E-marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to promote your business or services on a budget.

The advantages of emarketing over conventional promotional marketing material are huge -

• Cost effective – no need to purchase stamps, stationery/envelopes.
• Less time to prepare and send
• Successfully track reader response.
• Cross promote products
• Make extra money with affiliate marketing (which I will mention shortly!)

But before you decide to rushing toward your computer (although you are probably already there to read this!) and start planning your email to send, there are a few things you need to consider….

First up, DON’T ever send a mass email marketing campaign through Outlook or another email program! There are certain laws against spamming, and one of the main laws is that your email must be ‘permission’ based and must have an automatic Opt-out link, so the person is removed from your database immediately if requested. Outlook cannot do this. Furthermore, sending a bulk email out can clog your mailserver leading to your email being removed from the mailserver and nothing gets delivered.

There are a number of great online systems to send law-abiding email marketing to your clients, such as Vision6 or Constant Contact, both of which require very little internet related knowledge to send great looking emails allowing you to send and track the response. The only downside is that they charge you for sending bulk emails, and if you have a large group or send regularly, while still reasonably cheap, you do have to pay.

But if you already own your own website you can download a program called Pommo, which is a free professional email marketing system which you upload to your own web server, and set up in about 5 to 10 minutes. And there is no cost whatsoever!

If you don’t own your own hosting, then for a tiny sum of around $7.95 a month you can purchase a hosting plan from WebCrowd.com.au and we will install the software for you for nothing! This works out much cheaper than what you would be paying for the other systems mentioned, and Webcrowd also give you a free domain name and unlimited email accounts as part of the standard yearly hosting fee!

Now that you have your email system up and running, lets get down to business!….

You don’t need a degree in rocket science to know that to get people to read your enews it needs to be:

• Short and sweet – people will trash it instantly if they see a days worth of reading.
• Informative and interesting – Don’t just drone on about yourself or your products, include some interesting facts, some fun stuff, a thought of the day…add things people want to share with others..this is a great way to viral market yourself.
* Add incentives for signing up and reading your enews, like subscriber-only discounts or specials. This always works!

Now, how about if I was to tell you about a way you can make an income from e-marketing, with no products!?

No I am not joking, and yes, it is very easy…

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make extra cash every day, even every hour. Investing a couple of hours a week on email marketing can very easily reward you with a full time income. I’ll share with you the basics of how it’s done once you have your hosting and email marketing system in place…

Step A – Find yourself a few affiliate marketing programs.They are free to join. My favourites are Clickbank, DGM Pro, Commission Monster and Commission Junction. There are also plenty of travel agencies, fashion labels and others offering affiliate programs to choose between. MAke sure it ties in with your enewsletter topic.The process is simple – You sign up, you pick the products you wish to promote and they provide you with a script that you cut and paste into your enews. When someone click on the product link and makes a purchase you are rewarded with a commission. This commission could be anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. All you have to do is have that link in your email and attract them to click it and make a sale.

Step B – Join up with Google Adsense. Adsense is the other half of Google Adwords. The way Google Adwords works is people pay Google to promote their business or products, but for Google to get those ads out there they rely on affiliates that are willing to promote them, so they developed Adsense. Adsense lets you join up for free and you simply add the google code into your enewsletter and the Google script will automatically find ads that match your content of your enews. When someone click on the Google Ad while reading your enews you are rewarded. On average it doesn’t pay as well as Affiliate programs but you can easily make $10 or more on Adsense.

Step C – Work out a calendar to keep your marketing consistent and regular. Don’t send them too often or people will get annoyed, but don’t leave it too long either.

If you’d like to see how easy it really is to turn a few hours a week into an income, contact Devision and we will be happy to teach you the secrets to e-marketing success!