Throughout my career, I have done thousands of direct-response marketing campaigns, incorporating all channels (i.e., media), including direct mail, e-mail, telesales, television, print ads, radio, Web, and inserts. Billions of consumers have read, heard, or seen these campaigns. And during the 21 years I have been doing them, I have seen new formats, tactics, and strategies. Virtually everything in this industry is continually changing.

If you are using only one or two methods to market your product or service, you are not maximizing your profit potential. Getting involved in a "win-win" joint venture is the perfect way to add more to your bottom line.

In the world of search engine marketing, links are extremely important. Search engines view inbound links to your website as votes – endorsements of your site and its content. The more of these votes your site receives, the more the search engines regard it as a trusted source and the more likely you are to rank high in their search results for your keywords.

One of the best ways to build your online business is to build your house list of potential customers. But you can also do it by changing the way you market to your existing customers. Today, I want to show you how breaking up your existing customer database can boost your sales.

What good is it to have a website – one built with profits in mind – if potential customers can’t find it? Sure, you can drive Web traffic to your site in any number of ways… with e-mail, banners, and print ads, to name just a few.

But, if you think about it, there’s no better way to score online customer prospects than by reeling in people who:

Here’s a way to test your new product, concept, or headline by putting your marketing toe in the water before jumping in: Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other networks such as Kanoodle, Quigo, or Miva.

If you’ve got have a strong e-mail campaign going but you’re looking to expand your direct-response tactics to include online ads, chances are you will do some media buying. Why? Because purchasing banner, text or other display ads can be a very cost effective way to attract customers.

I was so excited my hands were shaking.

It was 7:13 p.m. on August 25, 2004, and I had just completed a content-rich, 70-minute teleseminar interview with personal-development and goal-achievement guru Brian Tracy.

“Get Top 10 Rankings in Google or Your Money Back” read the subject line in my inbox Monday morning. It was a forward from a colleague, Jim – a marketing piece he’d received.

Copywriters, marketing professionals, and business owners often ask me, “How do I tell the difference between good sales copy and bad sales copy?” It’s an important question, and getting it right can make the difference between a mediocre response rate and hitting an out-of-the-park homerun.

Our guest bathroom boasts a herd of 327 zebras of all stripes… though there is room for more. (I introduced you to our zebra collection back in ETR #1800, when we had only 277 of the critters.) Cuddly zebras, ceramic zebras, pencil-eraser zebras, zebra fishing lures, zebra-striped candy, zebra lithographs, fluffy zebra slippers, a zebra joke book, and zebra bath towels. Last month, I found a printed cotton cloth, the size, shape, and colors of a real zebra hide.

I wanted to buy a how-to video for a partner-dance called the West Coast Swing, so I went to Google and did a search. As you’d expect, I instantly found 2,480,000 results, including quite a few sites that looked like they might have the professional-level show dancing that I was looking for.