For both website and blog owners, the single biggest mistake they can make is to try and sell a product or service the first time a new visitor stops by their site. That, my friends, is how not to build a list of future customers. What is even more difficult to comprehend is that just a tiny fraction of online business owners give list building and list marketing the time and energy it needs to succeed.
Time and again it has been shown that well over ninety percent of first-time visitors will not buy anything! As an online business builder, your job is not to sell, but to develop a list of BUYERS. Your efforts need to be spent on collecting the names and email addresses of your visitors, building a trust-based relationship with them, and then, maybe, you can turn them into long-term customers.
You Need to Concentrate on Building A List Instead Of Getting A One-Time Sale
Invite your visitors to opt-in to receive a free report or software of some kind. Get their name and email address, and you’ll multiply your profits over time. Keep following up with solid information and offers for products and services. Using this two-step system will give you a much better chance of making sales to your readers.
The #1 Web Marketing Mistake – Are You Guilty?
All the best Internet marketers use tools such as mini courses, free eBooks or other forms of “ethical bribes” to encourage visitors to join a list. You should be doing the same thing simply because it flat works. By building a list of prospects who are interested in your products or services, you are creating a long-term asset. As smart marketers all know – the money is in the list. Or more accurately, the real money is in the relationship you develop with the people on your list.
Business Is Not About Products And Services – It’s All About Relationships
There are many different types of marketing. You can market online using traditional means such as banner advertising, text based ads, but the true powerhouse among online marketing methods is leads marketing. This juggernaut of a marketing tool has blasted its way on to the marketing scene and is here to stay. The power behind leads marketing is that it allows all your prospects to read about your product or service directly within their email box. Your product or service message is delivered right to their email, therefore there is no guess work involved with regards to estimating how much viewership your ad is receiving.
As always though, you need to be very selective with how you go about marketing using leads marketing. There are rules to follow if you decide to take on the task of bulk email marketing. You should always ensure that every lead you generate is truly a qualified lead and that the person has indeed opted in to receive information about your product or services. Another key aspect is to always give your prospects the option to unsubscribe from your list. These are all options that need to be implemented when you start an email marketing campaign.
When you dive into this form of marketing and decide that you’ll be using your own resources to create the mailing list, you need to ensure you have white-listed servers. Using your own servers to market to your email list requires in most cases require that you have a relationship with the top free email providers such as Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, AOL.com, Gmail and the other major email hosts. It’s critical that you have a great relationship with these companies or you’ll find that your email will not be delivered or if delivered appears in the “Junk Mail” box.
When starting any kind of leads marketing campaign on your own, ensure you have a step by step plan .You’ll need a detail course of action, as there are quite a few steps needed to ensure that your marketing campaign is truly successful.
In spite of what you read or hear, every affiliate program cannot earn huge amounts of money each month; it is an impossibility. The cash is available, but earning it will mean having to truly separate yourself from your competition. The money does not come easily. You will have to work for every penny.
Find Your Niche
Target your traffic. A broad market, sporting goods for example, does not work. There is far too much competition with this category, as it is too large. Focus your pitch on fresh-water bass fishing lures, or women’s softball instead.
Generate more traffic
There are multiple techniques for bringing traffic to your affiliate website. As a basic strategy pick no more than 3 methods; this is much more practical.
It is becoming more and more difficult to get free traffic from the big search engines. However, it is still possible if you create an attractive site and put in some effort to get it ranked high in Google. You will need to have constantly updated quality content to achieve this. Get as many “in-bound” links as you can (links to your site from other websites). You can forget about directory submissions when you use an affiliate program, though, because affiliate sites are not accepted by many directories.
A different option is to just pay for your traffic. Known as PPC (Pay Per Click), this system consists of paying a search engine for each visitor they send to you. This may actually be cheaper than hiring someone to keep your search rankings high.
Build Your Own Email List
The best way to do this is to offer a free bonus or service to visitors of your site. Be sure to get their email address through this process.
It is critical have an opt-in/ opt-out program (for people to either join or leave your email list). You want to avoid being considered a spammer. Remove someone immediately if they ask to taken off your list.
Send follow up emails over a period of days. Do not email everyone that you have on your list every day. You will appear annoying when you are too aggressive. Allow your customers room to breathe. Set your limit to emailing weekly or monthly newsletters.
You may be interested in buying traffic blasting software, but please don’t ever buy a list. The fact that this kind of head count doesn’t come to you directly and willingly proves you can’t sell to or please anybody on the list. Worse, you never know whether the people on the list have actually opted-in and given consent for their address to be used….normally it’s NOT the case.
The loyalty of your subscribers must be earned, and it is your legal obligation to make it very easy for them to opt-out!
Buying expired or about to expire domains is a smart move. It’s like people going to a store that has closed down and they suddenly teleport the people (redirect page) to your store. Once you’ve bought one, make sure the web hosting company doesn’t own it (make sure YOU own it) and that you can transfer the domain to a better host. Do a search for ‘purchase expired domains’ and you’ll get good leads. My suggestion is WebExpired.com.
Be sure to buy domains with the right keywords that relate to your business. People going to a 404 hair gel site are not going to be buying e-books on viral marketing anytime soon.
And of course, beware of those cyber-squatters who make a living out of buying and selling domain names (read: GOOD keywords) as they are playing a different ball game altogether.
About the Author:
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com
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