When you build your website you need to have a plan first. The reason for this is if you do not have a plan you will likely make mistakes, forget to include information, and overall have an unorganized and not a well thought out page. While you might read the page and completely understand everything, remember that your website visitor did not design the page and needs a little more direction. Read the following 10 website blunders that are common and will make your visitors head to another site quickly.

Blunder #1 Contact Information

You need to provide your contact information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical address if important. The reason for this is if a potential customer wants to contact you for whatever reason they can!

Blunder #2 Poor Organization

Make sure your website is well organized and that all links are obvious. You should even use subheadings to make it even more clear where information is. You don’t want to have to make people search.

Blunder #3 Checkout

Make the checkout process straightforward and easy. Too many times people get to the checkout and it is difficult, asks for a lot of unnecessary information, and generally takes longer than the customer wants to spend buying the product. As a result, the potential customer leaves your site to buy elsewhere. Don’t let this happen to you, make your checkout fast and easy!

Blunder #4 Typos

If your website has typographical errors, it will be noticed by your visitors. Many people consider this a sign of a novice, not a professional who is in business trying to make a living. If your website is full of typos, people are not going to believe that you take your site seriously and as a result they won’t either.

Blunder #5 Hidden Information

Do not hide information. You as a webmaster might not think the information is hidden, but if it is not readily visible it might as well be hidden. Make all information obvious and easy to find.

Blunder #6 Personal Information

Do not ask for personal information, and if you do explain why and do not make it mandatory. Many times people will want to buy your product and get to the checkout page only to have to answer lots of personal questions first. This will send people to other less interrogative pages.

Blunder #7 Too Many Forms

Keep it simple. If you are asking for memberships, checkouts, or anything that requires information, do not use a lot of forms. Figure out what questions you really need to ask and keep it short and sweet.

Blunder #8 You, not We

Focus on your customers, their needs, and what you can do for them. Your customer is not going to your page to find out about you, but what you can do for them. Remember this and if you have to put a web history about yourself, then do so in a special section where people can opt to read it.

Blunder #9 Help People Make a Decision

People might not know what they want when they go to your website. So, lead them, make suggestions about products, and provide backgrounds and uses for different products.

Blunder #10 Focus

Make sure the focus of your site is obvious and clear from the first page of your site and throughout.

info@powertraffictactics.com

In reality you should be able to find some great deals out there due to the competitive nature of website design. You should be able to get a good looking, search engine friendly website built for between £50 and £100. The websites mentioned at the bottom of this article were designed and uploaded for under £50!

Where do you find these web designers, willing to build a website for this affordable price?

These are the places I would be looking:

internet search engines

yellow pages

asking family and friends

newspaper advertisements

shop window advertisements

internet auction websites such as ebay

When you have found a designer who is going to build your website, you need to find the content for your website, choose colours and graphics and think of the page titles for each page. The page titles could be the key phrases people are likely to search for in your product area or even better the niche phrases.

Once the website is built you then have to think about promoting your website. Building up your backward links is becoming increasingly important and will eventually lead to higher search engine positions and therefore more traffic to your website.

Writing articles like the one you are reading is also of value as people are able to use them for free on their website, thus creating you an additional backward link.

If you would like to earn a little extra money from the website you could try google adsense. These are ads that the search engine google will place on your website. When a visitor clicks on the ad you earn money.

Stephen Hill has a number of websites including:

http://www.attention-deficit-disorder.co.uk

http://www.herbal-health.co.uk

http://www.natural-health-cure.co.uk

Step 1: Determine What You Have

Before you move anything, you need to know what you’ve got to transfer so that you can determine your requirements of the new hosting provider. Ask yourself these questions and find out the answers. You may need to ask your website designer or your current hosting provider for some of this information.

• Do you have all of the information you need to manage your domain names? If you don’t know what this is, read our guide to Understanding Your Domain Name.
• Can you get a complete backup copy of your website?
• What kind of server are you currently hosting on? Windows, Linux/Unix, something else?
• Is your site running any kind of dynamic code, scripts, or software, such as ASP, PHP, CGI, Java, etc.? What kind? Most shopping carts and data processing applications fall under this description.
• Does your site have a database? What kind? MySQL, SQL, PostgreSQL, Access, Oracle, something else?
• How many e-mail addresses do you have? Do you have a list of usernames and passwords? Are there any e-mail aliases or forwarded addresses set up?
• Are any parts of your site password protected or secured? How is this set up?
• Are there any elements of your site, such as the shopping cart, that are not under your domain name and cannot be taken with you? Some hosting providers offer a shopping cart which can only be used by their customers.
• How much storage space does your website take up?
• How much bandwidth does your website use up every month?
• Do you have any special requirements, such as the ability to receive delivery receipts for your e-mail?

If you can gather all of this information then you are in good shape. As with anything, preparation and good record keeping is the key to success.

Step 2: Find a Host That Can Meet Your Needs

Now that you know what you have, it’s time to look for somebody who can handle it. Check out different hosting companies, look at their packages to see what they offer, and contact them and ask what they can do to assist you in moving your website. A good host should not just be able to support your website on their servers, they should be able to help you move it as well.

If the new host you are looking at runs a different setup or a different type of server than your old host, find out how that will affect you. Some of your settings such as e-mail servers may change, you might have a different type of website control panel, you might gain some new options that you didn’t have before and you might lose some that you did.

Step 3: Set Up the New Camp Before You Break the Old One

Before you cancel your services with your old host, you need to make sure that everything is set up and running to your satisfaction on the new host. This is necessary to avoid having a broken website and interruption of your e-mail service once the hosting is transferred. The ideal is to leave your old host active up until the activation of the new host’s DNS, and to have a fully configured and operational website waiting for it when the domain is repointed. This will provide the smoothest possible transition from one host to another.

Most hosts provide a way for you to access your site prior to changing the DNS on your domain name. You should be able to access your control panel, upload your files, and perform all the operations necessary to recreate your website and e-mail accounts on the new host’s server. Tutorials should be provided on how to use all of the tools and features that the host provides you to perform these tasks, so be sure and read them. If you are still unsure how to proceed with anything, request assistance from the host’s support department.

Step 4: Notify Your Customers

If you have customers who regularly visit your site for purchases or information, you need to notify them that you are making administrative changes to the site and that it may be temporarily unavailable. While downtime may be what you’re trying to avoid, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and it shows your customers that you care. You may notify customers by email or by posting a notice on your website where it will be seen by those who need to know. Be sure to include a target date for your move in the notice.

Step 5: Move Your Domain Names

At this point you should have all of your files transferred, your e-mail accounts set up, shopping cart installed, etc. on the new host’s server. However, officially you are still being hosted by your old provider. Now it’s time to use that domain management information you found in Step 1. First you need to find out the names of your new host’s DNS. There should be a minimum of two, and they should look something like this:

NS1.YOURHOST.COM
NS2.YOURHOST.COM

You will need to enter this information in the DNS section of your domain manager for each domain that you wish to repoint to the new host. If you are parking multiple domains on the same site, make sure that the new host’s DNS is programmed to handle all of the parked domains and not just the one you are setting up the primary hosting account with.

The process of changing DNS does not occur instantaneously. Most DNS servers update their records at 12 or 24 hour intervals, although sometimes it may take as long as 48 hours. When you change your domain’s DNS, a notice is also issued to routers all across the internet that your domain is now using different DNS so that they can update their DNS tables accordingly to point your domain in the right direction when a request is issued for it in their sphere of influence. This notice does not spread evenly or instantaneously, which means that while Houston might recognize the move almost as soon as it happens, Berlin might not be able to see your new IP address for another 24 hours. This process generally completes itself within 48-72 hours.

Step 6: Test Your Site and Cancel Your Old Provider’s Services

Once you have repointed your domains and given the DNS system a couple of days to propagate the changes, you should be checking out all of the functions of your website once it is live on the new server to make sure that everything is operating as expected. Once you are satisfied that you no longer need to retrieve any information from the old host, then it is safe to cancel your services with them.

© Copyright 2005 by Stacy Clifford
Stacy Clifford is the founder of ChiliPepperWeb.net and has spent four years assisting customers in understanding how their web services work.

Many people associate autoresponders with emails. They are not mistaken anyway but for this piece of auto pilot programs are more than emails. Autoresponders are tools that can be used in a variety of ways to grow and skyrocket the sales of a business. Remember that, sale does not only involve the mounting of an ecommerce site, putting up a shopping cart and then getting buyers to make choices. It involves constant, well-crafted and sophiscated interaction with customers.

In this article, we look at 5 effective ways you can use autoresponders to generate six figure incomes for your website.

Publishing an ezine

Autoresponders which have the broadcast capabilities can be used as a cost effective means to create mailing lists to which you can periodically send your readers ezines. Ezines have the great value of preparing the minds of your prospective buyers for a purchase. It is a good platform from which you can launch your product or service, or explain how your business works. The more informed your customers are, the more they will buy from you.

If you are publishing ezines, it will serve you best to first offer a sample content. This way, prospective readers can have a preview of the actual ezines and then be able to get the needed urge to read the full ezine or the real one to follow.

Article distribution

You can use autoresponders to distribute your articles. Articles in which you have embedded your product links are an excellent way to boost sales. There are two reasons for this: First, an article is more explanatory and friendly than a sales letter. Secondly, an article can surreptitiously suggest to the reader to buy a product or patronize a service indirectly. The most important point for publishing articles are the confidence and authority with which the readers associate the writer. If your readers find your articles informative and useful, they will tend to like your opinions and recommendations’ resulting in greater sale of your products.

It is not only your opt-in list that can benefit from your articles. You can broadcast them to webmasters who need articles to boost their search engine rankings. As people read them at these sites, they follow the links in the articles to reach your site for a purchase or an enquiry of your product.

Using autoresponders to generate repeat sales

A customer who buys from you today is more likely to buy again tomorrow. Actually every business should strive for repeat sales and people who buy for the first time take less effort to make the next purchase.

You can use autoresponders to tell your past customers about the latest version of a product or an upgrade. You can even tell them about the availability of some accessories or enhancements to the original product that are worth buying. You can even tell them about discounts available and even say it is available to only past customers for them to get a feel of being valued as buyers.

No business can afford to lose sight of the leverage that autoresponders bring to them. It is therefore a strong recommendation that both start up businesses and well-established ones incorporate them in their website planning and online presence efforts. Autoresponders such as the high grade ones found at http://www.aceresponse.com/ to help a business generate a high return on its investments.

articles@ultra-webfusion.com

An email autoresponder should come as natural to every business. Web surfers stopped looking at ordinary websites years ago. Now every internet visitor wants a website that is caring and will build a positive relationship with its visitors. It is for this reason that online companies are investing huge millions into Customer Relationship Management programs. But if you are a start up businesses without the huge capital outlay to put into customer relations, you can use auto responders to deliver an amazing warm reception and interaction with their visitors.

To conduct a successful online business, you may want to be guided by available research on customers. Research has long established that, positive and timely responses are important ingredients that visitors use to judge how friendly websites are and how they would want to interact with them. And you may want to know that visitors are more likely to establish relationships with sites that provide excellent feedback and timely responses.

Auto responders therefore positively answer the call of website owners seeking automated interaction with customers at all facets of their customer relations.

An email autoresponder can securely perform 5 principal business boosting roles for every website which needs to get a high rating in customer relations and therefore enhance customer loyalty.

Acknowledgement:

Autoresponders can let people know you have received their emails and that you will soon respond to their enquiry. Even when you are not available to reply immediately, you will do so at some later time. You see, buyers are predominantly in a state of anxiety and it is a good marketing strategy to allay such anxieties.

People buy with several reasons; one of their being an urgent need to do something. So acknowledging their emails sets their minds at ease and then they are confident that a reply will be forth coming on their enquiry. If you have one thousand emails a day, there is no way you can efficiently reply to all these manually and that is where an auto responder comes in.

Notices:

Assuming you were out of the office for two days and a customer interested in bringing you a hundred thousand Dollar deal writes to you with the hope of receiving a response so business is transacted. It will be quite discouraging for him to wait and wait for no answer to come forth. If you have an email autoresponder installed, some preliminary email marketing messages can be sent to the sender; at least informing him of products/services available or explain your absence and when you will be back. If the sender wishes to wait, you can come back to respond appropriately and get the deal finalized.

Confirmation:

In this age of scam and fraud on the net, every buyer will want a confirmation of his purchase. An autoresponder confirmation serves two purposes - it assures the buyer that the goods will be forthcoming and it relieves him of the thoughts that he had transacted with a fraudster. An auto responder performing this function will make your customers happy and buy from you always.

Appreciation:

Buyers do businesses a great favor by buying. Although you are giving away a product or service in return, customers need to be appreciated for buying from you. At least they had other several options but they chose to buy from you because they like you or how you conducted your business. You can use an email auto responder to send follow up messages to customers thanking them for their business and assuring them of continued support.

Every business must make it a point to rely on an email auto responder to generate customer satisfaction and loyalty. Modern online businesses cannot afford to lose this part of everyday web-based transactions. There are many auto responders on the market available for free or a fee but the most versatile that can effectively perform the vital duties mentioned above can be found at http://www.aceresponse.com/

articles@ultra-webfusion.com

Relevance to a search:

• The frequency of the search word on a web page is an indicator of its relevance. If a web page contains the word ten times on the page, it is ten times more relevant than a page which contains the word only once.

• The position of the search word:
  • In the title tag.
    This appears in your browser at the very top of the screen, above File, Edit, View…

    This tag is important to search engines as it is visible to the visitor, and ostensibly sums up the purpose for the page. Other meta tags are largely ignored by search engines.

  • In a heading.
    This tag is very important to search engines as it is visible to the visitor, and ostensibly sums up the purpose for the page. The size of the heading does not matter. Take care not to have more that one such heading on the home page. (Don’t confuse the search engine).
  • In a link to another page.
    In the HTML coding, such a link could be Whodickies. If “Whodickies” are important enough to have a link to them, they are very relevant to a visitor’s search for whodickies.
  • In the body text.
    Key words near the top and the bottom of the text are important. Certainly many search results show the beginning and end of pages.
• Proportion of the search words on the page.
  The intensity of key words in relation to the total words in a page tells a search engine if there is spamming. Experience has shown that if the key words in a search make up more than 10% of the total web page the page is marked down. Some experts say 5%.
• Number of inside pages linking back to that web page.
  The more inside pages linking back to the home page the more relevant the home page appears to the search engine. A website with 30 pages must seem to have more information than one with 3 pages.
• Number of other websites linking to that web page.
  A website with links from 20 other websites seems more popular than one with links from only 2 other websites. The quality of such links has a bearing. e.g. Links from other websites which display your key words are better that links from websites without those words.
• Number of articles published linking to that web page.
  Many websites publish articles on many subjects. Check the formats acceptable. Compose your article, then submit it.

Why do different search engines give different rankings to the same website? Each search engine may give a different weight to each of the factors above.

Why would a website lose or gain ranking position, without any change? Search engines change their secret algorithms (formula of factor weighting) from time to time. Other websites may enter the lists, change, or leave the lists.

Remember that the main reason for putting up a website it to be found by search engines, so do all you can to be friendly to them.

More information on search engine optimization of websites can be found at platypus websites - www.platywebs.com.au

Ken McKay has been designing commercial websites since 1999.

‘e’ Business metrics

The term ‘e’ business was coined by Ogilvy and Mather for IBM in November of 1997 and has stuck around ever since. Great advertising, of course it came from e-commerce which was a general term, but I can still remember the IBM jingle and the ads showing IBM’s vision of networked computing. There was nothing wrong with the IBM idea or their adverts. However, one problem with this ‘e’ part is that for some reason people decided that the Internet was not like other marketing mediums.

Everything became "e or i something", it became associated with the brave new world of fast moving VC led consortiums buying and selling companies based on their business plans and little else. No-one measured success by ordinary standards any more, you didn’t need to pay rents, have credit history, loyal customers or reliable revenue, just a great idea and guts.

Great ideas aren’t measurable and neither are guts!

We all know what happened next of course. The normally cautious VC’s realized they had made some really stupid moves and pulled their money out before they went bankrupt. This starved the companies that they actually helped to mismanage and put a lot of otherwise talented individuals on the dole (sent them down the river, took away their jobs, you get the picture!).

So why did ordinarily savvy business men and women jump on this particular bandwagon? And why did IBM, Dell and other notable bricks and mortar businesses survive the dot bomb where so many failed?

Survival was down to ‘e’ business as usual

IBM, Dell and the likes simply developed their businesses by doing what they already knew worked and applied what new business intelligence they could glean from the Internet to help them with their existing strategies. In other words they used new information from web analytics in combination with real business metrics to develop online business plans. There wasn’t anything particularly clever about it, it was common sense and all the metrics had one thing in common, they were controllable.

Web business metrics you can control

There are hundreds of reports you can get from web analytic systems and if you know what you’re doing they can really help you. Things like bounce rates, entry and exit pages, scenario analysis, first time versus repeat buyers etc. are all extremely important to measure and build upon. They are individual KPI’s I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

However the only metrics which you as an e-business can directly control are average sale price, profit margin, overhead, conversion rate and visitors. You probably won’t see 2 or 3 of those 5 metrics reported in most web analytic systems, simply because it’s not down to a web measurement system to tell you what your profit margin or overhead is, though most good ones can manage average sale price, conversion rate and visitors.

Why these 5 metrics?

Let’s take a look at these 5 metrics and explain how you can affect them.

Average sale price ? You can directly alter your product prices to be higher or lower thus affecting the average sale price.

Profit margin ? You can reduce overheads or increase sales prices to improve profit margins. You can also reduce your margin if it’s strategically a good idea to reduce sales prices and you have no other way to reduce price other than eat into your margin. The idea being that more of your visitors will buy due to a lower price meaning overall you have a higher net profit.

Overhead ? By reducing overheads you can improve profit margins, or affect the product sales price. One of our clients has sold a lot of one kind of product. Now he has a very low overhead for that product range meaning he can reduce the average sale price of the product while retaining the same profit margin. Because his overheads are low his prices are very competitive and he continues to do well with this product category.

Conversion rate ? Believe it or not it is possible to control your conversion rate! By measuring other KPI’s mentioned using good web analytics tools you can see how people are behaving on your website. In a nutshell if you then fix the problems you will undoubtedly find, you improve the chances that people will buy your products. It’s not really that simple but that’s the way it generally starts.

Visitors ? The level of visitors you get is down to your marketing efforts whether that is paid or unpaid. You can engage in search optimization for critical keywords or PPC marketing to drive traffic for keywords you can’t rank for organically. You can pay affiliates to send you traffic that buy your products. You can put out press releases. You can engage in banner advertising or behavioral marketing. Or you can do nothing and hope that your content alone provides enough traffic from websites that point to you. All of these methods affect the levels of traffic. The key is getting relevant traffic rather than traffic that isn’t interested in your product range.

In Summary

I hope to have shown 2 uses of web analytics, using KPI’s to serve as warnings when things are going wrong and using web analytics in conjunction with metrics to help you start thinking of your web commerce as a business. By using the warning flags as indicators of where things might go wrong you can identify problems and figure out whether your website is visitor centric enough. By exercising control over the five metrics discussed here you can improve your bottom line.

Author: Steve Jackson, Editor - Conversion Chronicles

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Chronicles web site (http://www.conversionchronicles.com).

An autoresponder can send emails but the essence is that those emails get read and acted upon by the recipients. There is less benefit to a business if emails that get sent at the cost of bandwidth, just get deleted because they fail to convey the essential information the receiver needs.

We take a look at the factors that will create a conducive atmosphere for a message in an autoresponder email to be read. I mean the kind of stuff that will make an Eskimo order air conditioners.

Sequence:

Let the entire text of the autoresponder email flow like a story. Be sequential. For example, start talking about difficulties people face before you suggest a solution. If you are marketing twin-blade razors for example, you will have to talk about the ineffectiveness of single blade razors first before you talk about the effectiveness of twin models. This way, you are presenting the issue logically to the reader and before he gets to your main message, he understands the limitation of a certain situation and the need to improve it.

Killer headline:

According to research, every web visitor takes 5 seconds to decide whether a material is of value to him. Normally, the headline tells it all. If you are unable to attract a reader through your headline in an autoresponder, it will be difficult or almost impossible to convince him later in the body. The headline should be compelling enough for the reader to want to read on. If you are selling lawn mowers to an affluent neighborhood, you may have it wrong if you wrote

‘Buy cheap lawn mowers and make great savings’

The affluent does not need to save. It is the middle and lower class that needs savings most. Top class neighborhoods are rich. It is not cost- effectiveness they want. They want something luxurious, durable or exquisite.

The following headline can serve your business better:

‘Triple-power, dual-purpose, exquisite, sleek mowers for the busy executive.’

Make the message personal:

People don’t want to be treated generally or as part of a group. They want individual attention. People will buy products if they are convinced that it had been purposely made for them. They will also effective read your autoresponder message if it is addressed to them personally. It is therefore important to use the second person singular (You) in all cases to emphasis individuality. Who will be happy or convinced to read a message on a personal product that has been addressed to thousands of people?

In this regard. it is advisable to use an autoresponder that has advanced features to incorporate peoples names and other non-sensitive personal details in their messages such as the type featured at http://www.aceresponse.com/

Introduce the message well:

In the opening, tell the reader what the autoresponder mail is about and why he is receiving it. Many people forget they ever subscribed to an offer. If you do not make this point, the letter may be treated as spam and discarded. So at this point, it is essential that you introduce the subject. If it is a product, begin creating interest about the features, advantages compared to others, etc. Never mention price here because a product must sell for what its worth. If the reader has not formed an opinion about the real value of the product, how do you expect him to be in the mood to pay for it?

Move the reader to action:

After all the convincing, you need the reader to take action on your autoresponder email. At the end of the message, help the reader to buy the product or request for the service. At this point you may talk about the price, the security of the website and other relevant points. The essence is that you are making it easy for him to make a purchase.

An autoresponder can boost your sale with the appropriate message. If you craft the message well, sales will never stop coming in. We have given you the basics of every auto autoresponder message. Remember, good messages need to go with a good autoresponder for this we recommend http://www.aceresponse.com/

articles@ultra-webfusion.com

Here is a very simple 3 step process to find that perfect domain name using some free online tools

Step 1 Decide on a Theme.

It is very important that you decide on a Theme for your web page. Once you decide on a theme you should pick a Name that works well with your Theme. If your theme is about Pets you wouldn’t want your Domain Name to be All-About-Plants. For this example we will choose Debt Reduction and Bill consolidation as our theme

Step 2 Find a Domain Name

Most Internet Guru’s recommend that you get a ‘.com’ for your Domain. It is also best to choose a Domain with Keywords that are Popular for your Theme. Again if your domain is about Pets you probably wouldn’t want plants as part of your Domain Name unless you are Selling a Vegetarian Pet Cook Book.

If You already have a Domain name in Mind then you can skip to step 3 to see if your Domain is available. If Not keep reading step 2 for helpful hints on finding that Perfect domain Name

If you do not have a Domain Name yet and if you are at a Loss at what name to use don’t despair their are a few free online tools you can use. If your web site theme is Debt Reduction and Bill consolidation then you would probably want a Domain Name with one or more of those words in it. If you need help finding Keywords to include in your Domain Name here is a free Keyword Suggestion Tool you can use http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Now that you have some Keywords Picked out you can use either of these free Online Tools to help you find that perfect Domain Name

http://www.nameboy.com/ http://www.domaininformer.com/tools/

Some suggestions for our Debt Reduction theme is

• DebtDispatch.com

• Debt-be-Gone.com
• Debt-No-More.com
• DebtNoMore.com

Step 3 Register Your Domain

Before you can Register your Domain name you need to make sure it is still available. You can go to the following Whois Server to see if your domain is taken: http://www.internic.net/whois.html You would simply type in one of the names from step 2 like DebtDispatch.com and see if it’s available.

Once you have found that Perfect Domain Name and verified it is indeed available Internic has a List of approved Internet Registrars Here:http://www.internic.net/regist.html

You will notice that the List of Registrars is Long and confusing, A very Popular one is Goddaddy.com Their Pricing is very reasonable and they have a great reputation. Nameboy and Domaininformer from step 2 will also register your Domains.

Host Your Domain

Now All that is left is to host your Domain. There are hundreds of Web Hosts available some good and some not so good. It is really hard to know which ones to use. Findmyhosting.com has a Web Hosting rating service where users rate Web Hosts. They also Tell you the Up time History of your Web Hosts. Pick your Host Carefully. You may want to ask some of your friends and Associates which Hosts They use.

Now anytime you want a New Home on the Web Just follow this simple 3 Step System.

About the Author:
Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 When he Built an Organization of over 100,000 Members

Mike uses and recommends Kiosk Web Hosting
http://ewguru.com/kiosk

Get Mike’s Newsletter:
http://ewguru.com/newsletter

More Articles by Mike:
http://ewguru.com/tips

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler the Coolest Guy in the Universe

It is an established fact that autoresponders can boost sales. Customers tend to buy, and buy more, from people they are familiar with. But as the web is a faceless arena, how do you create familiarity then? The answer is an autoresponders. After a customer has answered to your advert or notice on the web, you can create a situation of familiarity automatically with auto responders to convert that initial response to a sale. After all that’s what businesses exist to do.

The safest technique is to follow up the initial enquiry or interest with enticing messages. Customers usually need more information or confidence to buy.

In this regards, you will have to put your autoresponders to work.

This is how it goes:

You set up autorespnders to send three pre-sell messages to the prospective customer who has expressed interest in your product. In the initial follow-up letter, you don’t need to say much else the interest will wane right away. Customers rarely tolerate hard sales approach.

Rather be brief and emphasize the importance, uniqueness or cost effectiveness of your product or service. Remember that, this letter is supposed to encourage the reader to buy without going much into service or product specifications.

On the second day, the autoresponders will have to send a second letter. This one should be explanatory and particularly - particularly - mention why the customer needs to buy and the benefits he will derive from such a purchase. Make sure you have stated the price, quantity, terms of shipping, taxes and after sales support in clear, common English language. Avoid technical jargons which may need a lot of interpretations. You want your clients to buy quickly and not refer to encyclopedias before understanding terms you have used.

The third letter from the autoresponders can be sent about a week or later from the date the second one was sent. In this letter, you suggest to the reader that perhaps he was unable to respond due to busy schedule, meetings, etc. The purpose of tgis letter is to rekindle his interest or remind him of your offer. Now, do not repeat the same things you said in your previous letter. Rather take a different perspective to present your product or service.

If the third letter from the autoresponders fails to yield any response, then stretch the timing of the next letter to a month. If the reader sees your letter regularly and one day decides to purchase the product, you will be the first he turns to as he would have by now accumulated a lot of info about the product to make a decision. Perhaps more importantly, you would have created the familiarity needed by people to build trust and confidence.

It may have to be understood that not all autoresponders can accomplish the task we have enumerated above. The functions we have alluded to in the article can best be handled by a professional auto responder such as the ones found at http://www.aceresponse.com/ These are high grade autoresponders with excellent facilities for designing the letters, setting the timing and even performing other auto pilot duties.

So that is how autoresponders can do the job of a salesman for you - all at the click of a mouse. You don’t need extensive knowledge to be able to put this sales generating method into practice. Neither do you need to know about html. You simple knowledge about websites and email is all you need to get the power out of this tool.

Article was written by Chad Cook

articles@ultra-webfusion.com