A house with no doors

A website that has not been optimized is like a house with no doors. A site needs to be designed and coded so search engines can find their way in. Once your site is optimized, that’s it, the doors are open! Now you just need to focus on developing rich content and building quality links to your site.

Don't be stingy with business cards

• Have some with you at all times - leave them at restaurants, banks, gas stations (however, please do not litter)
• Give them out to anyone and everyone - give them more than 1, maybe the will pass them on to someone else.
• Do you still mail your bills, include one.
• Send them along with invoices
• Use them as hang tags - attach then to your products
• Be Green, print your cards on recycled paper or be bold, print them on discarded cereal boxes.
• Try using 'odd shapes - make them stand out.

10 places to leave your business card

1. Doctor's office
2. Dentist's office
3. Obstetrician's office
   
4. Deli notice board
5. Veterinarian's office
6. Mechanic's waiting room
7. Hair or nail Saloon
8. Laundromat
   
9. Realtor's office
10. Daycare center

If you are required to wait - leave a business card

6 Viral Marketing Ideas

1. Publish an e book with your product links and allow your affiliates to add in their own affiliate links.
2. Make a entertaining video that features your product.
3. Make a video that others can re-brand with their affiliate links.
4. Have a promotional competition. Example 'Free gift to the to the next five people to become a fan on Facebook'.
5. Make your site interactive - give people something fun to do online.
6. Offer redistributable mp3 downloads.

10 E-mail Tips to Reach your Customer Inboxes

I am a huge proponent of email marketing. It is an effective marketing method with a very high ROI. Unfortunately, spammers and scammers have made it more difficult for legitimate senders to get their e-mails past Internet Service Provider (ISP) junk filters and into the inbox. Here are a few steps you can take to avoid the spam label and increase your e-mail marketing effectiveness.

1. Avoid using these words in your subject line:- Urgent, money back guarantees, and why pay more?

2. Do not use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks (!) in your subject line and in your E-MAIL CONTENT!!

3. If something sounds too good to be true, the junk mail filters probably agree. For example “once in a lifetime opportunity” etc.

4. Never send out an e-mail that is one giant image. The filters will likely filter it but even if it gets to the inbox, the recipient will have no enticement to turn on images. A good balance is 60 percent text and 40 percent graphics. Do not forget the ALT text.

5. Try to avoid excessive mentions of money in your e-mails as the spammers and scammers have made that hard to get through.

6. Keep your emails simple to maximize your chances of getting into the inbox. Avoid e-mails with red font, flashing objects, etc

7. Do not buy a list. This violate the terms of service of almost all E-mail Service Providers (ESPs) and your recipients are more likely to hit the spam complaint button. More than one complaint out of each 1,000 e-mails sent is very likely to get you blocked by one or more ISPs and make it more difficult to get emails through to your best customers.

8. Do not harvest e-mails from the web to send in bulk. Not only will you run into the same problems as when you buy a list, you will also be violating the CAN-SPAM Act.

9. Keep your e-mail frequency reasonably steady to keep your sending reputation intact. For instance, if you send only once every six months the ISPs and the recipients may have forgotten about you resulting in delivery problems and spam complaints.

10. On the other hand, do not send so often that you annoy your subscribers. Send at least once per month, carefully consider what volume will start to annoy your subscribers—who will unsubscribe from your list or worse, hit the spam button, sticking a label on you that can be hard to remove.