How to Create Viral Marketing Tools To Promote Your Newsletter

Your online marketing strategy depends on your ability to gain new subscribers to your own opt-in list.

More subscribers = bigger profits.

When your opt-in list grows, your marketing becomes easier because you're reaching a larger audience.

The easiest way to grow your newsletter is by using viral marketing tools.

In other words, if you give away free reports, ebooks, or other items to your subscribers, your free give-aways should be viral in nature.

Here's an example.

Let's suppose that you have an opt-in list related to cooking and recipes. Your subscribers are most likely looking for cooking tips and free recipes to spice up their meal times.

So, offer them a free ebook with 15 to 20 great recipes. On each page of the ebook, place a very visible link to your newsletter subscription webpage. Here's an example ad/link I created using the cooking motif:

Spice up your kitchen with our free weekly recipes! Each week you'll receive original recipes sent in by our subscribers. Subscribe today at: http://www.xyz.com/blah_blah.html

When you create your free ebook, offer it to your subscribers first. After all, they are thirsting for this kind of info.

Be sure to include a disclaimer letting them know that they can give away your ebook to their website visitors or to their own opt-in list.

After a few weeks of downloads, your ebook will deliver quality subscribers to your site.

So, what makes your ebook or report viral in nature?

1) You allow others to give it away for free.
2) Each and every page in your ebook *must* have a link back to your newsletter subscription form on your website, or the email address where people can subscribe.

If you really want to kick start your subscriber base, here's a simple 6 step process that works. (I've used this same method to gain thousands of subscribers to my own ezine.)

Step One:

Go to Altavista.com and search for newsletters related to your ebook or free report. (For instance, if you created a free ebook of recipes, you could search for:

"recipe newsletters"
"cooking newsletters"
"free recipe newsletter"
etc.

Be sure to visit the top sites 40 to 50 sites from your search results.

Step Two:

Write down the Editor's name, and Email address, website URL, and name of the newsletter for each of the top 50 or so results from *each* search you perform.

After three or four hours of work, you should have a list of names and other contact info on some of the most popular newsletters related to your own publication.

Step Three:

Subscribe to every one of the newsletters that you found from your search engine research. (You'll see *why* this is necessary in a moment.)

If you don't want to get bombarded with email, use a free email account from Hotmail, Excite, or any other free web-based email service.

Step Four:

Write a template email that you'll customize and send to the publisher/editor of each newsletter.

Using the cooking example, here's a possible email that you can send:

Dear [Editor's Name], I am a subscriber to your newsletter, [Name of Newsletter]. I really enjoy your newsletter, and I wanted to offer you a free gift you can give away to your subscribers. I recently created a free ebook with 20 delicious recipes your subscribers are sure to enjoy. I would love to hear what you think of my new ebook. You can download it here: [URL to your ebook] Once you've looked it over, you have my permission to give it away to your subscribers or website visitors. Thanks again [Editor's Name]. Email me if you enjoy my ebook or if you have any questions or comments about it. Sincerely, [Your Name] [Your Email Address] [URL to your Free Ebook]

You'll customize this email by filling in the blanks. There are several free software tools that will handle this tedious task for you.

Aureate's Group Mail software is an excellent tool. I still use it extensively for sending out customized direct email marketing campaigns.

You can download a free version of Group-Mail here:

http://www.group-mail.com

Step Five:

Before you start your email promotion campaign, be sure to create a couple of sample ads and solo mailers for ezine publishers to use when they promote your ebook.

Remember, the easier you make it for others to promote your ebook, the more downloads you'll receive.

Place these custom ads and solo mailers on your website and in your autoresponder.

Step Six:

Customize and send out your message to your targeted list of newsletter owners. Since you've subscribed to their ezines, you're much more likely to receive a response from your marketing efforts.

By subscribing to their opt-in lists, you're *not* sending out spam. Rather, you're sending a targeted email message to the list owner that you've developed a relationship with.

Be sure to use a catchy subject for your email, such as: "A suggestion about your newsletter."

In a nutshell, that's the entire process.

During the first 24 hours, you should get several responses to the ebook promotion email you sent out. When you receive a reply from a newsletter publisher about your ebook, be sure to respond quickly (within two days if possible).

A quick thank you note will help further your relationship with these newsletter owners. (In the future, you can send other free articles and reports to the ezine owners who responded to your initial offer.)

If 10% of the list owners you emailed respond to your email, and you sent your ebook promotion email to 50 newsletter owners, that's 5 newsletters that will promote your ebook to their subscribers.

If the average newsletter size is 2,000 subscribers, you're reaching a targeted audience of approximately 10,000 subscribers. (5 newsletters x 2,000 subscribers average.)

Even if you only convert 10% of the people who download your ebook into subscribers, that's still 1,000 new subscribers to your own list.

Using this six step process, you can literally add thousands of new subscribers to your newsletter.

Rob Willmann's free weekly "Gold Mine Ezine" is packed with articles and tips to help you start and grow your own ezine.

Subscribe today and download Rob's award winning ebook: "Turn YOUR Newsletter Into a Gold Mine!"

http://www.ubrande.com/?vmt

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded

The "duplicate content penalty" myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalise a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a "mirror" penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I'm talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: "penalty" is a loaded concept in SEO. "Penalty" means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine's terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine's index of web pages ("de-indexing" or "delisting").

How have I exploded the "duplicate content penalty" myth?

• PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 8) and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as www.nytimes.com (PR 10).
• The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it's a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.
• Experience. I've seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster "fans" who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn't want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the "reprint content" page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients' articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that's up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that's not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

• Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

• Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor's note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

• Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can't link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the "duplicate content penalty." Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

About the author: Joel Walsh owns UpMarket Content which has Joel's articles available for reprint, and also lets you order the complete website promotion content package of distribution and creation of web content.