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Focus On Building Yourself A Qualified List Of Customers Who Are Eager To Hear From You

By David Hurley in Featured

Your primary focus as an Internet marketer should be on “permission marketing”* and not be quick sales!

Sure, you can set up a website with some great content and plaster it with banners and links to pages that pre-sell products and then link through to the products themselves.

You can even succeed in making a nice little income this way, provided you are driving enough targeted traffic to your site.

But how much of the traffic drives off again without a trace, never to return?

And how many of the people who do click through and buy the product return to you to buy again?

If your site is well designed and targeted then it is quite possible that some people will return and buy again.

But, how much better would it be if instead of trying to get people to part with their cash as soon as possible, you actually focused less on the quick sale and more on building a relationship with the customer?

By focusing on your prospect’s need for trustworthy advice you would stand a much bigger chance of turning your prospect into a life-long customer who trusted you, was eager to hear from you and bought your recommended products time and time again.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Here is a list of the steps you need to take to move towards a method of marketing that places the customer’s needs at the centre and turns the relationship into a dialogue rather than a shouting match!

1. Focus on gaining people’s permission for you to contact them about their needs.

Do this by making a squeeze page (or several) and also by adding a form to each page of your website. Include an incentive for people to sign up, like a compelling free report about stuff they need to know but haven’t seen elsewhere.

2. Link the form on your page to your autoresponder, which has been pre-loaded with a series of messages that will now go out to the subscriber.

3. While you might like to include a link or two to your products, don’t over-do the sales at this stage of the game. Instead, remember that you have not yet won your reader’s trust.

What you have to do in the early stages is set up a dialogue and also provide useful services and recommendations.

To do that, your email newsletters should be packed with useful information that is written in a lively and personal manner and focuses on the customer.

Also, provide free resources, tips and information that are genuinely useful. Don’t be afraid to include links to sites other than your own - subscribers will appreciate your generosity and return for more.

4. From time to time make your subscribers a new opt-in offer. Give them a good incentive and require that they give your some more information that you can use to focus on their needs more closely.

Those who opt in will be transferred from the first to the second mailing list.

The second list will be your more powerful list of clients with whom you have developed a stronger relationship of trust and who will be eager and happy to hear your offers.

That is the list you make your money on in repeat sales and sales of your primary products and services.

But remember, it is also the list you must look after most assiduously. The subscribers on the list have learned to trust you and building trust online with your customers is the key.

If you are tempted to sell them short at this stage for a quick profit, you will soon find that you have succeeded in undermining your credibility and your hard work will have been wasted. Remember, you are seeking to build a long-term relationship of mutual benefit, so don’t muff it by succumbing to short-term greed.

I have only described a couple of stages of this “permission marketing” model.

Moving your customers “up the permission-marketing ladder”* is the key to success. It does not have to be just a one-step move. You can implement several steps, each one moving the customer relationship to a higher and more personal level.

The role of sub-niches is also important here. As you talk to your list and invite a response, you should also be prepared to place different responses on different lists at the higher level.

With fewer subscribers on each niche list, you now have the opportunity to get to know each customer more personally and open up several lines of 1-on-1 dialogue with subscribers who are now repeat-buyers.

Because they have moved up several rungs of the permission-marketing ladder you know a lot more about them and are now in a position to offer them exactly what they need, and they are in a position, based on experience to trust your offers and enjoy your mailings.

They are customers who are eager to hear from you and willing to buy from you, so treat their trust like gold-dust.

NOTE

*See Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends Into Customers” (available on Amazon.com)

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David Hurley is an Internet marketer who is based in Japan and is the owner of http://grasp-the-nettle.com, which focuses on success mentoring for Internet marketing start-ups. Get your own work-from-home Internet business set up free and find out how you can build an online business and master the net.

7 Great Tips for Writing Articles that Readers Can’t RESIST!

By Sharon Sarmiento in Featured

This article will give you 7 key tips for crafting an attention-grabbing article that will be welcomed by quality publishers, bring value to your readers, drive targeted traffic to your website *and* build up those precious one-way links in the process!

Let’s get started…

1) Remember who you’re writing for and why.

The object with article marketing is to write articles that bring value to your readers, that show you to be an expert on your topic, and that inspire your readers to click through to your website. Also keep in mind that your articles need to please the online publishers–after all, if your article doesn’t get picked up for publication, then nobody gets to read your article!

2) Don’t write about your website or business.

This is the part that so many article marketers struggle with! Remember, our articles are geared to meet the needs of our target readers and the online publishers. The minute your article stops sounding educational and starts sounding like an advertisement for your website, your readers will put their guard up and lose interest in your article, which is not what we’re going for! You need to take a more subtle approach. When you’re writing your articles, you are a teacher, an educator, an expert–not a salesperson!

The appropriate place to talk about your business, website or products is your author resource box.

3) Write about your area of expertise.

Your customers can be a constant source of article topic ideas. What are the top 10 questions that customers most frequently ask you? Write those questions down and create an article that answers each question. Remember, you have to be creative and subtle, because you must answer the question without mentioning your own website. Your role as the author of the article is to be a source of information, not a sales person.

4) Write ‘How To’,'7 Tips’ and ‘Top 10′ lists.

We all love a list, don’t we? Instructional ‘How To’ articles and informational ‘Top 10′ (or 7 or 5 or whatever) articles have a knack for catching readers eyes. No matter what the topic of your article, you can find a way to create a ‘How To’ or ‘Top 7′ list. This is an article writing strategy that works, so do it!

5) Always write about the topic of your website.

It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen more than a few authors who have a one track mind about article marketing–they just want to rack up the precious one-way backlinks that article marketing generates, and so they think it’s fine to write articles on any topic under the sun with a link in their resource box going back to their website on a different topic. Don’t do that!

Why? We’re not after just any type of traffic–we’re after *targeted traffic*. Targeted traffic means that the folks you lure to your website are people who would be very likely to be interested in the topic of your website. While you will never write directly about your website, you will definitely want to write about the *topic* of your website.

6) Make a great resource box.

Aha! This is the appropriate place to talk about your business. Writing a great resource box is an art in itself, but just to get you started here are a few tips:

• Do include a little biographical information.
• Do tell the reader why they should go to your website.
• Do ask them to click.
• Do customize your resource box to the article.
• Do include a link to your site, but don’t go ‘link crazy’. A single link is great. Three or four links is pretty pointless.

7) Don’t forget to have a great website.

This is the part that some folks overlook. They know that in order to increase their search engine rankings for their website that they need to generate incoming links and increased exposure for their site, but what then?

There’s no real benefit to drawing readers to a site that leaves them saying, “Is that all? This isn’t of much help to me.”

So, remember to create valuable content on your website too, so that you have a quality destination to which you’re trying to draw your readers.

The valuable content on your website is also like bait that entices a reader to click through to your site. Be sure to have something on your website that will expand upon the information you’ve just provided in your article.

Article marketing isn’t brain surgery–anyone can do it! Just follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to a successful article marketing campaign!

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Interested in putting these 7 tips into action? Sharon Sarmiento is an article marketing expert who enjoys teaching website owners how to write and submit articles for maximum traffic. She’ll guide you step-by-step through the article writing and submission process at the popular blog, Creative Article Marketing => http://www.creativearticlemarketing.com

Become an SEO Pro with 3 Simple Strategies

By Michael Small in Featured

Google is all about linking. And if you want to snatch a top spot in Google’s search results you need to link like a pro.

But don’t worry. Linking is a whole lot easier today than it was a few years ago. Experience has taught us a lot and with the information in this article you won’t need to worry about endless trial and error. We have a repeatable process that anyone can do, as easy as 1, 2, 3.

That said; let’s take a look at the linking strategies that Google will give you the most credit for…

© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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