Autoresponders - One Simple Trick That Will Improve Your Results

Autoresponders - One Simple Trick That Will Improve Your Results

By Hamish Hayward

Autoresponders,or responders, are simply programs that allow you to send outpre-written emails which have been pre-loaded into the responder.Prospective customers or recruits either input their email addressesinto a signup form on a website or send a blank email to a triggeraddress. They are then entered into a database and receive your emailsat the intervals you specify when you set up the responder.

Thisis an extremely powerful marketing technique as it allows you to sendrepeated messages to people who have positively displayed theirinterest in whatever you’re promoting.

Numerous studies haveshown that the majority of consumers will not buy, or signup tosomething, at the first exposure. Prospects typically need to havesomewhere between 5 and 12 exposures to the product or service beforethey feel comfortable enough to commit. The ideal number of follow upcontacts is often said to be 7, but this will vary depending upon theindividual consumer and the product on offer.

Since therecipient of your emails has given you permission to contact them, youwon’t be accused of"spamming". You may need to provide full contactdetails in your emails to be sure of this - it varies from country tocountry, but err on the side of caution. An added bonus is that youwill have their email address in your database - or"list"- so thatyou can keep them updated with any new offers you may have in future.

Manyinternet marketers already appreciate the awesome power of automatedfollow up using an autoresponder loaded with well crafted salesmessages. However, there is one enhancement that is often overlooked,even by relatively experienced marketers: The"Thank You"page. Usedproperly, this can boost your signup rate by as much as 20%, it canhelp promote your other programs, products and opportunities and it caneven earn you some money.

It’s easy to overlook this aspect ofautoresponders. After all, you’ve probably spent a good deal of timecrafting your email messages and loading them into the responder. It’sonly natural that when the last one is input you want to get themessages out to the big wide world ASAP - right? But take just a fewminutes - and that really is all it needs - and you could benefithugely.

First of all, whatever you do, don’t use the Thank Youpage that your autoresponder company so kindly provides for you. Why doyou think they provide this? Certainly, it is a service to theircustomers. Normally it gives a polite (if generic) thank you andcontains a few reassurances about spam along with brief details of theopt-out procedure. However, when you look at it closely, it is a fullpage advert for the autoresponder provider isn’t it? A full page advertwhich you have provided for them.

As an absolute minimum, if youcan’t be bothered to spend a few minutes to generate your own customThank you page, redirect your new signup to one of the other pages onyour website, or to the home page of one of your other sites if youhave more than one. However, it’s much better to take the time andproduce your own full page advert. Some of the items you might want toconsider including are listed below:

1. A polite thank you (mandatory).
2.A brief statement that you only send emails with permission, that theymay unsubscribe at any time and that you will never pass their contactdetails to a third party (also mandatory).
3. A link to another website that you own or promote.
4. An advert for another opportunity that you are involved in.
5. A"Tell A Friend"form or link.
6. Adverts from Google Adsense or some other source.

Items1&2 are only common courtesy. Items 3 - 6 could give yourperformance a real boost. Remember, this is a page that your viewerwill automatically click away from. They are"ready-to-click"so atleast give them the option of making a click that will benefit yourather than just clicking on their"favourites"or home page buttons.Not all of them will click - but some of them will and you need everyadvantage you can get!

About the Author: Hamish Hayward -Discover the key criteria that you must apply to ensure businesssuccess– now available in e-book format.http://www.perfectsystem.co.uk/

Source:www.isnare.com

Forget SEO– It’s All About Conversion!

Forget SEO– It’s All About Conversion!

By Stephen Munday

WhichSEO hat do you wear? Is it white or black? Or perhaps it’s a subtleshade of gray. Well, wherever you are on this spectrum, if you are like99% of the SEO-fixated webmasters out there, you are doing all you canto get visitors to your site. Where you used to optimize your keywordsmeta tags, you now worry about anchor text and XML site maps.

So,you finesse your site, schmooze the algorithm du jour and begin toclimb the slippery search engine rankings pole. But this is where youhave to leave your SEO tricks behind and start thinking conversion.

Whoathere! Conversion? That’s all about making sales on shopping sites. Mysite’s a forum! I don’t sell anything. What has conversion got to dowith me?

Everything, my friend. Everything….

SERP Conversion

Youwant visitors to come your site, right? That’s why you climb greasySERP pole, after all. (And why you lay awake at night wondering whenthe next Florida, Hilltop or Bourbon algorithm earthquake is going tohit.) But what does it matter if you reach the peak, but no one clicksthrough to your site anyway?

The fact is that you have toconvert prospective visitors even before they arrive. You have to piquetheir interest, tweak their curiosity and make sure they click yourlink and not the other guy’s. And all you have to use are words. Notechnical tricks will help you now– your only tools are plain ol’words.

The SERPs will show words from two of three places. Two of these you can control and one you can’t:

1.Your title tag.
2.Your meta description tag.
3.A directory description.

(For example, Google is known to use DMOZ descriptions in their SERPs, and Yahoo uses their directory descriptions in theirs.)

Now,there’s not much you can do about how Yahoo or DMOZ editors describeyour site, so don’t worry about number 3. But do what you can do: Placeyour value propositions clearly in 1 and 2, and use them to luresearchers into your website.

So you have to convert people before they even get to your site. But that’s not all…. You want them to stay, right?

Flash Conversion

No,this has nothing to do with being blinded by bright lights on the roadto Damascus. Nor am I telling you to go and make a 100% animatedwebsite.

This“flash” is that split second, that tiny window ofopportunity that opens up when a searcher arrives at your site anddecides whether they have actually found what they are looking for… ornot.

Typically, you’ll have a couple of seconds to persuade thenew visitor to stay and hang out. That’s all you get. It’s the ultimatein speed-dating. So, how do you wow your“date”? Do you show him a pageof scraped“content” interspersed with Adsense ads? Not if you wantthis to be a lasting relationship.

Follow these tips and be sure to impress your“date”:

1. Have a clear theme

Ranking high for“blue widgets”? Then be sure your visible title, copy and images are clearly focused on them.

2. Have a clean design

Imagineyou are taking a first date to a movie. Do you pick her up wearing yourpajamas in a dirty, trash-filled car? Or do you clean the car, washyour face and dress to impress? Of course you want to impress her, soyou make sure you look (and smell) good.

It’s the same withyour site: Clean design, a nice text size and pages that don’t scrollfrom here to eternity are going to float your first-time visitor-date’sboat.

3. Write clearly and focus on your“date”

Waffle onabout yourself and your date will get bored. She wants you to beinterested in her. And in terms of your site, that means giving herwhat she wants to know as quickly and succinctly as possible. Thiscomes down to your ability to write and communicate. So, if you arelike Steve Martin in“Roxanne”, make sure you get a someone else (acopywriter) to compose the lines to wow your“date” for you.

OK,so let’s say you have successfully wooed your first-time visitor date.He’s here and he has decided to stick around. You’re going steady,getting to know each other a little more. That’s all you want, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t! You want to pop the question, of course!

Getting hitched

You’vemade all this effort and spent money on getting your“date” this far,so you want to get the most out of your investment, right? You want tohear those sweet words,“I do”:

I do… want to click your Adsense ads. I do… want to become a forum member. I do… want to buy that cool digital thingy.

So how do you turn a whirlwind romance into a successful proposal? Try these ideas for size:

Have clear navigation

Youwant to make your date dizzy with excitement, not frustration! Makesure you have clear, consistent, well-labeled navigation and make yourvisitor-date’s time with you a pleasure, and not a reason to reach forthe Advil.

Have a clear proposition

What do you want yourvisitor to do? Buy something? Sign up for something? Join something?Whatever the point of your site is, it does have a point, right? Sodon’t beat about the bush, and don’t hold back waiting for the rightmoment: Make your“proposal”, and make it clear and direct.

Happily Ever After…

Youthought that was the end of the story? Wait a minute, it’s not overyet! I thought you were in this for a long-term relationship, not a onenight stand?

I know, you were thinking that having made allthat effort while you were dating, you could ease off now that you’re“married”. But don’t you know that the real rewards start here?

So what are the secrets of a long, blissful relationship with your visitors?

1. Feed them!

Youconvinced him to come visit once. But how often will he come back ifall you give him are the same old leftovers? Cook him up somethingjuicy and delicious, and have him salivating for more:

Enlivenyour content with new, relevant pages and, not only will you set thesearch engine robots drooling, but you will also find you have a hoardof visitors coming back for seconds. And in this age offast-(visitor)-food creation tools called blogs, there’s really noexcuse anymore.

2. Shower them with gifts

Everyone likes a gift - and not just on birthdays, anniversaries and at Christmas:

Moneytalks, and if you are selling anything through your site, thendiscounts and other offers to previous visitors and customers will drawthem back like magnets. Throw in tempting freebies as well and you willhave a potent marketing mix.

3. Send them“love” letters

Anyonewho has been in a long-distance relationship (like my wife and I werefor a year and a half), knows that if you can’t be together, the nextbest thing is a letter or email. For your website, this means aninteresting ezine that is light on sales pitch and rich in information.

4. Start a family!

Notliterally! But you can create a“family” atmosphere by adding a forumwhere your visitors can interact with each other– not just with youand your site. People are social animals, so use a forum to keep themcoming back.

OK, so perhaps I overstated it a little in mytitle. SEO is not dead, so don’t forget about it quite yet. Justremember that it will only get you so far: If you want to actuallyachieve anything with your site, then you need to focus on conversionlike a laser.

About the Author: Stephen Munday lives in Japan. His most recent project ishttp://www.japanese-name-translation.com/where you can get your name in kanji or buy a beautiful personalizedJapanese calligraphy. This article is© Stephen Munday 2005 and mayonly be reproduce as a whole with hyperlinks intact.

Source:www.isnare.com

RSS Feeds…Just Got Better!

RSS Feeds…Just Got Better!

By Terry Till

We all knowthat in the world of online internet marketing we need our sites to getgood quality targeted traffic on a daily basis. Whether we are justtrying to improve our web site traffic just in general or as a specificneed to increase our revenue from affiliate programs and adsense thelife blood of our business is and always will be quality laser targetedvisitors.

So in order to produce high quality web sites we allneeded to fill our web site pages with good content rich features andarticles, this being a two-fold strategy. Not only do we need highquality content to please our visitors and hopefully get them to returnto our sites in the future, good quality content also seduced the majorsearch engines into sending their bot crawlers to our sites on a dailybasis and thus ensuring that our web sites were placed and ranked wellin their search results. After all, well-ranked web sites in searchengine results equals more high quality laser targeted visitors and thecycle continues.

In our quest to fulfil the needs of this webcontent rss feeds came to the rescue, known by some as Rich SiteSummary, rss feeds offer a means of placing a link on your web sitefrom a feature source of interest and this will usually be updateddaily by the owner with new features and articles. This was a giantleap forward as far as web content was concerned and enabled many website owners to produce high quality web sites with fresh daily contentof interest to their visitors.

However nothing on the internetstays for long without some improvement and rss is no exception to therule as web site owners now have the opportunity to offer theirvisitors and the search engine bot crawlers an even more advanced formof rss feed.

Powerrss now offers feeds that can be randomised,shuffled and archived daily to make web pages even more appealing andyet give each web site owner an individual appearance of what mighthave been a good but widely used basic rss feed.

So now you can.

Automatically retrieve and displays keyword-rich (relevant) content on your web pages - without you lifting a single finger!

Eliminate the software footprints from your site by randomizing the RSS feeds before displaying them.

Inaddition, it allows you to automatically perform basic SEO pageoptimization by highlighting (e.g bold) the keywords, automaticallyinserts backlinks to your webpages (keyword is used as the anchor text)and the option to turn on the"nofollow"attribute to conserve the pagerank.

Use an automated archive system that builds your websitefor you - by adding a new (theme-related) page on your site each day -24×7!

About the Author: Copyright 2005 Terry Till - Find out all the facts about Power-rss now at:http://www.trafficgt.com/powerrss.html

Source:www.isnare.com

RSS Feeds…Just Got Better!

RSS Feeds…Just Got Better!

By Terry Till

We all knowthat in the world of online internet marketing we need our sites to getgood quality targeted traffic on a daily basis. Whether we are justtrying to improve our web site traffic just in general or as a specificneed to increase our revenue from affiliate programs and adsense thelife blood of our business is and always will be quality laser targetedvisitors.

So in order to produce high quality web sites we allneeded to fill our web site pages with good content rich features andarticles, this being a two-fold strategy. Not only do we need highquality content to please our visitors and hopefully get them to returnto our sites in the future, good quality content also seduced the majorsearch engines into sending their bot crawlers to our sites on a dailybasis and thus ensuring that our web sites were placed and ranked wellin their search results. After all, well-ranked web sites in searchengine results equals more high quality laser targeted visitors and thecycle continues.

In our quest to fulfil the needs of this webcontent rss feeds came to the rescue, known by some as Rich SiteSummary, rss feeds offer a means of placing a link on your web sitefrom a feature source of interest and this will usually be updateddaily by the owner with new features and articles. This was a giantleap forward as far as web content was concerned and enabled many website owners to produce high quality web sites with fresh daily contentof interest to their visitors.

However nothing on the internetstays for long without some improvement and rss is no exception to therule as web site owners now have the opportunity to offer theirvisitors and the search engine bot crawlers an even more advanced formof rss feed.

Powerrss now offers feeds that can be randomised,shuffled and archived daily to make web pages even more appealing andyet give each web site owner an individual appearance of what mighthave been a good but widely used basic rss feed.

So now you can.

Automatically retrieve and displays keyword-rich (relevant) content on your web pages - without you lifting a single finger!

Eliminate the software footprints from your site by randomizing the RSS feeds before displaying them.

Inaddition, it allows you to automatically perform basic SEO pageoptimization by highlighting (e.g bold) the keywords, automaticallyinserts backlinks to your webpages (keyword is used as the anchor text)and the option to turn on the"nofollow"attribute to conserve the pagerank.

Use an automated archive system that builds your websitefor you - by adding a new (theme-related) page on your site each day -24×7!

About the Author: Copyright 2005 Terry Till - Find out all the facts about Power-rss now at:http://www.trafficgt.com/powerrss.html

Source:www.isnare.com