This is a guest post by Tony Evans. You can see the author’s bio at the bottom of this article.

Gone are the times when you grab a thick book called the Yellow Pages and start calling potential customers and promote your offerings. Now, marketers hook their leads using tools in the social web. These strategies can be integrated and can be used in combinations. One of the most used online marketing tactics to date is email marketing. As the name implies, email marketing is all about collecting the leads’ basic information and email addresses and then selling your products or services to them through email.

However, unlike phones where you instantly get the response of your potential client, in emails, you won’t even know if your message has been understood with appreciation. In your first few attempts, clicks are only a few—and that’s normal. Sometimes, even worse, your emails are not opened by recipients! Why are your email open rates low? In this article, we will talk about top 5 reasons why your emails don’t get opened by your desired audience.

5 Probable Reasons Why Your Emails are Not Opened

1. You’re targeting the wrong audience.

There are those on the web which provide services that give you a whole long list of email addresses of random people. As a newbie in this email marketing field, you give in and buy the bulk. The problem is that you don’t have the exact demographics and study of background or profiles of these leads.

You may reach a few interested ones. But most probably, you only wasted your resources in doing so. What you need to do is keep persistence in achieving to reach relevant customers. You need to capture “authentic” audience by offering email subscription in your website. Also, to make sure that you get the right set, you may link this service to Facebook or other social media so you have more power to access their profiles. Then, require them to confirm subscription by clicking a link for activation of receiving “useful feeds” and “helpful information.”

2. You’re a spammer.

Sending emails regularly is recommended as a good practice. But if you keep on sending emails with a strong sales pitch to it, you may be giving the impression that you’re a spammer. Receiving the same promotions every single day is quite annoying to the recipients. If they get tired of seeing the same sender name and know that it just must be selling the same thing, your email will be directly sent to the Trash folder. To protect your emails form being filed as a spam, learn how to send them at right intervals. The best thing is to let your recipients choose the frequency. Let them answer a short survey or questionnaire and let the system schedule email-sending for you.

3. You don’t consider the time zone.

When you’re living in Asia and want to target, for instance, the Chinese to buy your products, consider their time zone. In any email marketing attempt, you must first look into the time zones of different countries. Even if you have composed the best email on the planet but it’s not sent at the right time (e.g. after office hours, before bed time, etc.), most likely it will not be opened and read. If your target audience is already asleep at that time, his email inbox will be flooded with many others and your message gets to the bottom of it. Your email would have lower chances of getting noticed.

Also, consider the day of your email delivery. Track and review your analytics for the email rate and see where the highest rate is. Is it on the first day of the month, first Friday of the month or last week of the month when people get to entertain emails? Know when most people receive their pay from employers. Chances are, they will be more interested on purchasing stuff if they have the purchasing power: the money.

4. You don’t give incentives.

Your customers are always questioning “What’s in it for me?” at the back of their minds. So you need to bribe them with freebies. At the end of your email, you may offer a discount or something similar. In your blog or website, mention this as well and form this marketing campaign in their heads. When you’re successful at it, your prospects would always look forward to reading your succeeding emails.

5. Your email does not have an attractive subject or title.

Writing very catchy email titles is your small window of opportunity to get your emails opened. The subject must project a high level of relevance and attractiveness to your target market. Follow guidelines in copywriting and don’t forget to incorporate your brand name in it. Having your brand in your subject line fosters brand awareness. Your company brand is one of the elements people rely on and trust in opening the email.

Conclusion

As a business owner, marketer or entrepreneur, email marketing can be one of your best tools to use to create loyalty among leads and customers. However, marketing through email and persuading them to open your email may be hard especially at the start. You just have to plan your actions and be resilient. Reach out to the right people, offer them what they want and give it at the right time.

Author bio:

+Tony Evans is a freelance web designer, an alumna of Upskilled Australia and a mother of a beautiful daughter, Athena. She has a passion in Aerobics and cooking healthy recipes.

This is a guest post by Carolyn from ordoro.com. The author’s bio is at the end of this article.

The list of ways you can make money online is almost endless. Just because there are many ways and business plans for making money online doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, however. You’re going to have to work hard at it either way, but your chances of success increase dramatically if you pick out a reasonable strategy in the beginning. Here are three basic and proven ways to make money online:
 

Method 1: Content

 
This is a relatively popular option, but it has the longest timeline out of the three. If you’re looking to make money fast then you might want to look somewhere else. The basic premise of this option is to build an audience and/or community on a set of content that you create. It’s a model perfected by print newspapers and magazines in the past, but it can also work on the web. The reason why this strategy could take a while is because you generally need to have many tens of thousands of visitors to your site on a monthly basis before it begins to make money off advertising and the like. To get started on this option, pick out a niche topic that you can write about. The topic should appeal to a wide audience and not be extremely competitive if possible. Then, get to writing!
 

Method 2: Affiliate

 
This strategy is similar to the first option mentioned above, but there are some differences. Affiliate marketing refers to programs where you work with existing businesses to help their sales and take a cut of the profits yourself. For example, Amazon.com has an affiliate program where you can get a small percentage of sales if people buy items after clicking through on your site. Many sites use this method, but some sites take it one step further and provide useful reviews about particular products. They then disclose the affiliate link and ask that the readers buy from the site if they found the review helpful. Whatever your strategy, it’s likely to revolve around content to some degree with this method.
 

Method 3: Ecommerce

 
The last option has much less focus on content than the previous two. An ecommerce strategy involves creating an online storefront and selling products through it. Some sites sell products made by the entrepreneurs themselves, while others act as a middleman between the manufacturer and the consumer. There are many ways to set up an ecommerce business, but the most important aspect of this kind of business is the profit margins you can expect to make from your products. Usually it’s better to sell high-margin items at lower volume instead of relying on high volume from low-margin products. If you do the research you can find products with an acceptable profit margin, then it’s just a matter of setting up the storefront and generating traffic through SEO and PPC efforts.
 
You can make money online in many ways, but the above three are some of the most popular and successful models to follow. Good luck!

Author’s bio: Carolyn is a guest author who writes about business and entrepreneurship. She helps ecommerce businesses find order management software that can integrate with Shopify, 3dcart, and BigCommerce.

The following is a guest post by Patrick Meninga.

Hi there! My name is Patrick but I also go by “Skinny Ninja” online, just for the fun of it.

Recently I earned my “ninja status” when it comes to passive earnings online, and I want to share with you exactly how I did it.

Judge for yourself if I qualify or not:

* I started a brand new website from scratch in a “real world” niche (not a marketing website).
* I put in a lot of effort up front and then let the site grow to over $2,000/month in AdSense income. Because all of my earnings came from AdSense, I had no customers to deal with and no one to answer to.
* I later sold the website for $200,000 when approached by an unsolicited buyer and now earn roughly $600 to $1,000 per month in dividends and growth from that money.
* I am currently building another business in order to grow my capital and create even more passive earnings, both online and through my investments.

Some people argue that passive income is a myth, and perhaps they are right. But I am having a blast creating businesses and making big money with them.

My methods are not extremely unique and they do require quite a bit of effort.

Here is my formula:

1) Build a large authority website that gets lots of free traffic.
2) Publish daily in order to achieve high volume and create a large website.
3) Promote using high quality guest posts and ignore other marketing tactics.

Build a large authority website that gets lots of free traffic

There are other methods of making money online, but my personal preference is the authority website model.

Make one big website and make it outstanding. Put all of your effort into it.

There are several advantages to this approach:

* You will build momentum and growth much quicker than if you have multiple websites.
* Your resale value will be much higher in the end if you build a single authority website. Mine sold for $200,000 when it was not even up for sale!
* You avoid spreading your effort too thin and creating low quality web properties. Putting all of your eggs in one basket insures premium quality. Risky? Perhaps. But so is spreading yourself too thin with multiple websites.
* You only have to build link juice and site authority once. After that is accomplished, you can focus all of your energy on creating quality content.

Publish daily in order to achieve high volume and create a large website

“Publish daily.” Sounds like work, right?

It is a lot of work, especially if you force yourself to publish every single day, weekends included.

Creating a passive income online requires quite a bit of upfront work. The easiest way to own a large website is to build it yourself, one day at a time.

Each day is an opportunity. Consider the math:

* Publishing two articles per day results in 730 articles per year.
* Publishing three articles per day results in 1,095 articles per year.

Either of those are fantastic outcomes if you can maintain high quality content.

Most people balk at the idea of publishing two or more articles per day, but this is a skill that you can acquire over time. Publishing speed is a muscle that can be strengthened. As you force yourself to publish every day, you will naturally get faster at it.

My methods for success rely on having a large website that receives lots of free traffic. The quickest way to acquire such a website is to publish multiple articles every single day, and keep plugging away at it.

A year or two is not so long to purchase your freedom, is it?

What else are you going to do? Keep working a day job forever?

Promote using high quality guest posts and ignore other marketing tactics

If you take my suggestions and build a large authority website, then you must also build link juice to your website in order to receive free traffic.

Think of building authority in terms of high quality incoming links to your site.

The best way to accomplish this is to guest post on related websites in your niche.

This takes time, effort, patience, and careful networking skills. You will be rejected often and probably get discouraged very quickly with this technique.

Do it anyway. It is hard work but it pays off handsomely if you can stick with it and land a few quality guest posts.

The alternative is to build cheap manufactured links that are not very effective and are on the brink of being entirely discounted by the search engines.

Without a few quality links, manufactured links will be entirely ineffective.

You can obtain strong backlinks via guest posting by:

* Using only your absolute best content to pitch as guest posts on other websites.
* Building a relationship with another site owner before pitching the idea of a guest post.
* Keeping plugged in to current news about your niche in order to form opinions and create fresh ideas for enticing guest posts.
* Participating heavily in discussion around your topic, both in comment threads and in forums, contributing value-added and meaningful comments.

Landing a guest post can be a lot of work, and this deters most Internet marketers from really pursuing this as a link building technique. Take the time to learn this skill and you can build a strong passive income from the authority you generate.

Achieving passive income is a whole lot of work!

It may require a huge effort in order to build up passive earnings online, but in my case it has been well worth the effort.

Selling my first business has given me the freedom and cushion to be able to work on another income generating website, while also enjoying passive earnings from my investments.

While the journey requires hard work and is anything but passive, the final outcome is about a thousand times better than the typical work-spend-work routine that sucks up all of your life energy.

For example, my current finances would allow me to take an entire year off from all work, provided I lived with a roommate and practiced some basic frugality principles.

I can live more comfortably than that by pushing hard to create new businesses. Chasing passive income is both exciting and addictive!

Any questions? Please ask them in the comments, and I will be sure to respond. Thanks!

Image source: mrjamin (SXC)

This is a guest post by Kyle Clouse. See below for bio.

Over the last decade, the Internet has become a viable option in facilitating business start-ups. Due to the large number of audiences that people can get with online company formations, more and more are using it. A great example for this is the company formation, which is a place in the Internet where anyone can form a profitable company on the Internet. Apart from being an easy way to create your own business, online company formations also make marketing much easier.

Following are a few steps to create an impressive business online:

It all starts with an idea. It is very important that you first plan everything before actually building your company online. Understand your market, competition, and supply and demand. Following a certain scheme for your online business will help it grow successfully. Consult with an attorney, accountant or mentor to understand any laws or regulations about business. Even if it’s an online business, there are still certain rules that need to be followed.

There are various company formation packages you can choose from when registering your business. Some of the examples are a C– Corporation, S-Corporation or Limited Liability Corporation. The type of formation that you choose will likely depend on the nature of your business, product or service.

After forming your business entity, you can then begin to design and construct your website. Your design needs to be related with the products and services that you offer so that people can recognize it easily. In most cases, seeking help from professionals with regard to your website and design can greatly expedite your profits and shorten or eliminate unnecessary learning curves.

Marketing your company online is the biggest way to bring in more customers and drive traffic to your website. Marketing your business on the Internet is also one of the principal and most important decisions that you make. It’s important that when choosing methods of marketing on the Internet that you take into consideration price, exposure, and ROI or Return on Investment. Without substantial traffic and ROI the chances of making your business a success on the Internet are almost impossible.

About the Author:
Video optimization should not lead to frustration. Kyle Clouse is a video marketing specialist and authority on social and Internet marketing. As a speaker and mentor of video marketing best practices, Kyle has demonstrated that getting on the first page of Google does not have to be difficult or time consuming. Increasing clients exposure and traffic up to 600%, Kyle has taken his proficiencies and appetite for excellence and partnered with New York Shop Exchange as their Vice President of all things online. With his trademark straightforward anal-retentive approach, Kyle offers weekly marketing webinars on increasing exposure, building brand awareness and search engine ranking (and it’s not always what you expect).

Yet, in all that time, my online income hasn’t stopped. Not from this blog. And, not from my other blogs and sites that I haven’t paid much attention to for over a year. That’s the beauty of creating income streams on the web. Some of them *can* become good sources of passive income.

So, what have I been up to? What has been keeping me busy and away from here?

In July 2010, I started a new job. Still working online, but for a nonprofit organisation. Things had been hectic in the job and most of my personal projects online had taken a backseat.

I keep thinking I’ll give this blog up. Perhaps, finally sell it like I planned to many years ago. In fact, I’ve had a handful of offers for this blog, even though I haven’t updated it or approached anyone about selling.

But, somehow, I find myself unable to for one reason or another. One of these days, perhaps.

For now, I’m still here. And will try to pick up the blogging again. Let’s see how this goes.

And to all of you who have been patiently supporting this site, regardless of the lack of updates: THANK YOU.

Special thanks goes out to all our sponsors and other supporters, like Internet Income University, Web Wealth Marketing, Global Success Club, SiteReviewsAuthorities, TopEarningTeam, AutoPilotWebsite System, and MakeMoneyGiant.

And, of course, a million thanks to all our regular readers, subscribers, and visitors. It’s because of you that JMMO continues to exist.

Consider these important principles of online marketing…

1) Belief

Can you succeed without belief? It’s all to do with your mindset, and as Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you will always be right.” So, if you go into your business venture thinking that it won’t work and will fail, it invariably will, as that is your expectation. Sometimes it may be hard to maintain your belief, particularly in the early stages of your business, as you don’t always see things happening as quickly as you might have expected, and then negative thoughts may start to creep in. This is entirely natural, and it is at this point in your journey, that you need ensure that persistence is on your side!

2) Persistence

Persistence is a great leveller, as it is an attribute that anyone can employ, whatever your intellect or capability. You really don’t need to have studied at the top universities to be able to make a great success of your business. In fact, many successful entrepreneurs and businessmen started with nothing, apart from a desire to succeed, and of course, persistence. When things get tough or you’ve been knocked back, you need persistence to pull you through. Many people may well give up at this point, but if you are truly serious about succeeding, persevere, try and try again, until you get what you want or where you want to be.

3) Right Business System

However, if you have chosen to follow a business system, you need to ensure that it is one that is not only proven to work, but that it will also give you what you need, in terms of backup and training. Remember, if you are new to internet marketing, you will need training and guidance, just like you would in any new job, so this should be one of the key elements when assessing your chosen system. If the system has already worked for lots of other people, then there should be no reason as to why it shouldn’t work for you as well.

4) The List

The List – this should be your mantra! Your list is your business, never forget this. All your marketing focus should be aimed towards building your list, as without this, the process of selling online becomes much, much harder, as you are then trying to sell to new, individual customers each time. And as all the marketing gurus will tell you, it’s much harder to find a customer than it is to retain them.

5) Relationships

But, to get a customer in the first place, they need to know and trust you. People buy from people! So, you need to be building relationships with your leads, and not bombarding them with the hard sell, to earn their trust, so that in time, they will listen to you and what you have to offer. The same rule apples for your customers, build the relationship, keep in contact, as you ideally want your customers to buy from you over and over again.

Keep these five principles close to you on your journey, and success and wealth will be virtually assured for your internet marketing business.

Author Bio:
John Chablo manages a website called Great Online Income

Vote now and share your thoughts. If you choose “Other”, please don’t forget to leave a comment.

Please note: This is just an acknowledgement of the support that this site has received from these advertisers, as such support help to run JMMO. This is NOT an endorsement of these services/products. You are always encouraged to do your own research before engaging in business with any of our advertisers.

They have also shared a guide on how to write a review on their site, if you need a bit of help. But, it looks pretty straightforward. Check out the list of products that they wished to be reviewed. I’m not sure if you’re allowed to review anything else that’s not on that list.

Also, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any information on who can join the promotion. Since this is an Australia-based shopping site, I’m not sure if reviewers can come from anywhere in the world*. And, since I haven’t personally joined the promotion, I’m not certain how it all works out.

I would’ve loved to be able to do a full report on the promo, but I don’t have the time to investigate it fully. I would’ve normally skipped writing about it because of that. But, in case it’s legit, I don’t want any of you to miss out. So, if you’re interested, check it out. They have also put an email address for questions, if you have any.

Good luck and do let me know if you give it a go.

UPDATE:
*“Qualifying Reviewers” for the purpose of this Promotion must:
a) be Australian residents of 18 years or over, who are registered users of Shopping.com; and
b) have or create a valid Australian PayPal account prior to the time at which the prizes for this Promotion are distributed.

Thanks, Lara Kulpa, for the update!

I’m finally able to share with you the poll results from our last poll, “What Do You Buy The Most Online?”

And, as you can see from the chart, according to JMMO readers, Electronics or Gadgets (phones, computers, etc) come first (22% of votes). Then, Books and Magazines come next (15%). Followed by Fashion Items (clothes, shoes, accessories, bags) (11%).

Then, there’s a tie between Digital Information Materials (ebooks, reports, etc) and Pornographic Material*, both receiving 10% of votes each.

Games* received 9% and there was also a 1% vote for Online Gaming Subscriptions*.

The next one that people buy online the most are Children’s Items (baby stuff, toys, etc) (7%), followed by Home and Garden (appliances, accessories, etc) (6%).

Then, there’s Art and Crafts (raw materials or products) (4%), Site Memberships or Subscriptions (3%), and Services (workshops, consultancies, etc) (2%).

Knowing where people like to spend money is a good way to study the online market. As online entrepreneurs, we might consider some of these options as possible business ventures.

By the way, there were 115 votes collected in this poll. Thanks again to all of you who voted!

* Reader-added options.