Testing and tracking your email marketing tactics is an essential part of a successful strategy. Without testing and tracking specific information how will you know what’s working and what needs to be tweaked or fine tuned for better results? After all, better results mean more money in your pocket, right?

As an email marketer, here’s what you should be testing and tracking:

Open rates. Do you know when your prospects are more likely to open your emails? What time of day? What day of the week? Open rates are a critical, some say the most critical, element of your email marketing campaign. After all, if your email isn’t opened then you’re unable to connect with and sell to your prospect, right?

Subject Line and To and From Lines. Just like you’d test a headline on a sales page, you want to test your subject lines. You also want to test your…

One of the most difficult aspects of email marketing is improving your open rate. After all, if your prospects don’t open your email, they can’t know what wonderful products and services you’re promoting.

Here are 3 direct response copywriting secrets you can use to increase your open rate and your bottom line.

1. Your subject line must be a short, attention grabbing, sentence much like what you would find on the envelope of a piece of direct mail you receive in your mailbox at home. Consider, when writing it, if it answers one of these three questions:

* Who is the email from? “HGTV Top Decorating Dos and Don’ts” for example, tells the recipient who the email is from. It also offers a benefit.

* What does the recipient have to do and when do they have to do it. For example, “Enter Today to win the $5000 Thanksgiving Sweepstakes.”

* What benefit do…

Are you envious of those blogs which seem to generate thousands of readers and subscribers and who are invariably making thousands of dollars from blogging? Set aside your envy and pay careful attention. They’re not making thousands of dollars doing anything you don’t already know how to do. The trick? They’re doing them consistently and you can too. Here’s what the big blogs do to grow their blog and how you can too:

#1 Guest blog. Guest blogging is a fantastic way to build awareness of you and your blog and it generates incoming links to your blog, which in turn generates traffic. More traffic = more profits.

#2 Post consistently and post often. The biggest blogs post every single day. Why is this such a great strategy? Their readers create a habit of visiting their blog every day. This is huge. Imagine your traffic if every single new person…

Many blog owners start their blogs as an experiment. They create their blog, start posting and then sit back to wait and see what happens. Unfortunately, without goals, it’s difficult to grow and profit from a blog. Let’s take a look at a few goals to consider if you want your blog to turn a profit.

Profitable Blog Goal #1

Posts per month. Do you have a regular posting schedule? One of the biggest reasons blogs struggle is because they’re not posting enough content to improve search engine rankings (which makes your blog easier to find to new readers). Additionally, if you’re not posting regular content, readers may lose interest or get out of the habit of reading your blog every day. Set a goal, one post a day for example, and stick to it.

Profitable Blog Goal #2

Incoming links. One of the best ways to drive traffic and readers to…

In the world of business, writing is often cold and impersonal. Contracts, job descriptions and other important documents require a great deal of formality. But when it comes to sales copy, that type of writing just doesn’t fly.

Most copywriters have been exposed to the concept of connecting with prospects on a personal level. But it’s easier said than done. This is especially true for those who are accustomed to writing reports and other documents that are less personal. When it comes time to write a sales letter, they tend to focus on the product’s features and write from the perspective of the company rather than an individual.

A good rule of thumb is to write as though you were writing to a friend. Stay on topic, and remember that your objective is to sell, but write like you know the recipient well enough to be informal with him or her. If…