Kristie T’s Home Business Blog Fun, mom-geared work-at-home tips and advice on making money on the net.

It’s been a busy summer. One of those where you just kind of surf at the top of your most urgent emails and the rest sinks to the bottom of the black inbox sea. And today I had it. My urgent email box was up to 476 emails. Geez Louse that’s bad. So, today for peace of mind I was determined to dig thru there and clean that sucker out. I am very proud to be down to 257 emails now.
Am I bad?

I even hire my husband to dig thru the 1500 or so emails I get a day from all my websites to send me the urgent stuff. So I only have the important stuff in my box.

Seriously, how fat is your email inbox? Is it busting at the seams? How many emails are sitting in your inbox right now?

I want to see if I am the only guilt one out there.

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I just got done watching Cynthia Kersey. Truly an inspiring inspirational woman. She shared with us the rules that anyone can follow to be unstoppable.

1) The ability to become unstoppable begins with YOU - What do you want? Get crystal clear.

2) Why must you achieve this goal - A strong reason why keeps you going even when the chips are down

3) Unstoppable people are empowered by belief. Beliefs drive behavior. Find out your current beliefs and then modify them. Stop the voice of fear and replace it with the voice of faith.

4) Find a small acion you can take every day to bring you one step closer to your dream.

There you have it! - We’ll feature a podcast interview with Cynthia Kersey later this week.

Next is Shape, Create, and Position your Unique Brand Power with Robin Koval, Eva Spenny, and Kathleen Leischen - stay tuned.

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No doubt you know your mailing list is one of your most valuable assets, but do you really know how to make money with it?

Here are 5 tips for making money with your ezine:

1) “Touch” your customers more frequently. By setting your ezine tips to go out automatically once a week, you can build a closer knit relationship with your list. The more you talk with them, the more they trust you, the more likely they are to buy what you recommend.

2) Write to an audience of one. One of the biggest things I have learned about email marketing is that you need to really write as though you were writing to one person. Picture your perfect customer in your mind. What is their name? What do they do for a living? What magazines do they read? What music do they listen to? I have a friend named “Beth” who perfectly personifies my work at home mom. Whenever I write an email marketing note, I write it to Beth. And when you write from a “heart” place with the genuine intent of helping and connecting with another individual, your whole list will feel that intimacy.

3) Offer a tip, recommend a product. Give value first with a tip that will really help your readers. Then at the end of your communication, you can say, “by the way, I found a product that will help you do that…. find out more about it here…”

4) Know the real problems your customers face and offer tips and solutions to those problems. It’s all about relevancy. If you have a list of work at home mothers, they probably don’t want to know about tips to clean your kitchen fast. However, if you have a tip and product to help them with time management, that’s a good fit.

5) If your list is too broad, you should consider breaking it up into lists by topic. For instance now instead of having 1 big Webmomz list, we have lots of lists based on your areas of interest and expertise. This allows you to address the specific concerns of that audience and be 100% on target with your tips and offers.

If you want to really boost the results of your email marketing, List and Traffic by Jimmy Brown is “the bomb”.
His List and Traffic tips have really helped me make more money with my ezine and email marketing.

Do you have tips to share on improving the effectiveness of your email marketing? Share your newsletter tips here.

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I’m sure your library is probably as crazy as mine. But sometimes I think I have so many awesome resources, that I forget what I have. Someone once said that the only thing that will be different 10 years from now is the books you read, the people you meet, and the experiences you have.

I have more the enough books that I’ve read - that’s for sure. My goal for next year is to IMPLEMENT what I have read. No more learning (which will be hard - I love learning)

Well, here are the books I have in my library. I have read 80% of them. The others, need to sit down and read.

Is your library as big as this? - And there are LOTS of ebooks and books in the basement haven’t even accounted for here.

(more…)

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I am certain that in your experience as an entrepreneur that you have gotten a note from one of your ezine subscribers who is upset because you have advertisements and product recommendations in your email newsletter or mention affiliate products in your email tips.

I got a note from one such subscriber today. She was a long time advertiser on our Webmomz site. She said that there are lots of home business websites out there that offer great free newsletters that don’t have advertising. Then she really put me down and took a knock at my character for being so low as to be “one of those marketers” and sending product recommendations.

Now I take offense to this. I love helping mom entrepreneurs to be successful in their online business. And I know it’s working because I get lots of feedback from work at home moms who are thankful for the helpful business advice we have given them.

I mean, there are lots of very reputable services that support themselves with ads:

- Yahoo email and Yahoo groups - supported by ads
- Google Gmail - supported by ads
- Read any major magazine - they are supported by ads
- Watch any tv show - supported by ads
- Read any newspaper - supported by ads.
- Listen to the radio - ads there too!

Yes, I love helping moms and would love to do it for free - but I also have a family to feed, bills to pay, a mortgage to pay. So I need to do something that allows me to make money AND help others. Webmomz has been the perfect match for me and helped me to earn a respectable 6 figure salary this year.

Our goal at Webmomz is to offer you the net’s #1 source of mom entrepreneurs tools, advice and information. That means we need a whole team of people to help create content, build web pages, proofread copy, set up our teleseminars, answer the phones, answer your e-mails and let people know we’re here for them. Those people require that we pay them.

I know we are offer tremendous value in our offerings at Webmomz. I get many thank you notes a day that back that up.

What are your thoughts on offering ads in your newsletters? Do you get some newsletters that are more advertising then content? Share your thoughts here.

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We’ve all gotten those emails. You know the ones. You read the email subject line, and within a second you hit the delete button to send that marketing note into email oblivion.

Robyn Tippins had a fun post on her blog Inside Motherhood about “The Fastest Way To Find Your Email In My Delete Box“.

You don’t bend to email subject lines like this do you?

“If you don’t reply then you aren’t my friend”

What’s the craziest email headline you ever got? Share your most amusing best email headlines here.

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One of the most valuable things you can do in your business is to start building your mailing list. And having a newsletter or ezine gives you a great way to stay connected with your customers. But how do you start a newsletter?

Here are 10 steps to getting your email newsletter off the ground.

1. Create a name for your newsletter.
2. Decide how frequently you will send it (monthly, weekly, quarterly)
3. Decide what content you want to provide: tips, quotes, articles, jokes, product recommendations etc
4. Create a blank template for your newsletter. A great idea is to take existing newsletter you get and see what sections they have.

Ex: Welcome message, feature article, ads, product recommendations, subscription information.
See how they break it up with lines or dashes for the various sections.

5. Create an editorial calendar with subjects you’d like to write about. It’s great to do keyword research and see what topics your audience is interested. Better yet, poll your friends and target audience members and perform an “ask campaign” and find out what their most pressing questions are and write your articles to answer those questions.

6. Write your first newsletter content.

7. Put it into the newsletter template.

8. Sign up for a newsletter service.
Here’s a free 30 day trial for the newsletter service we use

9. Put a subscribe form on your website.

10. You are ready to send your first issue!

It’s also great to archive your newsletters on your website. Google loves new content and that will help boost your rankings!

Here are 7 Ways to Self-Promote Within Your E-zine

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I was paging thru this month’s issue of Revenue Magazine (you DO get this don’t you! Revenue Magazine is a hot new magazine for affiliate marketers!) and Jay Conrad Levinson (here’s a picture of Jay Conrad Levinson and I , he’s such a neat guy!) gave some great tips on how to STAY connected to customers after they buy a product from you.

Guerilla Marketing Followup that Turns that One Time Sale Into a Repeat Buyer!
1) Make the sale
2) Send thank you note immediately
3) send another email or make a phone call 30 days after the sale.
Ask them if everything is going well and if the customer has any questions.
4) Send another note within 90 days letting them know of any new or related products or services.
5) After 6 months, you can announce the preview of an upcoming sale.
6) After 9 months ask for the names of 3 people who might benefit from being included in your mailing list
7) After 1 year, send the customer an anniversary card celebrating 1 year of being your customer
15 months later, send the customer a questionaire to find out more about their challenges, wants, needs so you can better serve them
9) 18 months later send announcement of new products that tie in with original purchase

Great tips huh? And the great thing is that this whole process can be automated. So you can load up these followup messages into your autoresponder sequence with a preset timing. Just set it, forget it, and watch the sales role in.

So, why settle for a one time sale when you can enjoy a lifetime of sales buy building relationships and telling the customer about related products that would help them?

Has a company ever followed up with you in a cool way? Share your customer followup tips and stories here!

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If you are an ezine or newsletter owner, you’ll want to check out the Top 10 email marketing trends as published in this white paper by ExactTarget with some key insights on email marketing including: relevance, frequency, design and more.

Here is a quick summary of their white paper on email marketing trends:

Be Relevant - The #1 Theme!

1) Deliverability will drive email success

Make sure if you send HTML emails to have enough text in your message that if they have images turned off, they can still tell what your email is about. Don’t depend on images to tell the story.

2) Open rates are over rated

open rates will go down as images are suppressed the numbers you’ll want to know are: open rates and click thrus

3) Email metrics and web analytics will be integrated

4) Multi channel marketing will deliver winning results

5) List growth will be healthy, but takes work

FACT: “The average list turnover runs about 25 percent yearly due to unsubscribes and email addresses gone bad.”

6) RSS will start to make an impact on email marketing

7) Email will get more personalized

(they talk about creating personalized landing pages for people - cool!)

Look for rich media in email (audio and video in email)

9) Email as carrier for third party advertising

10) The new metric: return on subscriber - creating high customer lifetime value

Have you noticed any difference in the responsiveness of your list? Are your email open rates going down?
Are you sending HTML or text emails these days? Share your email marketing experiences here.

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