There is a horrible rumor going around that marketing your products and services via email has lost it's effectiveness. I beg to differ. I do agree that the marketplace has changed drastically in the last few years. People are taking massive action to prevent and reduce so called "spam" emails and will not arbitrarily give out their email address. This means that when someone does give out their email information, they are genuinely interested in your product or service.

This is the age of relation marketing. People are much more wary of over hyped sales pages promising the moon. Today's marketing savvy prospects require a more subtle approach. You need to give them something in return for their information. Even pay per click prospects need to be handled differently. The days of sending an AdWords prospect directly to a sales page are over. OK, some people are still doing it, but they are losing sales.

The proper technique to maximize your convert ions is to send them to a landing page, normally called a squeeze page in marketing circles, where you give them a free report or a free trial of your product in return for their email information. They enter their name and email into a form that triggers your auto responder which will send them a series of emails that they have agreed to receive. Instead of going directly for the sale, you have signed them up to your newsletter where you can send them future offers and information relative to your niche.

There are different schools of thought on how to handle this. Some people say you should spend more time earning the prospects trust and send them several emails with help full information to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. You don't try to sell them anything until the third or fourth email in the series. There are other marketers that believe in always having some kind of offer in every email. The results will vary based on the niche. The best thing to do is to test, test, test, and test some more.

Set up two identical squeeze pages where one subscribes to an auto responder using the direct approach and one that subscribes to an auto responder that uses the more subtle approach. Take the extra effort to test your results and you will be rewarded. The truth of the matter is that most people don't make the extra effort and then wonder why they don't get good results. Find out what works and then stick to it.

Another form of email marketing is to use safe lists. A safe list is just a membership site where people accept emails from other members and in turn get to mail their offers to the membership. The most popular safe lists are credit based, meaning that you earn credits to send your emails by reading other member's emails. You still want to use the same approach with safe lists. Send them to a squeeze page and collect their info. You want to make sure that you use an attention getting subject line and title to your squeeze page. Safe list members are looking at your page to earn credits, not because they searched for your product.

Email marketing is not dead, only the methodology has changed. I promote a very popular affiliate product through click bank. The owner of the product gives his affiliates a lot of valuable tools to use including auto responder messages and a squeeze page. My sales conversions tripled when I started sending prospects to the squeeze page instead of directly to the sale page. Not only did I make more sales, but most of the prospects are still on my list and I send them offers for other products as well.

I like safe lists so much, I started my own called JT's Ad Venture. It is different than most safe lists in that you don't receive any emails. Instead you login and view other people's ads to earn credits. This way you don't have the hassle of dealing with over stuffed email accounts or lose credits to unopened emails. If you would like to see a list of safe lists that I recommend go to http://traffichitsmultiplier.com/safelists.html.

How often do you make decisions or judgments about a person or place based on appearances alone? I know that we are not supposed to make snap judgments like that but it is human nature to do so. We live in a word where first impressions can mean everything and most of the time it is the only chance you have for approval.

This phenomenon is multiplied by ten in cyberspace. I am sure a lot of you shop on line as much as you go to the mall. When you go to a store in the mall. The physical act of walking in commits you to at least a few minutes for even a brief walk through. Do you spend this much time at a digital store? If you are looking for an item on line, most of us will do a search and then start browsing through the results.

We literally have pages and pages of results that are supposed to be something similar to what we searched for. How much time do you spend looking art each result? I would feel safe to wager that you only spend a fraction of the time that you would spend at a store in the mall, unless something really grabbed your attention.

That is why the look and feel of your website is crucial to it's success. Don't get me wrong...content is still king, but today's fast paced web surfers have grown accustomed to taking a quick glance and moving on. You better have something unique or special to catch their eye and give your sales copy a chance to work it's magic.

You need to have professional looking web page graphics that are also unique. There are a lot of nice graphics packages for sale but there are a lot of people that also purchased these graphics. This is especially true in the Internet marketing arena. I have seen the same header graphics used over and over again. Your best chance for success is to a professional create some web page graphics for you, unless you are a master at Photoshop.

Now if you are thinking about going out and buying Photoshop to do your own web page graphics, you need to know that it is an $800 program and it will take you weeks to learn how to use it. I am speaking from experience. Photoshop is a very powerful and complicated program that you will not become proficient at in a few days. Hiring someone to do your web graphics can be expensive but if you look hard, you can find some good deals.

I recently spent 2 weeks looking for someone to make me a membership card graphic to use in JV Giveaway events. I became pretty frustrated. Everyone wanted almost $100 dollars just for a one banner sized graphic. Imagine what graphics for an entire website would run? I even tried Elance and got a quote for $65 from a company in India. I tried to do one myself with Irfanview and was disgusted with my results after 3 hours of work.

Then later that evening I was sending out a promotion to all of the safe lists that I belong to and noticed a small banner at the bottom of the page for a company called Grafixplus. I clicked on it and checked out the website. Long story short, I now have place to get professional graphics made for very reasonable prices. Their motto is that "all web page graphics done for you by Grafixplus are negotiable". That's good news for you.