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.

Business Lessons From a Toddler: You Can’t Walk Before You Crawl

Babies don’t come out of the womb wearing their Nikes ready to run. It takes a good year or so before they are able to take their first steps.

There’s a natural progression that most babies go through to get there – picking their heads up, rolling over, playing while on their tummmies, sitting up, crawling, standing up, and then walking. During each one of those stages, a baby develops, practices, and refines the skills – such as hand-eye coordination, depth perception, and the muscles – they need to start walking. If a baby skips any step along the way, the ultimate goal, walking, becomes much more difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

Business owners often fall into that trap of skipping steps in trying to grow their business. This often leads to disastrous results. Just look to Boston Market and Krispy Kreme as two well-known examples of businesses who paid the price for trying to run before they could crawl.

You can’t open your doors for business one day and expect to have the next Microsoft, Amazon.com, or eBay. There’s a natural progression needed to develop all the parts of a business. Each successful step along the way builds on the previous ones. Go too quickly or skip some steps along the way and the business will fall flat on its face.

This lesson is especially important for individuals that want to start an online business and develop a stream of SWISS Money. There is a tendency to want to rush things. You get bombarded with emails from internet gurus who have supposedly built huge fortunes and tell you that you can too if you just follow a few easy steps.

It just doesn’t work that way. The internet gurus who have built huge fortunes haven’t done so overnight. It took time for them to learn the skills they needed to start that huge flow of SWISS Money their way. They developed, practiced and refined their copywriting, sales, technology, direct response, and AdWords skills.

They built huge mailing lists.
They researched their target audiences.
They tested their marketing messages.

At each step along they way they developed the skills needed to successfully get to the next level. Those that did this have the SWISS Money flowing in. Those who went to fast and skipped steps in the development of their business – don’t.

As you grow your online or offline business(es), never take your eyes off your ultimate goal. Just don’t push things so that you try to get there before you, and the business, are ready. Because you will fall flat on your face.

Make sure you have the necessary skills and support structure in place so you can confidently and successfully take each step along the way to reaching your goals.

Because when building a successful business, as with babies learning to walk, you can’t walk before you crawl.

The New American Dream – Making SWISS Money?

Do you want to make money while you sleep?

While you’re on the beach in Hawaii?

While you’re playing with your kids (or grandkids)?

If you’re like me you answered – yes, yes and yes!

In fact, it seems like the new American Dream is to create an online business that can bring in an annuity income stream 24/7/365. Some savvy online marketers are doing just that and building unbelievable wealth. Others are happy just making enough to cover their mortgage payment, car payment, and/or child care expenses.

With a new name, new location, and new look, the S.W.I.S.S. Money Blog (formerly The Words That Click Blog) will explore entreprenuerism and marketing – with a focus squarely on using the internet to make Sales While I (You) Sleep Soundly.

Welcome!