THE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER ABOUT ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTERS
March 20, 2007
by Dan Harley, Jr. - danharley@primeconcepts.net
I want to thank those of you who had referred me business and/or subscribers since I started this newsletter publication. It is very much appreciated and I’m also very happy to see this e-newsletter start to become successful so quickly.
We have quite a few new readers from the referred subscribers, new clients and some friends that I had forgotten to add to the original list. I want to give you new readers a warm welcome and tell you what to expect from this publication.
This is a newsletter on how to make your own electronic newsletter. More accurately, it’s about how to utilize e-mail marketing to benefit your business. This newsletter is sent to a very small and private mailing list. This publication has already generated a few good business referrals from my readers in less than a month, and it cost me nothing but my time. I want to show you how to do this yourself.
The information I want to give to you is not about spamming, but completely the opposite. What I will show you could generate more business for you with less (or no) money than virtually any advertisement or marketing strategy you can think of. I publish this newsletter each week with tips and information on how to do this, and try to keep the reading to about 10 minutes. Best of all, it’s free! All you need to do is take about 10 minutes of you time to read it at your leisure.
It would be a good idea to review the previous newsletters so you better understand what I will cover today. You can review the previous newsletters on my blog site at:
http://primeconcepts.blogspot.com/
I received a number of questions that I will answer in the next segment and then I will temporarily veer from my original plan of talking about key elements in an e-newsletter. Thanks to your input, the Q & A segment of my newsletters will be a permanent fixture to this and future newsletter. I too am learning something from my own newsletter, and your responses are how I am learning. So keep writing back with your questions and comments.
This week, I’m going to discuss about proper e-mail etiquette and how to capitalize on it to market your business. This is something that I’m astounded at some of you who are very professional and successful business people do not do this as a staple in your correspondence.
Let’s get started!
GET A WEB SITE UP IN LESS THAN TWO DAYS!
For more information, contact me at: danharley@primeconcepts.net
or call 760-247-4814
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
By Dan Harley, Jr. - danharley@primeconcepts.net
Answering questions in a newsletter is an excellent way to provide very informative content to your newsletter readers. I encourage all of you to send me your questions, and I will gladly answer them in my future newsletters. Thanks to your input, this Q & A segment is a permanent fixture to this newsletter.
Q: What’s with the advertisement in your newsletter?
A: As I mentioned in last week’s Q&A, most everything that I’m doing in this newsletter is intentional. I placed the advertisement in key areas of this newsletter as an example of how you could do this yourself. The advertisement itself is carefully designed to be deceivingly simple. A big catchy headline followed by contact information. Even the center justification was planned, because it draws the reader’s eyes to the advertisement from the regular content.
The intention of the advertisements was not to sell you on my services, but to demonstrate how to do this in your own newsletter. I have received a few business referrals from my newsletter, so perhaps they’re working better than I intended.
Q: What makes your (e-marketing) technique better than spamming?
A: Putting it bluntly, spamming doesn’t work if you are intending to operate a legitimate business. The only way spamming works is if you send to literally millions of e-mail addresses and you intend to rip off those who respond. There will be one sucker out there that will respond to anything if you send enough e-mails to find him or her.
Perhaps the most popular spammer is the guy who is selling prescription drugs online. The guy actually sells NOTHING! He has a fake Web site that is used to collect credit card information from those who are naive enough to fall for it. He drains the credit cards, gets booted from the hosting service and shows up on another hosting service, which he pays by using credit card information that he had previously stolen. People like that make it very difficult for others who attempt to use e-mail marketing for legitimate purposes.
My technique utilizes common sense strategies developed even before Al Gore invented the Internet. Collecting contact information from a customer is a timeless function of any businessperson. Simply speaking, I take such strategies and add the Internet to make it easier, better and cheaper to do business. Most important, my strategy works.
Q: How long have you been working on Web sites?
A: I’ve been working on Web sites and in the Internet industry for about ten years now, which is a very long time for this industry. My computer background goes back much further than that.
I grew up around computers more or less like kids do today. My Dad was head of the electronics department at Victor Valley College and was “Dr. Dan the TV Man” for those of you who have been in the Victor Valley long enough to remember Harley’s Electronics. That in mind, I’ve been around electronics and computers all of my life.
My first computer was an Apple II serial #528, which was literally one of the first personal computer ever made. I still have the computer and it still works. I used to play games on it until I got bored and decided to tweak a stock market game so my stock prices would increase faster. I was only eight years old at the time, but I was hooked on computer programming from that moment on.
Q: Do I really need to have an e-newsletter to promote my business by e-mail?
A: Absolutely not, and this is why I’m changing course slightly on my articles to talk about e-marketing strategies other than an electronic newsletter publication. The reader who brought up this question had some very good points about why an e-newsletter may not work for his business. I still believe an e-newsletter would be good for him, but I also believe other e-marketing strategies would work even better.
Q: What is my wife doing in Vietnam right now?
A: I really appreciate the questions about my wife, and please continue to send me more. My new wife is my favorite subject in the world to talk about.
Currently, my wife is in Hanoi and staying at her parent’s house. She is waiting for my uncle to arrive from the U.S. with a box of cosmetics that my Mother had collected for her. Those Max Factor and Revlon cosmetics that you ladies may use regularly are worth more than their weight in gold in Vietnam. My wife has figured a way to make some very good money by selling the $3 cosmetics from here for $20 or more over there. My wife is also boning up on eBay and is securing suppliers for items she intends to sell through eBay.
The secret is now out… I didn’t marry my wife just for her looks… She’s going to make a mint the when I get her over here.
DOES YOUR WEB SITE SUCK?
DO YOU EVEN HAVE A WEB SITE?
I can fix that problem for you!
Contact me at: danharley@primeconcepts.net
or call: 760-247-4814
PROPER E-MAIL ETIQUETTE AND HOW TO USE IT TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS
By Dan Harley, Jr.
Thanks to a reader, I’m going to break my lessons down to something you can use right away instead of rocketing into launching your first e-newsletter that you may not do for a couple months and could require several more articles to build your knowledge to do so.
All of you have received regular e-mail correspondence from me. Find my latest one and see how I end it. You should see something like the following:
Dan Harley, Jr.
PrimeConcepts for Internet Solutions
http://primeconcepts.net
danharley@primeconcepts.net
ph: 760.247.4814 fx: 760.247.1387
This is called an electronic signature. Now, look at your own e-mail correspondence. Do you have an electronic signature at the bottom of your e-mail? Most of you do, but some of you don’t. Those of you that don’t are wasting a great opportunity to promote your business and your Web site. Those of you that do will receive an A for the day.
There are several good reasons why you should use an electronic signature for all of your business e-mails. In my opinion, the two most important reasons is professionalism and credibility. Other important reasons is to provide all of your contact information to you recipients in case they need to get a hold of you, which is especially important if you are in a sales related profession. There is a marketing related reason for electronic signatures that even I forget to capitalize on. To understand this, I need to breakdown the elements of an electronic signature.
Electronic signatures should be in a format similar to the following:
Your Name
Position
Company
Web site address
E-mail address
Phone Numbers
Company slogan or advertisement plug
Note that my electronic signature is missing the last element, and I should know better. My electronic signature should look more like the following:
Dan Harley, Jr.
PrimeConcepts for Internet Solutions
http://primeconcepts.net
danharley@primeconcepts.net
ph: 760.247.4814 fx: 760.247.1387
“Our success is YOUR online success…”
Or perhaps something like the following:
Dan Harley, Jr.
PrimeConcepts for Internet Solutions
http://primeconcepts.net
danharley@primeconcepts.net
ph: 760.247.4814 fx: 760.247.1387
Get your business Web site running in less than two business days!
Contact me to find out more.
Why? It’s because I have an opportunity to capitalize on free advertisement. An E-mail that you send with an electronic signature can promote your business and your Web site. Adding That one extra line at the bottom of your signature is probably meaningless to most who read your e-mails, but it could create a new business opportunity that cost nothing to you. On the other hand, you won’t find that business opportunity if you don’t have an electronic signature if you don’t use one.
Using an electronic signature will go a long way for promoting your company and establishing your credibility compared to not using one at all. Being creative with your electronic signature by can go even further.
Next week, I will discuss how to use form letters for e-mails and the advantages of using e-mail over regular mail. Keep those questions coming, and I will talk to you next week!
OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK!
If you read anything in this newsletter, you will want to read this segment. I will have an offer of some kind published here weekly. It could be discounts on my services. It could be coupons for free dinners. It could be opportunities to earn cold hard cash.
This week’s opportunity is FREE SERVICE…
I will continue this opportunity for one more week because it has been very successful.
My PrimeSubmission service can submit a Web site to over 90,000 locations throughout the Internet. Major search engines, industry specific search engines, foreign search engines and others are included in the submission. Some of my clients use this service as their only means of promoting their Web site and generate thousands of visitors from it. There’s no guarantee that results will be the same for your Web site, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to try.
There are two opportunities:
Refer a Subscriber
Each person you refer as a subscriber to my mailing list will earn you one (1) free PrimeSubmission session. There is no limit to how many you refer. The subscriber will be contacted to verify the desire to be on the mailing list.
Business Referrals
If you know a business in need of a Web site, I will give you six months of PrimeSubmission services (one submission/month) for free. There is no limit to how many you refer. The business referral will need to be interested enough to start their project by April 1st.
NOTE: Both opportunities expire on March 27th, 2007. Any referrals will be honored until midnight of that day. Contact me if you need more details and simply reply to this e-mail with your subscriber or business referral information.
ADDITION AND REMOVAL INSTRUCTION
This is a private mailing list and will never be used outside of our organization.
If you desire not to be on this mailing list, reply with REMOVE in the subject line and you will be removed promptly.
If you continue to receive this newsletter, contact Dan Harley (danharley@primeconcepts.net) to be removed manually. .
END
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