Most websites created or maintained by people who are new to online business are missing one important piece of the marketing puzzle. Namely, follow-up!

Of course there are other reasons websites don’t maintain mailing lists, but usually it is a result of an entrepreneur without any marketing experience. Other reasons exist though (and I’m a perpetrator in this regard), even though I’ve been selling, promoting and marketing online for the last 10 years – you’ll still find many of my websites lack a subscription box.

My reasons won’t be yours I assure you! Generally the sites I don’t actively market to via email are sites I’ve created for testing purposes – testing website traffic techniques which I report on, on even more websites. This is truly a case of ‘do what I say, not what I do’.

In the rest of this post we’ll talk about how and why to maintain a mailing list, and the variety of ways you can use an autoresponder account.

Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:

• increases your website’s value should you choose to sell it,
• assists you to make money on demand as you can continue to draw people back to your site with every email you write,
• allows you to ‘automate’ your marketing.

Just mentioning automation of marketing gets me excited about online business.

Why?

Well, once you have a fully automated system of a website in place that turns visitors into income, there’s little for an online business owner to do other than to keep the new traffic flowing or starting all over again with a second website, a second income stream, a second business. (Sounds good right?)

Automation is the key to any successful online business – a business that doesn’t tie the entrepreneur to his/her computer.

Granted some internet marketers have given automation a nasty connotation. The marketers who teach you to scrape other people’s website content and post spam messages to other people’s blogs.

No, not this kind of automation. This type of automated marketing I’m talking about it discontinuing any repetitive action that can be handled by a service or script. And believe me when I tell you, any online business has areas that would benefit from a little automation. The key is to have the right software or service to manage the task.

When I first started my business online I tried a number of products and signed up for a number of services that assisted in automating my business. One shined above all others.

Then, in 2005, I repeated the tests and trials – in a wide variety of price ranges. I had expected different results – after all, so much had changed online in five years – yet I stuck with the same service I’d chosen back in 1999!

There are reasons – which very few people talk about – why one service/software soars above all others tested. Affordability, versatility, deliverability, flexibility – customer support, continuallly upgrading servers and features, continously working in the field to ensure best results for their customers – and on and on. Wait, another big reason – free customer support, fast response.

If you’re lost now and wondering why you’d want to automate your mailing list…

Consider also that you don’t have to stop at a mailing list. Let’s think of some creative uses for automated marketing through auto-responder services.

Your website visitor signs up. Your autoresponder files the email address in your account then:

a) displays a thank you page on your website that could show a special offer for new subscribers. (income)
b) sends out a message to your new subscriber with a special offer… (income)

Also used for:

c) an immediate customer support response. It may take you a day or two to reply personally to a customer, but they will instantly feel as though someone is working on their request for service.
d) frequently asked questions sent to the customer via email.
e) free reports with affiliate links inside.
f) product lists and descriptions, or price lists

Use your own creativity to uncover and implement similar uses and you’ll begin to see your sales increase.

Owning a mailing list is, without a doubt, the most vital and necessary tool for your business.

Dare to be different. Don’t just put a small text link or graphic on your site that reads “subscribe to my mailing list”. That will get you some subscribers, but not nearly as many as you could get with an autoresponder pop up script or exit script.

Be creative to find ways to get potential customers to sign up to your mailing list. Offer a free report, a discount on future offers – as long as it is something of definite value they will subscribe.

Here are some of the ‘enticers’ I’ve used on other websites:

• discount coupons,

• free email course,
• contest entry,
• “Members Only” access to a special area of my website.

Check out my recommended “tried, tested and true” automated marketing, autoresponder service free for 30 days. Get the script for your website and start making money with an email list right away.

Read more about effective mailing list management and email marketing techniques from Smartzville Marketing.

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This gentleman wrote me because he wanted to start a side business online and return to a rural lifestyle away from the city. However, he couldn’t think of an idea for his online business!

Although this email is quite old (2004) and has focus on info-products and ebay selling (two areas which are harder to make money at now), the premise still stands. You must have a passion and an interest in your business to really make it online.

‘Making it online’ could be making money, making a name for yourself, or making a website that grows to huge proportion and has an exit strategy.

The conversation begins with defining yourself, your hobbies, your interests and ends with an idea for an online business.

Ideas for Online Business – Ask Laura (August 30, 2004)

Hello Laura:

I am 48 and my wife is 38. We have no kids living with us. My wife is from a town of about 15,000 in Indiana, and I grew up in a town about the same size in California. We have lived in *edited* for the last 12 years. The income here is good, and housing can be had for a reasonable percent of your wages.

Unfortunately, there is no time to enjoy much.

Work hours and commutes are long and any recreation you think of to do, there is already a crowd there with the same idea.

My wife is an administrative assistant and I have spent the last 30 some years working in the parts department at Chrysler dealerships. We both enjoy being creative and crafty. I also enjoy wood working and building something out of salvage or scrap pieces, and enjoy home improvement projects (I’m a HGTV junkie).

Anything where I can be creative would be interesting to me. My wife likes to crochet and also has recently gotten into candle making. Anyhow, we both crave a simpler, less harried lifestyle.

Thanks again for your consultation.

Blane

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Blane:

Some of the more obvious ways to make money online is ebay selling and info product creation.

Now I don’t know much about ebay selling (other than I first started this way as well). I used to buy junk chandeliers for $1-5, paint them, repair the wiring, etc. and sell them for $150-200 each. It was fun to do, satisfied my artistic side and made me some quick cash. But it wasn’t a lucrative use of my time (dollar/hour) – I had to find these vintage chandeliers, then do repair and decoration work, then post them on ebay, then package them for postal delivery, etc.

I am aware however that many people make huge dollars on ebay with less work. I can’t say for sure, but I believe they use drop-shippers to handle all the packaging and shipping. You choose the product line, promote it, send them the orders, and they handle the rest. As I said, I’m not sure if that’s how the ‘big’ money is being made on ebay, but I do know that many people are making a killing on ebay…

Now here is something that may interest you, to capitalize on the eBay brand, deliver value to people and make money online too. Lots of people make money simply by promoting the use of ebay! For every new person you can get to sign up to use eBay, eBay pays you a minimum of $12 USD! I make over $100 month on one of my sites just from people registering new accounts with eBay.

The other way to make money online is info products (which is one of my ‘things’). Talk about awesome! You put together a little book, set up a pay page, and away you go… this is probably what you’ve already read of mine.

With your crafty talents I’d suggest something like this…do you have a piece that you have made, or that you know is being made and is selling like hotcakes somewhere?

I’ll give you an example:

My husband makes these twig lights when he was laid off for the winter he made a pile of them, and sold them at my friend’s shop for $85 (she added her percentage in, which made them $170). People bought these like crazy.

Some people said “I can make these myself…” and went home and tried. Reporting back to the store they said they could make them, and they looked alright but it took a long time, and they didnt’ look as nice as Eric’s.

Now, had we been smart we could have also supplied the shop with an info product (make your own twig lamp). And, if we had the time or the interest we could probably sell an info product on making twig lamps for other crafters.

My point is, if you can take something you love to do, that has a following or interest online (for instance my goat book – who would have thought that an info book on goats would be a good seller?), you’ll be off and running.

And if it only manages to replace part of your current income, then make another info book, and another, until you have more than one stream of income. I have 4 info products, plus multiple other streams. They replace my old income of designing sites online and I do little through the work week to support or promote these items. Now (2004) I’m in a position where I can (a) help others, and (b) work towards replacing my husband’s income.

I’ve been rambling here…but I hope some of it helps to move you forward…think on all this, what your talents and interests are, etc. and feel free to write me back – collaboration is a wonderful thing!

Laura

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The 2007 Way to Make Money Partnering with EBAY

As I mentioned above, eBay pays website owners to send them traffic. New account setups will net you a minimum of $12 per person, but eBay also pays you for any sale you help them make. Their affiliate program is on a sliding scale, often with incentives and bonuses (which we can talk about another day). In the final months of 2006 I’ve been experimenting with a script that builds websites loaded with eBay products, all embedded with your referral link.

You can build custom websites with no html or php experience, that have serious potential to make you money online in less than an hour – start to finish. Instead of getting into how this works or how easy it is, I’m providing a free report that explains how to do this for all my online website visitors. Click: learn how to set up a website that makes money from eBay sales without having to sell a product! It’s a quick 4 pages and has a link within to a demo site where you can see and try it out for yourself.

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Last names and email addresses are never disclosed on this website, but proof of all email communication can be provided upon request. These emails are published solely to help and assist others with similar questions, situations and problems with getting their online business started or making their website business more successful.

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Gerry is asking about a WordPress script that I promoted a few months back over at Smartzville – see the free how-to set up an online store with WordPress and merchant datafeed videos here – although I’ve had decent success with my online stores, a few others have not. The clues to the differences lie below…

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Hi Laura

I’ve had some WordPress Datafeed stores set up for over 2 months now and they haven’t been indexed by any search engines (although they have been visited).

I thought these blogs were search engine friendly!!

Seriously, is there anything I can do or do I just wait.

Also have you any info on how to implement the Jerome keywords plug in, I can’t understand how to implement it.

I hope you can help me make some sales.

Gerry

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Hi Gerry:

Please excuse me, lots going on online and in my personal life – I’ve totally forgotten where your sites were, can you send me urls? I’ve got so many people I’m working with now, that if our past messages to each other aren’t in the return mail you send me I don’t know what I’ve already suggested, where your site is, or what you need to do next to take it up a notch.

My new stores are making decent sales with no promotion other than submitting my RSS Feed to the directories a few months back. I’ve just implemented the tag process into the store blogs so we’ll see how that goes. Using that method I instantly picked up and got PR2-5 backlinks and some foot traffic. We’ll see if it results in more sales. Have you heard about tagging? There’s a tag and ping course here, and a free download pdf of the basic tag and ping concept here.

The WordPress Datafeed stores are SE friendly. At last google update (about 2 months ago) I got two PR4s and lots of indexed pages on two brand new sites. I wonder what I’ve done that you haven’t? Send me your urls and any information on what you’ve done to optimize traffic. The other side of this is that google is due for an update soon – I’m waiting on it – and you may find better results at that time.

Also, when you say “haven’t been indexed – although have been visited” – please clarify…

- visited by whom? the bots and spiders or actual visitors?
- indexed by whom? all or just google?

If you’re having trouble with the Jerome plugin the best thing you can do is hit the plugin author’s site, read the comments from others and leave your questions there. Really, no one knows their code better than the author.

Looking forward to your answers.

Laura

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Hi Laura

I guess you’re the type of person who thrives on “lots going on”. Anyway you’re great for finding some time to help other people succeed.

I’d be proud to show you my sites – some of them are quite cool! I’ve got 8 stores but I’ve stopped doing them now until I figure how to make them work.

…list of sites edited…

I’ve got technorati tags on all posts – have done that from the beginning…and I’ve phased the posting so that new posts are continually added.

The sites have been visited by spiders and bots but none of the sites are indexed by google, msn, or yahoo. I’ve also got them on Traffic Swarm. The …url removed… has got a few clicks into the merchant, maybe about 50 since the beginning but no sales resulted, but I can’t see what’s different about that site (I think it’s the ugliest of the lot).

I shall follow your links to find out about tagging but in the meantime if you spot anything I’m not doing, I’d be really grateful for your advice, being a newbie, I’m not always sure where to turn.

Information is not hard to get – I’m constantly bombarded by it, but good, practical advice is a different thing altogether!

Gerry

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Hmmm…

Gerry, did you submit your rss feed to the rss directories?

On a side note – and not sure you did this, but you should never ad adsense ads to a site until a few weeks after google has indexed and included the site in their search results. Doing it before hand is a big red flag to google “this site exists only for the ad click income”.

I know that google, specifically, isn’t wild about sites that are 100% duplicated content. You might like to add a few articles into your blogs – keyword rich of course.

Another important thought – if your code doesn’t validate, you lose points in the search engines. Now this is a pain in the butt, and doesn’t have to be adherred to 100% but I’ve found that when I have more than 40 code errors on a page I lose rank – sometimes even being delisted.

If the code is sloppy and has lots of errors, this alone could be your trouble. Usually it’s in the php template. I’m not convinced this is why none of your sites are included in the SEs because you have a few different themes in your various sites.

But I do want you to consider changing or fixing your themes – for instance, go to this page:

…url removed…

If you were an online shopper, and perchance you landed here, would you want to buy any product from this page? Would you stay on the site and search for something you did want to buy?

I’m not trying to be mean to you, I just want you to think about this from a visitor’s perspective, as well as coding perspective, as well as the search engines. Search engines don’t like sending their searchers to pages with errors, pages that have little visitor value, etc.

Now when I checked that page on validator.w3.org it reported back 55 code errors.

Now, while I’m dumping all that on your lap, I also want you to consider that when the potential customers do come – it’s just too easy to lose them with all those technorati tags. If they decide they don’t like what you’re offering, they’re just goign to click a tag and be gone. And you don’t even make a cent off the transaction!

Anyway, just a few thoughts to consider…write me back if you have more questions – I realize I’ve gone off track here when you really wanted to know about search engine indexing.

Laura

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Laura:

Hmmm… (I like that – it’s the calm before the storm)

Thanks for all that advice – don’t mind criticism one bit.

Yes I submitted the rss feeds – it’s part of my procedure – (when these sites are profitable, I might publish it).

I’ll take out all advertising now (no point if there aren’t any visitors!!)

Keyword Rich Articles? I’ll try that. Do you mean extra posts or editing existing posts?

Can’t understand why I have so many code errors, could it be changes I’ve made or could it be the themes themselves are buggy? I think the furniture site theme is a bit ugly anyway, I think I’ll search for a brighter theme.

Technorati tags? Hmmm… When I bought the software, I remember reading “Never underestimate the power of technorati tags” Didn’t understand what it meant but I thought I was doing something clever by implementing them. Not sure what to do about them they’re in every post. Do I start again from scratch? hmmm… (I like that hmmm…)

I wasn’t just asking about se optimisation. I want to know anything and everything that will turn these into profitable sites.

I’ve shown you mine – how about showing me a good example of how it should be done!!

Thanks again for all your help and your precious time.

God bless (…I never say that!)

Gerry

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Gerry…

Code errors are likely the template stuff. Don’t stress about them too much, I’ve got a PR4 site here with 219 code errors – it’s a factor, but not the largest one – www.PrimitiveCountryDecor.com

Plus on that site you’ll see the most recent posts are keyword rich articles…most everything else is standard datafeed store.

Teli said “Never underestimate the power or Technorati tags” ! I guess we all, whomever is writing, needs to be really careful with our words. If you look at Teli’s blogs she’s got one or two highly targeted tags per post. Yes TTs are awesome, but (a) they need to be targeted and (b) used minimalisticly – that’s one of the things Sean teaches in that course.

As for all the existing tags you’ve got going on…do you own a laptop and watch television in the evenings? When I’ve gone and messed up I take my laptop upstairs and just pick away at the mundane tasks as I watch my favorite shows. (Sometimes I wish I had more shows I liked to watch just so I had more time to fix my mistakes!)

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Some parts of this letter have been edited to protect the integrity and identity of the email author. Although I will not post last names (unless given express permission), I can prove the validity of each letter written including email addresses, dates, and headers to the authorites if need be. I suggest that everything you publish online, sell online, or reference online, have a similar back up system in place. The FTC is always watching…

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