Newsletters can be a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. They help to create trust, build brand recognition, and establish you as the expert. Here are a few tips to help you take your newsletters to the next level.

1. Know your readers.

Although your newsletter should promote your business, its primary function is to build relationships with prospects and customers. Be sure to discuss topics that are relevant and interesting to your readers. If they know they’ll be getting useful information, they’ll continue to subscribe.

2. Make it unique.

If you want your newsletter to get noticed (and read), make it different. Add a touch of personalization by including a snapshot from your office, a video message from your staff, a link to an entertaining website, etc. Don’t be afraid to portray emotion and personality.

3. Take time for design.

The visual appeal of your newsletter has a lot to do with its success. The right design can captivate your audience before they read a single word. Create a design that is clean, simple, and reinforces your brand.

4. Solicit feedback.

Include your readers by asking for comments on your articles or stories. They’ll feel welcomed and you will get feedback on what you can do to improve and what your readers really like.

5. Include your contact information.

Although your goal isn’t to sell through your newsletter, you probably wouldn’t object to an occasional sale. So make sure readers have a way to reach you if they feel the urge to buy now.

Implement the above steps and your newsletter will help convert your readers into lifelong customers.

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A few months ago I heard a radio commercial for McDonald’s.

I’m not a big fan of general advertising, but I thought this commercial was moderately clever and effective.

In the commercial, a guy walks into work late carrying a cup of McDonald’s coffee.

The irate boss berates him: “You’re late because you stopped and bought a cup of McDonald’s coffee?”

“Nope,” the worker replies.

“What do you mean, nope?” the boss says, irritated. “It’s right in your hand.”

“But I didn’t BUY this cup of McDonald’s coffee,” our hero corrects him. “I got it FREE when I went to McDonald’s and bought a delicious breakfast meal.”

What they are selling, of course, is not the brand or the food.

They are selling the offer: buy a breakfast and get the coffee free.

As all direct marketers know, offers are essential for generating advertising response…and free offers are usually the most attractive.

Take Oreck vacuum cleaners, for instance.

In their mailings, the offer is a risk-free home trial of their 8-pound vacuum cleaner.

The incentive to respond is a gift – specifically, a free “dust buster” type of handheld mini-vacuum.

But now, you see more and more general advertisers taking a cue from direct marketing—and creating and promoting strong offers designed to get the cash register to ring.

For example, my local dry cleaner recently made this special offer: bring in any two garments to dry clean, and we will launder your shirts for just $1 each.

A local Italian restaurant puts out free bread (a common practice in restaurants), but accompanies it with a plate of fine aged parmesan.

One of the best offers out there, in my opinion, is the free coffee maker from Gevalia Coffee.

The deal is this: get one monthly shipment of coffee at a discount price, and they will send you a free coffee maker.

It’s a handsome machine, and it makes great coffee (I should know; we have one in our kitchen).

What kind of offer can you make your prospects that could attract more business and sales?

Here’s a quick checklist to get you started:

* Stress your guarantee (“satisfaction guaranteed or your money back”).

* Let your prospects use the product for a month without risk—meaning if they don’t like it, they can return the merchandise for a full refund (“send for your FREE 30-day home trial”).

* Give them a discount…with a reason for the discount, if possible (“save 40% during our 25th anniversary sale”).

* Be like Oreck and Gevalia: give them a free bonus gift with their order (“reply now and get this valuable FREE bonus gift”).

* Or, have a two for one sale (“buy one, get one free”). This works well for products the prospect wants more than one of, such as cleaning fluids or plastic storage containers for the kitchen.

* Offer to pay return shipping charges via UPS if your customers decide to return the product for a refund (“if you’re not 100% satisfied, we’ll come to your door, pick it up, and take it away—entirely at our expense”).

* Make a logical connection between the product and the offer, e.g. the Sovereign Society, a financial newsletter on offshore investing, offered a free Swiss bank account to new subscribers.

One more tip: if you can’t think of a reason to justify why you are making a special offer, get creative.

A record store, for example, could have a half-price sale—one day only—on Elvis’s birthday.

No logical tie-in for your product? Create your own. If you run a photography studio, declare this month “National Family Togetherness Month”…and send out a press release to the media suggesting a family portrait to celebrate.

A good source of ideas is Chase’s Calendar of Events, which gives you all the special events and celebrations for every month, week, and day of the year that there is one.

By the way, although I have spent the last 3 decades in direct marketing, my first few years were spent working in general marketing (for a couple of large corporations selling big-ticket products to business and government buyers).

Our ads (this was way before the World Wide Web) always told the prospect about the product and its many benefits.

But there was never an offer. We almost never told the prospect, “Respond to this ad today, and you will get these specific materials, information, services, benefits, or bonus.”

Then in one ad, we offered a “free engineering design guide”—and response rates soared.

The conclusion: offers are vital to generating a healthy response to your marketing. And they work in both consumer and business marketing.

For instance, a local janitorial service was willing to clean a plant or factory at no cost to demonstrate the quality of its services and hook new accounts who would hire them as their regular janitorial service.

Now, I said a minute ago that free offers are best. But there is a known direct marketing principle, called “the magic of a dollar”, that says offering something for a penny or a dollar can be as effective—or sometimes even more so, since it is less common.

In this case, the janitorial service sent a letter with a penny glued to the upper right corner of page one.

The copy said, “We will clean your entire plant or office for a penny…and I’ve even enclosed the penny, so it really costs you nothing!”

Mailing stamps or money with your direct mail letter is an old trick…and yes, it worked like gangbusters.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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It’s their collection of the best ads, headlines, bullet points etc and they use it for their “guided inspiration”.

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Likewise, I keep my own swipe file as well, and much more!

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Are you looking for the perfect Amazon auto-posting plugin?

You have come to the right place!

You know Amazon carries EVERYTHING and people worldwide trust the Amazon brand as a vendor. Install the WP Amaz-One plugin into WordPress gives you the freedom to set up more commercial blogs in niches you would never have previously considered.

Even as a site flipper, you can designed an Amazon-selling blog in 2 hours and resell it for +$50 profit or more. WP Amaz-One is fully functioning, feature-rich and come with UNLIMITED LICENSE in only one affordable price. As the Amazon API changes, you’ll get ALL updates for FREE!

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Our story starts in February, when Danny Sullivan saw that something had changed at Google. I mean, we heard something was in the wind when Matt Cutts mentioned that Google planned to take action against “content farms” shortly before, so it wasn’t like what happened was any big surprise.

And it wasn’t just Danny noticing. SEOs from all over the Web had seen significant changes to their organic traffic, but this important algorithm shift had no label until Danny called it the “Farmer” update in his SearchEngineLand.com blog.

Yet, when Google admitted to the update (which affected nearly 12% of all pages in the U. S.), they decided that they’d rather call it “Panda,” because it was more “friendly” and because they didn’t want people to think that they were specifically targeting content farms.

But they were targeting content farms and more. And thousands of websites immediately lost their traffic and were scrambling to figure things out.

Some major sites were affected by Panda, too. Suite101.com, for example, lost 94% and EzineArticles.com lost 90% of their organic traffic. There was no doubt that the devastation was a crushing blow to sites using only “duplicate” rather than the original content that Google wants to see.

That’s not to say that your site will be penalized if it holds some duplicate content. But if it’s ALL duplicate content or content “scraped” from other sites, you’ll want to pay close attention…

If your site was affected, you may have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic since the end of February. You can also check your positions in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if keyword positions have radically changed over the past 30 days.

But if your investigation proves that the Panda has bitten you, don’t worry. You can get your rankings back. Here are five things you can do to improve your image with Google:

1. Remove any pages with “scraped” content. Content that you didn’t create yourself, such as article reprints or blog “excerpt” posts with no original content added to back those up. Even very large sites with just a few such pages are feeling the bite, so if you think your site is too big to be bothered, you may want to think again.

2. Keep outside advertising to a minimum. It’s OK to have one or two ads on a page with a significant amount of content, but if you have a site where the ads outweigh the content or your site looks like a used car lot with streamers, banners, and blinking ads everywhere, get rid of that stuff! It’s going to hurt you.

3. Be sure that your customers have a way to contact a human being. If you’re writing a blog, be sure to respond to your comments. If your site is an e-commerce site, a membership site, or a stand-alone website, be sure that people have a way to contact you or at least your support department by mail, email, and telephone. Live chat isn’t a bad idea, either. Google wants to see human interaction or at least the potential for it.

4. Do everything you can to get traffic. Send social media outlets to your blog or web page, use paid media buys, do whatever it takes to get people interested in your site because Google wants to see some traffic coming in and they are counting your “authority” in social arenas, too.

5. Get quality backlinks. Don’t buy them ever. Google hates that. But you can guest post on other blogs in your niche, or submit to quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, or JoeAnt.com, for example (just be sure that the directory is human edited or it won’t count).

Though Google ins’t the only search engine on the block, it still gets the most traffic and will give you the best results if you optimize for it. Take some time now to figure out whether the Panda has bitten you, and then follow the steps above.

The bottom line is…Give Google the quality, unique content that it wants because there’s nothing more valuable than the bucket loads of targeted, free, converting traffic that Google supplies.

Take care of Google and it will most definitely take care of you.

Still worried about Panda? Here are more steps you can take to can improve your rankings, whether or not your site was bitten by the bear:

1) Care about your visitors

The overall user experience is important, not just to Google but to your customers. Be sure that your site design and usability are set to “easy,” keep ad-to-content ratio low, and work on brand perception. Keep your brand in their minds and on your pages.

If you’re already there…Great! You’re doing the right things.

2) Are you concentrating on awareness?

After ensuring all content on your site is high quality, be sure to consider your engagement with customers through social media channels. Promote your brand awareness with Facebook pages and Twitter. Work toward achieving “authority” in social media sites by getting as many Retweets and Likes as possible.

Focus on your customers’ experience interacting with your company. Let them know that there are real people behind it.

3) Have one kind of advertising, not several…

If you have a site or blog running AdSense, Kontera (or other link advertising), and banners, choose one form of advertising and stick to that. Too many forms just ring Google’s bell and could hurt your chances for higher rankings.

And if you’re already doing these things? Celebrate! You have appeased the gods of Google.

Extracted from StomperNet NewsFlash, April 22, 2011.

One of the most powerful tools you can have is the WPDrip plugin, which allows you to provide specific content on specific dates to your members.

This plugin easily turns your WordPress blog into a membership site that releases content incrementally so your members will not be overloaded with information, and can better progress with the knowledge they can receive at a steady, scheduled pace.

Think about it…

Your membership site ACTUALLY works like a virtual assistant giving your members access to the information when you want while you are doing the things that matter most to you.

But there is even more. There are some incredible NEW features and strategies that you NEED to know to start using immediately if not sooner.

My buddy Ryan Deiss just uncovered a source of FREE web traffic bigger than Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook…

(drumroll)…..COMBINED! Seriously!

This changes everything! This is easily the biggest IM breakthrough of 2011.

This traffic source is why GIANTS like Forbes, Agora and Boardroom couldn’t care less about Google, Facebook, Bing or ANY website for traffic.

He just made a FREE video that spills the beans.

Go watch it NOW!

Do you know about these secret codes that corporations and savvy marketers are using right under your nose?

They’re called QR Codes, and the technology is POWERFUL.

You can deploy this powerful too as a WordPress plugin now! Check out the short video here to see what I mean.

Auto Backlink Bomb is a killer at creating backlinks to your site, which translates to more incoming traffic. How? It is basically a forum profile link submitter. With it you can register into forums which run on MyBB, SMF, Elgg and Expression Engine as well as the PhPfox platform. It already comes with some links built in for you (about 1500 links in total), but with the software you also get a link finder for scraping links from the above forum types, as well as a good guide on using it and a HubPages comment poster.

Who has ever thought of forum backlinks? You may have heard of search engine backlinks, comment backlinks etc., and having diverse types of backlinks surely help. Once you create a standard profile with ABB, the software will place a short bio and include a keyword (anchor text) link back to your site. So the whole concept is an automated way of building another type of backlink to your sites.

For such an effective software, ABB:

* is only available for a one-time payment
* has lifetime updates
* creates thousands of profile backlinks all on autopilot!