Online Groups, also called Email Groups, are Internet (online) forums where like-minded people can choose to participate in group discussions and meeting of minds via email, the web or both. And there is a permanent shared record of the work of the group.
Online Groups take the pain out of group email collaboration by giving a group an email address and inbox. A group has a feature that makes it possible for you to email everyone in the group with one email address (that is the group’s email address). Online groups are more like email messaging systems that enable you make group posts to get information to group members, although online groups also have other excellent features. The email messaging system built into a group can be used to send information to the members of the group via email. You can use a group to send an email out to the entire group, without having to send everyone an email separately. With a single click everybody gets a copy of your email and can reply from their email clients.
The beauty of using online groups for your promotion
Email dominates online communication. Almost every web user has an email address and inbox that they use all the time. If you are into affiliate products promotion or any other kind of business promotion, you can use an online group to send bulk emails to so many people to market your product(s) at no extra cost. You can create a Group and use it as an email list building system. But it is far much easier if you can join an already existing group in your niche which has a large membership base.
Becoming a member of a group in your niche will ensure you have a group of people to market to, from time to time. Business promotion with Groups allows you to get good response and immense results for free - no advertisement costs or overheads.
Where you can find groups to join on the internet
There are many places to find Groups to join on the internet. You can conduct a search for “online groups” on the internet via Search Engines like Google.com, Bing.com and Yahoo.com but the following sites are usually the best places to dig out quality Groups on the internet:
• Yahoo Groups, http://groups.yahoo.com
• Google Groups, http://groups.google.com
• Facebook Groups, http://facebook.com/groups
• Onlinegroups, http://www.onlinegroups.net
• Multiply Groups, http://multiply.com/search/groups
• Linkedin Groups, http://www.linkedin.com/directory/groups/
• World Groups, http://www.worldgroups.com
• Free Lists, http://www.freelists.org/
• Catalyst (official catalog of LISTSERVTM lists), http://www.lsoft.com/catalist.html
• Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/groups
When you visit any of the aforementioned sites, browse through their categories to search for groups or mailing lists of interest, and then join. The size of the group (mailing list) matters a lot. Try looking for groups with larger membership bases. To find large groups with no maximum limit of members, try conducting your search on mailing list hosting websites like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups.
There’s no maximum limit of members in Yahoo groups, Google groups, and LinkedIn groups. In Yahoo groups there are also no maximum posts per day. Meaning that users can make unlimited posts; but in a case where one single member sends too many emails within an hour, that member will be tagged as a spammer and get an auto-responder message. That hourly limit is however unknown.
However, when considering groups to join, size isn’t really the only issue. It isn’t just the number of members that matters, the degree of member participation also matters. You need a large group with a high degree of engagement. Don’t forget to check whether the group is still very much active or not. To check, simply scroll down the homepage of the group (that has attracted your interest) to see if there are any recent postings to the group or not. The more recent postings you find in a group, the more active the group will be.
Finally, make sure you only join groups discussing topics related to the products or business you want to promote.
The secrets of promoting affiliate products and other business with online groups
• Join large groups with a high degree of member participation. You need a large but active group with discussions centered on the niche you are interested in or the product you want to promote.
• Join as many groups as you can. The more groups you join, the more members you can promote to. For a start join as many as 50 groups!
When you start getting results, you can join even more groups. It won’t be an uphill task if you join up to 500 groups or so in due course! You should have membership of several groups, which means different niches combined. Niches like making money, business opportunities, relationships and sex, love and dating, looking younger, and staying healthy tend to appeal to the general public. Groups centered on any of these niches would normally be very vibrant; hence marketing to people in these groups could get you quick results.
• Set up a separate email ID for your campaigns as you will also be getting loads of promotional messages and all sort of other messages from the members of the groups you have joined, almost like every day. Don’t join any online group (or mailing list) with your usual email address unless you want to be bombarded with messages every now and then! Sign up for a new email account, which is what you should be using to join the groups (mailing lists) that interest you.
• Opt for emails to be sent to you in abridged formats. This will help you save your email inbox space. In other words, this won’t take up too much of your inbox space.
• To send ads or promotional emails to the members of the groups you have joined, send them in text format (not html) as most people prefer the text format and also many email systems cannot open html type emails.
• Put this in your mind, your subject line is the most important part of every email you send! The subject line of your emails needs to be catchy. It needs to be the type that can catch the attention of your prospects even before they consider opening the mail. If your subject line can pique the curiousity of your prospects, they won’t resist reading more. If the subject line (or heading) of your promotional email grabs the attention of the prospect, you are halfway to a sale! The best way to create an attention grabbing subject line (or headline) is to try asking a question in the subject line. That usually gets people curious enough to click through. Here’s an example, “How Would You Like To Own Your Own Business Today?” I would also recommend you to capitalize the first letter in each word you have in your subject line, or perhaps the whole characters in the subject line. This tends to make your subject line (or headline) noticeable.
• Group posts in an online group can be an effective way to get information to the group members but using the email messaging system built into a group can be far much more effective, because it sends the information to the members of the group via email. Remember, a group has a feature that makes it possible for you to email everyone in the group with just one email address (which is the group’s email address). You can save a groups’ email address into your email contacts and send an email out to the entire group easily, without having the need to keep track of everyone’s new addresses and adding new ones who have joined the group. Anyone in a group can email that address and the whole group gets a copy and can reply from their email clients or on the web. A typical Facebook group will have something like groupname@groups.facebook.com as a group email address; and a typical Google group will have something like groupname@googlegroups.com .
• To send ads or promotional messages to each group, you would have to send emails manually to one group at a time; so, if you have joined 50 groups you would have to send a particular email 50 times. But there’s a simple way out: create a folder and put in it all the email addresses of the groups you have joined and when you want to send out a promotional email, just open the compose page and in the ‘send to’ field copy and paste all the email addresses. Write an attractive title for your message in the subject line (or subject field). Write the promotional email in the description box (compose field) which should contain your affiliate links if you are trying to promote an affiliate product, and then send. This gets your message to all the groups at one go, and simultaneously to everyone in the groups! This way, you will be able to get your promotional message to a large number of prospects without much effort.
• As a recommendation, try typing your promotional messages while offline. Keep it short – this makes it easy for them to get what you are selling or promoting. People are so crunched for time these days, and they receive so many emails, that they won’t have all day to read your email if you make it long. It is also recommended that you avoid using too much hype! A little bit of hype is okay, but don’t go overboard. People are just tired of hypes. Too much hype will make whatever you are promoting sound ludicrous. You also need to be yourself and warm people up to you – give them a short paragraph about yourself and your experience with whatever you are selling; give them something and someone they can relate to, but remember to keep it short. Moreover, you should also try to keep out the typos – proof read your messages before you send them out. Yes, everyone makes an occasional mistake but too many typographical errors may get prospects running away from you. Nobody wants to buy from, or do business with a dumb person! Don’t also forget the importance of your subject line (headline). Remember, your subject line is the single most important part! It needs to pique the curiousity of your prospects, so that they won’t resist clicking through to read more.
After typing your message offline and going through it to correct the typos, save it in a local directory on your computer or in a flash drive. Copy and paste it when you get back online.
• Put the prospect in a buying frame of mind, not to try and sell to them in the ad. Your message should put the prospect in a buying mood and have them click on your link to the sales page, and let the sales page do the selling. The guideline that will increase your conversion rates is to point out the pains the prospects must have incurred or may incur, and then persuade him or her with the gains or pleasure (benefits) they stand to get from your product. When stating the “benefits” or likely gains, use power words that sell, and make sure you make these power words bold and underlined.
Below is an example of promotional email trying to sell an affiliate product that teaches people how to make money from promoting other people’s products on the internet. The message has in some way deployed some of the aforementioned tips and strategies:
Subject: How Would You Like Creating A Perfect Income Stream?
Hello Friend!
I’m William Terry, an internet Marketing Entrepreneur. I have made quite a fortune promoting other people’s products on the internet without spending a dime on advertisements, and still earn far much more than those who advertise! In fact, this is the only thing I do for a living!
A few years ago, I tried my hands on a number of online “businesses” – Forex Trading, Adsense, HYIPs, Website Flipping, Network Marketing, Blogging, PPC Marketing, Fixed Odds Betting, etc – but got my fingers burnt. Suffering from bankruptcy, I desperately searched for a way out but all to no avail until I came across what I’m about to reveal to you.
I am happy to reveal to you these proven and tested methods to stop you from going through the kind of pain I went through before discovering the jackpot!
Proven and Tested – Has worked for everyone, both newbies and oldsters, and will definitely work for you.
Easy – These methods are really quite simple and easy to use. You don’t have to be a computer guru to use them.
Little or Zero-Startup – You only need just a little or even zero startup capital to start!
Click Here XXXXX To Learn More or Order.
You will be so glad with the results you will get!
You will notice that the above promotional message seemed so simple on the surface, but it may do well to compel the prospect to carry out the action you want him or her to do because it pointed out the pains previously incurred and the pains to avoid, then pin-pointed the pleasure (or benefits) to gain.
Now, just imagine if there are 1,000,000 total members in all the groups you have joined; and after receiving your promotional email only 1% of them clicked on the affiliate link in your email, meaning you are going to have 10,000 visits through your affiliate link to the affiliate sales page. The 10,000 visits you get won’t all translate into sales or conversion. But, even if just only 1% of the 10,000 visits convert into sales you would still get 100 sales from your affiliate link which will no doubt earn you substantial amount of commissions for free – no advertisement costs or overheads.
Final words of advice
Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail-email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Therefore, using online groups to market can also be considered as email marketing. The tips and strategies in this short report can also be applied in other forms of email marketing. So also, the challenges in email marketing are also the challenges that must be met in online group marketing in order to achieve a desired level of success. The three major challenges are:
- Getting your email into your audience’s inbox.
- Getting the recipient to open your email.
- Getting the recipient to act on your email.
Email marketing and online groups when used as an email marketing system are some of the fastest, easiest methods of getting your ads out to potential prospects, but you need to use them effectively to convert the ad views to sales. If you can meet the three aforementioned challenges by following the tips and strategies in this special report religiously, you are very much likely to achieve desirable results in your campaigns. However, if you don’t follow these tips and strategies rightly, your email ads may just end up being deleted by your potential prospects.
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