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This is a somewhat advanced email marketing tactic, although most serious email marketers having been doing it for years. For me though, this is something I’ve only recently been able to test because I haven’t had the technological resources to do so.

I recently upgraded my AWeber account to the “new” version. In case you missed the news about the new AWeber upgrades, the CEO Tom Kulzer and his team recently rolled out some nice advanced email marketing features.

The features let you create segmentations in your lists based on various elements, such as who opened your email and who clicked your links within the emails. There are other options as well, but for the purpose of this article let’s just focus on these two basic segmentations.

Before upgrading my account I was on the legacy version of AWeber, which is basically the same service, except I didn’t have as much power to segment my lists and consequently, beyond deciding which list I would broadcast too, I didn’t do much else. As a result, I generally hit all my newsletter with each message - a shotgun approach to email marketing.

Unfortunately (or really, fortunately) for me, my list is probably a bit larger than the average at AWeber, and with their new services came a new pricing structure, which meant I would pay more than five times per month than what I was previously, if I decided to upgrade. I eventually decided to bite the bullet because I know how good a service it is, how important my newsletter is to my business, and of course the primary reason - so I could test the new features.

Luckily for most of you reading this, if you are just starting out your email newsletter, the AWeber fee hasn’t really changed even for the new features. You’re still going to pay the very justified price of around the sub-$20 a month mark for a business-critical service. In my case, with some 40,000+ members of my newsletter, the fee is a little bit more.

In case you haven’t started your newsletter, here’s my review to help you decide whether AWeber is right for you - AWeber Email Autoresponder Review.

Now let me explain how I made use of the new features and how you can implement these advanced email marketing techniques…

The Problem With The Shotgun Approach

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How To Create Recruitment Systems To Hire People Before You Need Them

I was recently asked how I hired quality editors when running my previous business BetterEdit. As I responded to the question I realized the information provided might well serve others, so I’m going to explain my system for staying on top of the recruitment process here in this blog post.

Before I begin, a brief caveat - this system as I implemented it only worked because I had a website that received a continuous stream of traffic from Google. It was by no means a huge amount of people, perhaps a few hundred daily unique visitors, but because the traffic was targeted and due to the supply and demand ratio for editors versus work, I was in a good position to make the following system work.

However, that doesn’t mean this can’t work for you if you don’t have consistent search engine traffic or if the dynamics of the employment market in your industry are not as favorable, you just have to work a little harder to find the good people and bring in the traffic. If your website already receives consistent search engine visitors then you are position to immediately benefit from this technique, so make sure you write this down on your to-do list after you finish reading.

Slow Companies Fail

If you read Rich Schefren’s recent report, the Uncertainty Syndrome, you may remember he talked about hiring solutions that bring good people to work for your company BEFORE you need them.

Due to the speed of today’s markets, those who are quick and stay ahead of the curve generally win. Your company is only as good as the people working for it. If you combine those two ideas, then it makes sense you need the best people working for your business and you need them yesterday.

Think about any time you learned something new that you just knew you could apply to your business and immediately benefit from it, yet you don’t personally have the time to do it (nor does it make sense that you do it - it’s not your core strength), none of your current staff are available to take on the role and of course hiring new staff is never quick if you start from scratch. By the time you have the right person you’ve missed the boat - the market has moved on to the next thing and your prospective customers have already been captured by faster-moving competitors.

An even more common problem in successful organizations is business growth. In order for your business to take the next step you need help. Perhaps you require someone to take on the extra administration responsibilities, new talent to deliver the services your company provides, added customer support, maybe a project manager or a new tech person to help handle increasing technology demands.

If you are hiring reactively, then every stage of growth is hindered significantly by each new hire you have to make. This can be such a huge problem that you have to turn down work, work that is your company’s core strength that you would love to take on, simply because you don’t have the capacity to deliver the results due to limited resources. That’s VERY frustrating for an entrepreneur.

Be Proactive

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During the last few live question and answer sessions with my Blog Mastermind students at least one person every call asks for help determining whether they have a good choice for a blog topic.

Given that new people join the program each week, it’s not surprising that question crops up over and over again. Everyone new to blogging faces the challenge of topic selection as the first big hurdle, and while I can never offer the “right” solution, as only the market can tell you that, I do my best to offer my suggestions and tips for conducting research to aide with topic selection.

What Topic Is Right?

Topic selection for a blog is similar to niche selection for a business. What you decide to write about determines what type of audience you attract and how you make money from that audience. In today’s e-commerce landscape, content is the driving force behind traffic and purchasing decisions online, so topic selection is a big deal.

Today I want to offer a simple answer to this problem, to help choose what topic and niche is right for you. I say simple because it’s possible to make this a very complicated choice, with in-depth keyword research, market analysis and other assessable factors weighing in on the decision process.

Unfortunately I find that many people who do extensive research become paralyzed. With more data comes more awareness of the different variables at play. Sometimes knowing less is a good thing because it gives you a clear next step - an action you can take that actually moves you closer to a result.

This is especially important for newbies and people with personalities that demand they know everything about everything before taking that first step into the big wide world. As someone new to Internet marketing, learning about all the different ways to research a potential topic may be so much work and such a big learning curve that it takes months before any action is taken to actually test the topic in the market.

You have to learn how to choose a niche before even choosing a niche!

I’m not saying you should bury your head in the sand and take a leap of faith when choosing a topic, but you can certainly make it easier on yourself.

Spotting Opportunities

Let me explain how I have selected topics for the businesses I have run in the past. In almost all circumstances the process has gone something like this -

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It’s not quite as easy as the title makes it sound, but bear with me, this article will explain the three steps that are the foundation of every Internet business, why so many people go wrong and give you some realizations that might just be the key to take your Internet business to the next level…

I’ve been studying resources lately designed to teach Internet business, but not just introductory materials, content that goes beyond beginners and is intended to take you to making making millions online.

In my case I’m interested in advanced topics that I can apply to what I do and fill my current knowledge gaps to take the next step forwards. While hunting for those elusive gold nugget ideas I invariably scan the introductory materials and learn with interest how this particular person or organization cover the basics - how they suggest you get traffic and make sales.

My studies have led me to the conclusion that Internet business is actually quite easy. Explained in simple terms (which I will do in a moment), the structure of a successful online enterprise is comprised of a few components, that when linked together can deliver hundreds, thousands and even millions of dollars in online profits.

Easy As 1-2-3

While we all have different ways of presenting what we do and the tiny details of getting a result vary, most Internet marketing experts teach the same few principles, which are in fact no different from what direct marketers have been doing and teaching for decades.

It goes something like this…

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Apologies if you got this notice from my newsletter yesterday around 2PM. It appears Andy and Brad had some technology issues so people haven’t been able to take advantage of this one until today. The links in this post go to an active page where you can order.

You can skip the background story and go straight to the good stuff here -

Stomping the Search Engines 2

A long time ago I was a newbie just like you might be now.

A newbie is a person new to the Internet and in my case I was learning everything I could about building websites and then generating traffic to them.

About four years ago I stumbled across a man called Brad Fallon, who at the time was selling a product called Stomping the Search Engines.

Brad taught people how to convince search engines, specifically Google, to send thousands of visitors to your site simply by optimizing your web pages so they rank well in search result pages.

Brad was the first to teach me how important the following elements are in order to “search engine optimize” (SEO) my website -

• Titles
• Keyword Density
• Site Structure
• Internal Links
• PageRank
• Page Reputation
• Anchor Text
• Link Popularity
• Link Relevance

I owe a lot to Brad because he introduced me to the world of SEO and since then I’ve come to depend on Google to deliver fresh visitors to my blog.

Thankfully blogging is a great way to organically drive traffic from search engines and even if you forget about SEO you can do reasonably well just by publishing regularly to a WordPress.org blog.

However, if you are in a competitive niche, or you just can’t seem to grab that first page ranking for a certain keyphrase you know is the killer-term that could skyrocket your traffic, it pays to study the work of guys like Brad.

Today Brad is a partner-founder with Andy Jenkins of the Stompernet company - a massive Internet marketing organization made up of many experts, which they call the “faculty” (just like a university).

Stomping The Search Engines 2 Released Today

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