Use your mailing list as a test market

Your mailing list is a great way to promote your products and stay in touch with your customers. You may not realize it, but it also serves another purpose. You can use your mailing list as a test market for new products and services you may be thinking about offering.

A test market is a limited group of people you offer a product to in order to receive feed back before you put the product up for sale to the general population. Using a test market will allow you to get feedback on your product. Your test market may suggest adding a feature you hadn’t thought of or offer other advice which will be helpful in fine tuning your product.

Your mailing list is a natural choice for a test market, as they have already expressed interest in the type of products you offer. For example, if you have sold an information product on starting a home based business before, perhaps you can use your mailing list of people who have bought that product as a test market for an information product on marketing techniques. You already know they are interested in starting a business; therefore, they would probably appreciate learning how to market their new business.

You can choose to offer your test products at a normal rate, a reduced rate, or even for free. Let them know that you are still working out the bugs and that the product you are offering may be different from the finished product you are going to sell to the general public. Letting them know this in advance can ward off any ill feelings; if one of the people on your mailing list buys a test product and later sees a similar product with slightly different features for sale, they may feel they got ripped off.

If you are going to offer the product at a reduced rate or give it away for free, let them know you would appreciate their feedback in exchange. Have a form set up online where the customer can fill out their opinions and advice. Ask them to leave a recommendation that you can use on the landing page once the product is finished.

You can also use your mailing list to get feedback when you are in the development stages of creating an information product. For instance, you can send out an email with a link to a questionnaire form and ask them to fill it out. If you know the general topic you would like to create a product on, you can ask your test market what are their three biggest questions about that topic. If you end up receiving a bunch of questions in the same general areas, you know that is the area of content you would like to focus your product on.

If you have a service based business, you can still use your mailing list as a test market. You can ask what type of services they would like to have. If you offer tangible products, you can ask your test market what type of new products they would like to see you carry and which features can be improved upon in your current inventory.

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Article Marketing Success - Avoid the Bum-marketing Mistake

Article marketing in the form of “bum marketing” is very popular online. It’s used by those new to the Web, who want to make affiliate income, without creating their own Web site.

There’s a huge mistake you can be making with your bum marketing, and you should be aware of it.

Here it is: avoid writing endless articles promoting a variety of products without building your own business at the same time.

Article marketing as practiced by bum marketers works like this.

They choose an affiliate product, and write 30 articles promoting the product, by posting their articles to article directories.

Invariably, this means a lot of writing. However, some of these bum marketers do make the system work for them before they burn out.

But there’s an easier, more effective method, which ensures that your articles keep working for you in the months and years to come.

Write Reviews Promoting Your Chosen Products and Post Them to Your Own Site or Blog

Choose four affiliate products in any area, and write a review of each and post it to your site. Then write a comparison review of all four products.

Now you can start marketing your site to the article directories using standard bum marketing. Direct readers to your site’s comparison review. You want to have lots of links to the site, so that you start getting lots of organic traffic. This traffic costs you nothing, it’s sent to you by the search engines.

Next, choose another four products and repeat the process. You can get another domain name for these products, or put your reviews onto your original domain.

The benefits of sending your traffic from article marketing to your own site are immense.

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Increase your site’s traffic with an e-course

If you want to generate traffic to your website, increase the size of your mailing list, and sell more products, consider creating an e-course. An e-course is information, usually delivered a chunk at a time, as in one lesson per day, via email.

An e-course can be on any topic. Take a look at your website and think about what your target market would like to learn about. If your website is devoted to information about beauty treatments, you can create an e-course explaining how to have a spa day at home. If your website contains information about sewing, you can create an e-course that explains how people can start their own sewing business. The choices are limitless.

Once you know what your topic will be, you will need to start writing. If you are not familiar enough with the topic to write from your own experiences, research the subject first. You may want to write the entire course in one word processing file; once the work is done, you can read through it and find appropriate section breaks.

If writing an entire e-course seems daunting, don’t worry. You don’t have to write a book. Just write a few simple lines about a given subject in order to answer a question your target market likely has. Do this every day for a week, and you have written your e-course.

Once you have written your e-course, you will need to get it delivered to your subscribers. The easiest way to do this is with an autoresponder. You can subscribe to an autoresponder service for around $20 per month. You can create lists in your autoresponder, and load unique messages for that particular list.

Your autoresponder service will generate a bit of HTML code to display on your site or blog. When someone clicks on the link, they will be subscribed to your list. When someone subscribes to that list, they will receive all the messages in the order you select.

When you write your e-course, you should have some products you want to promote in mind. For instance, you may have created an information product about affiliate marketing. You can create a free e-course about affiliate marketing in order to promote your information product. You can also include links to other products you are an affiliate for.

You do not have to give your e-course away. Your e-course can be the information product that you are selling. You can also make it interactive by including links to audios, videos and other information.

Promoting the fact that you have these e-courses available will help bring traffic to your site. You can even make some of the links customizable for others to put in their affiliate links and give the e-courses away for others to use. If you do this, keep the links to your website unchangeable, so the people who end up reading the e-course can still come to your site for more information.

Make money writing: discover the secrets of article marketing

Want to boost your income? “Article marketing” is highly popular with Web site owners, because articles are money in the bank to them.

As a writer, this means that article marketing can be a great income stream for you, if you know how article marketing works, and how to write articles and where to submit them.

Judy Cullins’ great three-book set Advanced Article Marketing can be your guide to a fantastic income stream, with a hidden benefit: you can use article marketing to boost your writing business as well.

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