Your Online Business’ Most Valuable Asset

The List.

More specifically, the email list you keep of your prospects and customers is your online business’ most valuable asset. These email addresses are from people who have expressed an interest in what you do or, even better, have already given you money for doing it.

Why is the List so important?

Because it allows you to keep in touch with these VIPs on a regular basis.

This is how you keep yourself on people’s minds.
This is how you build relationships.
This is how you earn their trust.
This is how you make it easier for them to buy from you.

Another reason the list is so powerful is that email will likely be the most effective tool you have to drive traffic to your site and sales to your business. This is because email is very personal form of communication and the traffic you drive from email will generally be much more targeted and productive than traffic from other sources.

Be sure to pay special attention to your customer email list. Many marketers ignore customers, past and present, when marketing. This is a huge mistake. It is FAR easier (and cheaper) to get money from people who have already shown a willingness to do so than going out and try to convince new prospects to spend their money with you.

So how do you build your list?

Simple – use bribes. No, not an unethical kind of bribe. Use a bribe like a newsletter, whitepaper, special report, or some other piece of useful content.

Have a sign up form on your website and/or blog and let people know that you’ll be happy to send them some free awesome content in exchange for their email address. (FYI – I’ve heard the statistic that if your sign up form asks for more than a name and email address your response rate will fall by 50%. So don’t ask for more than those two pieces of information unless you absolutely need it!).

Once you have their email address, send them the content and then keep in touch. The easiest way to do this is to use an auto responder.  An auto responder is a program that will automatically send an email, or a series of emails to people on your list. If you’re not familiar with auto responders, you can learn more about them here.

One last note about your email list. DO NOT SPAM YOUR LIST. If you send spammy, hard-salesy type emails, you will lose the trust of the people on your list and they’ll unsubscribe in droves. It’s okay to mention new products, services, special offers, etc. – just don’t overdo it.

So as you set out marketing online, try to get people to opt-in to your email list. Build your list, respect those on your list, and provide them with quality content and your list will definitely become your business’ most valuable asset.

How To Send Email While You Sleep

A prospect comes to your website and expresses interest in your offer. Maybe they download a free report, a whitepaper, or fill out a form requesting more information.

You capture their email address (you are capturing their email address, right?) and now you have to follow up. If you just have a request or two trickle in here or there it’s no big deal to handle manually. But what if you have hundreds or, hopefully, thousands of requests coming in? How do you manage emailing your prospects?

Enter the auto responder.

An auto responder is basically an email that automatically gets sent to someone who requests information from you. It can be configured so the email, with the requested information attached, is sent as soon as a prospect submits their request. And that email will go out even if you’re sleeping or nowhere near a computer. This ensures the requested information is delivered while it’s still hot on the mind of your prospect.

Even better, you can build relationships with prospects by setting up a series of emails that starts when they submit a request to you. For example, an email with a free report is sent immediately after the prospect fills out the request form on your website. Then you schedule a follow up email to go out a few days later asking the prospect if they found the report helpful and informative. A week later an email with an additional tip or piece of useful information automatically goes out. Then another week or two later an email promoting a special offer shows up in the prospects inbox.

And all that happens without any work from you (after the initial setup, that is).

There’s no limit to how many auto responder emails you set up. I’ve been in some auto responder sequences for over a year now.

Many web hosting packages will include some sort of auto responder. However, my preference is to use a third party auto responder. My favorite is AWeber.

There are a few big advantages to using a service like AWeber:

1. Get your emails delivered. Reputable companies like AWeber have very strong relationships with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). These relationships help ensure that your emails get through spam filters and reach your intended recipients. This is a big issue when you are sending out emails to a list. If even a small percentage of your emails don’t get delivered due to spam filters it can adversely affect your bottom line. Undelievered emails have no chance of resulting in business no matter how good the offer is.

2. Easy integration with your website. AWeber lets you easily create forms you add to your website to capture information (name, email address, etc.) from prospects. You can customize the text and layout of the form using a drag and drop editor on the AWeber site. Then you just add the HTML code for the form to your website and that’s it. Once the prospect clicks the submit button, AWeber takes over. It adds the prospect’s name and email to your database and initiates the auto responder email sequence you’ve set up.

3. Test the effectiveness of your emails and forms. AWeber provides statistics on the performance of your email marketing campaigns. It also lets you split test the emails and web forms you create so you can determine which ones get the best response. Split testing is critical to the success of your marketing campaign and the importance of this feature shouldn’t be underestimated.

Those are the big three benefits to using AWeber as far as I’m concerned. It does have some other nice features for users though including the ability to:

• choose from over 50+ email templates
• send newsletters
• manage multiple email campaigns,
• integrate AWeber with a variety of online shopping carts.

When building a business, online or off, you need to develop and nurture relationships with your prospects and customers. Using an auto responder like AWeber to send emails while you sleep goes a long way toward helping you do that so you can make money while you sleep.

The One Thing You Must Understand About Doing Business Online

There’s a lot of talk about the internet and the “new” way of doing business or the changing face of business. What easily gets lost in all the excitement of building and running an online business is that the fundamentals of building and running a successful business remain the same.

Before starting an online business or taking your business online, you must understand:

There’s nothing new online, just a new and (usually) more efficient way of doing it.

So remember:

• Blogs are just a way to start a conversation with prospects and customers
• Social networking sites are just a way to meet people and expand your network of contacts (aka “sphere of influence”)
• Wikis are just a way of collaborating with customers
• Websites are just a way of presenting your sales message, company information, products, etc. to prospects and customers
• Google AdWords is just a form of direct mail (on steroids)
• Podcasts, emails, and web feeds are just a way of letting customers subscribe to your message (ie. giving you permission to share information with them)

All these tools provide a more efficient means to accomplish your goals. However, to build a successful online business:

You still have to provide a product or service that people want.
You still have to demonstrate the value of that product or service.
You still have focus on your customers’ needs, not yours.
You still have to provide excellent customer service.
You still have to work hard.
You still have to deliver the goods.
You still have to exceed expectations.
You still have to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
You still have to build a loyal following.
You still have to put in the time.

Henry Ford’s assembly line made building cars faster, easier and cheaper than every before. However, if his process had produced a pile of crap and he had given no thought to what his customers wanted, Ford would not have succeeded.

The internet makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to do business, and with a far greater reach, than ever before. But if you get caught up in the technology and forget about the underlying fundamentals, the internet also makes it faster and easier, though not necessarily cheaper, to go out of business than ever before.