True Results To Replace Your Job

Follow Up Tips For Your Internet Business

It is no longer a secret that people buy from those people that they trust. This is especially true:

1. In the online world where every product owner is “hiding” his/her face behind a computer.

2. When you’re selling a product that is not a popular brand (meaning people haven’t heard of the brand before).

These potential customers can’t be blamed either, since it is very easy to scam people nowadays simply by using the power of the Internet.

Armed with this knowledge, we as Internet business owners should build beneficial and trusting relationships with our prospects so that they know who we are, what we do, what our expertise are – so that they trust us and want to buy from us.

If you’ve been a loyal reader of this blog, you should have already known that I talk and advocate this a lot.

Without a good relationship with your prospects, it is VERY hard to sell them your products and services. Without a good relationship with your customers, it is also EXTREMELY difficult to sell other related products to them.

The key to successfully sell to them is to build, as I’ve said before, beneficial and trusting relationships with them. You do this by first creating some kind of valuable Freebie to “bait” your visitors to hand you their email addresses.

If you don’t want to create a freebie yet, you can also use some PLR freebies. Just make sure that they are high quality freebies and that you put your name as the creator of the freebie.

After your visitors hand over their email addresses, you want to impress them by giving much more than they expected of you. At this stage, your visitors have been converted to leads/prospects, thanks to the squeeze page that you’ve created.

For example, let’s say that on the squeeze page you promised to give them a Free report on how to train their dogs effectively. However on the download page, in addition to giving them this Free report, you might also give them another surprise freebie that shows them how to make sure their dogs are eating healthy, balanced diets.

The surprise freebie should be somewhat related to the main freebie that you promised.

A few days after they’ve subscribed to get your freebie, you ought to follow up with them to check how they are doing and if they have successfully downloaded the freebie (and surprise freebie) yet. You also want to remind them to implement what they’ve learned and that if they have any questions they can feel free to ask you.

Then a few days later you follow up with them again to give more free valuable content. It is very important that on the first few follow-ups with them you don’t sell them anything but instead concentrate on providing great content to educate them.

This is to impress them that you care for them and you know what you’re talking about. When they see you as someone who they can trust because you’ve stood out from the crowd by giving, giving, and giving first without even trying to sell them anything, their resistance barrier towards you will decrease.

Let’s say that your visitors are on 30 other marketers’ lists. 29 of them send out sales pitches all the time every day promoting the next big product launch, while the remaining one marketer (that’s YOU) give, give, and give, which one do you think will stand out from the crowd and get their attention?

I’m not saying you can’t send them sales pitches. At the end of the day, you and I are still marketers. We need to sell stuff in order to make money.

I’m simply saying that you should focus your efforts when you first come into contact with a person who doesn’t know you yet with the right approach, and that right approach is to impress them that you’re different than the rest of the pack and that you truly care for them.

You need to demonstrate that you’re in this business for the long term and that they can count on you to provide them with the stuff they need. In other words, you want them to buy from you.

I would say after 3 – 5 follow-ups with them, you can insert your first sales pitch to them. After this sales pitch, you would then educate them again with free, valuable content. Then once in while do your sales pitch again.

You need to have a balance between free content and sales pitch, and be sure to send more free content than sales pitch. In my current Internet business I’m using a 3:1 approach – meaning for every 3 content messages, I would send a sales pitch.

Different markets respond differently, so you need to test what works best for your market.

Please drop your comments below, I’d like to see what your opinions are…

The One Tool Every Internet Marketer Can’t Live Without

To succeed in Internet Marketing, you need tools to help you run your Internet business.

Internet marketing is not just about making money online.

It’s about running a profitable business on the Internet that is going to provide you with profits on a consistent basis for the long term.

It’s not a hit and run situation where you only earn money 1 time.

To make lots of money on the Internet, you need to view Internet marketing as a real business, just like you would when you run an offline brick and mortar store.

…and to be successful in running a very profitable Internet business, you need tools.

PERIOD.

You can’t do everything manually. There simply isn’t enough time for you to do everything by yourself.

We only have 24 hours in a day, so we should focus our time and efforts on the more important things and leave the repetitive tasks which can be automated into the hands of technology.

Hey we’re living in the 21st century!

One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of Internet marketing that you can automate is through the use of an autoresponder system.

An autoresponder system basically is a system to follow up with your website visitors so that you can build beneficial and trusting relationships with them, in the hope that they’ll buy your products/services in the future.

In this ever-increasing-competition society that we live in, every marketer and his dog is doing everything they can to sell their products and services.

People are getting tired of being harassed with marketing messages all day long.

Because of this, it is VERY HARD to be able to sell your products/services to prospects on your first encounter with them.

This is especially true if you’re selling your products/services on the Internet.

They don’t know who you are and they see you as someone who’s hiding behind a computer.

With that said, in order to be able to successfully sell your stuff to prospects, you need some kind of mechanism to “capture” their contact info so that you can follow up with them on a consistent basis to build trusting relationships with them.

After they begin to trust you will you be able to sell your stuff to them.

Sure there are exceptions where prospects buy your stuff the first time you offer them, but this is VERY RARE.

If you want to sell effectively and consistently you MUST have an autoresponder system in place to follow up with them.

To get people to sign up for your autoresponder, you need to “bait” them with some kind of valuable freebie such as a free report on your field/niche. If they want to receive this valuable free report, then they need to give you their contact info (usually in the form of email address).

Once they signed up for your autoresponder, you email them every few days to build beneficial and trusting relationships with them.

The best part with this autoresponder thing is that you can compose your messages in one go and then determine when you want these preset messages to be sent out to your prospects and it will do the job of automatically sending out the email messages for you (yes even while you sleep)!

SUPER IMPORTANT: Do Not sell your products/services all the time within these emails. Instead what you want to do is to have a mixture of education/sales messages.

Let me explain…

Let’s say that someone just signed up for your autoresponder to get your free report. Your first message to him should be to congratulate him for requesting your report to affirm him that he’s made the right decision. You want him to feel at ease and assure him that he’s going to get valuable and useful information.

Another message might go out to him automatically from your autoresponder system 3 days later and educate him more about your niche.

Then a few days later your autoresponder system emails him another message revealing even more great content.

You can then set the next message to be a sales message where you do your sales pitch about your product or an affiliate product if you don’t have a product yet (by the way if you don’t have a product yet, you might want to check out my brand new product creation crash course Instant Product System).

The key is to keep a balance between content and sales message. If all you do is send out sales message all day long, then your subscribers (people in your autoresponder system) are going to unsubscribe and you will not be able to follow up with them anymore, ever.

The converse is also true – that is, DO NOT send content messages all day long without doing any selling because if you do then you’re not going to sell your products/services.

After all, the whole purpose of getting them on your autoresponder system (also known as your list) is to follow up with them so they buy your products/services. If you don’t do any selling, you might as well not set up your autoresponder system in the first place.

In my opinion, having a good autoresponder system in place is A MUST to be able to sell effectively on a consistent basis.

The 2 leading autoresponder companies on the market today are Getresponse and Aweber. I’ve been using Getresponse since the start of my Internet business and I highly recommend them. Aweber is known to be awesome as well, although it has a much steeper price when your subscribers go over the 500 limit.

Whichever company you choose, make sure you get an autoresponder system in place for your Internet business!

HTML Or Text Links?

In my last post, I talked about how email marketing can make or break your business, depending on how you use utilize it.

If you keep sending promo emails after promo emails to your list, your subscribers will soon get tired of it and they will eventually unsubscribe from your list.

Today I’m going to show you a neat little technique you can apply to your email marketing messages so that more subscribers click on the link contained in your emails.

So what is this technique?

Though nothing revolutionary, this technique, when implemented correctly, can boost the click through rate (CTR) of your links contained within your email messages by 22% (in my case).

If you don’t know what CTR is, CTR simply means how often a link or set of links are clicked.

If 100 people opened your email, and 30 people clicked the link contained within that email, this means you have a CTR of 30%.

Of course, the higher the CTR the better.

Now, the technique I’m about to show you is to use persuasive words as links within the email.

What do I mean by that?

Suppose I want my subscribers to click on my site Beginners Blog Profits. Instead of writing:

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Hit the link below to see how any beginner can earn real decent money online:

==> http://BeginnersBlogProfits.com

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I would write:

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Hit the link below to see how any beginner can earn real decent money online:

==> Discover The Secrets Of Making Money Online As A Beginner

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Can you spot the difference?

In the first scenario, I use http://BeginnersBlogProfits.com as a link to my site.

In the second scenario, I use the words “Discover The Secrets Of Making Money Online As A Beginner” as a link to my site.

The second scenario would yield better CTR because it persuasively urges the reader to take action by using the words “Discover The Secrets Of Making Money Online As A Beginner“.

http://BeginnersBlogProfits.com, on the other hand, does not really urge the reader to take action.

Put yourself in their shoes, would you be thinking along the lines of “Beginners Blog Profits eh? So what?”

I bet your answer to the above question is a resounding “Yes”.

However, there is one thing you need to keep in mind in order to properly implement this “using persuasive words as links” technique – in order for this to work, your subscribers must be able to receive your email in HTML format.

Otherwise it won’t work.

Most autoresponder services allow you to send two kinds of messages, one in plain text and the other in HTML format.

So what you can do is you can send your email in both formats, and if your subscriber can read HTML emails, then he or she is going to receive it in HTML format. If not, then he or she is going to receive it in plain text, in which case you can’t implement the “using persuasive words as links” technique.

But hey, implementing this “using persuasive words as links” technique to some subscribers is still better than not implementing at all!

Don’t you agree? As always, I’d like to hear your thoughts, so please share them in a comment below…