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Building Your Business Base One Newsletter at a Time

Written by: Kaya Singer

Article Overview: Hw can you build your customer base and how can you keep track of people who visit your website? It is all about "giving" useful tools and information to your potential clients. Learn one easy way to do this!

Building Your Business Base One Newsletter at a Time

You've spent hours and many sleepless nights building your new
website, making it look cool and writing all about your business
products and services. Finally your website is live. It's
optimized. You are ecstatic and excited. You can't wait to have
your potential customers fill out your contact form or call you.

And then nothing happens. You feel deflated and the high suddenly
turns to a low. This story is unfortunately quite common. From a
marketing point of view a good website is absolutely essential,
however it is useless if you have no way of luring people to your
site and then capturing their e-mail once they get there.

We are all bombarded with tons of stuff to buy these days and it
requires a commitment to fill out a contact form and an even
greater investment to pick up a phone and call someone. These days
people don't make phone calls. They text, write notes on Linked in,
etc. A phone call is a big deal.

If you are counting on that happening after someone visits your
site, you are in lala land. Now, there are exceptions. If you have a
specific service that someone needs ASAP, they will call. For
instance carpet cleaning or plumbing.

Most people I work with are not in that category. Their potential
customers are window shopping and gathering ( usually free)
information.

The marketing funnel begins with giving these people free
information and beginning to build a relationship. One of the best
ways to do this is by giving a free report that is so alluring that
people want it enough that they are willing to trade their e-mail address for it.

It has to be good! Mine is actually a workbook, called, 5 Steps to Overcoming Real Obstacles in Building a Successful Small Business.
newsletter. When they download this free report they automatically sign-up for my newsletter. Bingo, I have a new potential client on my data base. My job is to send them a quality newsletter each and every month.

I have had people whine to me that they don't want to do a
newsletter, they don't write well, its too much work and so on.
Yes, marketing is a lot of work but it pays off if you do it right.

Like your free report, your newsletter needs to be all about
'giving' helpful advice to your potential clients. Certainly you
will also highlight your offers, but if it's all about sales,
people will unsubscribe in one swift click. How to figure out what
to write about each month? Listen to your clients. What questions are they asking?

There are three ways to do an online newsletter. Sign-up with
Aweber, Constant Contact or something similar. I use Aweber
because of the ability to send auto-responder messages and to have
unlimited lists and web forms. I use it for more than just my
newsletters.

With Aweber you can do either a text only newsletter or html one
or both.

1. Text only will be read by any browser and won't get jumbled.
Many people choose this option for that reason. However text only
is boring and ugly.

2. Html lets you add fancy graphics, colors and your logo. This can
be important for branding reasons. However, your newsletter might
look different on other people's computers and some people block
html emails. Those people get my text version automatically.

3. A web based newsletter is on your website. You send people a
short note with a link to your web page. The good thing is that
people will end up on your website. The risk is that many people
won't choose to click the link.

I began with text only and then switched to html because I
wanted my newsletter to look good. I put links in my newsletter
to direct people to my website.

The important thing is to do it. I get new people signing up
everyday and after a year of reading my newsletter, people will
suddenly fill out the contact form and set up a phone call with
me. It really works.

Related Articles
  Email Newsletters That Impress
  Where to Focus Your Newsletter
  Top Five Reasons Why Your E-newsletter isn’t Getting Responses
  No Pain No Gain 5 Step Sales Strategy
  Why Publish an eZine?

Article Tags: get more clients, how to write a newletter, marketing, website help



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