

First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn’t make a high value web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And you’ll end up with a high refund rate – and an unhappy credit card processor. That path means you’re taking advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. This isn’t the way to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.

Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales — a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you’ve created in your buyers. Hyped junk just doesn’t cut it.

Next, you’ve got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.

If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it’s imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and be customer friendly. This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back.

You’ll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent certain the operators actually speak and understand the primary language(s) of your targeted customer group. You’ll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts.

You should collect your own customer evaluations – separately. Don’t rely exclusively on any monitoring or customer satisfaction surveys provided by the call center. Track your ROI to be sure it’s money well-spent. Don’t stop monitoring just because the results looked good for the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure you’re tracking desired actions linked to the call center separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat. Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what’s really happening.

You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know exactly what you’re doing and why it should work. And you’ll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that makes for a successful “ugly” site.

To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use – colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn’t mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see on those sites. While other factors heavily influence traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing visitor behavior.

Keep in mind that a site’s desired actions affect the design and layout. You’ll want to study sites where those actions are most similar to the desired actions you target on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales, there’s not much point in emulating a site that’s optimized for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense.

If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you need backend products too), provide incentives for customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since they’ve shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce websites are all about value and customer service.

For more eCommerce tips and info visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/ecommerce/

1. People love to get free stuff. A free eBook is perfect. They will visit your web site to get the free valuable information.

2. Give away the full version of your eBook in exchange for testimonials. You can use these customer statements to improve your ads’ effectiveness.

3. When you write and give away a free eBook you will become known as an expert. This will gain people’s trust and they will buy your main product or service quicker.

4. Publish your web site in eBook format. Put the eBook on a disk or CD-ROM then include it with your direct mail packages. This can increase the number of people that buy your product or service.

5. Offer your eBook as a free bonus for buying one of your main products or services. People will buy the product or service more often when you offer a free bonus.

6. Allow people to download your eBook for free, if they give the e-mail addresses of 3 to 5 friends or associates that would be interested in your eBook. This will quickly build your e-mail list.

7. Create a directory of web sites in eBook form. List peoples web sites in the directory that will agree to advertise the eBook on their web site or e-zine. This will give them an incentive to give away or advertise your eBook.

8. Allow other people to give away your free eBook. This will increase the number of people that will see your ad in the eBook. You could also include a mini catalog of all your product or services that you offer in the eBook.

9. Gain new leads by having people sign up and give you their contact information before they can download your eBook. This is a very effective way to conduct market research.

10. Make money selling advertising space in your eBook. You could charge for full page color ads, classified ads or banners ads. You could also trade advertising space in your eBook for other forms of advertising.

11. Give away the eBook as a gift to your current customers as a way of letting them know you appreciate their business. Place an ad in the eBook for a new back end product you’re offering

12. Get free advertising by submitting your eBook to freebie and freeware/shareware web sites. This will increase the number of people that will down-load your eBook and see your ad.

13. Make money by selling the reprint rights to those that would like to sell the eBook. You could also make even more money by selling the master rights. This would allow other people to sell the reprint rights.

14. Hold a contest on your web site so people can win your eBook. You’ll get free advertising by submitting your contest ad to free contest or sweepstakes directories.

15. You will gain valuable referrals from people telling others about your eBook. Word of mouth advertising can be very effective.

16. Make money cross promoting your eBook with other people’s products or services. This technique will double your marketing effort with-out spending more time and money on your part.

17. Increase your e-zine subscribers by giving away your eBook to people that subscribe to your e-zine. This will give people an incentive to subscribe. Allow your e-zine subscribers to also give it away to multiply your subscribers.

18. Give away the eBook to people that join your affiliate program. This will increase the number of people that sign-up. You could also create an eBook for them to use that will help them promote
your product or service.

19. Give away the eBook in exchange for people leaving their contact information. This will help you follow-up with the prospects who buy your main product or service.

20. Offer a free eBook that contains a couple of sample chapters. If they like it, give them the option of ordering the full version. It would work just like a software demo or shareware.

For more info on eBooks visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/ebooks/

The web is a most versatile and often misused medium for direct marketing. In this email, I will share tips and techniques to make the web a major advertising tool for your sales and marketing efforts.

Do you have a website? A Web Newsletter? A mailing list of e-mail addresses for customers? Do you track and test everything? You can use the web to get sales in lots of exciting ways which are dependant on technology that’s available at the time.

Almost everyone is just too busy running their businesses to take the time or to give advertising much thought. This is just crazy.

Whether you budget is £600 or £6000, I can show you how it’s done effectively time after time after time!

So here’s what I do when I start working with clients and I would like to offer it to you as a gift now. Have a look at this list of ten great ways of marketing. I guarantee, that nearly all web site owners will not have every one of these simple methods in place right now.

Please pick at least two that you’re either not doing, or not doing that well – and MAKE A DECISION to add them to your marketing mix in the weeks ahead:

Direct Mail
Internet Marketing
Email Marketing
Advertising
Telephone Marketing
Direct Sales
Strategic Alliances
Referral Systems
PR
Additional Products/Services

We will tackle these in order

Direct Mail

Direct mail is often overused and badly done. It’s got a bad reputation over the years, mainly due to spammers, used instead of the telephone or by con artists seeking their next victim.

There are a lot of myths and nonsense about mailings. You may want to print this out, because in my continuing efforts to help you reach success – I am about to share the secrets of direct mail – I’d be surprised if the contents of this mail does not save you thousands of pounds over the next 12 months.

By the way, if you are totally new to Direct Mail – “It’s anything sent by post, sales letters, electronic mail or brochures etc”

I want to dispel some things about DM to you. “Direct Mail doesn’t work” . This ingenious conclusion is arrived at by the fact that most people throw most of the mail we get directly in the bin – therefore the thinking is that it’s a waste of money. The truth is that 90 out of 100 people might throw your mailing in the bin, but if 5 people look at it, 5 more read it and one of those 5 buys from you – you may well have a highly profitable mailing.

Last week I sent 400 emails to potential clients, and got 37 replies. That’s to say that 37 people actually read my mail, and I got exactly 9 new clients as a result.

Now what would happen if I doubled my mailings next week? I could expect from 800 mails, about 80 replies and maybe 20 sales!

And that’s easily doable by the way, because I’ve done it. But saying that, your mailing may not work – it depends on what you say, pricing of your product and some products may just not be suited to an email campaign. It’s very much a numbers game, but one thing is certain, email is free!

(A word of warning though) You have to enter this knowing that most of your mailings will go unread, but at least it’s cheaper than other advertising methods.

Large companies like Capital One, know their mailings DO work – they’ve spent a fortune fine tuning and testing these campaigns. But just to warn you – direct mail can fail, and they are the ones, usually, small to medium businesses send out, because they don’t understand what they are really doing.

If it’s done right, it will make your profits increase dramatically, and when it’s done badly – it can eat into a budget, so be very careful!

There are 2 types of mailings:

Potential Customers

Existing Customers

If you don’t do much mailing – start doing some now. It’s easy to not email out of fear of upsetting clients, scared of bombarding them with too many mails, thus losing a sale.

That’s crazy and it’s to nobodys advantage.

Actually, most sales emails are helpful and quite genuine. I was once told “You’ve got to be mad to not listen to a salesman – they might have something you need!” So next time you receive a mail or telesales call, consider that it could well be in your favour.

And there really is nothing wrong with sending out 2 mails each week.. So don’t worry.

I have noticed that many clients are sitting with 1000’s of email addresses – yet they aren’t contacting these clients. That’s like throwing money down the drain. They could say NO, then again they could say YES to your product. Imagine if a further 10 bought your services next week – how do you feel about not emailing those customers now?

Try it today….. Think of something you can offer these customers, you must have something you can offer! Even something for free. Send them a letter and measure the response. If it works, mail them and measure the results. If it keeps on working, keep on doing it!

The best email is a personal communication with a customer you know. It may read as follows:

Dear———–

I wanted to follow up after your purchase of (your product) on (date) to see how it’s working out for you and to thank you for your continuing business. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know by return email, or feel free to call my private phone number.

Many Thanks

Regards

Mr X

Your customer is going to open, read and appreciate an email like this. They may even respond to it, and even if they don’t, it doesn’t look like spam or bug anyone. And they probably will appreciate that.

——————————————————

Give it a go – you’ll be surprised.

For more help and tips on Direct Mail visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/direct%20mail/