It’s the Winter Olympics and all the sexier, high octane sports are getting into the news. Speed and jeopardy is making news. Me, I love those sports people who are ‘stalwarts’ of their sport, in it for their passion, not phased by not being in the lime-light, but proud to participate nevertheless. Those athletes honing their craft year round, without the glare of publicity shows a certain tenacity and passion.

The other day, I witnessed an example of the year-round dedication to perfection on my doorstep. I was walking my dog in freezing conditions in the foothills at the back of my house, where world champion cross-country cyclists and runners, alongside local fire-men and policemen are out in all weathers, staying fit, eyes on the horizon…

What struck me in this biting cold, was a sexy silver Bentley crawling along ahead of a heavy-set runner in tiny thin shorts, built like a rugby player, with legs red raw with the cold. He looked as if he had been out for hours in these punishing conditions!

I was fascinated by this starkly contrasting scene: between the grim determination and obvious hardship of that athlete was putting himself through, with what seemed to be his luxurious chauffeur driven car, by his side for the moment he was ready and which had the markings ‘winner’ and luxury all over it. (I am not sure which I was most impressed with!)

Whilst I might not have a Bentley, I also felt like I knew something of this runner’s mindset. I felt myself willing him every heavy footfall forward… Pushing oneself against the odds can be a tough and lonely place to be…The battle is with the self as much as the elements.

I am not an athlete, but understand the long-distance runner. I write more and more these days, both out of passion for this type of marketing, but also because my sights are also set on a horizon. I am beginning to follow what has consistently been a part of my life which I have never shared with others, until now. Now, I am writing as much as for the long-game of business success as the love of what I do, my sporadic compositions are becoming a practised discipline.

It feels a little like The Lonliness of the Long-Distance Runner, like in that Damon Runyan book. If there are any other writers reading right now, I am sure you will understand the sentiment. I know that readers appreciate what I say, because I see the stat’s; but still my public awards in the form of the desired links and comments are not there for me to polish up and point to as evidence of ‘making it’.

The point about article marketing and copywriting in the long-term sales cycle is that you want to take as many converts and fans with you on your journeys of discovery to getting those finish lines where everyone wins.

Understanding that even long-distance champions have their teams that they turn to sometimes for recognition who contribute to making them successful makes me determined to hone my craft.

With this in mind I wrote an article based on Eban Pagan’s ‘Voodoo Copywriting’ teachings, about how I see the dynamics of copywriting, which I hope that you too can relate too (and secretly, I hope you will check my stuff out and give me some great feedback at the finish line to spur me on to the next leg of my marketing marathon!!)

So, “What have the marathon Runner and the Writer Got In Common?”
Answer: Persistence, passion and finishing line focus.

I Writing!

What is it that inspires you to stick with it in the chillier Winter periods? What does your horizon look like that you keep your eyes fixed on?

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Mummy’s Birthday Present

Make a Smilebox digital scrapbooking design

XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX

“A kiss for every year of mummy’s life, ’cause she says “it’s all about passion”… (Did we give the game away? Did we?”) – Milly ‘n’ Moby

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Next week, I officially become a ‘woman of a certain age’ or ‘in her late forties. A lot has happened to radically change my life over the past year and it gives me pause for thought as a newbie entrepreneur…I’d like to share…

I’ve always been a big believer in trying to do what I believed was for the ‘common good’, even when this meant swimming against tide of opinion and even making myself unpopular in the process in my strident youth. At the end of the day, if you are not true to yourself, you are lost and vulnerable to whichever winds are blowing around you. Given that we are daily at risk of tripping over into Moral Morass Abyss, I tend to check the motives of my actions regularly and pay attention to my moral compass.

After riots rocked cities all over the United Kingdom in my formative years, I became involved in what has become a life-long commitment to work with others to improve peoples’ lives and environment. What is challenging for me nowadays is that I that I want to continue these efforts as an entrepreneur. I want to balance the pursuit of profit with using whatever skills, knowledge and wealth I accumulate as a woman business owner, to make bigger differences than I ever managed to do as a consistently near-broke employee of larger organisations.

My aim is to make my entrepreneurial efforts contribute to what might be called ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. Achieving the greatest positive benefits for the greatest amount of people, through my own efforts and those of the team with whom I choose to work is one of the ethical decisions I have made at the start of my business.

I am not alone it seems, Price Waterhouse Coopers recently undertook research about the effects of the recession on women and found: “The research that we have done on women in the recession shows that 72 per cent say that it has got them thinking about a new start,” she says. “And nearly half of them want to shift into a small business or a social enterprise”. (Dame Julie Mellor quoted in the Times Online.)

I am passionate about achieving balanced change in a world desperately out of balance. What keeps me grounded is my environment and my determination to contribute towards womens’ equality of access to wealth and resources. What lifts my eyes beyond my personal horizon is my assurance that the emergence of the moral entrepreneur is in ascendancy and that the community of entrepreneurs with whom I now work share my vision. Collaboration amongst entrepreneurs is how business has to be, especially in times of economic challenge in order to ‘raise the boat for everybody’.

We simply cannot afford to keep on doing the same things we have always done, if we want to see something different – Einstein described this as the definition of insanity. We only have to look around at some of the crises with which we are now faced to see that he was right. We DO have to do things differently from now on in order to stop the rot and redress the social imbalances within our own communities and yes, even between nations.

Lofty ideals maybe. I certainly don’t lay any claim to easy answers – albeit sometimes I am aware we absolutely need to “keep it simple, stupid” or KISS as my friends say!

I recently heard a speech from a college professor, eminent philosopher and author on this, Mr Michael Sandel. I was gripped. How to express that it could be ok for people to make money and not burn the earth or each other in the process had been on my mind for weeks… How am I going to remain ethical and be happy when I become a rich woman (yes, I am serious about that) and help others to generate wealth for themselves is a question I have churned over many times since deciding to become an entrepreneur.

If my business entails sharing ideas on how people can achieve dreams of wealth, I need to be clear that this is indeed a ‘worthy’ goal. This means ignoring my own scripts ready to start replaying in my mind at any moment, which were handed to me by poor parents and relations and an even poorer local community.
Professor Sandel is passionate about morality, justice and ethical politics and economics. Hearing him helped me take one of the most vital steps in forging ahead in establishing my own home business.

He called economics “spurious”. But I had been listening to debates on taxation, inflation, employment and economics on the radio for years, gradually figuring out how we all fit into place with these big systems; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Knowing that he was wiser than me, I turned the radio up and I went about tidying and cleaning up listening – my practical business activities could wait! This was far too important.

What he was getting at, was that economists tell us what we SHOULD be doing for the health of the GDP, employment, inflation and so forth (work harder, for longer hours, accept high taxation, etc) – as if it was all about the Economy and money. But all of these subjects are MORAL and political issues; they have to be weighed up in terms of justice, fairness, ecology and so forth, so they need to be democratically debated by everybody (not just economists). WE, the community has to have their say in order to discover ways to go about our daily life which enables the future of our communities, our families AND our environment to be secure…

The role of economics is to inform us of what might be the practical results of our decisions, no more than that. The crucial words here: ‘might be’. We are still learning all of the time, because the world is constantly evolving, as we learn new things about our world on a daily basis.

So, if our everyday behaviour as individual local citizens and even nations of people and international communities effects the balance of payments, distribution of welfare, health of the planet, the future of all living beings, for instance, then there are ethical implications of ignoring getting involved with each other in subjects about which we care passionately. In other words, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”.

When I worked for other people in the past, we shared the same ideas to some degree, but quite often the politics of working closely together could get in the way of positive results – be it clash of personality or values and beliefs. In the words of my all time favourite song-writers, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee: “Glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.”

So now, here I am, a mature woman of middle years and newbie entrepreneur, I now get to CHOOSE whom I work with. I choose my team carefully. If I am not convinced that they want to raise the bar for themselves and others somehow, then I really have little interest in supporting them or working with them. How can they inspire others to achieve better for themselves? It’s just not how I want to live my life. Fortunately, there are plenty of would be business owners out there who will be dreaming big too.

I set out in my working career in paid jobs working alongside or on behalf of communities in the belief we were changing lives for the better. I am still that person. Nowadays my methods are different, but the purpose remains. There’s hardly anything more exciting to me than hearing from someone who wants to change their own life, but who also has big dreams and is prepared to get their hands dirty.

Some might say that knowing there’s “10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire” is depressing and de-motivating. Not for me! Potholes need to be filled in so that we can all go safely about our business and the only way this is going to happen, for it to work for the maximum amount of people is by finding the right people to do the job and who want the same results. I always did like a challenge! But more importantly than that, I love finding people who want to get stuck in and get involved in wherever their passion takes them. Hope, combined with action and combined effort are the only way any of us will achieve success and fulfill our dreams.

I want more and better for more people and planet and I intend to build a team who feel the same. So what about you? What would you change if you had the economic power to do it?

(P.S. I chose these photo’s of the Land-Girls because their stories over the last year or so, in the 60th anniversary of ‘D’ Day and all, seemed to sum up what inspires me. The ladies in the hay-stacks are the Llandaff Land-Girls, from close to where I live)

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Last year I took a few more steps to becoming self-employed. I signed up to a few different online business programmes, which I thought would help me to work from home and earn money.

In all, before I found the right opportunity for me, I spent just short of £200 on cheap introductory online business schemes, which were leaders into more expensive back end product lines. This might not seem much, but at the time I was on welfare benefits for a few months after a car accident. I had no savings nor any partner’s earnings to lean on.

I knew I had to find another option for earning money; because of my injuries, I wasn’t sure I would be able to return to a physically demanding job that I had only been in a few days, after quitting a well paid management job, which had been slowly killing me. I was in a mess physically and financially.

Even a couple of hundred pounds can be the difference in putting food on the table or paying the phone bill and can come at a cost to your peace of mind. They were difficult days and I got my fingers burnt investigating opportunities and options.

Many work at home scams, rely on their adverts containing a grain of truth and depend on the naivety and vulnerability of people to believe what are at best only partial truth and at worst completely false claims. A spokesperson for the attorney general of Minnesota, Ben Wogsland was reported as citing the state’s highest unemployment rate in 25 years, which makes “so many people who are desperate, who are vulnerable.”

Suffice to say, my money went nowhere as even those front end products did not engender enough trust for me to want to spend any more money with them. My message to you is to beware of claims of “Get Rich Fast” , “Make Money Now” or “Better Faster”. The online business world is still prone to hype and scams, in spite of recent attempts by Google and the Federal Trade Commission to clean it up.

We haven’t seen the last of work at home scams yet. You may be attracted by offers which seem cheap or easy, but the devil is always in the detail. Buried in the “terms and conditions” may be small print allowing scammers to tap into your bank account.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently been applying pressure to rid the net of Get Rich Quick scams. Google have been cleaning up their pages and YouTube videos, making even legitimate online businesses raise the bar in terms of how they sell their products. Whilst some businesses have lost previous advertising campaigns as a result, it’s all good.

Fortunately, we are now seeing a decline in misrepresentation of business opportunities. But you need to check out what is involved with those offering you the chance to earn working from home. Perhaps you can only make money by recruiting other people to participate. This is known as a “pyramid scheme”; these are ILLEGAL.

This compares with legitimate direct sales or direct marketing for instance, where recruits earnings depend on sales as well as ‘residual income’ from their team.

If an advertisement makes an offer sounding ridiculously easy, it’s probably too good to be true. Similarly an online ad may only talk about your pipe dreams without telling you what kind of work you will do — other than it’s lucrative — this too can be a bad sign. Look for a contact number to ask about what is involved in this instance. If you cannot access a member of staff to talk to, do you really want to hand over any money?

Whilst you shouldn’t have to pay for information about a legitimate job, you may have to pay for training. You can always contact the Better Business Bureau or Office of Fair trading in the UK, or similar agency in other countries to see if there have been any other people making complaints about the “work at home” company you are looking into.

Watch out for apparently credible claims in scam email advertisements containing phrases such as “as seen on…” with logos of news organizations, such as ABC-TV or claiming affiliation to national institutions or corporations. Some scams show what look like legitimate business newspaper stories which endorse their product. Ask yourself if you are familiar with the named media, if not, you need to check them out.

To stay on the right side of the law, some ads contain lines like, “We are not a partner, affiliate, or licensee of (a large company) nor is our company in any other way formally associated with it.” However, the rest of the ad copy may seem to align themselves with legitimate online businesses.

Also, the word “advertisement” should appear somewhere on the page; this guarantees a certain standard of truth. If you see an ad which is suspect, report it to the relevant authorities.

Terms and conditions in ads can be very long, difficult to understand and skewed to benefit the company. It may say, for example, that in the event of a dispute, you can never sue the company; or in some cases, the company can sue you. Look out for continuing monthly charges, not just the shipping charge for the “free” kit. I got stung by such a scheme to the tune of over fifty pounds with one company and twenty with another!

Perhaps the most convincing of advertisements are those in an email which claim to be warnings of all other scams out there. Shockingly, they can be guilty of the very same work at home scams but lull you into a false sense of security by attacking others!

Finally, check amongst contact details for whether the work at home opportunity is with an off-shore company; if so, they may not be obliged to comply with regulations, meaning you are not protected. If there are no contact details available, steer clear.

Take a particular favourite scam of online business opportunities which features an ad of the good looking young man in jeans stretched out on a deck, one hand behind his head and the other resting on his chest. Next to him is his laptop, he’s apparently taking a snooze break from. The idyllic lifestyle is topped with the headline: “Work from home. Never set an alarm clock again. Make a fortune while being your own boss”. The ad contains the famous Google logo and makes income claims of “Earn up to $250 to $943 per day using Google.” (Anyone recognise ‘Google Fortune’?; there are other similar ones).

Google clamped down. The Federal Trade Commission earlier in 2009 sued a company calling itself ‘Google Money Tree’, which it said “conned consumers who are struggling to make a living and pay their bills during these difficult economic times” by claiming it was affiliated with Google.

Earning big money for simple and easy work from home, (that incidentally, requires your prior payment for a manual on how to do it) just is not common sense: “If that was true, we’d all be doing it”, is something I find myself saying to potential prospects to a legitimate opportunity I have since discovered since learning from having my fingers burnt with both scammers and also legitimate online business opportunities who simply lacked the integrity to tell the whole truth.

There are legitimate opportunities to work from home for a relatively small start up fees. A good example is the burgeoning secret shopper businesses, which women in particular find convenient to balance with other part time jobs and their home and family.

Of course, variations on secret shopper scams are also on the increase. For instance, if an offer is to “test shop” a money-transfer company, involving depositing a company check, this should ring alarm bells. It goes something like, you deposit a check into your own bank account and then wire some of your own money through e.g. Western Union. Low and behold, it later turns out to be worthless and you feel foolish to have been taken in.

Making anything upwards of about $15 per assignment is what you can generally expect as a mystery shopper. It tends to supplement other household earnings, unless you work it full time. This is work you can enjoy! It’s fun pretending to be someone else and being able to do it between other errands, so it doesn’t take too much of your time. The extra money funds your treats. “Kerching!”

The legitimate home based business home shopping sector is providing real benefits to people who can either only work part time or perhaps have disabilities, have retired or are students, i.e. people in circumstances which can make it difficult for them to find traditional work. This is a great legitimate opportunity to earn additional money I found for my own country…

Mystery Shopper UK offers an incredible amount of links to businesses offering opportunities to earn money as you work from home from online surveys, meals in restaurants, nights out at the theatre , theme parks; you name it, businesses are paying to find out how well their staff are doing in their jobs to serve you as a customer! There is a nominal fee of £12.90, which includes your list of contacts for all participating companies, together with all of your office link systems.

In addition, you don’t have the expense of driving as fuel is paid for. There’s no need to buy work clothes either. Personally, I am looking forward to more meals in restaurants and nights out in entertainment venues paid for by Mystery Shopper companies!

For more help with checking if a business or job online is legitimate or a home business scam or pyramid scheme you can contact: The Better Business Bureau and The Federal Trade Commission in the USA. In the UK the Office of Fair Trading and your local Trading Standards can offer advice.

I would be interested to hear other people’s experiences of work at home scams they have fallen for. What are your own circumstances that led to you falling for the deceptions? Would it stop you ever looking at other opportunities to earn from home again?

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I am not yet fortunate enough to know many women entrepreneurs in and as yet, my sponsor is my only relatively “wealthy woman” and self-made female entrepreneur that I know. It has always been my experience that successful women business owners tend to come from an entrepreneurial family back-ground.
Nevertheless, I understand the importance of women networking for empowering women, so as opportunities are limited where I am geographically based, I regularly tune into websites hosted by the likes of, Ellie Drake of Braveheartwomen. I specifically seek out sites created by women for women because I feel that I can relate to their specific experiences more easily and with less scepticism. I do not exclude male tutelage, but find that they are less interested in women’s empowerment, which is still regrettably, sorely needed.

I figure that women will more than likely have something extra to say to me as a woman that can help fill in the jig-saw pieces missing from pictures created by men which assume an equality of attitude and circumstances of women, which is not the case. As yet, it is still a male-dominated entrepreneurial world and although online marketing is increasingly populated by women, when I visit marketing forums, I find women still calling to hear the voices of other women.

Personally, I find there’s something particularly fulfilling and rewarding about seeing women sharing their specific experiences and in such diverse ways, which really inspires me. We need these female entrepreneurs as role models, so we can learn how to emulate what they do. I am eternally grateful to those women out there for having the commitment to share her good fortune and the good fortune of other successful women with those of us still hungry for their success.

Recently, Ellie Drake hosted a show where Kim Kiyosaki, one of the most successful women entrepreneurs in real estate today was sharing the stage with other successful women. What I learnt from the two part interviews has inspired me to share with you what these women and in particular Kim had to say.

Given the surge of women setting up a home based business, moving towards financial independence and that more women are looking for solutions to regaining control over their working life, in gratitude to those women on whose shoulders the rest of us stand, I hope you enjoy the video below and wish you success in seeking out your own female role models.

If you enjoy this, then when you have watched this, please sign up for your own account with Braveheart Women to see the second part of this show. (I do not profit by this – no affiliate scheme here. I just figure it is only fair to give something back to Ellie and her team in terms of growing the Braveheart membership and profile.)

Oh and whilst I’m in my ‘mission for women’s empowerment mode’, here’s another bonus piece of insight for women business owners and women entrepreneurs …

In return for bringing these women to you here, I want to ask you in return, which women do you consider as role models and why? Are any of there any favourite women marketers out there? Please leave a comment.

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I have not long been involved in the online world, but since the arrival of my lap top three years ago, I have increasingly become addicted to virtual socialising and sharing! Dating forums, debating forums to marketing forums; I love them!

For too long, however, I wasted time believing that as a woman ‘of a certain age’ living in the valleys of Wales, I was unlikely to meet a man in my day to day countryside lifestyle, so I’d take my pursuit of romance to online forums. He had to be out there, I thought… Let me just say to any younger readers here, I’m in the ‘more mature lady’ age bracket, so I don’t go clubbing and the pubs in my valley are pretty rubbish. It’s no fun to drive for at least half an hour to have one beer only to return home dissatisfied… it’s the forty-plus way in the countryside. (Be warned!)

The web encourages a ‘fast-food’ or ‘hit and run’ attitude to one of life’s most precious gifts. I eventually abandoned wasting my Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons, thinking I would leave a picky profile out there and if a fellow picky man was attracted to me, well then bonus….if not, hey, that’s OK too. Plenty else to do.

Meantime, there’s money to be made online. Having mastered the art of chatting to complete strangers on line, with no body language to read and having had far too much practice with time wasters, or people who just lacked learning in the communications skills department, I have discovered my virtual community in the many online forums out there.

Netlog is my latest online forum discovery and am looking forward to finding out how folk tick around here and to enjoying exchanging profound discoveries and complete rubbish in equal proportion. It’s a younger audience, but we all need to remain open to the influence of younger generations, right?

Here’s a few of my other favourite marketing forums:

• BB (exclusive to my business),
• Better Networker (LOADS to learn here about entrepreneurial skills and resources),
• Connected Women (still finding my way around here; it’s a new online forum),
• Yuwie(What! Get paid to socialise? I’m up for that!),
• Twitter (laughter, tears, inspiration; Twitter has it all!), Secret Women’s Business Network,
• LinkedIn (Women, Social Media and Green Group, amongst others!),
• Warrior Forum (I like to hop around here – there’s so much to learn from fellow online entrepreneurs…and so much fun here!).
• Direct Matches – Another money spinning and business building referral option is offered here.
• Last but not least, there are some great Google groups too…(select those in the middle range of membership numbers or be lost!).I tend to hang out amongst business owners and entrepreneurs here, although sometimes I drop in on my sisters looking to get a balance of work and personal life here too

This year I’m going to make my Sundays my do digital visits with my virtual valley friends.

Are there any other countryside dwellers out there who are on an online mission of any description? What are peoples’ favourite forums? Drop me a line and share your 2010 digital ambitions… Oh, by the way, my digital dating is on a back-boiler these days… making money online is much more fun for the foreseeable future!

Which dating sites am I still signed up to? Oh, that would be asking for trouble! ; )



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The older I get, the more communications technology excites me! It can be such a powerful force to get your messages out. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lone small business owner or a huge multi-national, you can compete on the internet these days on an equal footing, if you know how to use what’s on offer.

My latest source of excitement is the wonders of autoresponders! Their power to automate your words and make your messages viral is phenomenal if you get it right…

It is incredible that despite computers having been around for twenty years and the internet for about a decade, small to medium sized businesses have still not grasped the sales power of a well-targeted email marketing campaign. With other technological advances and the onslaught of social media, business owners are struggling to put all of the pieces together and juggle the various components of their marketing mix.

The autoresponder is one of the least talked about ‘work-horse’ tools of successful marketers. One great bonus lies in its ability to do your marketing exactly to your schedule once you have set it up. Autoresponder systems allow you to do the crucial on-going relationship building and marketing to the list of prospects you build. Once your messages get through spam filters, if you can achieve that magical click through, your chances of staying ahead of your competitors is increased.

Email marketing software tools allow you to set up well-thought out campaign messages that you want your markets to receive about you and your products or your industry. They allow you to keep your products and your brand and persona in the sights of your buyers and even reach new ones. With great copywriting in your headlines and used in combination with other strategies, you can ‘set it and forget it’, allowing the software to deliver your communications when you need to get the message out, for instance at special promotion times.

It’s worth knowing that a person has to be exposed to a product on average seven times, before they will buy. Autoresponder email software facilitates the process of more successful online marketing. Selling your ‘benefits’ consistently will increase your chances of a customer sharing their contact details with you to find out more when they are ready to buy.

In spite of the fact that we are all bombarded daily in our in-boxes, master marketers have combined the arts of strong copywriting and customer psychology to get past the sceptic reader and generate interest in them and their product over the ‘long term sales cycle’.

Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Survey 2009 found that ‘relevance’ of content of emails was the utmost priority of direct marketers using this medium. The second biggest challenge was gaining attention over competitors. Knowing one’s business, relationship development and information marketing all come together in strong copywriting in email campaigns.

There are 2 main functions to email marketing campaigns:

1 Collecting data about your prospects from your opt in box on your website, allowing you to customise your campaigns to warm markets. When used in conjunction with tracking your marketing campaign management will be more successful.

2 Automation of emails; if you were to have to send emails to all of your marketing leads individually, it would be extremely time-consuming and the campaign co-ordination and lead management would be nigh on impossible.

Here’s power to your clicks! : )

I would definitely recommend setting up your own Autoresponder email marketing software account. I’d say, in fact, it’s mandatory for any direct marketing success…

In times of increased competition and a plethora of marketing media, it is important to have a number of online marketing strategies in your arsenal to stay ahead of the game.

Return On Investment can be difficult to calculate in terms of marketing campaigns, unless set up right. It is important to monitor the time and costs incurred of any single campaign vis a vis sales generated as part of your planning and marketing strategy.

Some software will allow you to track click through rates to your web-site, so you can measure your success. Coupled with after-sales research and feedback, you know whether you are hitting your targets.

Email software may also facilitate maximising your ‘opt in’ rate or ‘digital foot-fall’ via tools to generate appropriate opt in boxes, where clients share their contact details in return for some benefit offered from doing so.

Aweber is one such email marketing software and stands out in terms of its success for deliverability of over 99% compared to competitors. It’s reliability and customer service are second to none in the industry and well worth checking out if you are looking to leverage the power of the internet for increasing sales.

If you are looking to learn more about how to make your email campaigns more successful and increase your bottom line, I have written more about these software systems on my site. Share some of your experiences of other software systems – gaffs, glitches, goals and glory! Which system do you prefer and why?

So Why Invest in Automated Email Software?

“Autoresponders are the greatest marketing invention ever created for the Internet, hands down!” – Forrester Research

Let’s Take A Closer Look at the Advantages of an Autoresponder System:

• Having your own email marketing software enables you to protect that most valuable of your assets as an entrepreneur, time management. Their administration can be out-sourced, as can the copywriting. Your need only be role the strategic planning and monitoring. Once set, you can forget and your software acts as your digital salesperson.
• Email marketing software enables you to capitalise on that equally important asset in direct marketing, your business leads. Being able to personalise your messages with the tools offered means that you are maintaining a relationship with your customers.
• This leads nicely into list building. Some email marketing software offer opt-in box tools, for you to maximise traffic from your web-site.
• Timed campaigns can be switched on and off according to events going on in the wider world: Christmas, Thanks-giving, New Year, Summer holidays, etc.
• If you are building up to a specific event, autoresponders enable you to give customers plenty of notice.
• Email software will allow you to broadcast messages without having to under-take previous key word research in order to get noticed – albeit your copy-writing and research of product and customer needs attention.
• Automated email campaigns allow you to do extra affiliate marketing. This can work well as an adjunct to your main messages in your ‘ps’.
• Video is increasingly taking precedence for relationship building, but some people just don’t feel comfortable with this medium. Emails allow your personality and brand to come forward in a no-pressure way.
• Never under-estimate the potential viral capacity, as your prospect forwards your message to other warm prospects, expanding your reach to ‘warm markets’. Digital media acts as a tool for ‘word of mouth’ recommmendation. Make your messages entertaining. We all love a laugh!
• As a team builder for instance in an MLM, replication of effort is vital to leverage income. Any email campaign you set up, can be duplicated by your downline, if you choose the right software that offers appropriate tools to do so.
• The option to set up separate lists of prospects to direct different campaigns to allows you to target your marketing messages according to whether your leads are ‘cold’, warm or hot, or what you believe their individual preferences may be. Emails which are automated make co-ordination of various campaigns more viable given shortages of time or staffing pressures.
• Depending upon your wider marketing strategy, there may be scope for linkage via the software to your own team of phone consultants who can do your telling and selling over the phone to your leads as a more ‘human face’ of your campaigns. This is all about the marketing mix and bringing the customer closer to you.
• Branding can be optimised through on-going contact. The intent of your email is simply to share the link to your online marketing pages with your email contact list. Rather than hard-selling, you’re simply sharing information by linking for instance to a company blog, where you can share your expertise or sharing the latest information or research on issues related to your products and services, with links to your sales pages. Recently, larger companies with bigger budgets are creating entertaining videos with no direct references to their products, only ‘sponsored by…’ The equivalent in small businesses might be videos of participation of staff in charitable events with humorous or ‘heart-warming’ story lines.
• Email marketing software is a powerful tool when integrated with other social media. E.g. They provide a complement to Twitter, MySpace, Facebook relationship marketing. Social media is a great forum for expressing ‘brand personality’. These can be links in generic emails, or form a ‘ps’ just to keep eyeballs on you for longer!!!

I’ll be returning to the theme of marketing mix strategies again, but would love to hear any additional comments you have to make about what your priorities are. Have you read the MarketingSherpa report? If so, what did you find helpful to your business development strategies? Feel free to post any questions here about Aweber, as this is my preferred choice and am just kicking off with it properly as we speak.




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