As a business owner you may be looking for ways to increase visits to your site and ultimately, purchases from your business. To do this, you need to constantly put yourself in front of your past, current, and future customers.

There are several ways you can create your newsletter. You can use your own email or you can use a program. There are free and paid programs you can use.

Free newsletter programs

Free programs usually have ads either at the top or the bottom of the newsletter. You have no control of what ads will appear, so you run the risk of having something that is in direct relation to what you offer or it may be something you wouldn’t want your readers to see or read.

To find free programs to use, do a Google search and see what you can find. You need to research each program that you find to see which one will work best for your needs. You will want to check to see if you have a maximum number of newsletters you can send for free. You will also want to see if there are a maximum number of subscribers you can have. Some programs will cap one or both of these for free users.

Paid Newsletter programs

Paid programs are better than free programs in many ways. You are able to use more themes, add pictures, and send out more newsletters. Most times with free programs, you either can’t use themes and pictures or you are very limited as to what you can use. With paid programs you have a large array of options.

Two of the most popular programs are constantcontact.com and aweber.com. Both of these programs allow you to use themes they provide or you can create your own based on headers and colors. You pay for a certain number of members and pictures.

One huge advantage to using a paid program is it looks professional. The more professional it looks, the more likely you are to have subscribers stay with you and refer you to others.

When you create your newsletters, you need to make sure that you are supplying your readers with high quality content. You also need to make sure you are creating content that is useful and helpful to your readers. You don’t want to use your newsletter to constantly advertise your business and add nothing else to it. It is ok to advertise your business and that’s important, but you don’t want to use your entire newsletter for this.

People want to read newsletters that will help them in some way or another. When you do this on a regular basis, you will grow your reader counts and you will keep your subscribers reading each time you create it.

        

You have a very nice growing list of subscribers to your newsletter. Sometimes it’s hard to find new ideas to add or if you’re new at this, what type of content you want. If you display your newsletter for visitors to read, then your goal is keep them interested and eventually become subscribers and of course, you want to keep your subscribers subscribed.

Here are seven ideas for newsletter content.

1. Newsletters are great for informing and keeping your subscribers/readers up-to-date on current happenings or coming events. Make announcements about online workshops, web conferencing or new project ideas. For something extra, you may want to publish special holiday editions during the holiday season.

2. Ask the expert, a question and answer or poll section. This is a great way to generate feedback, encourage participation and readers’ interest.

3. Product or e-book reviews. This is a benefit for you. By doing product or e-book reviews, it’s a great way to increase sales. You know the saying; people will buy from people they know and trust. Offering something of value is always a win-win situation and of course you want the best for your subscribers.

4. Offer a freebie. Who doesn’t like freebies? It could be anything really. If they subscribe to your newsletter, you can give them a sneak preview by allowing them to download a chapter or two of your e-book. If they are interested, they can purchase the e-book at a discounted price. The sky’s the limit when it comes to freebies.

5. Profile subscribers. This is a nice way of getting to know your subscribers and to show them your appreciation. Don’t you think they may have something to offer and share with the group that would be beneficial?

6. Helpful tips. You don’t need to have a full-fledged article for it to be considered informative and resourceful. Simple, easy to remember tips can go a long way.

7. Mix it up and offer a joke of the day, smile of the week, inspirational quotes or even a brain teaser. All work and no fun can become a stressful day. A quick pick-me-up can do the trick for early starters and late workers who need just a bit more energy before they call it a day.

Your newsletter doesn’t have to be long, but it needs to have useful content so you will get more subscribers and keep your current ones excited for your next update.

        

The number of newsletter opt-ins you get depends on how you market it. If you market it ineffectively, you may be missing out on opt-ins.

Here are 7 tips to increase your newsletter opt-ins:

1. Put the sign-up box in a visible location.

There are areas of your Web site that are more visible than others. If you’ve ever signed up for a Google Adsense account, you may know that Google has a heat map that shows which areas of the web page have the most visibility. (You can find the heat map by searching “adsense heat map” on Google.)

Typically, the upper area of the page has more visibility than the bottom of the page. The left sidebar has more visibility than the right sidebar. This is most likely because we read from left to right.

If you choose to have your newsletter sign-up box in a sidebar, try to have it in the left sidebar. Or if you only have a right sidebar, try redesigning your Web site to have a left sidebar instead.

2. Use article marketing.

Article marketing is where you write articles and distribute them for free. You get to promote your business at the end of your article. This section is called the resource box.

In your resource box, you can promote your newsletter and the URL to sign up for it.

3. Put the sign-up box on every page.

If you put the sign-up box on every page, you’ll increase the chance that the visitor will find it. Sometimes, your visitors may not land on your home page. So by putting the sign-up box on every page, they’ll still be able to find it.

4. Give a free report.

A free report gives an incentive for the visitor to subscribe to your newsletter. You can also create a small image of your report and put it on your web page. Doing this helps to catch your visitor’s attention.

5. List the benefits of subscribing.

Just like when selling products and services, you’ll want to list the benefits of subscribing to your newsletter. Write down what the visitor will get out of subscribing. Show how it will make your visitor smarter, richer, happier, or more attractive.

6. Request as little information as possible.

The more information you request from your visitor, the lower the chance you’ll get his subscription. He may be uncomfortable sharing some of his contact information.

Usually, you’ll only need her email address. You could request her first name too if you want to personalize your emails. But any more information than that is usually unnecessary.

7. Include a privacy statement.

Be sure to tell your visitors that their email address will never be shared with anyone. Tell them that their email address will only be used for the purpose of sending them the newsletter.

You could also add that you take their privacy very seriously and that they can unsubscribe at any time. This eases their fear of having their personal information shared with others.

        

There are many different factors which contribute to the effectiveness of link building. While some people may think it’s the number of links you have to your site that will help to improve your rankings in the search engine results pages, this is not always the case. There are many things that need to be considered before you have your site’s link added to another site. Here are some of the most important:

Trusted Domains

If you link to a domain that is trusted by Google and the page is relevant, this will pass on link juice. However, even if a web page is less relevant but with a powerful domain, the links will still be counted.

If you can get a link from a website that is in your niche community, this will help with the Topic Sensitive Page Rank. To get good ranking here, you’ll need to establish links from a niche website in a specific topical community. This is even effective if you can link to a new website in your niche community. Don’t overlook these sites just because they are new.

Page Rank

Google has recently changed the algorithms used to give page rank. This is due to the manipulation by many websites of the page ranking system. While page rank is important, don’t bypass the chance to link with pages that have a high PR and are only somewhat relevant.

Link Popularity

While page rank is a way to measure link popularity, this can be different for two websites. If a PR6 website has 1000 links and another with the same page rank has 7000, the one that has 7000 links is more valuable to link to.

You simply cannot measure the link popularity with the toolbar PR. Link analysis must be implemented as well. There are many free tools available that can be used to determine the number of links a website has. However, it is possible that Google may not count half of those links shown on these tools, so use this as a relative measure for link building. By consistently analyzing the links on the pages your site is linked to, you will soon see if a pattern emerges.

Link Popularity on Topic-Related Websites

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to rank in the SERP’s if you don’t have links to sites that are in your topical community. One way to distinguish between websites is to see if there are links of the same topic to other websites. This is a good indicator that the website is related to the topic of your webpage or site.

In Closing

Building links to websites that are in your topic community is the best way to work on raising your ranking in the SERP’s. Choose sites that are reputable and trusted. Realize that increasing your ranking will not happen overnight, but if you practice “white hat” techniques, you will see results. As always, avoid buying links or using link farms to try and improve your ranking.

        

One of the most important reasons to link building is that it opens new avenues through related websites and directories that help bring in more visitors who maybe otherwise would not of found your site or services.

So how do you go about implementing link building?

There are an array of options that can attract related websites to link to your website such as direct link request through email, internal linking throughout you own site, links offered to reviews, directory links, blogs, great content, reciprocal linking, inbound links and much more.

The key is offering something on your site that others want to share with their visitors. Offering a free tool that someone can download and place on their website or in their favourites. Strong content with targeted keywords that give visitors a different insight for services or tools that maybe a linking website does not have but wants their visitors to know about it. Even getting on to blogs and talking about your website and asking for help from other colleagues to look at your site is a great way to build links.

Requesting links from webmaster to webmaster can be a daunting task and takes lots of time. Though effective, it can be very time consuming and all encompassing. Nevertheless, it is still a beneficial way to build links and can be extremely rewarding over time.

Whichever way you go about Link Building the main objective is taking action and building those links to and from your website. Take action and find out how many links you have at the moment and how you can better optimise your website to build a better site. Check out our search engine compatibility report or request a monthly strategic Internet marketing tool. Both give you an insight on how to target each page within your website more and what needs to be done to do this.