You may already be swamped with email and this sounds like it's going to generate lots more. Electronic marketing will certainly generate more emails that you will turn into sales. But you don't really want to be driven crazy over this. So here's how you fix it.

One of the reasons you may be having trouble with too much email is that you are probably not using the email filters that are most likely already installed on your computer. If you have a Windows computer you already have Outlook Express installed and if you are using a version of Office you probably have the complete Outlook program.

We won't go into the “how to” details of setting up these filters because your help section of your program will do that. Search for “rules” or “organize” and read through the instructions. We just want to tell you what you can do to make your email program work for you so you don't end up in the psychiatric ward of Cyberville hospital.

Let's take junk email first.

Did you know you can set your program to recognize certain words or combinations of words so that when it sees them in an email, it automatically deletes the email before you even see it? This will save you from deleting literally thousands of pieces of email in the course of a year. Outlook starts you out with a bunch of words and symbols that it recognizes as spam or junk email. It also has an adult word file you can activate to eliminate pornography.

Now let's use the rules and organization features to put incoming email in specific folders automatically. Let's say you have an important client named John Lion. You make a folder for John and set up a rule that whenever an email comes in from John, the program automatically sends it to John's folder and the sound of a lion roars at the same time alerting you that John just sent you something.

Of course, you'll want to get to John's email immediately and see what he needs. Now let's make another rule for Jerry Jokester. Jerry sends you volumes of jokes, quips and quotes. You like Jerry so you don't want to offend him by asking to be removed from his list. It's just as simple to make Jerry a folder and make a rule so that when the program sees his name in the “from” line it sends his email directly into his folder in case he ever asks you about one of his emails. You could check the folder once in a while to see if Jerry sent you a real message OR you could use some advanced rules to separate the jokes that he sends out to everyone from personal emails he might send directly to you.

The Career of the future….

How to pick an autoresponder

• They must be automatic. The person sending an email to the autoresponder should not have to type anything specific into the subject or body of the email for it to work. Many people would misspell whatever they were supposed to type and the autoresponder would not work.
• You should be allowed an unlimited number of requests for your autoresponder.
• You should be able to make an unlimited number of changes to your return message and you should be able to do this yourself any time day or night.
• You should be able to capture the email address of the person requesting your autoresponder.

Smart Internet marketers make money coming and going . . . that is when their visitors are coming and going. Obviously when your visitor comes to your site you want them to buy. Not so obviously to the new marketer is the fact that an enormous amount of money can be had from people leaving your site if you know what to do. The beauty of many exit strategies is that the person has already decided NOT to buy and by using these techniques you get them to change their mind.

Here are some exit strategies:

Sell down technique: This technique can be used to offer a cheaper price when someone is leaving your sales page without purchasing. You can call the pop up box they get a “Pick Your Price” deal, but in actuality you can pre-select three cheaper price points for them to pick from. “Almost” everyone will pick the cheapest price, but some lovable souls choose from some of the higher priced options. The product they get is the same. This technique is best for digital download products like e-books because you don’t really have any cost of goods sold.

NOTE: You may not see the exit strategy if you have a really good series of pop up blockers. Exit pop ups are being blocked more frequently so this strategy will not work 100% of the time. It can still make lots of money, so don’t discount it’s use just because it’s not 100% anymore.

NOTE 2: Alternative software and scripts are being developed to simulate unblockable exit pop ups. Entry popups using dynamic HTML (dhtml) have been unblockable for a long time . . . exit pop ups have not. Programs like exit splash (very cool effect) http://powertips.exitsplash.hop.clickbank.net are a little bit harder than previous exit pop ups to put into play, but they can be extremely effective in catching people who are leaving your site and turning them into customers, or you also may like popover ads. It’s a little easier to implement than exit splash and gives you lots of options.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the hosting service when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. Google's pay per click program is called Adwords. Other PPC options are Yahoo Search Advertising, Amazon Product Ads, and Microsoft Ad Center. Facebook even has an option for ads.

This means that if you run a business and want to advertise your product, you can pay the search engines to place ads on the search engine results page (SERP). The search engine results page (SERP) is the page that comes up whenever somebody types in a word (or phrase) on a subject they are interested in.  

The SERP will show normal results (organic) in the middle of the page. The Pay Per Click ads will appear on the right. The more money a company or business is willing to pay per each click, the closer to the top of the page the ads are placed.

This is the main focus of businesses involved in online advertising.

How can your expertise in pay per click strengthen your career? 

What is the industry standard for bounce rate?

The simple and short answer is that there is no industry standard. There are a lot of factors that influence the bounce rate, so you really can’t compare bounce rates of one site (or page) to another.

The goal of the site should generally be to reduce the bounce rate to as low as possible. The lower the bounce rate the better job the site is doing to keep users engaged. One exception may be a site that is intended to accomplish all relevant user engagement on it’s landing page. This is more common on say, a campaign landing page intended to sign up users for direct marketing emails. Bounce rate is very unique to your site and page.

The best way to know if you are doing better or worse is to set your own baseline and compare your performance over time.

• Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce.
• Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I've seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.
• Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.
• Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.
• Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.
• Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%

Time On Site: Why is This Important?

“Avg. Time on Site.” This is an important statistic in terms of better search engine placement. Google and other search engines take note of how long a visitor stays on your site as an indicator of authority and importance. Any elements of your webpage that keep visitors there longer is called ‘stickiness.' Elements such as videos, news, polls and MP3 can keep a visitor engaged and attentive, keeping them on the page longer. This statistic in the analytics program can help you measure and track what new elements you'll need to create stickiness.

Increased time on site results in more sales. How can you fix this?

Just like anything else you have to be careful not to abuse the power of autoresponders. What you should do is give at least three customer satisfaction type messages before sending an upsell message. If you hammer people to buy, buy, buy they will quickly get sick of you.

• Message 1 Same day they purchase
• Message 2 Next day after they purchase
• Message 3 Five days after they purchase
• Message 4 9 Days after they purchase
• Message 5 23 Days after they purchase
• Message 6 37 Days after they purchase

Error Page Customization: Presumably if someone gets a 404 Page Not Found error on your site they will leave. This makes error page customization technically an “exit strategy”. And if you have an active website there will be times when pages disappear or people type in the wrong thing so this technique is a handy way to save them.

Here are some of the things you could put on a custom “Page Not Found” page:

• Search function for your site so people can find exactly what they want.

• Links to commonly misspelled pages on your site. Note: Make the links “absolute links” which means you include the entire http :// www …

• A link to your home page.

• A link to your site map

Note from the Geeks: Keep the page larger than 512 bytes or Internet Explorer takes over and displays its own page. You can get creative with these pages.

What would you be worth in the workplace with this kind of knowledge?

http://www.imtcva.org

This video tells you how you can ethically grab free content off the Internet, put it all in one place and get high search engine rankings and great revenue. This is a great way to participage in ecommerce.

Creating a custom email signature is a great place to help advertise your websites and services.

In most email programs you can add images and clickable links in the signature to drive another source of traffic to your business. Take a look at a few examples:

To make money at this Internet game you have to have some way to take credit cards. You must have a way to capture a sale immediately when you create the impulse to buy in your customer.

You don't even want your prospect to have to get up from their computer. Anything that distracts them could translate into a lost sale.

One of the most important ways to grab the sale NOW is to have your own Visa/MasterCard/AMEX merchant account tied to your shopping system. It used to be really tough to get a merchant account, especially if you work out of your home.

Now, you can't turn on your computer without 200 ads hitting you in the face from companies wanting to give you merchant account status. . . .Well “give” is not exactly the right word. . . It's going to cost you.

You can visit http://www.HowToUseAShoppingCart.com  to find the one we recommend.

You'll run into all kinds of deals where people will want to lease you card swiping equipment . . .unless you do a ton of live sales at trade shows or flea markets, you will never see a actual credit card when doing business online. All the sales are either via Internet or telephone.

Sometimes a fax will come in. You simply don't need a card machine. You can even take an order over your cell phone while on a plane before it takes off!

Get firm numbers on upfront fees, monthly fees, credit card percentages, and per transaction costs. While you're at it, find out exactly what a transaction is? Does calling for an “authorization only” constitute a transaction? Does doing a return equal a transaction? All these fees add up, but you’ll consider them chump change when you start doing lots of business.

Five Major Parts

For an online store to work there are five major parts that must all work together.

• Your website where your products and services are described

• Your Shopping Cart: that's the interface the customer uses to shop and put in their credit card information

• Online Gateway: that's the mechanism that connects the shopping cart to the merchant account and keeps the credit card information encrypted and safe as it travels between the shopping cart and the merchant account.

• The Merchant Account: that's the company that actually runs the credit card charges.

• Your bank that receives the money from the merchant account

Learn more about setting up a merchant account for your online business.