Here’s a little secret: If you start off by choosing the right topic, you are on your way to creating a winner. Let’s find out how to choose the topic and how to research on it.

1. Choose topic

Write on a subject in which you have a great deal of knowledge. It should also interest your target audience and be related to the product you are trying to sell.

For example, if you sell dog food with vitamin A, you can write an ecourse explaining why vitamin A is important for dogs. This subject will be of interest to dog owners and will also promote your product.

People like information on solving problems they face in their daily lives. Your course can identify a problem, discuss possible solutions and then show how the proposed solution can be implemented by using your products or services.

Examples of problem solving content
You sell handmade soaps for sensitive skin. In your ecourse, you can start off by discussing the problems that people with sensitive skin face, and then talk about ingredients which are good for sensitive skin. Then you can talk about how these ingredients have been used in your soaps.

If your products are decorative (candles, jewelry etc.) and don’t solve any problems, you can create ecourses on explaining how these products are made.

The list of such examples can be endless. The key is to know what information will interest your customers and relate to your product. People generally look for information about:

How to create something
How to make money
How to save time
Self-improvement
How to lead better lives
How to improve relations

2. Research

After choosing the topic you would like to write on, try to research on it. The research can be for two types of information:

The views of your target audience on the subject
The best way to ensure that your ecourse is of interest to your customers is to pay attention to their views on the subject before your start writing on it. You can find their views in the following ways:

1. Communicate with your customers. Ask them questions and listen to what they have to say about your product and your chosen subject.
2. Conduct an online survey or ask your website visitors for comments.
3. Read messages on message boards, chat rooms and discussion lists.

Current information available on the subject
Conducting a research about related information will give you an idea of what has already been written on the subject. It will also give you information you may not already be aware of. You will become more knowledgeable and your ecourse will become more informative. You will be able to write on the subject with more authority.

This research can be conducted through the following:
Search Engines
Ezines
Portals
Article announcement lists
Ebooks
Books

Now that you have chosen your subject and researched on it you are ready to create an ecourse. Become an Ecourse Master by Subscribing to Ecourse Intro – A FREE 7 day course on Writing, Creating and Promoting Ecourses. Visit Ecourse Wizard to subscribe.

Build a subscriber list

The best way to make money from email marketing is to create your own list and send them well written emails on a regular basis. This requires more effort as compared to buying an email list but gives much better results.

Place a subscribe form on every page of your website and offer a subscription incentive. If you can’t offer free gifts, give them a clearly stated benefit for subscribing, for example: “Join to receive subscriber only special deals”.

Follow up with prospects

Create a sequence of email messages which aim to convince your reader to buy. It is important to keep reminding your prospects about your offer so that they don’t forget about you. This is called following up with prospects. If you have a follow up system in place, it will help you in raising conversion rates and making more money.

What is a follow up system?

This system sends marketing emails to your subscribers, at intervals specified by you. As it is automated, you don’t have to worry about sending emails manually. Just set up your email marketing messages and place a subscribe form in your website, and it will take care of the rest. This type of system is popularly known as a follow up autoresponder system. (Ecourse Wizard is a user friendly autoresponder system with prices starting from only $2 per month.)

Give an irresistible offer

Once people subscribe, it is important to keep their interest alive by offering good content. Also, your message sequence must convince subscribers to take action. Time limited offers work well to convince people to act now. Here are some ideas:
1. Offer a free gift with every order
2. Offer discounts
3. Offer free consultation and support

Special offers can also be used to convince people to spend more money. This is helpful if you are selling multiple products/services. Here are some ideas:
1. Offer discounts when people buy two or more products
2. Offer free shipping on a minimum order amount
3. Offer free gift on a minimum order amount

Let email marketing convert subscribers to paying customers

Using a follow up autoresponder system ensures that you stay in touch with your subscribers. When they receive messages from you on a regular basis, there is a greater chance that they will be convinced to buy from you. Constant email reminders coupled with irresistible offers are a combination which is guaranteed to make you more money.

But the question is, how does one go about writing an ezine article that will result in free publicity? Follow a few simple rules and you will be able to write great ezine articles, which will be accepted for publication by ezines.

1. Choose topic

Choose a topic that interests your target audience and is related to the product you are trying to sell. For example, if you sell dog food with vitamin A, you can write an article explaining why vitamin A is important for dogs. This article will be of interest to dog owners and will also promote you product.

2. Research

Once you have chosen the topic you would like to write on, try to research on it. This will give you an idea of what has already been written on the subject. It will also give you information you may not be already aware of. You will become more knowledgeable and your article will become more informative. You will be able to write on the subject with more authority. The most convenient way to research is going to a search engine (Google is the most favourite) and typing in your chosen topic. Other search venues are forums, discussion lists and portals.

3. Write

Once you have collected relevant information on the subject, it is time to write the article. Decide which points you will be emphasizing on in the article and make a list of those points. Then, elaborate on each point. At this stage you don’t need to bother about editing or correcting any mistakes that you might be making.

4. Structure

Once you have written the initial draft, it is time to organize the article. An ezine article contains four major parts: introduction, body, conclusion and resource box. Introduction is a paragraph introducing the reader to the subject. Body contains the main information and conclusion summarizes the discussion done in the body. Resource box is where information about the writer is provided. This will be the source of free publicity for you if your article is published.

5. Content

The body will contain all the point that you wish to emphasize. Divide the body into short paragraphs. Each paragraph should emphasize a separate point. It will be helpful to give headings to each point. This will give your article an organized appearance, and make it easier and interesting to read.

6. Editing

Once you have organized your initial draft, you should edit and revise it further. Read and re read to correct grammatical and spelling mistakes. Try to improve your sentence structure. Keep your sentences short, and your language simple. Try to shorten the article as much as possible. People get bored of reading very lengthy sentences and paragraphs. Reading the article aloud to yourself will help you in editing it further.

7. Formatting

Once the article has been written, it should be formatted properly. Text only format works best for ezines. It will be a good idea to go over article submission guidelines of the ezines you are targeting, to get an idea of the formatting guidelines that you should follow. A free web based utility for formatting text is: Format It

8. Submitting

Submit the article to ezines that publish articles on topics similar to yours. Write an email with the subject “article submission”. Introduce yourself and give a little information about the article. You can also include conditions for publishing the article in the introduction. Then include the whole article along with your by-line or resource box.

Writing articles is not an easy task, and it will require practice and patience to master the art. Follow the above guidelines and you will be on your way to writing amazing articles. Here are further resources, which provide very useful guidelines for writing and editing articles.

Ezine advertising is considered one of the most effective ways of online advertising. However, you must have a well written ad to get the required response from ezine advertising. If you go through the following process, your ezine ads are bound to become more compelling and get more response.

1) Identify Your Target Audience

First of all, you need to determine the audience you want to target with your ad. Unless you have a clear idea of whom you are writing for, you can never come up with effective ad copy. Everyone in the world might be able to buy your product, but there are only some people who have an actual need for it. These are the people whom you should be targeting.

It would help if you realize that your target audience depends on the product you are selling. For example:

Keep the profile of your typical customer in mind when writing the ad. Write as if you are addressing that single person. This would help in giving your ad a personal tone and would increase its effectiveness. The reader should feel as if this ad was written specifically for him/her. This would make them pay attention to your ad.

2) Arouse Their Interest

Once your target audience has been identified, you need to come up with an offer that would interest them. For this purpose, you must understand exactly what their needs are, or identify the problems for which they want solutions.

Sometimes you would know instinctively what your customers want. At other times, you might have to carry out a bit of research. Asking your current customers is always helpful. In fact, at times they would tell you what they want without asking. All you have to do is listen and listen carefully. Business owners, who understand their customers’ needs well, can never fail.

Let’s take the above examples again and look at the needs of the target audiences we identified:

Now that you know what their needs are, you need to communicate clearly through your ad, how your offering can fulfill their needs and solve their problems.

3) Focus on Benefits

People don’t buy products; they buy benefits that those products are offering. Successful ad copy always focuses on benefits. It is necessary to stress on benefits for the purpose of making them desire your product. They should believe that your product would fulfill their needs or solve their problems. Tell them how your offering can benefit them and do so clearly.

The benefits of your offering are derived from the features of your products. Let us look at some examples to clarify this:

Feature Benefit

Once you have identified the most compelling benefit of your product, center your ad around that benefit and make your product sound desirable. The headline of your ad would either mention the identified problem or be a combination of both the identified problem and the product benefit. If you are able to come up with the right headline, you would definitely capture their interest. Only then would the reader be compelled to act and would want to own your product. For example:

The second line of the ad should explain the claim made in the headline. For example:

4) Ask for Response

The purpose of all types of advertising is to elicit response from the target audience. Ezine ads are no different. Typically, the purpose of ezine ads should be to make people want more information or contact the seller.

While you are writing the ad, keep the required response of the reader in your mind. After you have written it, read and re-read to ensure that it would achieve the required response.

To motivate your target audience to respond immediately, you can make special offers that are time sensitive. Good examples of special offers for ezine ads can be:

Depending on your product and your target audience, you can come up with all sorts of creative ideas for special offers that would compel the readers of your ezine ad to take action.

Moreover, you must clearly ask them and motivate them to take action. Don’t assume that they would do it themselves. Without a call for action, your ad is incomplete; and at times could be entirely useless. For example:

It is also important to include some form of contact information in the ezine ad, so that your prospects can get in touch, or get more information. You must mention the URL of your website and your email address . You may also include your phone number. If you don’t have a website, you should set up an autoresponder message with details of your offering and mention the autoresponder address in the ad.

5) Format the Ad

While writing an ezine ad may sound similar to any other type of copywriting, there is one major difference. Ezine ads have some specific formatting requirements. If these requirements are not followed, your ezine ad would lose its effectiveness. Following are the formatting considerations that should be kept in mind.

(More tips on text only formatting)

These are the five steps that would enable you to develop an ezine ad, which compels your target audience to take action. Follow each step carefully, and you will reap the rewards.

1. Target the Right Keywords

The first step is to determine the keywords that you want to target and prepare meta tags from them. Think of general words related to your business and make a list of them. Now you need to check if people are actually searching these keywords. Two very useful resources for checking searched keywords are:

The best way to go about this process would be to get a list of popular and related keywords from the Goto.com suggestion tool and then run them through the free trial offered by Word Tracker to identify keywords that you want to target.

Remember, the more specific a keyword, the lesser competition it would face. And the lesser competition a keyword has, the more chances that you would get higher rankings on it.

After finalizing the list of keywords you want to target, you must create the meta tags for these keywords. Your most important keywords must go in your title tag, along with your description and keyword tags. While the keyword tags are generally longer, the title and description tags are shorter and hence you would have to be comparatively choosy about their content.

Make sure that your most important keywords are also a part of the actual content of your web page, especially the first paragraph, as the search engines would index this, and it would contribute towards your keywords density.

2. Link Popularity

Sites that have their links in other web sites are also ranked highly by search engines. However, the site that has your link must have content similar to yours to give you a higher ranking.

There are many ways to increase your link popularity. You can do a search for your keywords and make a list of sites that rank highly on them. If these sites are not too closely competitive you can write to their webmasters and request a link exchange. You can also join various networking groups and exchange links with their members. Following are some groups dedicated to link exchanging.

3. Learn More About Search Engines

Understanding the way search engines work can be a tricky business. All search engines have different ways of ranking web sites listed within them. Some rank according to meta tags while others totally ignore the meta tags and focus only on the title tag and web page content. To make sense of it all, and to optimise you web pages so that they rank highly on all the important search engines, you may want to check out the following resources.

4. Automated Submissions

To save time you may want to check out the following tools for automated submissions. These tools would instantly submit your web site to some of the most popular search engines in a matter of seconds.

5. Required Information

To speed up the submission process you may want to keep the information required by search engines and directories handy. In general, search engines/directories require the following information:

You can type all this information in a text file and then simply cut and paste while you are submitting the site. The following software for filling forms would also prove useful.

6. Spread Sheets to Track Results

If you want to keep a track of the results of your submission efforts, you can create a spread sheet in MS Excel to help you with the process. The spread sheet may have the following sections listed horizontally:

Submitting to search engines is a time consuming process and it is important to do it right the first time. This would ensure that you get your fair share of traffic and the rankings that you deserve.

1.Open your text editor (Notepad) and create a new page. Then type in your .Sig exactly as you want it to appear.
2.Save the file (like “Sigfile.txt”), and remember where you save the file.
3.Open the Netscape browser and click on the “Mail” menu.
4. Now click the “Identity” tab. At the bottom of this box you’ll see a line called “Signature File,” with a button labeled “Browse” to the right of it.
5.Click the “Browse” button, locate your .Sig file on your hard disk, and double-click it. Click “OK.”

Setup In Internet Explorer

1.Open Internet Explorer and Click on the Tools menu.
2.In the Tools menu , select “Read Mail” or “Read News,” depending on which signature you want to create.
3.Your mail program would open. Create your sig file in the program.

Setup in Outlook Express

1.Open the Tools menu and click on options.
2.Click on the Signatures tab within the Options menu
3.Type your signature in here, as you would like it to appear.
4.Click OK

Setup in Eudora Lite

1.From the top menu bar, click on Tools.
2.Click on the Signatures option.
3.Go inside the box it opens (click the tab that contains a pen icon)
4.Right click your mouse to bring up the menu
5.Choose new and enter Signature Name
6.Press Enter
7.Type your signature in the box.
8.When you are finished click File, Save

Setup in Free Mail Accounts

If you use a free email account, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc -
1.Click on the “Preferences” option and then into “Signature”.
2.Follow the directions with each account and compose your signature file.
3.Start your .Sig file with “-” separate the body of the email from your Sig file.

1. Description of web site

On the Internet, your presence can only be asserted through words. Therefore, it is necessary to remind your email recipients again and again about your business through your sig file. For this purpose, you must have a brief and well-written description of your web site in your sig file.

A well-written web site description should stress on the benefits of visiting your web site and convince the readers to visit it. To come up with convincing benefits, you must try to think the way your customers do: what appeals to them, what do they want. Tell them clearly why they should be visiting your web site and what’s in it for them.

As for the length of the web site description, it should be short and relevant, preferably a line or 60 characters long, as a long description is not very likely to be read. Write and rewrite the description so that it is perfected and summarized, and includes all information that you want to give out.

2. Special offers

A special offer can be a major benefit in itself. A special offer can be anything from seasonal discounts to quantity discounts to free stuff. Offering something for free is the most attractive benefit, from the customer’s point of view. It can provide your email recipients a good incentive to visit your web site and would have a positive impact on your web site traffic.

There are a number of things that you can offer for free in your sig file. Your free offers would depend on the products or services you are trying to sell. However, one very popular free offering on the net is information. Netpreneurs can easily offer free information in the form of ezines or articles.

3. Regular updates

It is advisable to regularly change your email sig and update it. This arouses interest amongst your regular email receivers. It gives them the impression that you have something new to offer. Even if you do not offer anything new, changing your email sig would diversify the way you communicate through your sig file, leading to more response. In this way, you would also be able to test the response to various email sigs, and can identify the most effective sig file.

4. Variety of sig files for different purposes

It would be a good idea to have different sig files for different target audiences, or even different businesses. For example if you have three different web sites or are trying to promote a number of affiliate programs you might want to make a different sig file for each of them to promote them well. If you try to squeeze all this information into one sig file you would not be able to do justice to any of the businesses that you are trying to promote.

Moreover, it is also necessary that you target your market clearly: the more targeted the sig file, the more powerful its impact would be. The first step in this process would be to identify and define all your target audiences. Then you can compose a different sig file for each target market.

5. For ezine publishers

All ezine publishers want to increase their subscriber base. You can take help from your sig file in this regard by describing how someone can subscribe to your ezine. You should also give your subscription address in your sig file. In this way people can easily subscribe to your ezine. You would notice an increase in your subscriber base if you post helpful messages to lists and bulletin boards, along with your ezine subscription address. The more helpful your email message is, the more subscribers you would gain.

6. What if you don’t have a web site?

There are people who conduct business on the net or offline, and do not have a web site. Their sig files are brief and to the point. How can they offer more information about their business to their email recipients?

This can be done in the following way. Compose a sales letter or email message that offers information about your business. Then, set up this particular email message as an auto responder message. The auto responder email address should be included in your sig file.

If your email recipients are interested in more information they simply have to send an email to that address. You can also follow up on the people who request information via the auto responder. In this way, the 5 lines of your sig file can become a full blown sales letter.

Even if you do have a web site this approach can prove to be good marketing tool for you. There are people who read email messages a lot more attentively as compared to web site content. This approach can be ideal for this kind of people.

These are a few tips on writing the content of your sig file. Do keep in mind that the impact of your sig file does not depend only on the way you format and compose it. It also depends on the content of the email message that accompanies it. Try to write useful and informative email messages to increase the impact of your sig file.

A sig file is equivalent to a business card or a letterhead, for your online business correspondence. It is a mini ad attached to the bottom of every email you send out.

This is one promotion tool that you would consistently use for your online business. Each and every person with whom you interact on email would see it. Is it important for your sig file to be effective and well written? You bet, it is.

How can you make sure that your sig file is effective? If all the three points listed below are given careful consideration your sig file is bound to get attention and give positive results.

While the content of an email message would vary form one situation to another, the formatting and content of sig file would be comparatively constant. These are the two aspects that we would discuss here. This part of the article would focus on the formatting of sig files.

Is there a big deal about the format of a sig file? Well, that depends. You can format it in whatever way you like. But you want your email sig to be “effective”, remember? Look closely and you will find that the best email sigs have a number of features in common.

1. Click able URL

You do have your URL in your sig file, right?
“Of course,” You’ll say,” what’s the point of a sig file without a web site URL?”
Agreed. But is the URL click able?
A lot of people tend to use this format in their sig files:
www.mywebsite.com

This is not a click able format. Therefore, if someone wants to visit your web site, they would have to cut and paste your URL in their browser. It does make sense to make it easier for them to visit your web site, doesn’t it? You can make your web site URL click able. Just follow the following format: http://www.mywebsite.com

However, there is one caveat. This format does not work for AOL users. To make your URL click able for AOL users, use the following format:
<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com">http://www.mywebsite.com</a>
This is especially advisable if the majority of people whom you interact with are AOL users.

2. How long should it be?

It is considered good netiquette to have a short sig file. Most discussion lists have a maximum limit of six lines, for sig files. A long sig file annoys people and gives them the impression that you are only interested in blatant advertising and nothing else. This would make them take you less seriously.

3. Using a PS for sig file

People in favor of using a PS say, that since PS is always read in sales letters, a sig file in the form of a PS would be equally effective. I disagree, for the simple reason, that every email that you send out is not a sales letter. While a PS asking for action from customers may be fine in sales letter, how would they look in a personal letter written to a new acquaintance? Not very appropriate, you would agree.

“So what?” you might say “who cares about being appropriate as long as the message is being read?”
Maybe, but are you sure that people are reading your advertisements concealed in the form of PS messages?
My personal experience is, that people who use PS in sig files, often tend to ignore even personal messages written as PS. Since they use PS for sig files, they assume that every PS they come across is a sig file, and they have conditioned themselves to ignore them.

This is not all. Another problem with PS sig files is that they tend to merge with the email message. This confuses the readers and may even cause problems for those who are searching for your sig files.

4. Using borders

Using borders for sig files is fine. Infact, it is a good idea, because it separates the sig file from your message and makes it easier to find. However, avoid using very fancy borders like these:
##$@%##$@%##$@%##$@%##$@%
They appear distracting and untidy.Instead use simple borders to give an appearance of being organized.
———————————-
====================
***********************

The borderline should be of a sufficient enough length to serve the purpose of a separator. But don’t make it so long that it goes all the way through the browser window.

5. How do they get in touch?

Be sure to give the relevant contact information like email addresses or toll free phone numbers in your sig file. Make the email address clickable by using the following format: mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com

6. Text or HTML?

Please use a text sig file. Most people cannot receive or read html email. Moreover, html format can be infected with viruses and they can make your email a much greater size than it actually is.

Make sure that your text sig file wraps at a maximum of 60 characters. Otherwise it would lead to unwanted and disorganized line breaks, when it gets automatically wrapped.

7. Make them understandable

Avoid using acronyms and abbreviations. They may be familiar to you but may alienate your sig file readers. Your sig file is very unlikely to make an impact if it is not understandable.

8. No mistakes, please!!!

Carefully read and reread your sig files to ensure that it is free of spelling and grammatical mistakes.

These are some of the basics of sig file format. By following them you can build a sig files which appears tidy and organized and also proves to be useful.