Having a great website and offering great products and services, is not enough to make a business successful. You must also work hard to reach your target market through your online ads. These ads will be used to bring visitors and hopefully potential customers to your website. When placing ads on the Internet, it is absolutely necessary that your ad copy be written and planned out well to bring you the best results.

The first part of your ad that customers will read is your ad copy. Without a good headline, the remaining content of your advertisement will not mean much to viewers. In fact, if you do not have a good headline that catches the attention of viewers, they are not likely to even read through your entire ad.

A headline must attract a person’s interest. The headline should present to the reader the benefits of your products and services. Make the reader understand why what your business has to offer is of importance to them. What can your business offer to anyone reading your ad? If you do not show a viewer, why they need your products or services, they are not likely to visit your website or to take a look at your business.

Some ads are simply just text ads. However other ad sites and ad types may include graphic ads. If you can ad a picture to your ad, go ahead! People are often very visual and using a graphic is yet another way to attract people’s attention to your ad. You will also want to make sure that the headline of your ad stands out from the rest of the ad. You can place the headline in bold or italics for example.

Your ad should “show” viewers why they should consider your products and services over those of your competitors. What makes your business different or unique from others? You may be offering the same services or products as another business and therefore it is essential that your potential customers know why they should do business with you over someone else.

Before you even begin to develop and ad, you need to identify your target market. The market you will be attracting for your business will affect the content of your ad as well as where your ad will be placed. Take time to carefully place your online ads in locations where the people most likely to benefit from your products and services can be found. For example, if your business offers products for college students, advertise on websites for college students and other websites and forums that college students are most likely to visit.

The purpose of your ad need not be to make a sale. Your ad should be used to gain people’s interest so that they will visit your website. After visiting your website they may decide to make a purchase. Or your website may interest a person enough that they will visit again and may become a customer in the future.

You know the saying, “if at first you don’t succeed: try, try again.” Not every ad will bring great results. And not every location online where you place an ad will bring results either. You need to be flexible and willing to make changes to your ad campaign. If one idea does not work well, try another. Be creative!

In order to know how well your ads are working, you need to track those ads. When using online ads, it is important to track the results of each ad. This is the only way you will be able to see which ads are bringing the most visitors and the most results. If one ad isn’t working, try to develop a new ad. When some ad locations do not work, find some new websites and venues to place your ads. In time, you will find an advertising campaign that works well.

Creating online ads takes some time and work. You need to first decide who your target market will be. Come up with places where you would like to place your ads. Carefully plan out the ad copy. Remember that you want to attract people’s attention from the very beginning (headline). Make certain your ad copy shows people how they can benefit from your products or services.

Test your ads. Try out different colors and fonts. Rework your ad copy until it sounds great and brings in the most visitors to your website. Try placing ads in various locations to find those that bring the most results. Carefully plan your ads, but also have some fun doing so. Your creativity will pay off!

Whether you own a blog or a traditional site, the road to niche domination is clear: traffic. A leader of a given niche has to actually be seen by the target audience. The best ideas are sometimes never found online because of insufficient exposure. Here are some tips to help you break in, move up, and take over your niche.

Update frequently

Like Google, users love fresh content. A stale website or blog isn’t going to gain many visitors unless your site is really, really good. Know the difference between data and information when it comes to your readers. Until processed, data is simply raw facts. Information, however, is the real goldmine to focus upon. Information is data that’s been processed for users. In a sense, data is akin to the ingredients for a good salad or a well done casserole, whereas information is the finished meal itself. Which one would your users rather have? The Internet is chock full of data just waiting to be turned into valuable information for your site’s visitors. This is the #1 secret of membership-driven websites and even books.

For example, you can learn how to get into copywriting, or even just how to become a better cook with free articles online, but many still buy books written by Bob Bly and Alton Brown, respectively.

Link wisely

Links are good, especially when they are links pointing to your website. However, do make sure you are linking to related sites. Visitors tend to trust sites that aren’t “digital islands”. Throw out the lifesaver to your visitors by linking to interesting content that you think will benefit them. Combined with good commentary, this can easily lead to you becoming the “expert” and information filter in your niche.

That said, be careful with your linkbacks. You may not wish to link to many sites that have unrelated content. It may be fair to link to a friend that has supported you and your website, but you don’t need to link to 2 million personal blogs simply because you know the blog’s owner.

Research your niche thoroughly and regularly

Keeping current is the name of the game, but how do you begin the journey? Research other sites within your niche, and pay attention to the details. What is the prevailing tone of the other sites? What are they doing, and is it successful for them? What news is being discussed on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis? If the niche has a parallel to the real world, are there any authorities that are making waves offline? Researching takes considerable time, but helps to set you apart from those that haven’t done their homework on the niche. Over time, the research you gain will bring you more visitors than if you just sit and piggyback off of what everyone else is saying and doing. Adapt some of the techniques of others if you feel they’re worth it, but don’t be afraid to bring your own flavor.

Go above and beyond

Researching your niche extensively should help you get over some common jitters, like fretting over PageRank. PageRank is only a small slice of the overall picture – if you’re worried about visibility, PageRank should be the last thing on your mind.

Your research into your niche should give you a good picture of what is working for the niche overall, what isn’t, and ways you can add value. Visitors like sites that go above and beyond just normal “reporting”. Release a video on your niche – if that’s something that would be interesting to your readers. If your site is technical, releasing code that does something a lot of people want to see can go a long way when it comes to sustaining traffic.

Looking at other sources of visibility also leaves questions for the site owner: do you have users searching for your blog in Technorati? If you are running a traditional website, how likely are your users to submit your site as a story on Digg? If a reader typed your website’s name into a site like Squidoo, what content would come up? All these questions are easily addressed once PageRank is put on the back burner where it belongs. After all, there’s so many elements of your website and its promotion that you can control; why worry about something out of your hands?

Go to the real trenches

Those at the top of their niche also know when to give back. If you’re aiming to be any type of subject matter expert, you’ll really want to check our relevant forums. What better way to move up and gain bonus points with existing and future visitors than if you’re on a forum sharing what you know? A quick search on Google should yield good results for forums relevant to your site’s niche.

If you can’t seem to find a solid community within your niche, take advantage of the void and build your own. Generate noise about it on your website, and frequent visitors to are bound to be curious.

Conclusion

It seems that any strategy of building up exposure online takes time, but those that are patient in this game truly come out on top. Building up a web presence isn’t going to be done overnight; there are some fortunate enough to do this, but don’t consider yourself entitled to overnight popularity. All good things come to those that wait, link popularity and site visibility included.

When not plotting niche domination, Isabella Murphy writes about small business, accounting, personal finance, and more on Keeping You Honest.

An email from EmailLabs correcting their pricing. This email came in response to our earlier White Label Bulk Email Provider review.

From: EmailLabs
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 1:00 PM

I saw this blog but wasn’t sure who had posted it. http://www.howtoadvertise.net/white-label-bulk-email-providers.html

I wish I had figured it out earlier as the pricing you mention is incorrect. It is $250 for every ten sub-account, which breaks down to $25 per client. It isn’t $250 per client. That’s obviously my fault for not being clear when we spoke, so I apologize for that.

Out of curiosity, do you guys or your clients do anything with web analytics, landing pages, pay-per-click or deliverability monitoring? I ask because we are releasing our HQ product on the 15th and all of this functionality is going to be integrated into one dashboard with an all-encompassing pricing model based on the seat license concept. It’s a first-of-its-kind product in this industry and is going to offer companies a powerful way to standardize tracking and reporting and allow them to make actionable decisions based on the subsequent analyses. Currently clients are required to deal with multiple vendors to have access to the same data and functionality, which means multiple points of contact for support as well as multiple reports showing disparate metrics. With HQ it is centralized tracking, reporting and support. A true one-stop-shop to consolidate your digital marketing efforts.

Sorry I was ambiguous on pricing up-front as I think we are a great solution for you.

What I was trying to achieve

As a web developer in the DFW area, I’ve been getting lots and lots of requests from my small business clients to do email marketing. I’ve been handling those clients myself using a piece of Windows based bulk email software called Groupmail and my own email server, but the maintenance has grown beyond my capabilities.

Rather than host the service myself, I started looking around for bulk email services that I could re-brand and resell to my clients. I would help my customers with copywriting, html services, etc., and I would apply a reasonable markup to the product.

Definitions for this report

White label bulk email provider: A bulk email service that makes an effort to conceal their own brand from all but the most technically savvy end customers. Major stumbling blocks in providing a true white label solution were:

• Unsubscribe URLs,
• Individual account management URLs,
• And mail server “from” domain names.

Footer: CAN-SPAM requirements dictate that bulk email should provide a way for recipients to opt-out of future communication, and should also include a physical address for the sender. This is most often accomplished with a few lines of text at the end of the message.

Ratings

As an after-thought to writing this article, I decided to add a ratings system. I scored each provider on a scale of 1-5 based on their white label capabilities, their overall pricing, and their ease of use (including web sites, customer service, and responsiveness). Scores in each category were then totaled for a possible 15 points.

It is important to note, however, that I am trying to achieve a very specific goal with these bulk email providers. I want to be able to act as a middle man for their services, maintain a healthy profit margin, and interact with their systems on my customers’ behalf. My ratings system is based on the needs I am addressing for myself and is not applicable to other ways that these products could be used.

What I told the email marketing companies

In order to judge the companies on equal footing, I had to establish a baseline for requesting information. Nothing is simpler than the truth, so I gave the same details to all of the companies I called.

I run a web development firm located in Dallas, TX. I’ve been getting a lot of requests for email marketing and would like to contract with a provider that can offer white label email marketing services that I can re-brand and resell to my clients. Top concerns are price and true white labeling capabilities (custom unsubscribe urls, generic client login pages, etc.). Most of my customers will be small businesses with between 1000 and 2000 email addresses on their lists and will probably send out one to two times a month.

The reviews

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emailbrain

URL: http://www.emailbrain.com
Product: Reseller Agencies
Pricing:

250 – yearly for footer re-branding
250 – yearly URL masking
20,000 minimum – $323/6 months (rates published on their site).

Notes/Opinions

I really liked emailbrain – they had almost everything I was looking for in a white label bulk email provider. I was a little disappointed that they were charging annual fees for the footer re-branding and the URL masking, but I could live with it if I had to. Their web site was also very intuitive to navigate. If I couldn’t find better pricing, they would definitely be at the top of my list.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 5/4/5
Overall: 14 of 15

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iContact

URL: http://www.icontact.com/
Product: Agency Edition
Pricing: 250 setup fee plus negotiated bulk per email rate.

Notes/Opinions

iContact stands above most of the other bulk email providers because of their pricing model and the usability of their web site. So far as pricing is concerned, the $250 one-time setup fee is minimal and the bulk per-email send rate is excellent, even with the relatively low volume I was projecting. I found their web site highly intuitive and their only major competition was emailbrain.

Where iContact is a little lacking is in their white label re-branding. Aside from cost, my biggest concern in this business is that a customer will bypass my service and contract directly with my supplier if they find out who I’m going with. iContact does not make use of footer re-branding or domain masking to white label their product, but they do offer a co-branded solution.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 3/5/5
Overall: 13 of 15

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emma

URL: http://www.myemma.com
Product: Emma Agency
Pricing:

Setup charge – private label setup 1500.00 includes Agency setup plus one account
25% off the published per email rate or better
One time 100.00 setup fee for new accounts.
.0225 per email (50/month minimum)

Notes/Opinions

They were there when I called. Normally not that big of a deal, but if you read the notes from previous companies this is pretty hard to come by!

Interface is a little blah, but the customer service was fantastic and I think they would be helpful and available once accounts were setup. Thanks Theresa!

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 4/3/3
Overall: 10 of 15

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EmailLabs

URL: http://www.emaillabs.com/
Product: Email Marketing Agency Edition
Pricing: Measured in CPM – Cost Per Thousand emails sent and number of client accounts created.

500/month up to 10,000 emails
625/month up to 25,000 emails
250/month per 10 sub accounts

Notes/Opinions

Thanks to Ken for taking the time to talk to me. Although it looked like EmailLabs has a decent white label solution, I was turned off by the charge for each account. $250 isn’t a lot of money, but not every customer I sign will warrant the cost. What if I want to setup a trial account for someone, or what if I want an account for myself?

Update 11/09/07: After posting this article, EmailLabs contacted me regarding the setup fee for accounts under their agency program. Their per-account-setup pricing is actually 250 for ten accounts which drastically alters my original scoring and comments. I don’t think it’s right to re-write this review since communication was part of the judging criteria, but I also don’t want to post bad information. Here’s a link to the email from EmailLabs clarifying the situation.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 4/2/3
Overall: 9 of 15

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ExactTarget

URL: http://email.exacttarget.com
Product: Agency Partnership
Pricing: Pricing unavailable – by quote only. There was some reference made to the purchase of a “licenses” which I assume means that I will have to pay a per-client fee in addition to an actual cost per email. The only pricing I was able to walk away with was 2 licenses – 5000/year, but I don’t have nearly enough information about what that figure will buy.

Notes/Opinions

ExactTarget was difficult to nail down on almost every aspect. I didn’t get the impression that they were designed for resellers, but rather for “the big boys” of marketing. If you’re a company like Travelocity and want to handle your email marketing in-house but don’t want to maintain your own hardware, these guys might be for you. It sounded like each setup would be unique to the customer, hence all the information gathering before price quotes. While this might mean excellent customer service for the larger companies, it also means that I would probably be hanging on hold or waiting for my sales rep to call me back while they handled bigger fish.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 5/1/2
Overall: 7 of 15

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BlueHornet

URL: http://www.bluehornet.com
Product: Possible white label program – not sure because the answering service had limited information.
Pricing: 3500 setup fee plus 350/customer and 500/month for up to 100,000 emails.

Notes/Opinions

I initially reached an answering service that asked a LOT of questions about how I run my business (volume, location, etc.) and said “someone will contact you on Tuesday”. I thought to myself “Awesome – when they call on Tuesday I’ll tell them who I went with.”

I did finally get a call back from Mike in the sales department with some pricing. I found out if you tell the operator “I’m making buying decisions today,” you get a faster response.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 2/2/2
Overall: 6 of 15

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VerticalResponse

URL: http://www.verticalresponse.com/
Product: VerticalResponse for Partners
Pricing: ala carte style

1000 setup fee
500 to link multiple accounts together
300 for shared credits
300-500? for domain branding
300 annual renewal fee
.015/email

Notes/Opinions

I spoke to Nick in the sales department, who said that pricing per email was the same as on the web site. Emails are sent from vertical response URLs, so there’s an issue with white label re-branding. They have whitelabled the sending for few clients, but it’s a specialty setup procedure, and the sales operator wasn’t sure they were offering it as an option any longer. I seriously doubt it would be a simple proces.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 2/2/1
Overall: 5 of 15

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Cooler Email

URL: http://www.cooleremail.com
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

When I called the operator tried REALLY hard to get me to email them rather than talk to them. That was weird. Everyone was busy, so I’ll have to wait for a call back.

Someone did call me back later in the day, but they had to refer my agency questions to someone else and have them call me back.

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

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Responsys

URL: http://www.responsys.com/
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

Sales Department was unavailable during business hours

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

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Constant Contact

URL: http://www.constantcontact.com
Product:
Pricing:

Notes/Opinions

Sales Department was unavailable during business hours

Ratings

White label/Pricing/Ease of Use Ratings: 0/0/0
Overall: 0 of 15

E-mail marketing is a tricky subject with so many people abusing it these days, but it’s becoming such a vital part of business that it can’t be ignored. Here are ten tips that I personally use in my e-mail marketing campaigns that have measurably improved their success:

1. Avoid HTML style e-mails and attachments whenever possible. Nothing gets a better response for me than a short, to the point, plain-text message.
2. Be personable. Approach your audience like you would a new friend. People respond best when they’re treated with respect and kindness.
3. Don’t send messages to anyone who doesn’t want to receive them. Providing an easy way to unsubscribe from your recurring mailer will save you a lot of heartache and angry customers.
4. Avoid doubletalk and corporate speak – these are major turnoffs for readers. Most people don’t read their own company memos, let alone random press releases from a stranger.
5. Don’t write too much. Your audience’s time is valuable and you should respect it. If you can’t make your point in five to ten sentences, take it back to the drawing board and try again.
6. Automate responses. If you have a way for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, why not send them an automated response? Why not two or four? With the right email program, you can schedule a full sales cycle of introduction, explanation of services, special offer and a follow up and have it run completely unattended!
7. Include a specific call to action. After you make your case or present your offer, don’t forget to ask for the sale! Something as simple as “visit our website now for 15% off this product” can mean the difference between success or failure.
8. Avoid unnecessary punctuation and capitalization. YOU DON’T WANT TO END UP IN THE READER’S JUNK MAILBOX!!!
9. Provide something of value to your audience. Give them a reason to stay on your mailing list other than “buy my product.” Offer helpful advice, discounts, or something of value that they will look forward to.
10. Personalize your emails whenever possible. I found that an email that starts out with “Dear firstname,” will be on average 15-30% more effective than a generic message.
11. Back up your emails with a web site. There’s nothing worse than getting your customer fired up from an email without having an outlet to learn more. Always direct your customer back to your web site for more information or to close an immediate sale! (Yes, I know this is #11 in my ten point list, but it was too important to leave out.)