Email Marketing and Opt In List Building: On Keeping Online Businesses Profitable

Since the advent of the information technology, the Internet had been a valuable commodity to most people. Here, they find ways on how to earn more money even without having to spend more capital on building a business.

Nowadays, many business people are realizing the importance of email marketing. Through emails, an online business can market their product directly through their customers.

Generally, the main purpose of email marketing is to reach their target audience as quickly and as direct as possible. They need to reach their target market so as to promote their products and services that would benefit their customers.

However, some businesses use email marketing in order to maintain their contact and relationship with their customers.

The reason why email marketing has grown in such unprecedented rate is based on the fact that people in the virtual community are always hungry for information. They subscribe to information that they are interested in.

On the other hand, not all people are willing to subscribe to such information. They may be interested on your products once but may no longer be interested to buy again. Moreover, when you continue to send those emails that do not have their permissions, you can be accused of spamming.

The Importance of Blog Design

Blogs have increased popularity over this past months.  Many people have started to create their personal blogs to express their thoughts and feelings.  Internet companies have also started their blogs to inform consumers on the latest product news and reviews.

Because of this, blogs are also being used as internet marketing media.  Before, internet marketing is done by placing banners and links on popular websites, such as news and information sites.  Links were also included on newsletters and marketing letters sent to the members of their mailing lists.

Many people spend time reading blogs.  People read their friend's blogs, their favorite author's blogs, blogs on topics that they are interested in, and blogs on product reviews.  With the increasing popularity of blogging, it is even feared that people rely on blogs to get the latest news.

While getting news reports from blogs isn't reliable, some people look for product reviews through blogs.  In some cases, this is more dependable.  While it is true that some media persons are being paid to write good reviews about a certain product, blog writers write about their actual experiences on products and services from a company.

Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

How to create a sitemap

A sitemap of a website is similar to the table of contents of a book. Sitemaps are important because it guides web surfers to the particular part of the website they have a point of interest in. With it they would save time following links and get right to the point instead.

Sitemaps are also where search engines look at if somebody is looking for a particular keyword or phrase. If you have a site map, you can most likely be searched.

Creating a sitemap, now with software technology surging in, is relatively easier than before. You need not be a programming guru to be one. All need is a notepad, a program editor, and some patience. Here’s how you do it:

Create the listing on a notepad.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a notepad. Any word processing program will do. First off, make sure to type in all the parts and pieces of your website. Include all pages and all links you have. Create it as if you listing the contents of your book. Make a draft first. You’re sure no to miss something out this way.

Create a new page for your sitemap.

You can insert the sitemap on your website on one of its pages or you can create an entirely different page for it. Using your notepad, incorporate all tags necessary to it to make another webpage. Open up your website creator program and tag your sitemap using it. If you have created your website on your own, this will be easy for you.