If you would ask this question, ‘Which one is more important the mailing list or the product?’ any savvy marketer would answer you, ‘The mailing list’.

Principally, any wise business person puts the importance of hungry demand (and not just any demand) in front of the product. In other words, there is no product if there is no demand! And a mailing list represents the demand or your business if you would like to call it.

If you frequent the Joint Venture forums and membership sites of any kind, you will find that product and service owners need mailing list owners more than the other way round. This is because the mailing list owners have the prospects that the other type of partner is looking for to sell to.

And if you are a mailing list owner, you do not have to necessarily make money from selling your own product. You can sell advertising space or craft a Joint Venture with product owners in return of commissions, recurring or not.

Most of the biggest success web businesses on the Internet today often establish the mailing list (or subscribers) first before the product. One fine example is Facebook.

Facebook, in the nutshell, is a website that connects friends and potential friends from around the world through a free membership access.

While Facebook does not make money from the number of members who join the site, the business makes money from selling advertising space and partnering with other big time merchants and businesses, owing to the established number of members Facebook has recruited.

This business is perfect example that demonstrates why every business should establish a need or demand before the product itself, and why you should do the same, whether you run a friends site or not.

Copyright and privacy infringement may be taking place on an unprecedented scale, but that doesn’t mean existing laws are irrelevant

From “podcast” to “poke”, “wiki” to “weblog”, the internet generation has a language all of its own. But since web guru Tim O’Reilly popularised the phrase “Web 2.0″ in 2004, even those who never considered themselves internet-literate have worked the new technology into their daily lives. Facebook, the social networking phenomenon, dominates water cooler conversations everywhere, having gained a staggering 42 million users since its worldwide launch in 2006. YouTube, which was founded as recently as 2005, attracts some 100 million page views a day.

Thus begins a great article in the London Times on the 23rd (October). The numbers are astonishing, yes, but the question still remains, “How do we utilize the possibilities of Web 2.0 for business?

Facebook, which I call a grown up MySpace is pretty cool. Yet it still isn’t easy to reach your target audience, or is it. Creativity is the name of the game. Facebook apps (a product of the web 2.0 consciousness) are beacons of hope in the sometimes confusing new world of web 2.0. Yeah, even though the term was invented in ‘04, no one knew what the hell it meant until yesterday (or so it seems). With the ability to use these mini applications built just for faceboook to do things like show rss feeds of your blogs right on your profile page, connecting with a chosen demographic just got a little easier. No blatent selling, unlike the old MySpace, but be honest and deliver compelling content and suddenly Facebook becomes a great lead generating tool.

To be continued. . .

A great article today that I found that deals with branding yourself. With all the competition out there it is so important to set yourself apart. Self promotion is NOT a bad word, I promise.

Developer (and web worker) Rob Walling has published his take on the subject in his article Self-Marketing for Software Developers. Based on his years in development and management, he offers 3 rules for marketing your own skills so that you stand out of the pack. even though he’s writing for software developers, the rules can be widely applied by any smalll business with a web presence. Here’s a quick overview; refer to Rob’s original article for more depth.

Rule #1: “Self-Marketing Rule #1: It’s a sad statement, but even from early on in your career, knowing how to market yourself will do more for your earnings and reputation than becoming better at what you do. This is not a license to be a crappy developer, but an imperative to become a better self-marketer. ”

Don’t believe it? Think about the all people in your industry who make more money and are more famous than you. Do they really know more than you? Did they just get lucky? Or were they savvy about how to promote themselves? Sure bet: the promoter. This can be a tough truth to accept, particularly when you’re new in a field and still think superior knowledge will conquer the world, but the sooner you realize that marketing is important, the better.

Rule #2: “Self-Marketing Rule #2: Start now. It will take a long time to get going (think years, not months), and the sooner you start the sooner you’ll reap the rewards.”

Building your blog circulation, getting people to notice you, building your social network, working your way on to the speaker list at conferences can take some time. If you put it off until next month or next year, someone else who didn’t put it off is going to blow you away. That is unless you have really good promotion techniques. I like the fast track myself.

Rule #3: “Self-Marketing Rule #3: If you have an exceptional talent, market yourself through exceptional means. Don’t play the game everyone else is playing.”

How many blogs are out there today? Just having a blog isn’t marketing any more; you need to do something different. Set yourself up as the expert on some subject, blog relevant articles on a regular basis, and mail the links to everyone who might be remotely interested: then a blog is worthwhile. Or use social networks or video links or something even more innovative. The goal of marketing is to set yourself apart; you can’t, by definition, do this if you insist on doing exactly what everyone else does.

There is a little more to this but by using every means necessary to spread the work about yourself will pay dividends that are well worth the effort.

I just read online about a company touting their internet market prowess. . .

They had the following article under the title of: “Email marketing campaigns ‘benefit from targeting”.

Sending out an online mailshot has been a favourite Internet Marketing method for years, but the effect of sending out a bulk load of emails can be improved, it has been suggested.

Trade group the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said that email marketing is best used sparingly and with a specific target audience in mind.

“When used correctly email can be an excellent channel either on its own or as part of an integrated strategy,” said Richard Gibson, chair of DMA’s benchmarking hub.

However, attempting to skimp on investment or sending out bulk mail indiscriminately can diminish the effect of an email marketing campaign.

“Relevancy, segmentation, targeting and analysis are most definitely in the direction where email marketing has been headed for some time,” he said.

“Many studies show that the more relevant an email is to the recipient the more likely they are to engage with the sender.” (Click here to visit their site).

What they fail to talk about is an email flow that both captures and engages the reader.  What business on the web is all about is traffic conversion.  Giving relevant content, enticing the visitor to give their contact info in exchange for more content, newsletter, ebook or more.  Their subscription gives you “relevancy, segmentation, targeting” as mentioned above. 

Permission marketing is the only way to market via the web.  At this point is is SO obvious that bulk mailing in not a quality means, it’s also damn annoying.

Qualify your list and sell to them.

If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other peopleí’ product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paperís high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

On the Internet, it is very possible to make money without selling any product. One way of doing so is through starting your own eZine, also known as an electronic newsletter.

In a nutshell, you send out your eZine issues on a periodical basis to your subscribers. The good part is that you have a flexible choice in automating the process of sending out your eZine issues for you or manually sending them on a periodical basis.

As an eZine publisher, not only can you easily achieve the benefits a conventional newsletter publisher enjoys without having to chop down several trees in the process, you can easily and conveniently spread your marketing influence and expertise to your base of subscribers from the shoes of an ordinary individual.

In other words, you do not have to invest in expensive printing equipment, brick and mortar business, and hiring staff just to run your own newsletter publication, resulting in a lot of time, money and effort saved.

Basically, all you need to start your own eZine are an auto responder and broadcast feature to go with, enabling you to reach out to your massive subscribers whom you can regard as your prospects, too.

All in all, if you do not have the commitments of creating your own product for sale, then publishing your own online newsletter can be one of the wisest decisions you will ever make, given the benefits of impressive marketing power and influence it can offer to you.