To be honest, there are a bunch of unscrupulous marketers out there who need to get a kick in the pants, and these rules provide just that. On the other hand, there are other marketers who have integrity, and these new regulations are certainly going to make things a bit more difficult for them as well.

Anyway, without further ado, instead of typing my own post outlining what is going on, I’ll just forward you to Frank Kern’s blog where he did a pretty decent job of summarizing what the FTC has cooked up for Internet marketers. Check it out. FTC Declares Shenanigans On All Kinds Of Stuff!

A mailing list allows you to:

1)“Recycle” your traffic by allowing you to email your list with updates and bring them back to your blog over and over again.

2)Earn money by selling ad space within your newsletter.

3)Start making sales overnight by sending out a special offer exclusive to you list .

4)Do joint ventures with other online entrepreneurs who are looking to promote their new product.

5)Build an asset with real cash value.

They key to building a list quickly is giving your visitors or prospects an incentive to join your list.

After all, few people will willingly give up their contact information unless you give them a good reason to do so.

Capturing your blog visitors contact information is actually fairly simple, if you know what you’re doing. All you need to do is offer your visitors something they would want that can be digitally delivered, like an ebook, or an audio or video product.

You should have an idea of what your blog visitors are interested in because they are looking at your blog and are therefore interested in the kind of information you have to offer. But going the extra step and setting up a survey with survey monkey or setting up an ASK campaign to see what they want would be even better.

All You then need to do is find or create an information product that one of your visitors would also be interested in.

For example, suppose you have a blog that chronicles your travels across the world and divulges all kinds of travel secrets like how to save money in different places or how to avoid scams overseas, etc.

You would then need to find a travel related information product to use as a list building incentive.

To find such a product you could either search the Internet for a travel related information product with resell rights or compile one yourself.

….Or you could just go to ebay.com.

On Ebay you can find an information product with resell rights on just about any topic you can imagine in less than 2 minutes and without spending more than $2!

Offering such an information product to you visitors in exchange for their contact information will give you the incentive offer often necessary to get visitors to sign up to your list.

Remember that the faster you build your email list and the bigger it becomes, the more money you will ultimately make.

When writing blog posts, make sure the title to each post has your main keyword in it. Put it as close to the front of the title as possible without making it look too silly. In addition, include your keyword a couple of times in the article, but don’t make it unnatural sounding. Also use synonyms and other related words as well so as not to appear to be keyword stuffing, which is heavily frowned upon by Google.

Google has something called “page rank”, which is Google’s way of determining the authority of a particular page. A high page rank often means a higher ranking in the search engines, which leads to more traffic. Things considered are whether your keywords are appropriate for your content, number of backlinks, how often you update your site, and many other things. High page rank will also attract more blog comments, which will lead to more content, more authority, and more traffic. Just be sure to watch out for spam comments. That is one of the bad things about having a high ranking blog. But I’m sure we will all happily deal with the nuisance of spam blog comments if it means that we have a popular blog with tons of traffic. I know I will.

Also, something to keep in mind when writing blog content is that search engines don’t like duplicate content. So if you have a blog article and you submit the same article to tons of article directories, you have a potential problem. Why? Because the search engines don’t want the same content showing up over and over again in the first page, so the highest ranking site typically gets credit for that article on the first page, and that site might not be yours. So it helps to change your blog articles enough when you submit them to directories so that they don’t show up as duplicate content.

One of the best things about blogs is that the search engine spiders love them. They’re easy for spiders to navigate because they’re primarily text in most cases. There’s not a lot of code to stop the spiders and send them to another site. So, blog pages are indexed quickly, and each post is considered to be one page. Therefore, the more you post to your blog, the greater the number of pages. The more pages you have, the higher your page rank will be, and the higher your blog will rise in the search engine results. That means traffic.

Try to make sure your posts have a call to action to entice people to click and visit your squeeze page. Also, make the anchor text a keyword you want to rank for.

These are just a few tips to get you in the right direction in blogging for traffic. Follow these tips, and be sure to post as often as possible, and you’ll see your traffic grow and your list building efforts will be benefited greatly.

For a complete overview of list building, visit List Money Blueprint.

One thing that makes people uneasy about blogging is that it requires a lot of writing, and many people don’t think they can write. Well, lucky for you, you don’t have to be a great writer to start a blog. If you can speak in coherent sentences, you’re fine. Just write the way you speak. Don’t worry about using elegant language or big vocabulary words. Just be yourself in your writing and you’ll be fine, even if you writing skills aren’t high level. People will appreciate the authenticity and it makes you appear more down to earth and approachable.

Also, if you are blogging about a topic that people are passionate about, they will read your blog based on your passion and knowledge of the topic. So if you know what you are talking about, then readers will read what you have to say and they will subscribe to your list. So put that limiting belief that you need to be an excellent writer aside. There are bloggers who speak English as a second or third language who make thousands of dollars a month and even more than that blogging.

First, be sure that the keywords for your blog get enough traffic each month to justify your time. So do extensive keyword research before you set up your blog and squeeze page to make sure the market is healthy.

Another issue people have is finding content for your blog. The more content you write, the more traffic you will get over time, because the search engines love regularly updated content. So this is a crucial issue. What did we do when we wanted to find information about a topic before the Internet was around? We went to bookstores and libraries. Lucky for us (at least for the time being), bookstores and libraries are still around. So if you want to find content for your blog, become knowledgeable about the topic of your blog. Get books, magazines, visit museums, etc. Do anything and go anywhere where you can learn more about the topic of your blog. If you are going to blog regularly about a topic, you need to become knowledgeable, and eventually an expert. So get started and you will have all of the content that you need.

In addition to using your own head, there are other options for content such as private label rights products and article directories. Also, you can feature a post from a guest blogger.

If you really don’t want to write, you can just hire the job out to someone else. You can get articles written for about $10, more or less depending on the level of quality that you want. Be careful about paying too little for articles, because you get what you pay for. If at all possible, get a writer who is already familiar with your niche.

These are some of the key techniques to get more traffic to your blog, which will result in more squeeze page traffic as well for your list building efforts. Check out the next post for a continuation of this topic.

Are they using a popup window to capture leads?

Do they offer incentives to anyone joining their lists?

Are they participating in any ezine ad swaps to build their lists?

How many different places at their website can you find references to joining their lists? What are they — how are they used?

Do they use a javascript alert window to capture email addresses?

Do they have a form for subscribing? If so, where?

Are they buying subscribers from a co-registration service?

Basically, you want to look at your competition and see how they are building their lists. If you find someone who has a large list, then follow their model. Do what they do (as long as it is legal and moral, needless to say) and you should see similar results. And don’t be afraid to contact them and ask. Say something like this:

“Hey Mr. Big Time Guru so and so, I’ve noticed that you have a super successful ezine with over 25,000 subscribers. I’m just getting started. Can you let me know what you’ve done to build your list so successfully?”

Use the knowledge of others to your benefit. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Building a list is the most important job any Internet marketing person has. Without a list, you’re just another random person out there trying to sell something. People are sure you’re out to cheat them, and it’s hard to sell anything at all. People don’t know you, and if they can’t trust you, you won’t make much money.

You can’t ignore list building, and it should have been your first priority when you moved into the Internet marketing world. But many of us put it off and don’t give it the attention we should. We are short sighted and want immediate profits by selling, when all along an email address is a commodity more valuable than one sale, because with it you can make multiple sales to the same person.

Now that you realize the importance of having a list, the first step after deciding your niche is to buy a domain name. It should be a name that’s easy to remember and that fits your niche. For example, if you’re selling natural perfumes, your domain should have “natural perfumes” in the domain title if possible.

Then, you need a web hosting account. If you’re serious about your Internet marketing business, it’s going to grow and you’re going to need to add more than one domain to your account. So, get an account that has mySQL database availability. That will be important when it’s time to start a blog or add an affiliate program. Look into the future when choosing your hosting account, and also look for reliability. You need your website to be up 99.9% of the time.

Your next step is to get an autoresponder service. The main concern here is deliverability. Will your email arrive at its destination? With spam filters in effect today, if you don’t have a great autoresponder, your email marketing efforts won’t be very effective.

After all of this is in place, you’ll need to build your first squeeze page. But don’t worry. It’s nothing more than a few bullet points, which provide the benefits of your offer, and and opt-in form, which you get from your autoresponder service. Images of yourself or of something you’re giving away in exchange for getting people’s names and email addresses work well, too. When you’re done with this step, you upload the squeeze page, and you’re ready to build your list.

Significant Internet marketing success rests on the size and responsiveness of your list. You need to gather a group of people who know and trust you, and who are grateful for the knowledge you can give them about your niche. When they get a recommendation from you, they’re more likely to follow it. If you follow through with the steps above, you’ll have your list growing in no time. All you have to do is concentrate on sending some traffic to your page. Then, get ready for your Internet marketing to start growing by leaps and bounds.

Here are four key tips to make your email copy more compelling.

Keep it Short

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Make some paragraphs as short as one sentence, and make some sentences as short as one word. Also, each paragraph shouldn’t be more than about 4 or 5 lines. The key is to make your email easy to read with plenty of white space. Long word blocks are intimidating and make a person less likely to read. Also, forget what you learned in English class back in the day, you don’t need to make paragraph breaks based on content.

Don’t be Wordy

Simple enough. Keep things clear and simple. Make sure your message is clear and concise. If your messages are long, just be sure to tighten up your message and make it flow. If you want to be eloquent and wordy, become an English professor. This is marketing, so act accordingly.

Use Action Verbs

Make your sentences more powerful with the liberal use of actions verbs. You want your email to be clear enough for a 7 year old to understand. People get frustrated if they have to spend too much time figuring out what you have to say, so make it easy for them.

Use Compelling Subheadings

Your subheadings should be like mini-headlines. Use them to break up large bodies of text and to bring people back into the body of the letter. Many people will only scan your email, so make the subheads communicate a clear message.

Once you get a subscriber to your list, knowing how to maximize your profit over the long term should be your next concern. Writing effective email copy will enable you to get sales almost on demand, thereby increasing your ability to profit from your list significantly.

Free Advertising

You gotta love joint ventures already for this reason alone. In the majority of cases (at least the ones we’ll be talking about) you receive 100% free advertising. You gain targeted traffic at ZERO cost to yourself. With the right joint venture you can *literally* get thousands of dollars in free advertising by just making a few phone calls or sending a few quick emails.

Quick Setup

Most joint venture offers very quick and easy to set up. They do take a bit of preparation, but overall, they don’t take a lot of time at all. You can have a profitable joint venture in the works in just a few short HOURS. Later, as we explore 11 joint ventures you can launch, you’ll see that they can be setup in just a short amount of time, with a small amount of work, but with…

Amazing Results

How would you like to make thousands of dollars in profits for less than an hour’s work? Sounds nice, right? This is common for joint ventures. You can get some absolutely tremendous results from JV partnerships. The results are not only in terms of profits, but also through: new mailing list subscribers, new affiliates in your affiliate program, name recognition and branding, and future JV partners. The results can be truly spectacular if set up properly.

Future Profits

With these kinds of partnerships you can earn more profits through automated follow-ups with your contacts (customers and leads generated from the JV), list building (new subscribers to your ezine), strategically placed backend offers (there’s always an additional offer you can make!) and from future joint ventures with your partners (if your initial JV was profitable for them, then they will definitely be open to future JVs).

So joint ventures are a great way to supercharge your traffic and profits.

One product by an Australian marketer states that you need to give products you review on your affiliate sites a high rating. Hmmm…what if the product sucks? I guess that doesn’t matter. Admittedly, the product is good. But stuff like that still rubs me the wrong way.

Another product, and this one rhymes with Commission Blueprint, teaches people to create a story around a character for a more persuasive sales tactic. These character based stories have become very popular in the past few years, taking the form of fake testimonials and fake blogs.

These fake blogs are very common in the health niche, especially in the weight loss market. A storyline is created around what is often a female who lost a considerable amount of weight using a weight loss product, like one of the Acai weight loss products, or the Rachael Ray Diet.

The problem is that oftentimes a man wrote the blog, and the picture of the women who allegedly lost 40 or so pounds was bought from a photo site. So basically, some guy searched the Internet for a before and after picture of a lady who lost weight, then the guy makes a blog posing as that lady and telling everyone a completely made up weight loss story designed only to sell an affiliate product without any regard for whether the product really works or not. There is one picture featuring a German model that is especially popular, being that at least 80 different fake blogs have used. Of course, the woman in the picture has a different name depending on which blog she is on. Scandalous behavior in my book. The marketer just plays on the vulnerability and the desperation of people to get fatter pockets.

The FTC has kept up with things as best as it can, and it is cracking down on these fake blogs. There are new rules that have really shaken up the affiliate industry. People now have to *gasp* actually be honest when promoting products. Wow, picture that. You can see an overview of some of the laws the FTC enforces here. Pay close attention to the section on testimonials and endorsements.

Anyway, there are certainly plenty of ethical marketers out there. I just wish there were more. The marketers that are less than ethical should be warned that the government is cracking down, and the chickens might just be coming home to roost sooner than they like if they don’t straighten up their acts.

If you do this, you will be way ahead of the game and in a far better position than most marketers because you will know exactly what your market wants. When you are in that position, it makes it easy to write emails, write copy, and provide content for your list, because you know exactly what it wants.

It might seem odd, but it might be a good idea to hold off on collecting people’s names and email address in order to focus on getting as many answers to as many questions as you can within a shorter period of time. In the long run, the amount of insight that you gain into the mind of your market will more than make up for the few names that you didn’t get on your list while getting your 100 answers.

Use the answers you get from your questions to write bullet points on sales copy, headlines, and other things on your squeeze page. You now have a true window into the mind of your prospect, because with an ASK campaign, you don’t have to rely on guess work and assumptions.

If you want to use paid advertising for your ASK campaign, start by asking what they want. Then on your thank-you page you can then offer the opportunity to join your list.

Another technique is to offer a free e-course or free report on the squeeze page to get the prospect to opt-in. Then, the Thank you page say something along the lines of: “Thanks for subscribing. You’ll be getting your first lesson soon. In the meantime, what is you single biggest question about ____ topic.”

This process will help you to begin building a relationship with your niche. Then, while you are developing content based on the answers to the questions in the ASK campaign, you can also recommend products that are worthwhile to your list.

If you want to skyrocket your Internet success and income, you should take seriously the job of building a bond and rapport with your list. That is done by having personality, offering valuable content, and being trustworthy in your product recommendation. If you do those things, you will be able to make much more money in the long run, and your list will benefit much more from your email marketing as well.

At the end of the day, the ASK campaign all about selling your list what they want, as opposed to selling them what you want to sell them – which is what most people do. Don’t be like most people. Set yourself apart from the crowd.