People Keep a Blog as a Type of Personal Creative Exercise

But you can easily use this popular online type of writing to market your business. Blogs are very popular right now and they can be a great and inexpensive way to contact more customers. The great thing about blogs is that people read them for fun.

Customers may be becoming more jaded about advertising, but they will gladly read a blog that has some interesting things to say. Many top companies are using blogs to deliver a better and more personal message about their companies and the strategy seems to be working. Starting a blog is as simple as finding a space online to write and the time to write.

To begin a blog, first develop a theme idea or blog idea. You may want to look at other people’s blogs to do so. In general, you will want to develop a central theme for your blog in the same way that columnists develop a theme for their articles.

This helps ensure that your blog is not too scattered. Next, find some place to publish your blog. There are several sites, both paying and free that give bloggers a chance to publish their material. Simply set up your blog on your website especially if you already have an active website.

Once you have a place to publish your blog, you will have to set aside some time each week to develop new content. When writing your blog, write simply and clearly. Use small paragraphs and spell check before uploading.

Your readers will trust what you have to say if you say it well. Go easy on the advertising. The idea of a blog is to give readers something fun and exciting to read and look at. You will have more readers if you comment on the world and are entertaining, rather than just hype your product.

Consider writing about your day, the atmosphere your workplace has, and culture, rather than just your company. Consider many types of content. Blogs allow you to upload images, create links, and allow users to make comments.

Your blog will have many more readers if you make your blog exciting with these pluses. Just putting your blog online is not enough. After all, there are many millions of blogs on the web right now, so unless your blog is on a high-traffic site, you may not get readers unless you advertise.

You can easily advertise your blog without spending a cent by mentioning your blog in your emails and web pages or newsletters. You can also enter in online competitions. If your blog wins a prize, you are more likely to get a constant flow of traffic to your blog.

You can also ask ezines and other content providers to review your blog, which will also draw readers. You will want to search for a widely used blog host to publish your blog so that your readers can find you. Once you develop a blog, you will want to use the best blog marketing strategies you can to sell your company.

However, marketing blogs are different from personal blogs and blog marketing, or advertising is very different than other forms of marketing. To make your blog a powerful marketing tool, you need to get your customers and clients to see it. That means that you will need to advertise and provide content that gets attention.

Make your blog visually exciting. Choose an attractive background color and provide photos or images. Consider sound. Develop your blog as you would a website, with the same visual appeal. Some bloggers even add video and sound to their blogs.

Your Subscribers can Easily Opt-In or Opt-Out

And all the distribution is handled for you, based on the schedule that you set. List maintenance can become very difficult without the automation that autoresponders provide. You can write each issue of your ezine or newsletter well in advance, and have it delivered to your mailing list, no matter where you are or what you are doing.

That is the beauty of automation. Since all past broadcast and automatic response messages are saved, you can easily refer to old issues, or allow people to request past issues. You can also use the tracking feature throughout each issue of the newsletter to determine how many clicks you are getting for the various products or websites that you promote in your ezine.

If you have not yet purchased an autoresponder or signed up with any autoresponder service, make sure that you inquire about the broadcast feature first. Not all autoresponders or autoresponder services have this feature, and as your marketing progresses, you will find that this is one of the most useful features of the service or program. If you have looked at the prices of autoresponders that are available online, you may have decided to search for and use a free autoresponder for your marketing needs.

Using free autoresponders is acceptable in certain situations and in the world of online marketing, any autoresponder is better than not using an autoresponder at all. Your first option for a free autoresponder should be the one that comes with your web hosting account. These autoresponders can easily be set up through the control panel of your website, and they do not contain advertisements from the autoresponder company or web hosting service.

If you do not have a hosting account, or your hosting account does not include autoresponders, there are other options that you can pursue. There are many free autoresponder services to choose from. These services are free, because the company makes their money by placing a small advertisement in each message that your autoresponder sends out.

These advertisements may appear at the top of your auto responses, or at the bottom, depending on which company you use. Many paid autoresponder services offer a free version as well. These free versions may or may not include advertisements in the outgoing messages.

These lighter versions of the paid autoresponders typically do not include many of the powerful features of the paid versions. But if you do not need the more advanced features, this is a great choice. Most free autoresponders have a limit on the number of subscribers you can have.

Many people start out with the limited free versions, and then upgrade to the paid versions once their lists are large enough to exceed those limits. Many marketers do not feel that the expense of the autoresponder is warranted until the list that they are building is turning a profit. From a business standpoint, this makes sense.

As the owner of a business, you are the only one who can decide whether you need a paid autoresponder service, or if a free one will do the job. If your list is small, a free autoresponder should do everything that you need it to do, but as your list grows, you should consider upgrading. However, having the small advertisements that the free services place in the outgoing messages may present a problem if the ads compete with what you are trying to sell.

Again, this depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your autoresponder. A blog is a type of online journal or diary, often including personal comments as well as web links and images.

Advertising Campaigns Cost a Lot of Time and Money

Campaigns that are not doing well need to either be changed or scraped. When using autoresponders for purposes of internet marketing, you will be able to tell how well your autoresponder messages are doing by using response tracking. Autoresponder response tracking is usually easily set up with the higher quality paid autoresponder services.

Using the tracking set up tool, you simply enter the web site address that you want your readers to visit, and the software generates a brand-new URL. This URL is used track the number of clicks that you have from the autoresponder message to the web site that you are promoting. When a person clicks on that special URL, the click is captured, and they are automatically redirected to the web site that you intended them to arrive at.

The visitor does not know that they have been redirected in most cases. You can monitor the results through the control panel of your autoresponder service account. The control panel will tell you how many messages were delivered, and how many clicks were received.

Most quality autoresponders will even include a feature that allows you to track how many of the emails were opened. This is a great marketing research tool for mass email marketing. Not all autoresponder services offer tracking abilities such as this.

If tracking is important to you, you need to make sure that this is one of the features of the autoresponder service before you sign up. This feature gives you the ability to know whether the message you are sending out is effective, or if changes need to be made. It also allows you to see if the sales copy on your web site is effective.

For instance, if you are getting thousands of clicks from the autoresponder message, but very few clicks from the sales page to the order page, you know that the autoresponder message is working, but the sales copy is failing. If you have never tracked your autoresponder responses before, you should consider it. Again, this information allows you to find out what is working, and what is not working.

It will essentially make your autoresponder marketing much more effective and profitable. You will most likely be very surprised at the results of the tracking. There are many uses for an autoresponder. One such use is the publishing and distribution of an ezine or newsletter.

Since autoresponder services usually are set up to send automatic responses to the people on the list at certain intervals after they sign up, setting up an autoresponder to send out an ezine can be a little confusing. Depending on the service or autoresponder that you are using, you will need a broadcast feature. The broadcast feature works essentially the same as the automatic response feature, with one big difference.

The messages are not sent out at intervals. The messages can, however, be scheduled to go out on a certain day, which has no bearing on when the subscriber was added to the mailing list. Broadcast messages are one-time messages that are only sent to your current mailing list.

People who sign up for your list after the broadcast has been sent do not receive it, unless the specifically request it with an autoresponder address, which you must set up. Using the broadcast feature of most autoresponder services, you can simply go and either type your newsletter, or copy and paste it into the editor, then choose to send the broadcast to your entire mailing list. More advanced autoresponder services will usually have broadcasting features.

Using an autoresponder to maintain a mailing list and to distribute a newsletter is a wonderful idea.