The First Commandment of Marketing Online

If you are going to be making money on line there is one commandment that you must follow.

Other people will tell you this is optional or suggest that you do so, but I am telling you right now that it’s an absolute requirement for your success. There is no doubt that with this principle you will make several times more money if you follow this commandment and will make significantly less if you ignore it. Ignoring this commandment is one of the most insane foolish things that you can do.

The 1st Internet Marketing Commandment

You can’t promote anything on line without first capturing the email address of your website visitors.

You shouldn’t even attempt to get one visitor to your website without having a mechanism in place to capture the name and email address of the website visitors that come to your website.

Why would I make this a commandment?

Most people that come to your website the first time will not buy your product. They are just casually surfing the web looking for information and somehow they end up on your site. They haven’t heard of you before and don’t have any intentions of buying anything from you (of course some people will love your site and buy without flinching on impulse). Research has shown that it takes a average of 7-15 communications with a potential customer before they buy from your website.

If you capture their name and email address you can send them carefully planned marketing campaigns that ultimately lead them to purchase your products.

How do you collect email addresses?

The magic tool for this purpose is called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an account that you subscribe to that manages your database of potential customers (people who submitted their email address when they were on your website). When you log into your auto responder account there is a section where you can generate a sign up form, you then place it on your website and people are now able to submit their email address to you, the auto responder account records the name and email so that you can email to them any time you wish to.

That ’s not all the auto responder does. You can pre-program messages in the auto responder so that if someone gives you their email you can send them an instant message, one the next day, one 2 days later, one 5 days after that, one 30 days later, and so on.

You can have 10 years worth of emails automatically programmed into your auto responder account, and you should want to!

When someone subscribes to your auto responder they will automatically receive a sequence of pre-programmed messages that you have set up in the auto responder Everything happens automatically and it ’s all managed from your auto responder account. This is amazingly powerful.

You can also send a broadcast email to your entire list any time you want (like when you release a new product - this is why I want you to plan for a sequel).

Let ’s suppose you get 200 visitors coming to your website every day (an easy goal to achieve). Let ’s say that 20 of them subscribe (your site should get 10-30% sign up conversion rate). After 1 year you will have 7,300+ email addresses in your auto responder At this point you can release your second product/service and send a broadcast email to your 7,300+ prospects with a special offer. Let ’s say that 3% of these people are interested in your offer, that’s 219+ customers. Let ’s say that your new product sells for $197, but you give them a 48 hour special price (for being valued subscribers) of only $97. At the end of the blast you’ll make 219 * $97 = $21,243!

How long would it take you to make that at a job? That ’s a nice weekend for most people!

It ’s even better than you think from the example above. The 7,300 subscribers are still in your auto responder. Just because you sold something to them when you released your second product, doesn’t mean you can’t sell to them again. You can market to them again and again and keep making more and more money from these names. You would see diminished results if you emailed a promotion to them every day (most people would stop reading your emails), but done tastefully you can keep selling to these people every few weeks.

There are some auto responder scripts that you can get and upload to your website, but I am warning you to stay away from them completely. It is best to use an on line-based account that lives on a third party server. For the auto responder I use, go to:

http://greatautoresponder.com

This auto responder is the best that I have found (I’ve tried several). It will cost you under $20 a month, but it is the best investment you can make.

Why would someone give you their email address?

People really don’t want to give their email address out at first. You have to give them an amazing incentive to give you their email address. The main way to get someone’s email is to create a super-duper over-the-top free product that you give away in exchange for their email address .

You can also get someone to subscribe to your auto responder by offering them a mini course of valuable information relating to your product or service. A mini-course can be anywhere from a 2-10 part series of emails that give people valuable tips, articles, or info nuggets that get people excited about the topic on your website (these messages also creatively sell your product).

The mini-course and free report can also be combined. Everything can be delivered by auto responder immediately after the prospect signs up from your website. They’ll be happy to get instant gratification when they get awesome free stuff just by submitting their email. If the free stuff is worth reading, they’ll also read your other emails (you want them to so they can see your marketing messages).

Reposted from my mentor Brian Campbell www.thesocialmediasource.com