What Really Happens When People Visit Your Website...
You write an ad and bid on a keyword.
Someone sees your ad on Google.
She clicks. (And Google whacks your credit card, for 10 cents or a buck or ten bucks... whatever.)
She looks at your website for, say, 10 seconds.
"Nah, that's not what I was looking for," she thinks. Or "Too expensive, I'm going to look somewhere else." Or "Too cheap, must not be any good." Or "That's nice, maybe I'll search again next week." Or "These guys really don't have what I'm looking for" -- even though you have *exactly* what they were looking for, they just didn't spend enough time to see that.
She clicks the BACK button and she's gone. Forever.
Or... if you're lucky, she might come back again, but Google charges you AGAIN when she comes back.
(Good for Google. Not so good for you.)
You know what the problem is?
It's a little bit like planting a tomato seed in the ground with a string attached to it, and yanking the seed out if it doesn't grow up into a ripe tomato plant overnight.
That $1 click is often just a ten second visit and a one-time event, but if you can turn it into a long-term process, you earn three to five times as much.
It would be nice if marketing on the web were as simple as buying a click and hearing the cash register ring, but if that's all you plan for, you're only skimming the thin layer off the top.
So if you want to fully engage your visitors, and really get the most out of all that traffic you buy, the engine that's going to drive everything is:
Email.
Email is the only way you can develop a relationship with the gal who just visited your website 10 seconds ago. It's the only realistic way to guide her through the maze of what you do and what you sell, to the point where she trusts you more than she trusts everyone else.
And it's the only way to make sure that if she needs you six months from now, that you're still on top of her mind.
Web marketing is not an event, it's a process.
That's why you're getting this email from me. Because I couldn't tell you everything I wanted to tell you on the first visit.
And here's another thing: Email may be "free" but there's really no such thing as something for nothing. In this age of Permission Marketing, a lot of people think that Permission = permission to pitch and sell all the time. Frankly, that just leads to a lot of crappy messages in your inbox.
When someone gives you permission to send them email, they are not granting you permission to pitch them on stuff all the time. They're giving you permission to build a relationship with them, with quality information, at no additional cost to you. If you're willing to take the time to do that, you will eventually win. It's almost inevitable.
With email at the center, the entire spectrum of web marketing comes into view. Here's what I consider to be the really important factors in web marketing:
-Getting your email messages through spamfilters
-Using Autoresponders to send a timed sequence of appropriate messages
-Writing advertising copy. This is vitally, critically important, and it's probably the trickiest ingredient for most people because it's so 'organic.' Most people don't know that you can borrow great ideas from others and adapt them to your own purposes, rather than sitting there in front of your screen with 'writers block.'
-Affiliate programs - it's one thing to be an affiliate for someone else, and get paid for sending traffic to their site - it's another thing to have a bunch
of affiliates selling your product for you, all over the web. If you do it right, it's incredibly powerful. Fortunately for you, most companies don't have a clue how to do this, and worst yet, some companies think of their affiliates as some kind of inferior race of people. (This is not unique to the online world - there are lots of manufacturers who have the same disrespect for their distributors, retail stores, reps, or whatever. It's a common malady but it's poison - it costs them a lot of money!)
Since I'm talking about affiliate programs, here are a couple of tips:
1) If you're going to join someone's affiliate program, look for signs that they really respect and appreciate their affiliates - their affiliates aren't just an annoyance or an afterthought.
2) If you have an affiliate program, then before you try to sign people up, you need to be certain that your site will make money for them. How do you do that? Buy clicks on Google with your own nickels and tweak your site until the sales process is effective. Once you've done that, your sales will multiply because your affiliates discover that they make more money sending people to YOUR site than to anyone else's. It's a magic carpet ride when your affiliate network takes off.
OK, and a few other things I think are really, really important in web marketing:
-Placing ads and articles in E-Zines. You can often buy space in other people's e-zines for a few bucks, and sometimes you can get free space if your articles are good. Very powerful, low cost method of getting more traffic. And when your articles are posted on various sites all over the net, you get a constant trickle of visitors freom different sources, and
it all adds up.
-Online Surveys: Sometimes the simplest thing you can do to explore a market is to simply ask people what they want! And I think the most valuable thing you get out of this is the words they use to describe their problem, which becomes powerful elements of your sales story.
I could refer you to dozens of gurus on all these various topics, but for beginners and intermediate web marketers, I think the best and most comprehensive coverage of ALL these topics, put together in one single place, is Cindy Kappler's "Online Marketing Secrets Uncovered." It uses text, video and audio to take you by the hand and show you how all of these things work together. You can find out more about Cindy and her course at secrets.makeyourwebsitepay.com
Sincerely,
Perry Marshall
(PerryMarshall.com)
See: http://www.webservicenetwork.com/marketing-secrets.htm
