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Using Internet Marketing Forums

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One aspect of Internet marketing that I suspect most newbie marketers tend to neglect is the importance of participating in online Internet marketing forums.

Why are Internet marketing forums so important?

There is no better way to learn how to make money online than by interacting with the people who are actually doing it.  Internet marketing forums are filled with people who are more than happy to answer your questions or help you out with a problem you are having.  In most cases all you need to do is ask.

There is also the networking aspect of participating in Internet marketing forums.  It always helps to get to know who the big players in any industry are but it’s even more important that they get to know who you are.  Internet marketing forums are a great way to socialize and interact with these people get to get to know them on a more personal level.

And of course there is the traffic!

While you usually can’t openly promote your affiliate links on Internet marketing forums you can often add them to your signature which appears beneath all of your posts.  The more posts you add to the forum the more likely your signature will be noticed by other forum members.  If you’re lucky the thread you are posting in might even get picked up by some of the major search engines giving you even more valuable traffic to your links.

But no spamming is allowed!

You can’t join an Internet marketing forum with the goal of getting your links into as many threads as possible.  Most members can spot someone doing this right away.  I can guarantee you won’t last long if you approach Internet marketing forums this way.

When joining a new Internet marketing forum it’s a good idea to just read the new posts for a few days to get a feel for the conversations there and to see who are the most active members.

Before you start posting it’s always a good idea to introduce yourself to the other members.  There is usually a specific part of the forum dedicated to new user introductions.  Just tell everyone a little bit about yourself so they will be more likely to recognize you when you start adding to the conversations later.

Of course make sure you read and understand any forum rules before you start posting.

Once you have a feel for the forum and you’ve introduced yourself you can start adding to the conversations.  Just be yourself and try to add relative content to the conversations.  Try to avoid adding one line responses like “I agree”.

It can take some time to start seeing results from participating in Internet marketing forums.  That’s why it is important to try and stay active and visit your forums at least once every few days.  It might take awhile but the information learned from forums and the relationships built from them can become invaluable to you in the future.

And just for fun… here’s a little video I found from the 1950’s with a less than serious way of explaining how to get started with posting in forums.  Enjoy!

Sending HTML Emails in Aweber

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This had been bugging me for a long time.  I finally figured it out and thought it was worthy of a blog post.

When sending emails with Aweber you are presented with two boxes where you can put your email… one for html and one for text.  For years I have been just been using the text email option figuring that text emails are going to be the most accessible to the most number of people.

Aweber has a neat feature for tracking the number of times the links in your emails are clicked.  The problem with this is that it turns all your links into these big ugly tracker links that nobody wants to click.  I also like to include a signature in my emails with links to this site and my Twitter so those end up getting converted too.  But if you send html emails you can fix this!

Here’s how you do it…

From within the Aweber html editor highlight your URLs and click the “link” icon at the top of the editor.  Then paste your URL in the “Link Text” and “URL” boxes and click “Apply”.  This will tell Aweber that your URL is a link and it will also display it correctly when you turn the link tracker on.

For about a week I switched and started sending html emails instead of text emails.  The stats were great.  I could even split test and find out which headlines got the most people to open my emails.  However, sending only html emails boosted the spam detector up to 2.7 because apparently spammers are known for sending a lot of html emails with just an image and a link.  Not horrible, but not great either.

I finally found the solution in of all places… on the Aweber site!

It seems that the trick is to create your email in the html editor first and then copy and paste that email into the text editor.  You don’t have to worry about people receiving the same email twice.  Aweber will send both the html and text emails but the end user will only see the version that their email program supports.

So there you go.  Now you can send out your Aweber emails with all the fancy tracking features, your links won’t look like crap, and you can assure that your emails are being delivered to the maximum number of people.