Marketing and Sales Guru

There are 1,000 ways to invest your time every day as an internet marketer, you will never, ever run out of ways that you could improve what you are doing or expand what you are trying to accomplish. There are always more tools, methods, strategies, and avenues to explore than there are minutes in a day to even comprehend them.

Here are the top 4 time wasters I have seen in the internet marketing space:

1. Trying to please everyone who emails you with feedback about your product. Yes, you should “crowd source” and innovate and pay attention to both negative and positive feedback but if you focus too much on tweaking your product or service forever you will miss the next big opportunity coming your way.
2. Believe that more links are always better links. There is a lot that goes into SEO besides quantity of links nowdays to rank well so sit back and try to design your ideal link graph. How can you strategically gain links from the top 100 websites within your industry? Those links are typically worth more than 3,000 links that are from domains outside of your space.
3. Thinking that by throwing money at a problem it will get solved. Cash can serve as a catalyst but it does not create solutions and often by doing things the hard way you learn how to do them efficiently and you see the extra benefits of the approach. This is hard to balance as your websites grow bigger, stronger, and more diverse in their nature but never forget when you started how you ran your whole marketing campaign on a shoestring budget. You can waste a lot of time by waiting for problems to be solved just because you have spent some money on them – like everything else what you invest into something is what you will get out.
4. Moving in too many directions at once. It is tempting to go after every opportunity we see but as a result we don’t do anything very efficiently. This is the #1 time waster in the internet marketing, never be working on more than 5 priorities and always know what your #1 and #2 goals are so you can focus on those first every single day when you start working.

I hope these internet marketing time wasters are things that you and all of us can avoid as often as possible. Cheers.

tags: time management and internet marketing, time management, internet marketing, online marketing, how to invest my time in internet marketing, how to invest my marketing time, internet marketing time savers, how to be more efficient at internet marketing

The Internet has made it easier than ever to create a lasting relationship with customers, and fast. The important thing here, however, is that you do so correctly. There are many ways to create and initiate the relationship process, including email marketing. Email marketing is essentially the use of email to market to your target audience, potential buyers, and current customers to increase sales, encourage engagement, etc.

Here are a few tips to increasing your effectiveness through email marketing:

1. Make it easy to sign up. Encourage people to sign up for your mailing lists by offering them something in return or by really selling the important characteristics of your email lists like free offers, tips, etc. These benefits should be listed. Additionally, tell people to sign up for your mailing list. This “telling” is a call to action, something that should be present in press releases, blog posts, etc. These calls-to-action are recommendations for what the visitor/reader/customer should do next, like signing up for your mailing list.
2. Make your content relevant. No one wants to receive an email that is pointless, useless, and irrelevant. Make your emails about your products, or better yet, about your industry. If you make the email less about you and more about the customer and the decisions they are making that involve your company (like which company to go through to re-roof their house), they are more likely to look to you when it is finally time to make that decision.
3. Offer something of value. Following from point #2, make sure that what you are sending is valuable to them. People love things for free, but if you send them something that is of no value to them, the results may be less than satisfactory for you.
4. Avoid sending the wrong emails. Some customers can get angry or upset if they get an email that is not targeted to them. For example, you send an email asking someone to sign up for your program, but they are already a participant in your program. This can cause some waves in the otherwise happy life of your customer.
5. Send emails at the right time. Just like the above, avoid sending emails that are not right for the time. For example, someone may not be interested in your holiday services in the middle of April. Be sure to be aware of your target market’s habits, lifestyles, etc., so that you not only send the right email but at the right time.

Email marketing can be very effective, but no one likes spam. If you intend on spamming your entire mailing list, it may be best that you avoid starting at all, because you won’t get far. The point of email marketing is to further position yourself as an authority figure in your industry and to further gain the trust of your buyers and potential buyers. More importantly, however, is that you encourage them to respond and that you, yourself, reply to their inquiries, comments, and feedback.

Have you used email marketing? What were your successes? Downfalls?