On the subject of generating leads and traffic to your website, we found another article related to this information. Read on as Cody Moya gives you some very useful ideas:
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Websites generate sales. That's the whole reason they exist for many people. And mailing lists also generate sales. Targeted mailing lists, especially, are valuable; the audience they are directed at have been identified as interested in a niche item, and are likely to have a higher per-piece sale ratio than an audience on a list generated from the phone book.
Did you know you could leverage the power of the targeted mailing list for your website sales? It's not spam; you will be asking people to express interest in you mailing them things before you send them anything. And it's a great way to get a list of people you can advertise to as well.
What you're doing is building a subscriber list – a group of people who like what you offer on your web site so much they're willing to have their email box filled with more information from the site. And the primary tool you're going to use to do it is the excellent original article.
Generating the Interest
The first step in this unique method of creating a pool of targeted customers is to generate enough interest in your web site to make the customers want to get more. The best way to do this is by putting content-rich informative articles on your website.
Whether you write them, you hire someone to write them for you, or you get them from article broker like www.YourOwnArticles.com these articles should whet your customer's thirst for knowledge enough to get them to take the second step: signing up for a newsletter.
You can set the signup area as a form that emails the customer information back to you, where you'll be responsible for signing the customer up for the newsletter.
You can also set up an automated system using some freely-available software utilities – in essence, your customer's emails will bounce to the program sitting on your server, and the program itself will process the customer's request to be included on your email list.
No matter how you do it, ensure that the signup process is as simple, unobtrusive, and quick as possible. Customers asked to fill out lengthy forms or to jump through multiple email hoops aren't likely to finish the signup process.
Generating the Subscriber List
The list of emails you now have is your subscriber list. And those emails are really all you need to run your newsletter well, provided you have the content to insert into it. You will need to maintain the list, pruning out dead emails from time to time, and you should be responsive to any customer requests to be removed from the list as well.
How you maintain the list and email out the newsletter is up to you. You can create a group section on Yahoo Groups if you wish; this is one of the simplest methods of creating your group, but it also requires that your group emails include a Yahoo advertisement on each.
You can also create a group email distribution list in your home or online email as well, and send out your newsletter by hand when a new issue is ready.
The newsletter doesn't have to be fancier than plain text, though you'll see a few corporate email newsletters done in HTML; the important part of the email is that you include good solid content that the subscribers crave.
Leveraging the Subscriber List
Now that you have a subscriber list, you can do all kinds of nifty things with it. You can offer subscriber-only sales and deals; this drives fresh sales to your site, while also making your subscribers feel special because they've been singled out to participate in the sale. You can give them special discount coupons as well.
Or you can sell ad space on your newsletter to other vendors. Never sell anything inappropriate for your website; for instance, if you sell sports equipment, gym shoes or tickets to sporting events would be appropriate, while information about lawnmowers would not be appropriate and would probably result in some annoyance among your customers.
Though you can sell advertising within your newsletter itself, you should never sell your subscriber's email list. Web consumers are pretty smart, and it's not hard to figure out that you've been selling their information to someone without their consent. This is more likely to drive customers away than to make them more loyal.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts
course on Article Marketing. You can sign up for his free
Article Marketing Course and get additional information at his
website: http://www.articlemarketingcourse.com
Nov 28, 2005
Nov 26, 2005
How to Hold on to Your Customers and Keep Them Coming Back
Another one of the most frequent questions we receive is how to stay in constant contact with prospects and clients, and how to make them buy if they don't do it the first time around. Read the next article by Cody Moya which presents a clear answer:
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Everyone's done it – you go to a great website. As you flip through, you find tons of interesting information, great things you want to buy, ebooks you want to download. You vow you'll come back later when you have more time to check it out.
And you don't ever return. Not only do you never return, you either don't bookmark it or you forget what name the bookmark was under. You've lost a potential goldmine of information, and the site owner has lost at least one, and probably several, potential future sales.
Don't let this happen to your website. Keep your customers coming back by giving them what they really want: great information and service.
Hooking Them the First Time A customer who comes to your site the first time is usually curious, or thinks that your site has the resources to give him or her what they are urgently seeking.
If you don't either fully engage their curiosity or demonstrate that you are what they're looking for within the first ten seconds, you'll lose the sale, almost guaranteed. If, on the other hand, you hook the customer, you just might have a sale.
That crucial first ten seconds is all you have to get their attention, and the best way to do this is by having a clear, easy-to-read, content-rich homepage that appears to lead into website that promises the same qualities. The qualities you should focus on for your site are:
- Clear, legible, literate text
- Easy navigation
- Good content on the very first page.
Easy navigation is, of course, part of good web site design. To a certain degree, legible text is also part of design. But clear, literate text delivering good content falls outside web design.
If you can't write well, there are solutions available to you. The best solution, and one that sets you up as a clear expert in your field, is to purchase directly from writers or from content article brokers, like www.YourOwnArticles.com, articles and content that will suit your website.
These articles have the advantage of being well-written by people who know what they're talking about and who have excellent writing skills. But because they sell private label rights to you, you are able to put your own name on the article if you like.
Now you have clear, quality content on your page, and you've established yourself as an expert. But how do you keep them coming back?
Repeat Customers: Push Marketing If a customer likes your website enough to want to return, they probably are also interested enough in your information to sign up for an emailed newsletter. That's your next goal.
If you can send your potential customer pool a newsletter on a regular basis, you are reminding them that you exist, and that you have great information as well as good resources for them to use.
In addition, you can sell advertising on your newsletter to secondary vendors, or you can advertise your own special bargains and sales.
Fill your newsletters with more content provided to you through the writer or content article broker like www.YourOwnArticles.com you already have established a relationship with. This ensures a couple of things: first, a consistent voice in your newsletter, instead of one that goes from formal to informal to chummy, and back to formal.
This isn't something that is immediately obvious to your customers, but it will make them uncomfortable over time, and you may lose a significant number of them.
Second, you will be developing a writer or pool of writers who can supply you with quality information on your topic, and who will be developing their own expertise in the area without being potential competitors to you.
Third, the longer you work with a writer or content article broker like www.YourOwnArticles.com, the more likely they are to be able to supply exactly the information you're looking for.
Newsletters are a type of "push" marketing because you're pushing your information out to your customers, instead of relying on a hook like a search engine to draw them back to you. .
[N.E.: Another way of learning to use your content thru the use of articles, is using one or several of the tools created to that purpose. One that we advocate is “Article-Money-Maker” (found at http://www.123-sites.com/Article-Money-Maker) with which you can make a great passive income.].
Push marketing is always a better way to go when you have an identified interested audience; you are more motivated to sell your service or product than they are to buy it!
With great content and a newsletter as a tool to keep your customers coming back, your site has a much better chance of fulfilling its purpose as an excellent marketing tool.
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About The Author:
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his free Article Marketing Course and get additional information at his website.
This article © 2005
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