MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide a Bestseller

You probably know I’m a huge fan of MarketingSherpa. They consistantly keep the pulse of internet marketing. They tell us what works and what doesn’t using real world application and data.

If there’s one area I want to improve on as an internet marketer it is email marketing. Done right it can be an additional revenue stream. You can put ads in your emails (affiliate or paid sponsors), get co-registrations for complimentary businesses), and build customer loyalty (translates to more sales).

The world of email providers is large and deep and choosing the right provider is vital. The last thing you want is more or less functionality than you need or to be blacklisted because you share server space with a spammer or company passing around spy or adware.

We’re coming on a new year and that means new budgets. In coming weeks, many internet marketers will get a fresh start on their 2007 marketing plans.

MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide Preview:

• 100% re-researched reports – get ideas and inspiration for your 2007 marketing

• 233 charts & tables, 21 images and 8 new eyetracking heatmaps.

• 3,637 internet marketers share actual results and budgeting data, and what tests are worth doing (to save you time)

Download your copy instantly (and get your printed-and-bound copy in the mail).

This is a common theme in affiliate marketing. When an affiliate manager over a program sees what the top affiliates are making, they want to be an affiliate. I wonder if being an effective affiliate manager prepares you to become a successful affiliate.

Last year there was news about account reps at Commission Junction (know Chad Darling – wonder how it’s going for him). They risked their jobs and were asked to leave. I know someone who left a nice paying job at NASA to be an affiliate (but it took several years).

I wonder how that goes for affiliates. Is the income up and down? If you left your job to be a full-time affiliate, has it been worth it? Jeremy Palmer quit after six months but the climb is probably slower for most. Don’t kid yourself that they don’t work hard though, depending on their model and goals. If you want to keep growing richer, it’s going to take A LOT of energy and time – more than a regular job would demand – especially in the first years.

As you know that was my intention early this year. My stomach couldn’t handle the uncertainty. Perhaps one day (like when I’m not the sole breadwinner or have a few year’s income saved) but for now I like the regular paychecks.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is work you did yesterday can continue to bring income today without any additional attention. It’s nice to get those checks in the mail when you’re too busy to spend any time on it. If you were in early and broad enough you could run almost entirely on autopilot.

I’d appreciate your input on this. If you quit your day job to be an affiliate, what was your day job? Were you ever an affiliate manager? How long did it take you? Are you a sole breadwinner for your family? I think this would make an interesting article.

Today I had lunch with the two founders of Yepic, Corey and Richard. Too bad I was listening too much to think of taking a picture. It was a complete mind trip.

I’m prone to hero worship at times. My heroes are people who excel and who get and/or see things that other people don’t. They do it naturally. If they are humble about it I love it even more.

These two are forming a brilliant business. I can’t even wrap my head around the potential and the beauty of their model. I predict that it will become The Web 2.0 marketplace for content. Forget article sites and other flat ways of presenting content.

This works especially well for practical, useful information. Information that makes people better able to do things. Information that makes them smarter. Rich, meaningful, and integrated.

And they are going to enable information that evolves and improves (with collaboration). Most importantly they will make it easy to buy and sell content on multiple platforms. This isn’t another ad-generated model dependent on lots of traffic.

It has the potential to transform traditional media by removing the buracracy and power centers. Just like eBay you work directly with the customer and the market becomes very efficient.

Here’s what Richard said:

“Everyone on the internet right now benefits more from sharing information than from protecting it.”

And that is the essense of web 2.0.

This is a story that I want to write, about the formation of this company. There has to be a unique way to present it (perhaps on Yepic itself and at the same time on Business 2.0 with a pitch fitting for the story).

I’m proud to be one of the first 100 writers on the site and part of the (now private) beta. More thoughts to come…

Related posts:
PR Catapults Yepic’s Success
Yepic: Find and Sell Information

I’m having comment issues. I’m migrating my blog to a server rather than a WordPress hosted site for added functionality (see my progress at  www.newspapergrl.com). I wonder if it’s causing a problem with comments. I just got 2 emails telling me they are not working.

In the meantime I have a lot of blog posts from lunch today. I had the most fascinating conversation with the guys from Yepic. I don’t know that I’ve known any other people who understood and articulated web 2.0 as well as they did. I was entralled.

Unfortunately the restaurant was too noisy to tape it (next time I’ll choose differently). I could blog about the content marketplace indefinately. Stay tuned. I’ve been busy and haven’t posted as often but this is worth waiting for!

I blogged about my friend Carolyn who got laid off from a struggling startup. We both got laid off the same week and wanted to take action. After a lot of brainstorming (which I could do professionally I think) she decided to start a business with $100 and 30 days.

She didn’t want to wait for investors or find a job right away. She knew she could get things done herself more efficiently than most businesses she’d worked for. So she created her own job in 5 days. It was intense.

(Side note: I read China Inc. recently. It’s more common there for people to come up with a business idea, pull resources, and launch it immediately).

CopperRain produced a video about the $100 business and it’s posted on the $100 business blog right now (the $100 business video).

The business model is to open co-op kiosk in a local mall. She worked with vendors to carry products on a commission-basis. They also pooled to cover rental and advertising costs. The products are all from local small businesses.

I’m impressed with the final product. I bet Carolyn and everyone will be glad when the kisok experiment is over. They put in amazing hours. In my short visit I knew I wasn’t cut out to run a mall kiosk.

I challenge her to do a content business next (I’ll be blogging about that soon). Maybe she could assemble the lessons learned and sell the article as a PDF download on ebay. Today I learned content is selling like mad on eBay.

She really should get news coverage. If anyone knows some news stations in Utah, please help Carolyn get the story out. It got her a video and a news station could easily use it in the story. The kiosk has really meant a lot to Kelly at startupprincess. She needed to test market her idea but didn’t have the funding. I hear she’s selling out of her products!

Nice job everyone!

Can you transform a regular company into a web 2.0 company successfully? MyFamily.com is going to try. They are changing their name to The Generations Network. This encompasses all of their sites: MyFamily.com, Ancestry.com, etc.

The Generations Network doesn’t quite make me think of family history, searching for ancestors, connecting with relatives quite like MyFamily.com did. I worked there for a year or so several years ago. We had a normal company mentality. I’ll have to watch to see how this evolves. If they can pull it off it could be amazing. I can imagine the potential of a true web 2.0 experience for geneologists or for families.

I’m surprised my friend Brad broke this (at least the first I saw). Paul Allen must be busy today! This needs to be dugg. I don’t have time (I’m working on migrating my blog to my own domain and putting in social networking pieces to make this easier).

I recently blogged about how press releases, newsletters, and especially web sites need to have a call to action. You need to guide people who come to your site what you’d like them to do and how to do it. Make it easy. Amazing enough I still forget to do this at times – especially on my affiliate sites.

I found a helpful and creative list of “37 calls to action that you can use, tweak, change, twist, alter, swap, substitute, obliterate, stretch, revamp, reload and pimp to fit your own needs.”

Here are some of my calls to action:

• Listen to a short preview of this press release
• Explore the many uses of a tent cot
• Don’t miss a single post of Newspapergrl – sign up for the RSS feed
• Add Newspapergrl (http://www.newspapergrl.com) to your blog roll now
• Hire Paul (mr.paulwilson at gmail.com) to write your social media press release and get thousands of clicks to your web site. (Much of the proceeds from Paul’s business this year will go to some folks in need. Paul tutored me in internet marketing when we worked together several years ago. I’m indebted.)

Please note any creative or effective calls to action you’ve seen or have come up with.

Guy Kawasaki gets 8-10K views a day on his blog! That’s incredible. You could pretty much sum up his readers as rich men without kids. According to his survey, only 12% of the about 1200 respondents were women. Here are the results of Guy Kawasaki’s survey. It’s a pretty elite group.

I was going to ask you to fill out my survey until someone pointed out that no one would because it’s not anonymous. That hit me as very funny. Maybe there’s just too much going on right now.

I realized when I went skiing with RMAMA (Rocky Mountain Association of Affiliate Marketers) on Friday that even my fun is challenging lately. The snow was icy and it’s been a while. Sitting in front of a computer doesn’t exactly prepare me to be a great skiier. Luckily, I didn’t see any of the backcountry.com guys whizzing by me on the slopes (because I was on the blue diamonds and I’m sure they were on the black runs).

My friend Jeremy Palmer put me up to this (with good company), so here goes.

5 things you don’t know about newspapergrl (Janet Meiners):

1 – In high school I worked for a ice cream and sandwich shop. One day when it was slow I tried to hypnotize my coworkers in the storage room. Just this year I was explaining how I did it and almost hypnotized a coworker at Tahitian Noni. I guess I still have the touch.

2 – I made #151 for a book on how to bootstrap creatively: date men who will help you for free. That was said in jest at an entrepreneur class when describing my business plan related to online dating. But yes, I’ve learned a lot from successful businessmen I’ve dated. I just learned I’m forever known as #151 to the person who wrote the book.

3 – I can be a crusader and love to raise money for a good cause. I once planned an all-day band concert to help restore a historical building. It seemed everything that could go wrong did but it was still a success. Today that building is called Academy Square Library. I still feel a sense of pride when I drive by.

4 – My first entrepreneurial venture was selling suckers  when I was maybe 12. I did well (I even got a competitor) until my parents stopped paying for the ingredients.

5 – When I was a kid my grandma always had the best video cameras on the market. My cousins and I had a great time filming ourselves. I dressed up in her business suit and did a newscast. I was the anchor woman. I made my cousins cover sports and weather. I still love to interview people and get their story.

I tag:
Jason Alba
Chris Knudson
Shahar Boyayan

Tagged means that now you blog 5 things about yourself that we might not know. Please ping me when you do (thanks Chris).

I saw this coming. PRWeb’s podcasts were just too good. They call you and interview you over the phone about your news release and a day or two later it’s done. They’re professionally produced and edited. Demand was high and rising. That usually means the price will go up.

Next week PRWeb will start charging for podcasts they produce. Until now podcasts were only available with the $200 release for no additional charge. Starting this Monday, December 18th, it will cost $100 for a podcast but you can request one for any level of distribution. They informally say that each podcast gets about 200 listens.

If you want something more comprehensive, PRWeb will produce a 20 min. podcast about your news with any press release price level for $200.

Now for the good news. In January you can upload your own podcast to go with a $200 press release for no additional charge (up to 10MB).

One weakness of the podcasts that went with the release is they were standard issue. So if you listen to one you probably wouldn’t want to listen to another from the same company. Now each podcast can be unique.

I’m sure there will be a wide range of quality in the non-PRWeb podcasts. But if you’re already producing quality podcasts, this is just one more way to broaden your audience. If you aren’t producing quality podcasts and want to let the pros do it for you, PRWeb offers a great service.