ADUTAINMENT: Advertising as Entertainment
JellyBasket.com - JELLY by the CASE or as a GIFT BASKET.

Why Go Home Based Over Traditional Business
How many times have you... thought about starting your own Business. Have you ever pictured yourself with a successful Business?

Tourism Marketing Expert Offers Free E-Book on How to Outsmart Those Competitors Who Plan to Outspend You in 2007
Bill Todd, co-author of Speaking of Success is offering tourism professionals a free E-book detailing how to out market the competition during the travel industry's most competitive marketing year on record. According to Todd, "During 2007, leisure travelers, meeting planners and corporate travel managers will be inundated by an avalanche of new competing sales and marketing messages. For the first time since 2001 individual hotels, tourism offices, attractions, cruise lines, and lodging chains alike have armed their marketing people with substantial sales and advertising budgets. Collectively they intend to make a lot of marketing noise before the year is out.

Internet Business 101: Maximize Your Daily Efficiency
When running an online business you have to work efficient. This rule is even more true when you are the business owner with no employees. It is easy to lose track of what you are doing or taking the day too easy and let valuable time just slip by. The loss of efficiency will be felt in your wallet in form of less money at the end of the month.Here are a few items to consider that help you to work more efficient

How Top Management Uses Blogs To Increase Business
Top management executives at corporate giants like Sun Microsystems, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, General Motors and Hewlett-Packard have ventured into the blogging arena. What is prompting these busy executives to take time out form their hectic schedules to join in the conversations in the blogosphere? Simple, it is the desire to promote a new atmosphere of openness with employees, shareholders, customers, prospects and the general public in the process not only increasing business but, more so, giving a human voice to the company.

Marketing Messages: Your 10 Most Important Business Principles
As a self-employed professional, you have two basic strategies for your marketing efforts: Writing or Speaking.No matter whether or not you do both of these activities or only one of them, you need to know what messages you want to convey to your audience.

IWCO Direct Receives Awards For Corporate Business Achievement And Safety
IWCO Direct, the nation's leading provider of integrated direct mail production services and marketing solutions, recently was presented with a Corporate Business Achievement Award by the U.S. Postal Service and recognized as an Industry Safety Leader by the Envelope Manufacturers Association (EMA).

The Top 4 Mistakes You Should Not Make in Network Marketing
In the past, I have been in network marketing with minimal success and lots of failure. Over my years being in and out of the industry, I have discovered mistakes that I and many of my fellow network marketers made before quitting or making it big in the multi-level marketing (MLM) industry.

Doing Business on the Internet
Internet Business OpportunitiesThe Internet is definitely the place to look for business opportunities. It's positively bristling with web sites promising earnings of anything from £24,000 in 24 hours to $Millions within a year!Leaving aside the scams and cons and the plain over-optimistic, there are many genuine Internet-based opportunities.

Search Marketing Expo - SMX Advanced Adds Developer Day to Program
SMX adds sessions for developers that will explore search-friendly web application development.

Internet Marketing Success With Ebooks
Ebooks have become a very common commodity on the Internet. You can now download ebooks from many different websites and you can even visit an ebookstore to find these information products. Ebooks are hot sellers because today's computer savvy generation spends a great deal of time reading ebooks for learning and enjoyment purposes. Some in the book industry have even begun to predict that ebooks may make traditional printed books obsolete within the next 20 years.

When Do I Need To Hire A Business Plan Consultant
Every new business owner knows that a business plan is critical – it is drilled into them by potential investors and every banking officer they meet. So why is something that is so important to the launch of a new venture so difficult to write? Good question! In this article I will try to address when you should go out and hire a business plan writer versus taking on the task yourself.

Gamer Geeks "Team Tetris" Take Over Small Town Parade, Release New Video
For the 4th Independence Day in a row, Team Tetris participated in the 74th annual Loggerodeo Parade in Sedro-Woolley, WA. Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Sub Zero, Scorpion and more were in attendance to the delight of children and adults. The event was documented and a video is now available at Gamespeek.com (http://www.gamespeek.com).

Makelaar Groningen, A Profitable Business
Buying a dwelling can be a long, problematical and frightening process, and it is always necessary to be prepared. Knowledge is basic when it comes to negotiating the difficult world of house prices, interest rates and mortgage loans. For these reason, you should read this article with attention.

CCTV: The Ultimate Weapon In Home And Business Security
For those who don't yet know, CCTV stands for closed-circuit television. This is a type of camera that doesn't broadcast over regular television channels; the term "closed circuit" means that the image being recorded is only shown on the particular monitor hooked up to the CCTV and no place else. If you're concerned about security for your home or business, you must consider using a CCTV!

What is a Commercial Business Loan?
A commercial business loan is designed for a wide range of UK small, medium and startup business needs including the purchase, refinance, expansion of a business, development loans or any type of commercial investment.Finance is the lifeblood of a business.

Why Use Permission-Based Email Marketing?

The goal of all marketing is to attract interest in, build desire for, and generate sales of your products or services. Email marketing is a perfect medium to pick up where other marketing leaves off. Email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. It's far cheaper than traditional bulk postage mail and in many cases can have a much larger impact on immediate sales and long-term relationship strength than traditional advertising.

When done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely powerful and effective marketing technique. It's a medium that allows a buyer and seller to freely communicate with one another and build a relationship based on value and trust. When done incorrectly, however, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into litigious flamers. It is for this reason that one must make sure they send only permission-based email communications to their subscribers.

Before we proceed any further, let's define exactly what permission-based email marketing is. It is important to note that there are two types of email marketing. One can either send unsolicited email promotions or send out emails only to persons who have requested to receive them. Unsolicited email is, of course, called spam. Sending spam will ruin any legitimate organization's reputation and brand value faster than mold grows on bread that is left outside in the middle of summer. Rule number one of becoming an intelligent email marketer is to not send unsolicited email.

Permission-based email marketing, on the other hand, is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build the value of their brands, increase sales, and strengthen the relationships they have with their clients and subscribers. The key difference, of course, is that these senders are only sending messages to persons who have requested to receive them.

Let's take a second to understand the key difference between spam and permission-based emails.

The Axiom of Value

For the last 100 years, companies have relied on traditional advertising in the form of catchy jingles, TV commercials, billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, hot air balloons, and waving mascots. The technique is to interrupt a radio listener, TV viewer, or magazine reader with an attention grabbing ad that compels the consumer to buy the company's product or at least have the product closer to the forefront of his or her mind next time the individual is making a buying decision.

In most instances, advertising is acceptable to the consumer. Most people don't mind seeing ads while watching television, listening to the radio, or reading magazines—or at least they understand that these ads are necessary in order to receive the content they are seeing, reading, or hearing. While technologies like TiVo, DVR, and satellite radio are challenging advertisers to come up with new methods of advertising, other technologies such as Internet television require users to watch a 30-second advertisement prior to the start of a show. The point is, as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements.

This same axiom holds true online. As long as your web site provides content that people value, visitors will continue returning to the site even if there are a few banner ads or Google AdWords boxes within the page layout. While some web sites, such as WSJ.com, have successfully switched to a subscription-based model, many more web sites rely on banner, box, skyscraper, and contextual advertisements to earn the bulk of their income.

The same axiom, that as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements, also holds true with email. As long as one provides value—whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount off a product related to one purchased previously—people will allow you to continue to contact them. Each and every email you send of course contains your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. These items are the advertising and should be surrounded on all sides by the items which make the communication actually add value to the lives of your readers.

Spam however, by its very nature, breaks the axiom. Unsolicited bulk email very rarely has any value. Spam is usually irrelevant, always impersonal, and rarely helpful. Everyone with an email inbox knows how aggravating it is to sort through forty new emails to only find two that are from persons you know. While spam may make money for persons in Eastern Europe promoting fake drugs, I feel strongly that sending spam will always have a net negative impact on any legitimate organization.

For this reason, we strongly recommend only sending permission-based email, also known as opt-in email. Permission-based email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase visitor-to-sale conversion rates, build strong relationships with your customers, and turn your one-time buyers into lifetime product evangelizers who recommend your organization to everyone they know. Permission-based email marketing allows companies to develop and sustain relationships with their prospects and consumers by creating value. Permission marketing is about "turning strangers into friends and friends into customers" as Seth Godin likes to say.

The nature of permission marketing—building a relationship with a prospect or expanding the relationship with an existing customer over time—allows you to concentrate on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you have to sell and are more than willing to become repeat customers.

The Five-Step Process of Permission Email Marketing

There is a simple five-step process in putting a successful permission-based email marketing campaign in place. This process is reviewed below.

1. Start using a permission-based email software such as IntelliContact Pro that allows you to easily create newsletters, automatically manage subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, and view reporting statistics like opens and clickthroughs.

2. Decide on the type and frequency of email communication you will be sending. We recommend sending at least a monthly newsletter. You can certainly send multiple newsletters if you sell different types of products. You can also send promotional messages offering a discount or coupon for a product or service.

3. Add a sign-up form to your web site so you can start collecting subscribers and import any existing lists of subscribers that have already requested your communications. It is generally also safe to import the names of anyone who has done business with you in the past year, provided you will be sending content relevant to what they purchased.

4. Create a good email template by using a template provided within the email software, having your in-house team create one, or using the custom design services of the email software company. IntelliContact Pro provides over 140 design templates within the software that can be used free of charge and can also develop a custom template for a nominal charge.

5. Develop quality relevant content for your newsletter or message and send it out to your list. Continue sending your newsletters, announcements, or promotions with consistent frequency. As your list grows, you will notice increased traffic (and if applicable, increased sales) on the day of and the days following an email send.

By providing quality relevant content you will succeed in keeping your brand mindshare at the front of the mind of your customers and cement strong relationships with your subscribers.

Ryan Allis is an internationally recognized expert on email marketing. Ryan is the CEO of Broadwick Corp, providers of the email marketing software IntelliContact Pro. For additional information on email marketing software, visit http://www.email-marketing-software-resource.com