Autoresponders are used as a means of promptly connecting with anyone that responds to your site. This is done at the very basic level by placing an autoresponder on all email received. However, this principle also applies to all sales made from your website.

One unique approach to the utilization of autoresponders is the virtually hands-free approach to providing an educational series of articles about your product or an e-course about your service or the concepts behind your success.

The web is full of information and your customers may be interested in participating in an opt-in informational series that can be distributed through autoresponders.

From the customer’s perspective you are offering a free e-course on the best use of your product, the best ways to maximize a service or ways to use that product or service as a means of a revenue stream. They sign up for the e-course and an autoresponder takes over from there. No matter when a visitors signs up for something managed by autoresponders they begin receiving the first issue of the course and will continue receiving them on a regular basis until they are finished. The autoresponder keeps track of who has already received material and who needs to receive additional portions of the series.

For the online marketer the hard work has already been taken care of by producing a well-crafted series that is educational, helpful and subtly leads the recipient to consider the very product or service you provide. While the information is free it is, in some ways, a personal invitation to accept an educational sales pitch.

The beauty of an e-course is that you truly are able to consider the needs of your clients and potential customers. By doing so the customer is encouraged to extend trust in your products or services.

Each article in your e-course should provide a tagline that tells what the reader can expect in the next issue. This is generally done as a mild sales pitch for the next article. If you can mix a precise description of the next chapter in the e-course with a bit of mystery many of your opt-in visitors will be checking their inbox to find out more.

The more time your customer spends being a part of an autoresponder e-course the greater the likelihood that they will eventually purchase from your online firm.

These days, autoresponders make for great follow up tools. You can set them up to your liking, as they are easy to set up and will hold a lot of preset messages. Although they are very popular, a lot of people fail to see the power they hold and therefore never use them. If you’ve been looking to make extra money, the tips below will show you how you can make money using an autoresponder.

The first thing to do, is ensure that your site has a signup form. A signup form is an obvious way to use an autoresponder, yet a lot of people don’t think about it. Each and every day your website attracts visitors, many of us come back. If you put a signup form on your site, they can sign up and become a contact. This way, your customer base will grow with each passing day. You can stay in close contact with your customers this way, and even increase your audience over time as well.

www.nichementor.com/v5.html You can also give out free reports or ebooks as well. It’s actually an easy task to exchange reports or ebooks for someone’s email address. Even though you may not have a website, you can still make the free report or ebook available by having people send blank emails to your autoresponder. In doing so, you will build a client list and get your report out there - which can help you make money.

www.nichementor.com/createyourownebook/You can also choose to publish an ezine. To do so, you’ll need to load your autoresponder will a course that contains several parts. This way, your clients will receive your reports and material in sections. You can also build a customer base this way, and eventually recommend you to their family and friends. Once you have a relationship and your clients start to trust you, you can send them information for other products.

You can also use autoresponders as curriers as well. When you send an email out, ask the recipient to pass your email along to family and friends. As they pass your emails along, you’ll gain more subscribers. Although you’ll have to start out small when you first begin, you’ll find that your client list will grow in little to no time at all.

Autoresponders are also great to use with customer response as well. Autoresponders are very handy, and they can answer a large portion of your technical questions. Whenever someone sends you an email needing customer support, simply answer with an autoresponder message that entails a lot of the most common problems. A lot of customers find this to be very helpful, as chances are it will cover the issue they are experiencing.

Autoresponders are also handy with site updates as well. If you update your site on a regular basis, you may want to use an autoresponder with individuals who want to be informed when your site is updated. With an autoresponder, all you have to do is send out a broadcast email and everyone will be informed at the same time.

When it's time to select your e-news distribution method, I recommend that you use a web-based provider. Such services are easy to use and quite inexpensive. Advantages of using an outside service provider over sending your own e-news out are:

* It is much less labor intensive.
* You won't be accused of spamming by your ISP.
* Distribution is fast and won't hog your computer's resources.
* You get reports on bounces and user response.

I advise against sending out your e-news yourself if you do not have a full-time technology staffer on hand. Even if you do, you run the risk of being identified as a spammer and having your organization's domain name (that means all emails from your organization, not just your e-newsletter) filtered. It's far better to outsource your e-newsletter distribution to a provider that is 100%-focused on deliverability (getting your e-news through to readers).

Before you start searching for the right provider, you need to define what you're looking for. Common features you'll want to include are the ability to easily move your database of emails and names in and out, opt-in set-up, reader tracking information, bounce management, ability to segment your list and personalization. You'll also need to estimate number of recipients and distribution frequency to ballpark service provider fees.

Here are a few tips:

1. Solicit recommendations on e-newsletter service providers from colleagues, based on your own parameters.

2. Research other providers and get additional input on those recommended.

3. Focus on these Critical Factors:

* Ease of Use - It should be straightforward and fairly quick to import your mailing database, manage your list online, create and send e-newsletters and review results.

* Deliverability - Ask prospective providers what they do to ensure the highest probability of e-news receipt. Ideally, they will maintain a strict anti-spam policy, build relationships and feedback loops with major ISPs and get on white lists (lists of approved email addresses) to ensure your e-news is delivered. Ask what kind of information you get on bounces and how bounces are handled. You'll want to know which email addresses are hard bounces (the address no longer exists) and which are soft bounces (undeliverable at the present time).

* Reliability - Make sure your provider has a track record of reliable service. Ask for references or statistics to prove it. Your organization has too much to lose if something happens -- your email list gets copied or your newsletter goes out looking very different that the way you previewed it.

* Flexibility - You may want to switch from text to HTML format at some point, to send both for different purposes or to segment your email addresses by state or title.

* Tracking - One of the greatest benefits of e-newsletters is generation of quantifiable results. Make sure your e-newsletter provider tracks how many people (and who) get it, open it and/or click through to your website.

* Pricing - Usually a monthly fee based on size of your list and/or number of emails sent. Some providers also charge a modest one-time set-up fee. Constant Contact charges $50/month for 2,500-5,000 readers to whom you can send an unlimited number of emails. Intelli Contact charges $25/month for unlimited emails to 2,501-5,000 readers. BrontoMail charges $150/month for up to 5,000 readers.

The concept of viral marketing is fairly new. It was coined by the guys of Hotmail in around 1996.The internet was that time in a nascent stage, so people had never heard of a kind of marketing which could spread like virus. Since emails could go very fast and fast and reach millions of people in just a few hours, the concept of viral marketing was born with internet.

Now what the guys at Hotmail did(before they sold themselves to Microsoft)was that they used to offer free email service to people(at that time even the concept of free email was relatively new)and would advertise its free email service in the footers of the mails sent from person to person(the footer was something like this- 'Click here to get your FREE Hotmail account').And you guessed right, with almost zero advertising on their part Hotmail had reached well over millions of members using this concept of free viral marketing.

Viral marketing is so called because as one can understand, it spreads like a virus. A virus duplicates itself with everything that comes into contact with it. Every new contact then becomes a host and can start off the process on its own leg.

For example suppose I have viral fever and you come in contact with me, then the virus spreads from me to you. Then the virus spreads from you to somebody else who comes in contact with you, and so on and so forth. The concept of viral advertising also works in a similar way!

With so many buyers and sellers using the Internet these days, it's no wonder why search engine optimization has become a hot topic among real estate agents. About 85% of Website visitors will come from search engines. A more important fact is that over 90% of these users rarely browse past the first 20 results from search engines. Statistical studies have revealed that users will generally look through another search engine before even giving a chance to look beyond the first two pages of a search result. Thus, a higher search ranking is the dream of every Website operator. A Website by itself is like a needle in a haystack—certainly difficult to find. But a Website with strong search engine visibility becomes more like a radiating beacon that effectively catches the attention of people. Through their natural search behavior, a high-ranking Website is guaranteed to be picked for browsing. The more people who can see your Website, then the higher the potential for increased sales would be. This is what Internet marketing is all about, and this is essentially the importance of search engine optimization for real estate companies.

Real estate is beyond doubt a high profit business. Many real estate agencies, however, fail to utilize the Internet to their advantage. Real estate, being the billion dollar industry it is, can make for difficult search engine optimization. The real importance of search engine optimization for real estate companies lies in the boosting of a company’s Website ranking among the top 20 for actual keywords in search engines. Failure of achieving such, one can only start to imagine the lost revenue and exposure that your real estate company is suffering. Search engine optimization is very much similar to a well-marketed TV advertisement. You have to look at Internet advertisement like this. A tough competition indeed, with the plethora of Websites floating aimlessly, thousands or hundreds of in direct competition with your real estate business all fighting for the front two pages of a search engine. Facing a lot of competition from other real estate companies, the importance of search engine optimization lies in allowing you to gain that extra advantage to guarantee that your real estate business Website can maintain a consistent high top-20 ranking.

A real estate company has a considerable chance of increasing search traffic to its Website if it concentrates its search engine optimization efforts on a specific geographical area. This tactic helps in establishing Website visibility while eradicating the necessity to compete based on standard industry termed content that will not differentiate a real estate company in Chicago from another in Tampa.

Recently, the major search engines have started putting more weight on original content and quality incoming links. Many real estate Websites use standard content provided by Website vendors. Thus, in order to rank well you must be able to replace standard content with original content that is attractive to the search engines, and to the site's visitors. In addition, you will be adding value to your Website visitors.

The important point is to stand out from competitors—be original! Real estate companies employing search engine optimization should shift importance to the goal of becoming the most valuable resource for information pertaining to a particular real estate market. Whether buying or renting, people need a place to turn to for beneficial information. If a real estate Website can provide it, high search traffic volume and volume of clients will naturally follow.

To catch attention of a potential customer seems to be very difficult in the over crowded Internet. Unique Advertising methods are being adopted regularly by the Webmasters. Contextual Advertising, Link buying, Banner Advertising etc. are some of those methods used for Website promotion.

Search Engines are the cheapest and best option for Promoting your website. There are number of search engines being used all over the world. To get a prominent place in a Search Engine, it requires hard work and constant effort. The first step towards this target is making effective links, which describes your business in a nutshell and tying them with popular websites. Yes, Links are the lead generators to your site. Without effective links, your site will remain unknown to Search Engines and prospective customers. Your Links should be able to communicate to search engines about your website, its purpose and nature of the content it holds. Use simple and keyword rich wordings for this purpose. When making a link for yourself, do it with utmost care and passion. Don't use different links for the same website. You must use the same wordings for the links being placed in other websites.

Don't expect an immediate surge in traffic. It's an organic process, which requires time and constant effort. If you are able to place enough links with other websites you will experience a slow and steady increase in your traffic day by day.

Every growing and even some stagnant door and window manufacturers and their suppliers are constantly striving to develop new products and / or services, so they say. These new products are often developed in the manufacturer’s facility by a team including sales, marketing, distribution and manufacturing personnel. Some companies have new product development teams while others have a new product development manager. Regular meetings are held to decide which products merit new tooling / purchasing and eventually going to market.

The process usually begins by the sales team asking for a product they saw on a competitor’s product, and without which they will be at a competitive disadvantage. This isn’t really new product development in its true sense but rather “copy product development.” Generally speaking there are no patent infringements, and suddenly the new “copy” products are part of the market ante that every manufacturer has. There was no margin or sales lift to the manufacturer or any other players in the distribution chain, and in fact, the new “copy” product is soon a non-issue.

Some firms are becoming more inventive and really starting the new products process where it should start – in the market. Does this mean that persons with new product development titles and engineers should go way? Not at all. But in most companies in this fenestration business, they should be redeployed.

As anyone sits down to write a great novel or make a great meal, they need and are influenced by factors outside of their office or kitchen. These factors can not be experienced surfing the web or speaking over the telephone with field contactors (sales persons). They have to be seen, smelled, evaluated, tried, retried and finally established as something that is truly going to make a difference and provide the manufacturer and their customer a competitive edge. A sustainable competitive edge places a company as “top of mind” in the markets they serve for at least 6 months, until the copy innovators do their thing. Manufacturers can make the copy process more difficult and longer by making the copier’s entry fee higher.

More and more true innovators are conducting market research at job sites, consumer’s homes and retailers to discover what the market wants, needs and is willing to pay for. Making installation easier and better is one place where the window and door industry is starting to grasp the concept, and in some cases this is paying large dividends. Some manufacturers of windows and doors are even installing their products in new builds. Some are even installing in remodeling or replacement applications. What is the upside? Fewer product warranty claims since the install is “factory installed,” window packaging is removed from job sites cutting down on the contractors waste bills. These services were not developed in the factory. They were developed through field observations known as ethnographic studies, focus groups and one-on-one discussions and were fined tuned through a process called triangulation.

Ethnographic research is the same thing as the late Diane Fossi did when she observed the great apes. Teams including a qualitative researcher, new product development person and an engineering / manufacturing person conduct between 12 and 16 in-field observations. One may ask…”do I need an outside qualitative researcher?” An outside researcher brings no bias to the effort. If only company people are involved, the entire process is likely to be compromised.

Next ideas and products are tested through focus groups, and more one-on-one discussions. This may need to be repeated several times to get the right product for that competitive advantage. The immediate reaction by most company leaders is this process is too expensive. But wait! How many new products did not work out and how much money was spent on those in marketing and manufacturing efforts?

That’s triangulation. Conducting several tests to discover and zero in on where the competitive advantage truly is.

Deciding the product policy is the main task in product development processes. What products should the company make? Where exactly are these products to be offered? What market, or market segment should it be offered in? What should be the relationship among the various members of a product line? What should be the width of the product mix? How many different product lines can the company accommodate? How should the products be positioned in the market? What should be the brand policy? Should there be individual brands, family brands and/or multiple brands? Can a product be left to middleman’s branding? Answers to these questions will constitute the product policy of a firm.

A growing business has to undertake a constant appraisal of its existing product line. No product lasts forever, and no product lines are perfect forever. Changes in the business environment, changes in customer tastes and preferences and the extent of competition all exercise some pressure on the product policy of a firm. A product might have lost its marketable image, be facing the threat of functional obsolescence, lost its profitability, be poor in quality or simply served its purpose and is on the decline.

The techniques employed by firms to render their product or brand distinct and different from the competing brands, is termed product differentiation. Differentiation can be based on product, channel and promotion. Product, however, lends the maximum scope for differentiation. The aim of a product differentiation strategy is to endow the company’s product with certain real differences compared with other competing brands. And the main requirement is that the consumers must perceive the product as different in some respect.

How many eyeballs does your website grab in a day? Don’t know? Well it is about time for you to find this out and determine your actual levels of visibility on the web. The more visible it is, the more the public will talk about this. Your website promotion online depends on how visible you can be on the web. The web has a very wide reach and thus if your website promotion online is good you will reach out to people in all corners of the globe. So after the promotion you can have global customers buying your goods and services.

Ranking high and very high in relevant keywords in all major search engines is what the special emphasis of website promotion online is all about. Some of the major search engines on which you must get top ranking while doing website promotion online for your business site are Google, Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, MSN and Ask. There are many rules and methods that you can implement for making your site top ranked in the major search engines.

Write a page title for the different pages for your website. The page title of your site must describe clearly what a particular page is all about. This is helpful when major search engines index your webpage. Use all the appropriate and relevant keywords related to the goods and services you are offering. Do not use just the name of your company on the page title. Avoid using those keywords that you do not have on the web page as this can affect your rankings.

Link building your website with other related and relevant sites is another important factor that you can do for website promotion online for your business. Link building helps you in generating traffic to your site and tremendously boosts up your visibility everywhere on the web. Try building and exchanging the links of your site with sites that have high page ranks and are very popular on the web among online users. This means that the popularity and visibility of your site also increases tremendously. Search engine rankings are also affected by this. So, take care of this factor while you are building links for your site.

Writing articles relevant to your site and the products you are selling is one good way to increase your visibility on the web. Articles are a great source to attract traffic and customers to your site. Submit your articles to all major article sites on the web. Try to make use of only one author name for all the articles so that the name of the author becomes a well known brand in the internet. So the next time people see an article written by this author they automatically tend to believe that the article is good and thus you can get valuable customers for your goods and services.

Pay per click advertising is one good way for website promotion online for any business site. Pay per click is an advertising method that makes use of relevant and the most appropriate keywords for advertising about your goods. If you undertake pay per click successfully, your site will be displayed at the top of sponsored listings of search engines. It has been found that being listed at the top of the sponsored listings guarantees to bring customers to your online business site.

Programs designed to drive massive traffic to a website will be the focus of this article. The huge question remains, is it necessary to purchase a program that will assist in the successful promotion of a website.

Newbie marketers, as well as seasoned veterans will be well advised to know that the answer to the above is question is a flat NO!

No program, no seemingly flawless system, nothing that promises great rewards on the internet is needed to actually promote a website successfully. Most programs, while seemingly appealing to people to become highly successful on the net are designed to do just one thing...make the owners of such programs a huge amount of money while providing basic information in return.

The great news here is...absolutely anyone, breathing that is, has all the tools they need for successful internet marketing before them when they look in the mirror. Yes, the individual has, if they have the ability to write has all the tools necessary. No program is needed, money can be saved and pressure relieved by this statement.

The consistent act of writing effective press releases and ezine articles is actually all that one need do in order to gain top positioning on Google. This system in and of itself is known as organic position techniques for website promotions. This is by far the most effective way to promote a website on the net today.

While pay-per-clicks may be effective for some, the simply fact is that unless one has the financial resources to consistently pay money for hits, this can and often does lead to no success...and a huge amount of money spent, usually for no gain.

So, in terms of dollars and cents, actually how much does it cost to submit press releases and ezine articles?

How about $0? Is that cheap enough?

Now the only reasonable excuse is thwarted. What else is the hindrance here?

Most people will not learn this valuable lesson and will continue to spend needless money to so called internet marketing gurus. Their pockets will be further lined with gold and the process continues because of people's unwillingness to believe in themselves and what they can accomplish on their own!

When does outsource product development make sense?

Outsource product development has caught the imagination of the entire business world. Sometimes, an enterprise opts for outsourced product development to manage costs, boost bottom line and save time for core activities. Other times, some strategic purposes such as dispense with some centers located at critical geographical regions have bearing on the option for outsource product development. There are several reasons can be cited for outsourcing option. But the moot question is -When does outsourcing make sense?

Outsourcing product development makes the most sense when:

* There is a need for expertise the company doesn’t have or need full time involvement.
* There is a need for resources the company currently does not have to complete all of the required work.
* It incurs heavily to keep up internal teams to do some or all of the development projects.
* There is a desire to incorporate standard practices or fresh approach in the product development processes.
* The capabilities to find, evaluate, and hire the outsourcing firm.
* Methods, protocols, and resources for communicating and managing the outsourcing firm.
* Tools, resources, and plans for gaining, storing, and using knowledge transfer.


What are the reasons to outsource product development?

Acquiring Expertise
One of the most plausible and successful reasons to outsource product development is to acquire expertise not currently available within the company. This lack of expertise could be because of a specific, non-core activity within the company, or it could be due to sudden rise in demand that exceeds the company’s existing capability.

In both situations, outsourcing product development is an excellent way to plug the need for expertise. However, a critical factor for successful implementation of outsourced product development is to ensure protection of all proprietary information, which should be arranged at the earliest or just before the onset of the project with some sort of contract.


Building Additional Resources
One very obvious reason to outsource is to supplement the number of development teams available to complete projects. Actually, in most of the cases firms prefer to staff below their total development capabilities in order to lower costs and risk, and with outsourcing they escape the possible burden of repetitive layoffs and hiring sprees.

This approach to outsourcing, or resource expansion, works well when the company outsourcing the project understands the capabilities required to effectively outsource a development project. These capabilities include:

* Identifying the best projects to outsource
* Managing the outsourcing relationship
* Identifying the project deliverables
* Auditing and smoothly integrating the project deliverables into existing systems

Although expansion or augmentation of resources is a common reason for outsourcing, it sometimes acts as a compelling reason for firms to miss out this opportunity. Ineffective cost benefit analysis and an inability to measure internal development costs often leads to conclude that the project can be done internally for less. Inevitably, the internal teams get pressurized and over burdened that lead to delayed and ineffectual product development. Development teams focusing on a single project produce the best results because they avoid the overhead and mistakes that result from multi-tasking across several projects.

Minimizing Development Costs
One very pertinent reason to outsourcing is to minimize costs involved in the development of products. Outsourcing seems to be a better and cost-effective measure, if you take into consideration all costs involved in maintaining the necessary capabilities within your company, which include:

* Employee costs such as salary, taxes, benefits, etc.
* Overhead expenditure on office space, desks, computer, training, software and hardware tools, etc.
* Supporting costs on information systems, management, human resources, payroll, etc.
* Risk costs such as downsizing costs including severance pay, legal support, etc.

In addition, certain irritating questions keep recurring such as:

* How do we build and maintain a high quality development team within our corporate culture?
* What traits and skills are important? Are those traits and skills available in our area of geography and expertise? How long will it take? What will it cost?
* How many teams will we need today and should we try to staff every project internally?

After having done cost benefit analysis on all these posed questions, most firms come to the conclusion that outsourced product development teams cost less than maintaining comparable internal product development teams.

In addition, organizations having internal product development resources that choose to outsource product development projects can have the following benefits of outsourcing:

* Gaining new perspective & process
* Acquiring quality system reviews, and
* Gaining industry standard practices

Most would agree that firms that don’t usually outsource product development should periodically do so to know how they could improve the results of their internal development teams. To glean the maximum benefit, the firm outsourcing the development should have systems in place to imbibe within the lessons-learned and to integrate them into its systems where appropriate.

Here’s how to create successful new products if you’ve never had an original idea in your life. I'm not very creative, so that’s the only way I could create any products at all. All I’ve done is to create new products by improving on an existing product that already sells well. By doing this I’ve sold over $39 Million of products to major retailers.

Improving on existing products takes most of the risk away. With a totally new invention or completely new product, you don't know at first whether it will sell. If you start with something that sells well already and you make it a lot better, you don’t have that problem.

Here’s a story that makes the point:

When I started my first business, my partner had a small screen printing operation and we set up a joint venture together to explore products I would create and sell and he would make. He was selling souvenirs and a popular look at the time was to make decals out of prismatic vinyl. (This a metallic material with a pattern embossed into it to reflect light into rainbows.)

Though I started by selling souvenirs, before long I noticed there were hundreds of companies starting to make stickers for kids and they were collecting them. (Note how quick I was to see this - after 100 other companies were already doing it!).

Most of these stickers were just traditional paper, so I decided to try our prismatic material and see how it would sell. We put a product line together of prismatic stickers on rolls and started selling some gift shops.

Sales were incredible.....

They sold better than anything else in the store so we decided to make some more - and amazingly, they sold well too.

The next step was to put these same stickers in packages to sell to the major chains. Long story short, in another couple years we were in Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, and about every other major retailer and we were selling over $1.0 million of stickers every month!

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

A few years later, I started another company selling school supplies exclusively to the major chains. We came up with an entire line of folders, notebooks, pens, pencils, 3 ring binders all with the prismatic/holographic look.

All I did is take the look that worked on stickers and put it on another kids product. And that’s not all - I went to companies who already knew how to make all these products and had them made with our holographic look.

Result - another multimillion dollar success. This one even got us the "Best New Vendor of the Year" award from Target’s stationery & school supply department.

AND ANOTHER

I wasn't done yet - I had also discovered that kids stickers were sold to the medical market as give-aways for pediatricians, dentists and others to give to kids when they came in to their offices.

The products being sold at the time were all plain paper circles just like the retail market had been 5 - 6 years earlier. This time I started a mail order company to sell the prismatic look stickers to medical offices.

Another success....

After we grew to having over 10,000 medical offices and hospitals as customers, I sold this company to a larger competitor.

All in all, 3 national businesses founded and grew from one simple idea applied over and over.....make an existing product better.

Start with this concept - make an existing product better. But instead of depending on the consumer acceptance of the improvements like I did with the examples I gave you, how about making it cheaper too!

The examples above actually cost more than our competitors - in some cases as much as 4 times as much as the paper products we replaced. Retailers were initially very skeptical that the products would sell because of that.

For example, a typical paper portfolio printed in full color with attractive designs was selling for 59 - 69 cents for the nice ones and as low as 29 - 39 cents for the budget models without any art.

Our portfolio was to retail at $2.00!

Though they sold better than everything else, there was quite a bit of initial buyer skepticism because of the price.

Here's how to make it a sure thing......

MAKE IT BETTER, FASTER & CHEAPER

When you make the changes to improve the product, do it for less money, not more! And I don't mean just a little bit better either - make it a lot better.

A couple examples will show you what I mean.

By watching the trends in my raw materials, I found out right away when the prismatic and holographic materials started to be made of paper instead of vinyl or polyester.

At the same time thin film technology appeared to make the brighter film products much thinner to match the paper costs.