Members. All blogs that have great longevity have got members, and you will notice more and more that people are offering free newsletters, updates on articles, extra content and more when you visit their blog. When you have a member base on your blog, you effectively have a captive audience, which you can keep updated with all your latest offers and updates. It is a very good thing to have extra content available on a weekly basis for these members, because they will follow links through to your site, and that steady stream of traffic will keep returning week after week. You must never over-market this list either. It is generally not a good idea to send out offers to them at all until you have had them as members for a long time, receiving free information and such. WordPress does not have this built in as standard, so you have to be creative and use plugins, or at least use AWeber or a similar autoresponder that can send out offers at a time you specify.

If you start by offering free information, and build their trust and respect as a blogger, you can then begin to send out paid offers or links to affiliate sites later on. Using AWeber to manage your list is much easier than using WordPress plugins, and you can send out a ‘paid’ email 28 days after the initial contact email, so your member has had free content for almost a month before you hit them with a paid ad.

Most people assume they have to create new content regularly for their members to ensure they retain them. This is not always the case. If you wrote up a synopsis of a great article you found on another marketer’s site, and linked them to your blog to read that synopsis… and THEN linked to the marketer’s blog – then this is a great way of keeping your readers entertained, as well as providing great free content as a build up to a paid ad.

There has been much concern over some of Facebook’s features being used for spamming. The best feature that has fallen into the wrong hands is Facebook’s tagging feature, which can be used very well for marketing, but unfortunately spammers use it to mass tag people, who have no interest in the link whatsoever.

Facebook tagging is another way of inviting people to look at a photo, link or page you find interesting online. You simply type the @ symbol, followed by the name of a friend in your friends list (or a page that you are connected to) and then the interesting info you have found. For the marketer, there are great ways to use this, such as posting links to new content on your site, and having THOUSANDS of people reading it.

For example, if you created a new post on your blog, which was a review of a product, with which you are affiliated, then you would be able to link to this page quite easily, on a very popular page that you are a fan of. So let’s say you are reviewing a marketing ebook that specialises in backlinking. You would make yourself a member of a fan page that is related to backlinking, and then write a short update on your wall, including the fan page name after the @ sign. E.g.: “ @Backlinking Group : This is a frank review of Backlinking Bonanza v3.0, and I’ve pulled no punches. Let me know what you think.” After the above text, click the Add Link button, and enter your URL. If you have a fan page – even better (because you will get a small icon pop up too in the update). This status update would then be posted to the fan page (which could have thousands of regular viewers), thus putting your link in front of those users – and getting traffic!

If you have been fortunate enough to be on a top email marketing list from one of the gurus lately, you may have noticed that things have changed with squeeze pages. No longer do you have to scroll through 15 pages of information that leaves your eyes heavy, and there’s no more hype after pitch after hype in big bold letters. The game has changed across the world, and everyone is changing the way they handle squeeze pages and sales pages.

Some time ago, the only way you would be talked into a sale from someone you had never met or seen before is with a long and drawn out sales page. Even if the sales page was short, there was still so much of the same thing going around, that you got bored after 30 seconds. Now, the main players, and the ones who saw the tsunami coming, are using video sales pages to do their work for them.

What video sales pages mean to the average marketer is the opportunity to get a prospect interested in two things at once: you and your product. They instantly feel that they are being spoken to, and they are listening to what you have to say. They don’t need to scroll down the page, everything is above the fold. And that, in all honesty, is the way it should be.

The most simple layouts work. Just a video on one side of the page, and an arrow pointing to an email capture is all that’s needed. And if you are doing your selling right there and then, a big buy it now button is all that is required. You can get across 3000 words in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee, so the viewer genuinely has no problem in sitting there whilst you sell to them.

Whether you are selling your own products, or even affiliate products – these sales pages will return much more than words ever could.