The goal is to build an online business that yields $1000 in revenue a month, with minimal start up costs, overhead, and expenses, in one month.  Other requirements include:  It has to be something I can build and run in my “spare time” since I already have a business, a family and lots of other responsibilites.  Also, no shipping of product.  The money has to come from advertising and product referrals (otherwise known as affiliate marketing).  And the subject can’t be about how to make money on the internet.  And startup expenses (inclusding advertising) can’t be more than $500.   And as I said, at the end of the month, I want it to be generating $1000 in revenue from advertising and affiliate marketing.  And I am going to follow a course or book step by step  – to see if I can do it too.

So up for the challenge – you can comment below or sign up for the email newsletter to stay up to date.

2. Google Adwords – Google Adwords is a great tool – it’s the little ads you see on the right hand side of the google search page. You also see them on some websites – mainly publishing or media sites. People use these ads, when they’re searching for something. They type in a search phrase and along with all of the organic or non paid results, come the paid for. Advertisers get to write catchy headlines to entice people to click through. You set up an account, you write the short ad, add in your squeeze page url, tell google which keywords to target, decide how much you want to pay per click or person who clicks on your ad and drive them right to your squeeze page, where you then hope to convert them (convince them to sing up) based on your awesome squeeze page copy. You decide how much you want to spend overall throughout the day and you can instantly and quickly drive
internet searcher to your business. It’s great for testing different version of your squeeze page and comparing effectiveness.

3. Articles – also known as article marketing this is practice of writing short, descriptive, how to articles for internet article engines. You write something on your topic or type of business (without making is a blatant selling article) and at the bottom of the article you can add in your name, a brief bio of you and your squeeze page url. These articles get distributed all over the internet with the stipulation that your resource box (your name, bio and url) are connect. Try EzineArticles.com or Idea Marketers for more of this. You do not need to be a published author and you do not need to have a publisher give you a chance to write an article – you just write it and allow others to use. This will increase links to your squeeze page all across the internet world and you will find internet traffic trickling in. To be effective, experts advise writing lots of articles on the main keywords of your subject and getting many, many of them out there. It’s time consuming but one of the least (money-wise) expensive ways of promoting you. And make sure the url is your squeeze page – you want to convert subscribers, not get lookly loos who come, click and zip.

4. Newsletter – Once you have a list you will be emailing it regularly. Make sure there is a way people who get forwarded your email can sign up with you – include a link to your squeeze page or is possible, a sign up box right in the newsletter

4. Media – Any time you do get a chance to appear in the media – and with the rise of internet radio and tv, it’s getting easier and easier to get on a show, make sure you use your squeeze page url when asked (and most hosts will ask). With media appearances you will usually get a bump in internet seaches and traffic that spikes and passes as you become old news. Don’t let all that internet traffic go to waste – do your best to get email sign ups out of it. (If your squeeze page url is too long or complicated or not your main site, if you are going to be on a show, then see if you can get a sign up box put right on your front page before you go and keep it up for a while afterward – you want to build your list.

We’ve talked about quantity and quality in my opinion you can never have too much of either, but general opinion says it’s better to have a smaller list of well qualified (or targeted) email names than a huge list of people who could care less about you.

So what are some elements that make for a successful squeeze page – how can you turn this into a totally amazing tool to build your list.

1. Focus it. We discussed already, that based on your knowledge of what you’re selling and who your customers are you have people who come to you with different, specific problems. Even though you may be selling nutritional counseling, moms who come to you for themselves have different needs and motivations than moms who are looking for advice or help on behalf of their children. One page won’t answer their needs
2. Keep it simple – you don’t need to do too much selling on a squeeze page. You have one goal – get an email address. Don’t expect to sell them anything from your squeeze page
3. Answer their questions, their burning need. What will they get from you if they agree to hand over their email address – a weekly on monthly newsletter packed with information. Be up front about why they should join your email list. There is no sense in getting a lot of people to sign up and then having them drop off your list when they realize they will be hearing from you on a regular basis.
4. Make it easy. You need their email address and possibly there first name. That’s it. Nothing else.
5. Incent them to be honest – Encourage people to sign up with real email addresses by giving them something after they have confirmed their subscription – see sweeten the deal below
6. Offer a freebie – a free report, a free ebook – something that they will get for signing up for the list. You will use most likely use this freebie as part of your compelling offer to get people to land on your page in the first place.
7. Don’t let them escape. The best squeeze pages or landing pages allow the searcher to do one thing only – give up the email address or leave. If you can, set up a page with no links and no other options except to answer the call to action – giving away an email address. You don’t want them to browse around the site and then decide to give an email address – they won’t. Your job is to make the squeeze page, or landing page, offer so compelling that they really, really want what you have

Next – more on using keywords, images and copy effectively on your landing pages

Tip 1: Stay Focused Your buyers come to you for a few reasons (and I don’t mean friendly service). I mean because you sell funny political t-shirts, heirloom baby gifts or the hottest coupons for moms on the run, or nutrition counseling sessions for the whole family. Now while you might consider it your mission to treat the whole family you might have noticed that people come to you because they’re concerned about their daughter, or their spouse or their son. They might be concerned because a particular problem has cropped up they want to address, or for a more general reason.

The purpose of using a squeeze page is to build a large and targeted email marketing list. So it’s important to remember that when people come looking for you on the internet, they will come through a specific path. The mom looking for help for her daughter vs. wanting help for herself will have different concerns, different needs and different objectives in using your services. You will have to use your squeeze page to answer these questions, convince them to turn over their email address and build your email list.

In each case, you will probably want a separate squeeze page that is clearly focused to the needs of moms looking for help for their daughter vs. help for themselves. Can you imagine how you might talk these moms differently, how you would address their concerns? I bet you can. This will help you build a targeted email list.

So first tip of building a squeeze page – it must be focused for results, focused to the particular and specific group of people you are looking to engage in and build your email marketing list with.

Overwhelmed – well so was I – in fact if you want to check out my squeeze page it’s at www.raiseagirlmogul.com and it’s actually a bit too long and too general. In this case, do as I will be doing, not as I am. But I am planning on some changes in the near future. The best way is to pick one group of prospects – like the moms of daughters or the mom themselves who need nutrition counseling and start out by building a page just for them. Once you have that, move on to the next group and so on.

Resist the urge to be general and when starting with your first squeeze page to build your email marketing list, think about who are the most lucrative or prominent section of your business and start there.

Next up – What you should offer.

I’ll talk more about what to say in the email newsletter in a few posts, showing where I started with GirlMogul and where I am now. But for right now, I am going to touch on how to start building an email list.

Many internet gurus, will tell you that your very first step when starting an internet business is to be sure to find a profitable niche. By this they mean a subject which has lots of people searching for information on the internet, low competition and low advertising costs – oh and that the people searching for the information are hungry enough to pay for a subject.

Well I didn’t do that. I already had my business, but as I had come to find, people just didn’t wake up wanting to buy a girl power t-shirt,though they thought it was a cool idea when they found out about it. I also found out that mom were the ones doing the buying, as the demographic for the shirts, tween girls was a bit on the low side.

So I know I knew I needed to find moms of tweens and build a list of them. Well by doing some keyword research, which I will talk about later, I targeted searches related to self-esteem. Great – now I had a group of people searching for things on the internet. Now I needed to get them sign up to my Internet list.

How? By building a squeeze page. A what? A squeeze page. Yep, those cheesy pages that lure in a person with the promise of some information to get said person’s email address. The whole purpose is to “squeeze” the email address out of the person.

A squeeze page is really a page with some sales copy on it and a form for the person to leave her email address. Once they do, you give them what they signed up for – usually some sort of gift like a free report, drop them some place on your internet site and then store their email address for future use.

The squeeze page is a very SIMPLE Page – in fact it has one purpose and one purpose only – to get the person to give you an email address. You shouldn’t have any other navigation links on it. Just copy that describes what the person will be getting in return for the email address.
Next we’ll talk more about the rules of a squeeze page.

As you can imagine I soon dreamed of building a giant list. A 10,000 email name list. I was at 500 names so 10,000 was quite a goal. And what was the point of having a giant list? With a list of qualified emails you can cheaply send emails repeatedly to the people on your list, increasing your exposure and your chances of making a sale.
So What have I learned about list-building?
1. Size does matter. A 1000 list is better than a 100 person list
2. You must use email consistently and repeatedly to build a relationship – there is no sense in building a list when you don’t bother to follow up with them
3. You can spend a lot of money building a list – use paid methods (like Google PPC) with caution when building a list. You can spend a lot of money on this and not see a return
4. Know the how much each sign up is worth to you and know how much it costs to get it. This can be tricky when starting out, since you have little volume. It might be ok to spend $15 to get someone on your list if you figure that the average value of everyone on your list is $20 – in other words it costs a lot to build a list but these people buy a lot from you
5. Be sure you need a list. Yes everyone needs a list, but if you’re a manufacturer of cute baby onesies who wants to sell wholesale to boutiques should you spend your time (and money)cultivating a large list of individual customers? You might be better off going to trade shows.

So now that we have gone over why you must have a list, let’s go onto the first step in building that list – the squeeze page….
Well sheer numbers don’t always help, but they don’t hurt. If 100 people see what you want to buy vs. 1000 do you think you would have a better shot at selling – to the 100 or the 1000? The quality of your list also matters

I have sent two regular emails with iContact. The first one was a holiday promotion – it promoted products, though it offered no discounts. Title – Sparkly Holiday Jewels for Girls”.
My most recent campaign was an information newsletter and included only one small sales pitch at the bottom. Title: 7 Ways to Increase Your GirlPower in 2009

Which do you think did better…And the winner was Sparkly Holiday Jewels for Girls…
Not by much. The open rate for Sparkly was 33% and the open rate for 7 Ways was 26%. The list for 7 Ways was bigger than for Sparkly, but still more people opened up Sparkly.

Now – neither newsletter produced a sale…so perhaps my comparing open rates is a moot point. Or perhaps the strength really lies in numbers. I have heard 10,000 names as a the list size needed to sell products. Hmm 10, 000 is a lot more than the 500 or so I have now. So I will keep sending emails – and I will keep comparing the numbers for you, but I am also going to focus on building my list. I have been reading about some new strategies that I will be implemented in the next few weeks…So please sign up to find out what happens next…

Be sure to check out GirlMogul.com for all of your girl power apparel & Accessories

So I settled on my title – 7 Ways to Increase Your Girl Power in 2009, except I am afraid that this will be filtered by spam as something obscene, so I am going with 7 Ways to Make 2009 the Best Year Ever…
I will have a main article listing seven ways to increase your girl power in 2009 – it will be appropriate for almost all age. I’ll put an excerpt in the email and link back to the main site. I will also include a Girl Power quote, a trivia question, and maybe a tip or two for money saving all tied back to my recent series of posts on GirlMogul Magazine.

Other things on my email to do list:

I need to take all the new customers from the holiday shopping season and add them to a list – they will get a welcome email with a 15% off coupon. I need to do this the first week, because I would like them to get the newsletter as well, but I don’t want them to be overwhelmed by GirlMogul email campaigns, so I feel spacing the communication is important. My goal is to get the main email newsletter out no later than Jan 15th.

I have almost (like 95%) completed my free report that I will be using as an incentive when people sign up for the newsletter list. I need to add in a few images, convert it to pdf, and we should be good to go. Even something as simple as a free report – this one is 12 pages, I might call it a booklet, has taken a fair amount of effort to write and put together. I did my research, wrote, re-wrote and formatted to create something I feel really has value. I am proud of it and excited to share. On the other hand, this kind of work, which seems to be all the background and isn’t something tangible like shipping orders or answering emails, can make a small business owner feel antsy – in other words we sometimes focus on the busy tasks, rather on doing the longer term foundation work. So I am very glad I am almost done, so I can implement this strategy and see how it works. As always – will keep you posted.

Phew! I certainly feel better now that I have laid out a plan. Next week I will be posting my New Year’s resolutions for making sure that 2009 is a profitable and successful year for my business. I will be on vacation for the rest of the week – one of the perks of being the boss.

Therefore, my newsletter should probably have content about how moms (or dads) can raise successful girls – so tips, activities that good for parents to share with girls. I am planning on having very few if any product features. I would also like to set up the format of the newsletter to a standard – one main feature, an encouraging quote, a trivia question, a tips section, GirlMogul of the month section and then perhaps a Featured product section, so that every month readers know what they’re getting (and writing the newsletter will be a lot easier).

So that’s how I envision the content will lay out. Now for the headline that will drive my open rates through the roof:

So here are the email newsletter headlines that made the short list:
9. A Guide to…”Raising a Smart kid… A Money Smart kid…Making 2009 a Successful Year.”
10 Ways to… “Raise a smart girl…a money savvy girl…a girl who likes math…”
9. A Guide to…”Raising a Smart kid… A Money Smart kid…Making 2009 a Successful Year.”
13. 7 Sure-Fire Tips For…
6. Learn Exactly How…”start your own bracelet making business…win the science fair…”

Hmm – I like # 6 for a future article. I think I want the headline to be reflective of the main feature of the newsletter. It’s a brand new year and lots of people will be doing resolution list, how to have the best year of your life etc, so I think I am going to go with
“10 Ways to Encourage A Successful Girl in 2009… All I need to do is to come up with 10 ways to do this.

I’ll keep you posted…

The other goal is to create a well written newsletter with information girls and parents can use. I want people to be excited to open the GirlMogul magazine – maybe there will be a fun quote, a cool article, a trivia question. I want the email to be forwarded to others, as another way to grow my list
and I want my readers to trust me and raise their level of confidence in my brand. It will be nice to see my statistics — the number of opens, clicks and subscribers to go up. I am not counting on sales – my hope is that will be a by product of providing a fun, entertaining and useful newsletter.

However, I am not going to discount the winning wisdom – that your headline is one of the keys to getting your email opened. In fact, I am going to give up trying to re-invent the wheel and follow some advice.

So I present 50 headlines from which I will choose a few to try and craft a “winning email newsletter’ that covers a theme that’s important to parents and their daughters…My comments are presented against the list in quotations.

1. Do You Struggle With…
2. Discover…
3. The Untold Secrets to Making…
4. Who Else Wants to…
5. 10 Ways to… “Raise a smart girl…a money savvy girl…a girl who likes math…”
6. Learn Exactly How…”start your own bracelet making business…win the science fair…”
7. 7 Amazing Strategies to…”to get your daughter to read…Win the class election…
8. Boost Your…
9. A Guide to…”Raising a Smart kid… A Money Smart kid…Making 2009 a Successful Year.”
10. Why Aren’t You…?
11. If You Had Just One Opportunity to…
12. If You Want to Learn How to…”Run a lemonade stand..Make spa solutions”
13. 7 Sure-Fire Tips For…
14. How to Attract More…
15. Uncover…
16. How a “Regular Guy” from (Place)…
17. Want to…?
18. READ THIS: If You Are Truly Serious About…
19. Do You Wish There Was An Easier Way to… “don’t we all…”
20. Tips on… “Money Management for girls, saving money in 2009, getting an A in science?”
21. 8 Deadly (Insert Topic) Sins…
22. Learn How to Start…”your own kid business”
23. How to Make Your…
24. Are You At Risk of…?
25. 3 Direct Reasons Why You’ll Be Kicking Yourself if You Don’t…
26. Double Your…
27. More Tips to Improve…
28. Exposed for the First Time Ever…
29. Learn the Secrets to Becoming…
30. How to…
31. Instant Strategies Anyone Can Use to…
32. How to Find… “a great summer camp…”
33. 5 Big Reasons to…
34. 10 Steps to…
35. Tired of…
36. Techniques That Enable You to…
37. Watch This “Shocking” Play-By-Play Underground Video…
38. 5 Action Ideas to Get…
39. Discover the “Insider” Strategies That…
40. How to Make a Life-Changing…
41. (Insert Topic): 3 Things You Must Know…
42. The 7 Secrets of…”
43. Skyrocket Your…
44. The 5 Ugly Lies About…
45. Finally Revealed!
46. Uncover…
47. Get an Instant 20-50% Increase in…
48. Discover How We…
49. Proof That…
50. The Truth About…”Girls And Science”
51. How This Surprising Little Secret…
52. 10 Simple Steps to Catapult Your…
53. Discover How YOU Can…
54. How I (Insert Accomplishment) in Record Time…
55. Learn How to EXPLODE…
56. Three Quick-Start Tips to…
57. Discover the *Secret Formula*…

In my next post I’ll be selecting a few headlines to work with to create my highly readable email newsletter.

Tell me – which one is your favorite? Least favorite?