26. Keeping in Touch with Visitors
September 10, 2008 by Andy
We are now in the traffic building phase of our website. In the last chapter we looked at Directory submissions, and that, plus the article submissions we discussed previously, should be starting to pay off in terms of website traffic.
Before we discuss other ways of building traffic, there is something I think you should put into action now. You are getting visitors to your site, but most do not buy anything on a first visit. For that reason, you need a way to keep in contact with them so you can expose them to your offerings a few more times.
There are various ways of doing that, and we will look at some of them now.
The most obvious way of keeping in touch with your visitors is to run a newsletter. When I first started my own newsletter, I used a free service called "Your Mailing List Provider" which was fine to begin with.
However, I eventually swapped over to Aweber because of the extra features I could get.
Aweber makes it easy to setup multiple mailing lists, so you can run multiple newsletters over multiple sites.
e.g. suppose you ran a wine site. It would be a great idea to have a wine newsletter, which provided articles on various wines, together with the affiliate links to merchants who sell those wines. Newsletters could then be posted on your site, adding to the valuable, unique content, which would in turn, increases traffic through the keyword optimization of those articles.
Another example: If you ran a baby site, you could run a newsletter that offered help and advice on parenting in the first few years. In the newsletter, you can provide solid advice on things like potty training, while directing your readers to merchants that sell potty-training potties, or ebooks on potty training. You could provide nursery decoration ideas, and show where your reader can purchase the items you mention. The list is endless and only limited by your imagination, and the merchant products in your niche.
Newsletters provide a way to keep in contact with your visitors. People are often happy to sign up for a newsletter if:
* it is free
* they know they can unsubscribe at any time
* they know that their details wont be sold to mailing lists
* they know they will learn stuff
* they get a bonus for signing up
This is one of the best ways to get repeat visitors to your site, or your merchants.
If you look at the list of things people look for before signing up for a newsletter, you can see the sorts of things you should include in the description of your offering on your site.
* Tell your visitor their details are kept private and will never be sold or given away.
* Tell you visitor that their email address will only be used for sending the newsletter.
* Tell your visitors that they can easily unsubscribe using a link in each newsletter if they wish.
* Tell them about the types of information you provide in the newsletter.
* Provide a bonus report for them if they sign up.
As for the last point, this is easy.
If you want to write a short report yourself, that is fine. An easier way would be to find some relevant articles at article directories, and edit them into a report. Creating free reports is easy. Just edit them in a word processor, and convert them to a PDF format. We have mentioned in previous sections of this course how to do this.
Whenever you write a newsletter, add it as content to your site. Keep an archive so visitors can go back and read previous newsletters (this will encourage them to join if they see quality information in previous newsletters).
If you setup a newsletter, use double opt-in, and don’t send the newsletter from your own domain.
OK, what does that mean?
Well, double opt-in means that the person trying to sign up for your newsletter MUST confirm their subscription by clicking on a link in an email they are sent after signing up. If they don’t confirm, they don’t get the newsletter. Double opt-in is very important, and can save you legal problems in the future.
Double opt-in means no-one can receive your newsletter without permission from the person who owns that email address.
There are some nasty people about. People do take other people’s email addresses and subscribed them to this and that. Without double opt-in this is easy. This not only causes hassles for the owner of the email address, but it also can cause problems for the newsletter owner, since they then send out a newsletter to someone who did not subscribe. The recipient of the newsletter then cries "SPAM", and the newsletter owner gets into trouble.
Double opt-in prevents this. If someone tried to sign up an unknowing victim to my newsletter using the victim’s email address, my double opt-in system would send the owner of that email address an email saying that they tried to sign up, but to complete the process they need to click the link in the email. If they had not signed up themselves, they can ignore the email, and they wont receive my newsletter.
This brings me to the second point. Don’t send a newsletter from your own domain (e.g. using a bulk mailing program which sends through your SMTP gateway). If your web hosting company gets a lot of spam complaints about your newsletter, they could close your account, and your business would go down the drain. Don’t think that double opt-in is enough. I use double opt-in, yet Aweber get spam reports for this newsletter on a monthly basis from people who opted-in to receive it. If I had been sending this form my own domain, my main site may have been closed down by now.
For these reasons, using a third party newsletter provider is essential. Let them deal with spam reports. The people at Aweber are use to dealing with this type of situation, and all they do is look at your mailing list setup, see you are using double opt-in, and ignore the spam report (sending you notification of who made the complaint, just in case you want to drop them a quick “thank you” ;o).
OK, newsletters are a great idea, but they are time consuming. Here is an alternative that works very well.
SETUP AN AUTORESPONDER COURSE.
An autoresponder course is a set of predefined mailings. You configure these to send out x number of messages, at intervals you choose. e.g. I may setup a 10 part autoresponder course, with each part being sent on a one per week schedule. That would mean that anyone signing up for it would receive your messages over a period of 10 weeks. That is plenty of time to gain their trust and pre-sell them something.
Autoresponders often come with web hosting, but these can be limited to a single “autoresponse”.
Fortunately, Aweber give you unlimited autoresponders when you sign up for an account with them. That means you have one Aweber account from which you can run multiple newsletters, and multiple autoresponder courses.
I highly recommend that as part of your traffic building (and income building) strategies, you set up a newsletter or mini-course (autoresponder course) on each of your sites. You can setup miniseries in much the same way as you can setup free reports. Find 5 or 10 articles relevant to your site, and use those as the basis for each autoresponder message. Just add in a leading paragraph, and a closing paragraph with some pre-sell, and you have your autoresponder course written. Just plug it into your Aweber control panel, add the Aweber subscription form on your site, and you are ready to catch subscribers.
My tool of choice and the one I recommend for newsletters and autoresponders has to be Aweber.
WARNING: You cannot import a mailing list into Aweber without getting your subscribers to re-confirm their subscription. This is because of the restrictions of double opt-in. When I moved my mailing list from "Your Mailing List Provider" over to Aweber (to take advantage of the autoresponders and other advanced features), I imported my old list into Aweber and waited for my subscribers to re-confirm their subscription via the emails Aweber sent them. I lost more than 50% of my list. Now, as it happens, they were probably lost because they did not read my newsletter, or they would have known to look out for the confirmation email. In that case, that 50% were probably no great loss. However, in hindsight, I wish I had gone with Aweber to begin with.
In this section, we have looked at how we can capture our visitors email address, which gives us more chance of getting them back to our site, or sell them a product by repeated exposure to your offerings. This repeated exposure is also used to build trust between your “visitors” and yourself.
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