Love it or hate it: Ya have to market Part 1

No matter what business you have, affiliate site you have taken on or product or service you are offering, no way to get around this, you HAVE to market. You know the old saying "Build it and they will come?" Only, if you market it. You can have absolutely the best site, service and or product in the known universe, without marketing, no one knows about it, no one comes.

Off-line you have many venues for advertising: print, electronic media, local, regional, national, international. Print includes newspapers, shoppers, mail advertising, coupons, flyers. They can be stuffed in your mailbox, placed on your windshield. You can buy them as in newspapers and magazines. You find them placed on billboards, on signs and bulletin boards. Electronic media includes radio, television and cinema. All these things can be very local in nature or national or even worldwide.

On-line you have parellel choices: email advertising via safelists, leads, FFA posts. Traffic exchanges that "show" your site and generate "hits." Search engines, adboards, portal sites, adblasters and other mediums and venues. Where ever it is you run your business, you must advertise and market or you have no business. This is a very simple fact of commerce.

On the internet, you have not only have lots of choices of venues, you also have free and paid resources! Personally I love free resources. There are downsides to free sometimes however, and this series looks at some great free resouces and then their paid solutions.

Email Marketing: There are several traditional choices when it comes to email marketing and one, new, very promising venue.

1. Safe lists: These are lists you opt into by joining and agreeing to receive email in return for sending email. Just like anything else, there are lists which are effective, their are lists which are not. A lot has to do this the script and the owners. Some members never read their emails, they just join to send out their own ads. Some scan subject lines. Some read mails to gain points at the lists which are credit based in order to get enough credits to send their own ads out. Two of my lists are credit based: http://xtreamsubmitter.safelisthosting.us/ and http://xtreamsurf.safelist-nation.com/ . Two of my favorite lists which I have always had good response out of are: http://www.gotsafelist.com/index.php?id=5073 and http://www.adtactics.com/index.php?ac=cheriehalliday

Most safelists are free to join. Upgraded members receive credits, banner ads and other incentives to upgrade. It is always best to join free, find out if that list works enough for you to warrent the cost of an upgrade. Many lists now offer you other goods and services to upgrade. massive is a great example of that and one I highly recommend:
http://www.massivesafelist.com/ms/g.php?r=3172

Most Safelists require you have two seperate email accounts: one for your list mail one for admin. Adtactics and Gotsafelist only require one email addy. Some are very particular on what email you can use so always check the faqs.

One thing about safelist advertising is that if you do one, you generally need to do a lot of them to get the widest possible reach. This means getting into a good, professional submitter, something we will discuss next article.

- Cherie Halliday
http://www.xtreamsurf.com