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

Ask any experienced online marketer, and they will tell you that the most important thing you can ever do when you are building an online business is to create lists that you are able to send out content to. It doesn’t matter what niche you are targeting, you need to have a list of people that content to.

Build a list, build a list…the money is in the list…you need to have a list of hungry buyers.

But WHY?

Today I am starting a series of posts on list building. In the coming posts I will be covering topics such as WHY you need to build a list, a few of the different methods HOW you can go about this and then into some of the various techniques you can use to be successful in your list building efforts.

So, let’s dig in:

In the beginning, every name on any list you build will be a potential customer. Once you know how to ‘work’ that mailing list properly, you will quickly start to turn some of those potentials into customers.

No matter what kind of online business you are running, it is important to understand that there is a huge difference between making money online and building your business.

For example, there are thousands of people who decide that they want to make some money online. They begin their ‘Internet Marketing’ journey without a product, without software, or without some sort of service of their own to offer to potential customers.

Consequently, they start their business doing something like promoting products as an affiliate marketer or by featuring paid advertising on a webpage.

In both of these situations, this person might be making some money but they are not building their business. At the very heart of the business building concept is the ability to coerce information from the people who visit your website.

In this case, the specific action that you need to ask them to take is to provide their email address and their name. You in turn need to provide something of value to them in exchange for this, whether it be an ebook or a piece of software or a collection of graphics. Whatever that ‘ethical bribe’ is, having them take this action and confirming their email address will add them to that particular mailing list.

Doing this gives you permission to send them additional information in the future.

When people chose to subscribe to your list, they make a small commitment to your business. However, at this point, they have not made the most important commitment, spending money with you.

By using the tactics and strategies that you’ll read in ‘List Building From Scratch’ and by coming back here and reading the content that I provide in these posts, you will be able to convince some of your prospects to spend money with you, and when they do so, they become your customer.

Isn’t that what we all really want?

The commitment that they have now shown to your business is far greater and more important, for several reasons.

Firstly, they have demonstrated that they trust you and are happy to do business with you. This is important because every business person (whether operating online or offline) wants to build a list of loyal customers to whom they can sell products and services on a regular basis.

By becoming a customer, that person has indicated that they are willing to pay you for more valuable content. That content is either offered through your messages that are loaded into your autoresponder and trickled to them at specific intervals or through blog posts like this.

Alright, so we have some basics of ‘why’ you need to not only have a list of people that you can mail out to, next time  I will ‘how’ you are going to start getting these people on to your list.

Til then, check out ‘List Building From Scratch’, you’ll have a better handle on what I will be covering…

One of the easiest to implement yet most overlooked ways to get the subscribers of your newsletter, or your customers, to warm up to you and feel like you value them and want to help them is to ask them simple questions.

Everybody’s favorite subject is himself or herself so why not show some interest?

Ask questions and do things that require some sort of interaction from your readers. It doesn’t really matter what you ask. You can ask questions that are completely unrelated to what your newsletter is about so long as you get people to respond.

When you get them used to doing things you ask them to do, no matter what it is, it’s easy for them to keep doing things you ask them to do like buy the products you recommend.
The more you can get your readers to communicate with you, the more they will feel like they know and can trust you.

A relationship (as far as an online newsletter or email course goes) is nothing more than two people (you and each individual subscriber) knowing what their place is in relation to each other.

You are the provider of helpful information and someone who wants to help your reader succeed at something.

You must get that across.

Your reader is someone who will learn to trust your advice and listen to your recommendations because you have built up a history of doing things that seem to benefit them more than they seem to benefit you. That doesn’t necessarily have to be true, as long as it seems like it’s the truth to your readers.

Remember, perception (or what people believe) is the only truth that really matters as far as they’re concerned.

As attractive and inviting as this website looks, it’s just one of millions of pages/sites on the internet and just like email messages, can be a very impersonal place, unless you make it otherwise.

What it boils down to is: The Internet is a cold and distant place. It’s just a series of tubes where people dump text and images (or at least that is what you would get out of this video)

That’s actually to your advantage because if you can consistently get across to your readers that you are a real person with real concerns (just like them) and you know what it’s like for them to be in the situation they’re in because you’ve been there, you won’t have any trouble getting people to warm up to you.

People in general tend to like others who look out for them because people (again, in general) think about themselves first. If it seems like another person is looking out for them first then that person will automatically take a high position in their eyes.

In other words, when you’re writing, not every link in it has to be an affiliate link for a product you’ll get paid from.

Understand this…

Your readers are buying products and services all the time that aren’t putting money in your pockets so it doesn’t hurt you at all to tell them about a product or service that you won’t make money from.

This sets you up to make money when you do have something to recommend that will put a commission check in your pockets.

To set yourself up to make money you have to give, give, give and then give some more. Now it’s important to note that you don’t have to give everything away.

Giving (as I’m using the term) means to give of yourself. Share stories with your readers, point them to helpful resources and let them know about things they probably haven’t found on their own.

In other words, offer your guidance. That’s what they signed up to your mailing list for. Not for a bunch of ads they can find on their own.

Are you publishing your own newsletter? Are you stumped for content? No worries, my friend Doug Champigny has the solution for you. Newsletter in a Box is the perfect solution for you. There is over a year’s worth of content for your newsletter, article submissions, or create your own info product from the content! It’s a GREAT resource!

Looking for more ‘Inside Information’ like this, subscribe to my K.A.R. Newsletter (Knowledge, Application, Results) and receive a few unadvertised bonuses for signing up. You can sign up in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Stay tuned for Part II – Guys…you also stay tuned…I will be launching a new website later today that you will be VERY interested in…I guarantee it!

Until next time,

Here’s to YOUR Successes,

Ron