In fact, that is just one example of how email marketing can integrate so well with other forms of social media. After all, getting your content out to your email list is great, but getting that content out to the rest of the world is better, right? It brings people back to your site and hopefully builds your list and, therefore, the number of potential prospects for your product or service.

We’ve written a primer on getting started in blogging for your business, so feel free to read that post to get you started. The point here is that you can write a post for your blog and then use that post as content for your email. After all, don’t assume that the people on your email list are all reading your blog. They probably aren’t, so let’s get them going there. It saves you time by re-purposing your content AND gets more traffic going to your site. In fact, some very successful email marketers simply send out their blog posts every few days or every week as their email content.

So, now you’ve got periodic emails regularly going out to your list. How do you continue to build that list outside of adding the people to whom you become introduced in the normal course of your business day? Remember: Your list is your database for potential clients, affiliates and partners, and therefore, arguably one of your business’s most valuable resource. In the old days (just a few years ago), the primary way to attract new customers was to spend a great deal of your hard earned cash on push advertising using television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Those mediums are still valuable, but email marketing, when done right, can be an exponentially more cost-effective means of attracting qualified people to your product or service.

Back to building your list. Your next step should be to put a short form on your web site so that visitors can add themselves (opt-in) to your email list 24/7. To increase the effectiveness of your subscriber opt-in process, think of some valuable piece of information that you give them in exchange for submitting their name and email address to you. Yeah… a bribe! Go back to part one of this series and look at the example email content subjects. Any of those would work well for this purpose.

To expand upon those examples, a law firm could create a report entitled, “Inheritance: Protecting your lifelong assets for your loved ones.” A real estate agent could create, “Secrets to finding wealth-creating real estate assets in a down economy”. And a home heating oil/AC service company could create, “5 year-round cash saving tips you can do yourself for pennies”. As you would for email content topics, think of common questions or problems experienced by your customers, or mistakes you see customers commonly making. Think of a topic, create the product and have your webmaster post the PDF (or video if you’re a bit more ambitious!) and start promoting that link.

How do you promote that link throughout the Internet so that people opt in to your list? Hint: It has a lot to do with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media of which you haven’t yet taken full advantage. We’ll cover that in depth for you in part 3.

First, why use email marketing? Because it is a very cost-effective way of communicating with your prospects and clients. The more often you communicate to these important people, and do so with life-benefiting information, the more likely they will see you as a trusted expert and your product as one they should consider. Notice I didn’t just say, “the more often you email them a sales pitch about your product…”, because people don’t want to be solicited. We want to be given value. That is the key to effective email marketing.

As your fist step, you need a list of people to email. Hopefully, you’ve been keeping a database of names and email addresses of customers and the people who inquire about your product or service. Your list is key. If you have no such list, begin now by compiling one. Start by… creating an Excel spreadsheet of your customer’s names and emails. There is no magic number of names in order to start. If you have 27, start with 27. The most important thing to do is just start!

Next, how will you mail to your list? To do emailing correctly, you need a service into which you can upload your list and then compose and send your email. Vertical Response and Constant Contact are two services I would recommend. A more robust service that the emailing pros use is AWeber. AWeber has some great features including autoresponders that will send out emails on a pre-determined schedule or automatically when someone responds to your message in some way.

This brings up the subject of permission-based emailing. You can send unsolicited emails, but you risk services like AOL locking you out if people using AOL complain that they are receiving unwanted email from you. You can also be restricted by your service provider if they get too many complaints and you can risk getting flagged as spam by people’s servers when you try to email them. Unlike Vertical Response or Constant Contact, AWeber won’t let you send out unsolicited emails. Your audience MUST agree to receive emails from you. In fact, your first campaign from AWeber must be an email that literally asks them if they wish to receive information from you–and if so, to agree and then confirm. Once you make it through that step, you’re home free. Why go through that hassle? Because your emails are now fully permission-based so that they will make it through the spam filters and will most likely be more read by more recipients. Email programs and servers are getting much smarter. They know if you’ve been given permission to send email.

So, you now have your list and a service through which to send them. Now, what do you send? Send the people on your list information that will benefit them. Think of questions people ask you. Think of important topics that people are unaware of, but need to know. Think if current news topics that relate to your business, product or service.

Let me give you some examples. Say you are a day care facility. How about “7 little known cost cutting measures that will benefit your child.” or “3 tax benefits of which you’re probably not taking full advantage.” or “Questions you need to ask any perspective babysitter before they care for your child.” or “The single most dangerous food ingredient, and how to know if your child is being effected by it.” or “How to save money buying clothes for your child.” or “Vaccinations: The two sides of the argument” and so on.

Say you are a Yoga facility. How about: “How to shovel snow without adding strain to your back.” or “Why you’re probably not getting enough water.” or “Milk: What may it be doing to your bones that you’re unaware of?” or “How to improve your work and disposition by a 10 minute meditation at your desk.” or “The most neglected muscle and why you should pay attention.”

One more. Say you’re a bed and breakfast. How about: “Planning the most romantic getaway ever.” or “Great things to do in New York’s Hudson Valley.” or “Three key considerations when choosing a bed and breakfast.” or “What most people don’t think about when planning a long weekend getaway.” or “How to save money while having the 3 day weekend trip of your dreams.”

Notice what they all have in common. They’re providing value, not a sales pitch. None of them are: “Why you need Yoga.” or “The top 3 reasons our Bed and Breakfast is the best.” or “Why more parents prefer our day care facility over the others.” These types of messages will be ignored and people will opt out. Wouldn’t you? So, keep them focused on a value you can provide people that is related to your expertise or product/service. Only then, will your audience see you as a leader in your field and an indispensable expert they’ll want to seek out should they need your product or service.

By the way, didn’t all those topics sound like blog topics? Yes they did, and in part two we will show you how a blog integrates perfectly with a good email strategy.

The reporter with whom I spoke yesterday was intrigued, and welcomed my contrarian outlook on the economy. I told him that companies are still spending money on marketing, and the good ones always will. I told him the creative freelancers I know continue to fill their days with paying work. I told him that Redlake’s most recent three clients are in or related to the real estate business(!) and have hired us to create strategic marketing strategies. They’re planning.

Last night I heard for the gazillionth time a popular and self-serving Washington cliche, and for the first time, it made an impact on me. “We want to get the economy working again.” Well, the fact is that the US economy IS working and has been steadily for the past 225 years. There are plenty of places around the world to remind us what a non-working economy looks and feels like! But, this is not a political discussion-for that let’s hang out sometime. Rather, this is my assurance to you that while the economy is in a downturn, there are LOTS of people making great money and the same can be done by anyone reading this.

Here’s how: First, recognize that you must focus on delivering an exemplary quality of work now more than ever. Picking up a regular paycheck by doing “good enough” and taking your clients for granted was never a prescription for grand success, but is less so now. So, how would YOU answer these six questions:

1. What is your written plan for success?
2. How much of each day do you engage in income-relevant training?
3. Exactly how are you applying that training?
4. What is your level of engagement in on-line social media? I don’t mean looking a recent Letterman episodes on YouTube, but instead, reaching out and joining the discussion related to your skills or profession.
5. What three things within your control can do you this week to improve the quality of your product or service?
6. What income-supplementing activities can you enlist outside of your professional job requirements? Examples include multilevel marketing of a great product, active participation in the stock market and selling your knowledge on the Internet. Don’t know how? Then learn! (see #2 above)

Getting your personal economy working doesn’t require an act of Congress! It requires you to take personal responsibility for producing the absolutely best product or service of which you’re capable, and then effectively marketing that product or service to the broadest possible audience. Not sure how? Start by reading aloud your answers to those half dozen questions!

Now, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all trying to figure out the best use of social media for commerce. There are plenty of national brands with their own Facebook account and Twitter page, but the jury is still out on how well that actually sells their product. Clearly, the gentleman I spoke of above has a contrarian view, but I think it’s worth mentioning because he said some things that I thought were instructive.

This internet marketer drew boxes on the board, each containing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. and said, “I look at each of these as a party”. When you go to a party and introduce yourself to people, you don’t just start by… telling people all about the benefits of buying your product or giving them testimonials. Instead, you tell them some personal things about yourself. You’ll probably talk about what you do for a living, but it’s not a pitch. The point here is that social media, in this guy’s opinion, is a party where you are making friends. You’re telling stories, sharing experiences and getting to know people better.

He then said that his blog is like his home. It contains cool stuff that visitor might like to see and experience. Again, not a sales pitch. So after he meets people on Linkedin (a party), for instance, he invites them to his blog (his home). After getting to know him better by coming to his blog, people may be inclined to tell their friends about him. After a while enough people get to know him and trust him and perhaps respect his professional skills, they might choose to buy his product. But that purchase isn’t forced through his social networking or blog. Those purchases are a consequence of familiarity. Sound a bit like traditional brand marketing?

I’m playing right now with Twitter and trying to figure out my best use of it. I would suggest taking the plunge into one or more of the many available social networking and media sites to see what you might find – or who might find you. As my friend above said, perhaps consider it a party where you meet people and you each learn about each other. Don’t pitch. Meet and greet. If you’re nice, you never know how many parties to which he might invite you.

First, writing a blog positions you as a thought leader. Assuming you know how to promote it, your blog provides ideas that help people, and by doing so, demonstrates your knowledge in your particular specialty. (After reading this post for example, you might think I know something about the internet.) Again, however, you must… promote it. If your blog and all its brilliant prose sits on your server with no one but you and a few friends and relatives reading it, you’ll get little business value from it.

There are several ways to promote your blog. First make it prevalent on your site so that visitors will see it. You should also send out occasional emails to your list highlighting your recent posts with links back to the blog. There are also services that allow you to distribute your posts to a list simply and sometimes automatically. Feedblitz is one of the more popular services.

Second, it helps search. A lot. You’ve probably heard this: Search engines love sites with lots of pages, lots of good relavent content and lots of frequent changes. Well, blogs accomplish all of the above. A blog gives you the opportunity to create new pages of content that are relavent to your readers and your market. And it helps you create those pages MUCH easier than getting your programmer to create a new page on your site.

How do you become relavent? By thinking about what your clients ask you and also by looking on the web for questions being asked by the masses. Go to Google and type the type of service you provide followed by the word “forums” or “discussion”. For example, if you sell hardware, Google “Hardware forums”. Forums are on-line discussions usually started with a particular question or problem people are having. Look through these discussions and you should have lots of great topics to use a blog post subjects.

Here’s a tip: Use the phrase of your topic throughout your blog post so that it has the best chance of being picked up when someone searches using that phrase. For example, I should be using the phrase “writing good blog posts” or “Why create a blog on my web site” or “how to write a blog”. Those phrases, used sparingly throughout a post will draw search. Did I mention how to write a blog?

Third, creating a blog on your web site (did you catch how I used that phrase again?) helps you develop material for future use. A year of weekly blog posts could be a book. A month or two could be an eBook. Books position you as a world-class expert and eBooks can be used as add-on extras to your product or service, and can also be sold on-line. Consider the benefits of selling your eBook or physical book on line 24/7. Making money while you sleep is a wonderful concept!

And best of all, getting started is cheap and easy. Services such as Blogger, Typepad and WordPress can get you started within an hour or two. WordPress is even free if you host it on your server. Don’t know what that means? Then pay a couple bucks and go to WordPress.com and get started.

Creating a blog on your web site was never easier, cheaper and more benefitial. Happy bloggng!