Part of the reason people get into online businesses is the ability to “not be there” and still get the order complete.

• Sales letter up 24/7
• Order transaction up 24/7
• Order fulfillment up 24/7
• Automatic email confirmation up 24/7

Real contact with the customer

ZERO

(sounds like a MasterCard commercial, huh?)

Online digital businesses make people lazy.

No matter how you cut it, people want to do less and less and get more and more.

A common fallacy – mainly contributed by the successful – is that you have all this free time to sit on the beach and drink from a coconut. Lots of sales copy reads, “I send out a couple of emails a week and clear twenty-grand a month.”

It sounds so simple, but there’s much more to it.

Nobody tells you about the number of emails you get that start with:

“I can’t get the thing to download. You mentioned something about an acrobat. What does that have to do with anything?”

How you serve your customers determines if they will ever buy from you again.

And it determines if they will tell their friends.

Excuse me!

What they tell their friends?

They will tell them something, but what that something is, is up to you.

It’s how you follow up…

How you treat your customer…

Your Follow Up Cash Plan will guide you along that successful path

You want your customers to tell their friends that you are a great marketer, right?

Three Reminders…

It’s About Support, Not Just Selling

Today an eleven-year-old with a website can sell something online. Selling is not the issue. But how will that kid react with an angry, frustrated, or confused buyer? What happens when the tyke who drinks bytes for breakfast meets grandma who decides this will be the day she logs on to the internet for the first time?

The unsuccessful look at a sale as the completion of THE goal.

Get the sale.

Get the sale.

They sell one person then move to the next. Those making the most money realize the first sell is a stepping stone to a relationship through which more sales will come.

Any kid can make a sale; it takes a pro to supply support.

It’s About Friendship, Not Just Salesmanship

There’s enough arrogant copywriting high-fiving happening in business it’s a wonder that some people can type with their blistered hands. Few people write real sales copy, most of it is just hype.

Why?

To get the money.

Big deal.

How many friends have you made through your products and services?

How many of your customers can you call and they’re thrilled to hear from you?

Whose house could you stop by for a cookie and a glass of milk?

Crooks don’t stop by for a cookie – friends do.

Uh-oh, I hear some excuses…

”But I run an internet business…but I never see a customer…but I’m trying to remain anonymous and make $4,000 a day from my kitchen table in my underwear…”

Some of my best friendships (and most profitable ones) have come as a result my digital business. No, you don’t have to be everyone’s pal, and there will be some customers you’ll need to get rid of – especially the dreaded freebie seeker.

But a handful of solid clients that you laugh with, dream with, go to for advice, and go the extra mile for will only boost your business.

What kind of friend are you to your customers?

Your Follow Up Cash Plan will provide you with the ‘insider’ knowledge of how to create that relationship with your best customers. It will give you enough material that you can’t be lazy.

See you on the inside

How’s that list building going for you?

Do you check your stats each day, or at least once a week to find out IF your efforts are paying off?

Here’s what I mean

Regardless of what autoresponder service you are using, you should be checking your subscriber stats regularly. What you are looking for is a trend.

An upward trend.

Do the people who sign up to get your gift unsubscribe right away after they download or do they stay on your list for any length of time?

If they are staying on for any length of time, you might be doing something right

but if they are steady (meaning you’re not increasing your numbers each week), or they are declining, you’re probably destroying your business slowly.

Granted, you may be making a few bucks here and there depending on how you have your signup funnel set up and whether or not you have relevant one time or affiliate offers on the back end, but I would venture to say that unless you have established yourself as someone who people are going to learn things from, you aren’t making the cash you expected to make and your subscriber list is dwindling.

Why?

Well, here are three main reasons that your list building efforts are destroying your business:

Your ethical bribe is stale

Stale? You mean like bread?

No… I mean that your ‘offering’ or the product that you are giving away in exchange for their name and email address is old… stale… “I’ve seen it before”.

Why do I say this?

Believe it or not, I participate in a lot of giveaway events and up until about 6 months ago was going whole hog on email swaps… what I see in both of these venues is the same gifts being offered as the bribe.

When I first started out my list building efforts, I had no clue what I was doing, so what I did was download just about everything I could find and I would literally read through all that I could and soak in the knowledge. After about 6-10 of these events I was seeing the same ‘gifts’ being offered by the same people and sometimes even the same gifts being offered by multiple people.

I ended up finding a plr product that was out there and that I hadn’t seen in any of the events, grabbed it, made some changes to make it ‘my own’ and started entering these giveaways.

The first few months my list grew steadily and I realized the power of these events so I sought out to find another topic that I could find plr and do the same thing.

What I see others doing right now is banging away at the giveaways and swaps but they are not changing things up… they are using the same old stale bread and expecting to attract new birds. And then they wonder why their list isn’t growing steadily.

Blasting your list with ‘offers’ everyday

I think this is self explanatory.

Ok, I have a confession, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but of the numerous emails I get each day (I am unable to put an exact number on it because I haven’t really counted, but I would venture to say it’s over 100 consistently) from ‘marketers’ who are out there trying to make this business work, 98% of them are ‘offers’ for ‘the next great thing’…

Some of the emails are fairly well disguised, but a vast majority of them are of the ‘hey,  my good friend so and so just released his brand new ebook and he’s actually given me permission to send you over to it… and he’s giving it away for free!!!’… type of email.

It’s an email swap… they have ‘teamed’ up with someone to trade lists… you know, you send out to your list for me and I’ll send out to my list for you. If your list is bigger than mine, I’ll send out twice for you or vice versa.

Now, these are ok to do once in a while, but if you are doing them EVERYDAY, where’s your content? As I mentioned in my last post, are you one of the ones that are guilty as charged?

Now, you’re asking… how do I know this? Well, remember above I said that I get a ton of emails each day… some of them I will click the link, go to the opt in page and depending on the offer, I’ll opt in. Of course, I don’t opt in with my personal email addresses because they have my name in them, I opt in with a valid email address that I made up to do exactly this…

Believe me when I say 98% of the lists I opt in to, blast me (and probably you) with email swaps  almost on a daily basis and probably 70% of them are offers that I saw last year or longer ago… it’s rare that I see something new.

Why? Lack of creativity maybe… I don’t know.

Which brings me to the final reason you’re destroying your IM business and probably don’t know it…

Follow-up Failure

How many emails do you have loaded into your autoresponder?

One

two

four

twenty?

How many of those emails contain content related to the topic the person signed up for?

You don’t have to answer that…

Now, I am NOT saying that you are like every other marketer out there, whether you just came online yesterday or have been at this for a while, but here is what I see. Nobody is original. You’re bombarding me with worthless crap that has no content, or worse, no content!

I’m not saying this is right or wrong, what I am saying is that MOST marketers are operating under the impression that if they don’t bombard their readers with offers, they aren’t going to make any money!

I am going to go out on a limb right now and say that there are thousands of newbie marketers that have been ‘taught’ that they must continually send out emails for others to build their list and make money.

That is the number one way to absolutely destroy your ‘business’, if you even had one to begin with.

That’s why I asked the question at the beginning of this section… how many emails do you have pre-loaded into your autoresponder?

If you don’t have any… and you’re working from the seat of your pants just blasting your ‘list’ with promo emails, you’ve got a hole in your boat and you’re gonna eventually sink your business!

Stay tuned for my next post where I am going to start talking about how you can use your autoresponder to your advantage (actually what it’s designed to do) and do some things that virtually NOBODY is doing…

if you’re a subscriber to my list, you’re gonna find out about this later today, because I am giving my readers a sneak preview of my next product… sign up before 9pm Eastern tonight to get the sneaky preview….

or wait…

Anyway… Am I way off base, or am I dead on the head of the nail? Leave me a comment with your reaction…

A few posts ago I promised you that I was going to go into the ways that you can eliminate the mistakes in your list building and really start to make the money that you were ‘promised’ when you came online.

So you’ve been following Guru A or Guru B and soaking in what they are telling you. I mean, if you’re anything like me you soak this stuff up like a sponge… and hopefully take action on it.

Gooroo is telling you that in order to make money you MUST have your own product to sell… and for the most part, he is absolutely correct. What he’s NOT covering is how to go about creating the buzz for that product or how exactly to launch it and follow up.

I mean, you’ve put your heart and soul into a creating a kick ass product. You’ve made sure it has professionally written content (whether you did it yourself, or outsourced it). You’ve marketed it diligently, using social networking, article marketing, guest blogging (well maybe not that), but you get the idea.

You’ve even created a semblance of a follow up ‘plan’.

Launch day comes and ….

It’s not working. The extra sales ‘gooroo’ promised you haven’t done much more than trickle in.

And you’re left wondering what went wrong. What happened?

Well, here are three reasons you are ‘guilty as charged’ when it comes to creating that followup action plan:

1. Your content is great – but it’s not content your reader is drooling to get. In other words, you skipped the research stage. You didn’t find out what he was ‘really’ looking for. Why would he buy from you if it’s not something he’s interested in?

2. Your subject line is limp… there’s no sizzle… no curiosity. There’s nothing there to entice him to open the email and read the message. Your subject lines are suffering from E.D. (email dysfunctionality) and they need a boost of email Cialis or something like that!

3. You have no affiliate program. Think about it… you’ve found a flippin fantastic ebook about butterflies and after some research you discover that marketer A has no affiliate program but Marketer B does. AND it pays 85% commission or better! Who are you most likely to buy from? Um, no brainer? And if it took more time to make your decision than to read that sentence, you’re in the wrong business.

Now, I admit that I am guilty of this one (not having an affiliate program), but I am working on that as you read this.

4. You have an affiliate program – but you didn’t bother to mention it in your follow up emails. Probably one of the best ways to make those extra sales is to have a good paying affiliate program and make sure you let your customers know about it. Tell them in the first or second email you send out… you know, something like ‘I hope you have enjoyed (Name of product) and if you would like to get $xx deposited directly into your paypal account each time you refer another customer to me, click here to get the information need to do this. Simple as that!

5. You’ve outsourced your follows up to someone who isn’t qualified and you may or may not know it. You may be using them because your budget is tight and they were cheap… or you may be blindly trusting someone without having checked their work (or even credentials.)  Even if you do outsource, you need to provide the people doing the work a set of instructions and explain exactly what you are looking for and if they fail to follow them, they fail to get paid. You want your customers feel as if the product is really is coming from you. They DON’T need to know you are outsourcing.

Ooops, ok, I gave you five reasons… but I think you get the idea so far. My next post I am going to go more in depth on the follow ups and how you are going to connect with your reader…

Til then… try to avoid the E.D.