Personally I have always been a bit sceptical about the masses of testimonials you often see on sales pages.
How do these people either get several well known marketers to supply testimonials, or a huge list of members to provide them?
Do they pay them a fee for supplying them or just generate a large amount of hype to get them worked up?
Why do they rarely give you full details of these people so that if you are interested you can contact them directly, to hear it from them directly?

Well, I believe that a new software that has just been published for $27 answers that question, this software claims to allow you to write a testimonial in minutes. This will increase my sceptisism of testimonials, because program producers can write them for their members to put their names to for free membership or something of the nature, that is assuming these people are genuine members.
Of course a post like this will generate a certain amount of controversy, because a lot of them rely on testimonials to make sales, but how much can you trust them?

I hope you realise this is purely a personal opinion, I am sure that the producer of this program did it with the bast of intentions, but it could very easily be abused.

To become a successful internet marketer nowadays you need to do something to attract people to you.

It is no good chasing leads all over the internet, because if they don’t know and trust you the chances of them buying from you are very slim.

There are so many people out there that are simply interested in taking your money and not following up or seeing if you are benefiting from their products that they fail to build any trust.

Would you ever buy from them again?
I think the answer to that question must be NO.

To be able to sell consistently you have to build a relationship with your potential customers, give them what they need before you try to sell them anything.
If they contact you to ask any questions, give them a straightforward answer, without selling them anything. Do this for a while and they will begin to trust you and then will be more likely to buy what you are selling.

Start your communication with new prospects by giving them something they need, whether it is information, advice, or a product. Get them to input their name and email when you give them your product, and follow up with useful advice and help.
Build a relationship with them and freely give your expertise to them. You do not need to know a lot more than them, just enough so that they come to look on you as their friend and an expert in whatever area you are discussing.

If you set up information where they can access it, through a blog, website, Squidoo page, you tube profile, or something similar, they will be able to find you and you provide them with useful tips on whatever subject you wish to.
This is how to start building your relationships with internet users that hopefully will become your customers, and friends.
Once you start building like this they will be likely to suggest others come to you for the help and advice they need.

The answer to the above question is definitely YES, email marketing is still an extremely valid form of promotion.

The headline needs to draw the reader in, make it a question, give them the answer to a problem, make them curious.
If you don’t make the headline appealing in some way they will never read the body of the email.

Open whenever possible with the recipients name, as most marketing emails are generated with the use of an autoresponder that is not hard to do.

Start the body with the most important statement, you only have few seconds to get the readers attention and if the opening statement doesn’t hold their attention they will just delete the email and you’ve lost them.

Anything you wish to emphasise use a bulleted list as that is much easier to read than a big block of text, you need to do this because most readers will just scan the text and not read it fully.
Just include the necessary amount of information, unless it is extremely well written most people wont read a long email that is used to promote a product. Insert a call to action on the part of the reader, one of the most powerful statements you can put in is ‘click here’, this tells the reader what they need to do.

Always finish with your name and possibly a link to your website or something that they may remember you by.
Lastly try to add a P.S. a lot of readers will simply read the headline then skip to the bottom of the message.
In the P.S. put another call to action.

One mistake I see a lot of people making is that they put too many links into the email, if there is more than one link in an email the reader will simply get confused as to what link you want them to click on and just delete the message, so none of it will get read.

You may think that if you are sending emails through a list builder where the reader has to click a link outside the body of the email to get their points that they will go to the web page that you want them to go to anyway, that is not necessarily the case, if the email was of interest they will be more likely to follow up on the web page, if not they will just collect their points then delete the page.

Most newcomers to internet marketing use list-builders to get their information out to their potential clients.
To do this they join list building programs such as:

1. List Joe
2. the List Auction
3. Viral Url
4. List DotCom

These are just a few of the many list building programs available on the internet today, and new ones are appearing all the time.

These programs are a good starting point to building your own list or promoting a product or opportunity you are involved in.

However one thing you need to be careful of when you are promoting through these is their email personalisation facilities.
The majority of these programs allow you to personalise your emails so that when they are opened the recipients name is inserted into them.
A lot of affiliate programs supply you with pre-written emails for you to send out that have a personalisation code written in, they would open with something like:
Dear {Firstname}, {Firstname} is the code that the autoresponder uses to insert the recipients first name into the message.
That code will only work for specific autoresponders, if the list builder uses a different autoresponder the code will be different. Here are some example personalisation codes used by specific programs to insert the first name:

1. List Joe, The List Auction               {FIRSTNAME}
2. ViralUrl                                        {firstname}
3. ListDotCom                                   [[NAME]]

As you can see from these examples there are several differences, if you don’t change them to the correct coding all the recipients will see is what was originally written on the copy you received from your program. (Dear {Firstname})

You need to read the instructions on sending emails from your list building program to make sure you use the correct code for that program, if it does not allow personalisation you are better to either remove the code all together or change it to something like, Dear Friend.

Not doing that will reduce the chances of your email being opened, I know I generally ignore an email if that simple rule is not followed as do many of my colleagues.

Following on from my last post ‘When free is not really free’ This is software that really is Free.

When did you last buy a major item of software, recently I expect but you thought that you needed to have it and paid out a lot of money for it.
Well a lot of major software items are available for free. Open Office: a full featured office suite, fully compatible with Microsoft office, it comes with: word processor, spreadsheet, database and basic drawing program. One advantage it has over Microsoft office is that the word processor has a built in PDF writer, so you can write a book or report and publish it directly as a PDF, without the need for any other software. It is available from: http://openoffice.org

GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Program) This open source software is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, although not quite a sophisticated new plugins are being developed all the time. The facilities it offers should be perfectly acceptable to most normal users and it is free. It is available from: http://gimp.org/

The last one I am going to mention this time is a web browser and email client that are produced by the Mozilla Organisation, they are FireFox and Thunderbird. Firefox is probably the most widely used browser within the internet marketing world, simply because it is more efficient and secure than Internet Explorer, I have been using it ever since it came out and it is getting more popular all the time. Thunderbird is a good email client, I find works better than Outlook Express that comes with Windows Check these out at: http://www.mozilla.com/ These are just some of the many first class products available for free, I will be adding more later