- Powerfull promotion.
- Keep in touch with prospects and customers via your Newsletter.
Most Newsletters contain valuable information about the topics of your product/service and a light sales pitch. But you can also have a 'Newsletter' containing updates to your product/service or special offers. (In that case describe your Newsletter as "Would you like to be informed about
updates of our product?").
Or you can write about a certain ranking, statistics or special figures that come out in a certain frequency.
Anyway, write something to keep in touch to do some promotion. This is powerful!
The frequency of writing can be daily (difficult if you do not have news), weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Longer periods tend to loose interest of your subscribers.
Ok, how do you achieve that.
- First let your visitor subscribe to your Newsletter. You need a special program for that (a CGI-script) that makes interaction between your site and your visitor possible.
In our samples you find a guestbook page that is fully operational!
- Second, put his/her email address (and name for personalization) in a list or a database and store that data.
- Third, send out your letter to all addresses in the database.
- Fourth, manage your database. Subscribers should have an option to unsubscribe. Furthermore you have to check bounced Email, that is Email that could not be delivered and is coming back to you for some reason. Soft bounces possibly can be delivered again (the mail box was full or a temporary malfunction), but hard bounces (mail address no longer used) should be deleted.
All of this can be done at your computer at home. Pegasus is very good for that. But I tell you, it takes a LOT of time to manage your list by hand and to send all messages if your list grows and grows.
So, you're better of using a special service, a Mailing List Manager or ListServer. Some ISP's offer this sort of
service. Host services usually do provide this option.
But there are also some FREE services. Two of them are
http://www.topica.com/
http://www.onelist.com/
They provide the HTML-code that you can use on your site to let your visitors subscribe and they handle
management, bounces and posting.
As most free services they send a small commercial message with every post you send out (a paid commercial service has no commercial messages and thus looks more professional) and personalization in not always possible.
By the way, you can subscribe to our Ezine at
http://www.affordable-online-strategies.com/
Remember, your List is a very powerful way to promote your product/service.
- Powerful Promotion again: Autoresponders
- These pages are also available on an Autoresponder (also called (E)Mailbot, Autobot, Infobot) at
thinking@aweber.com
It does the following:
- automatically sends an Email message when the visitor "requests" such a message.
- can personalize the messages
- tells the day a message is send
- can send a sequence of messages
- the receiver can stop sending further messages
- MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL: it's all preset!
Yes, you don't have to lift a finger! How about that for website promotion?
Do you see the power of an Autoresponder? Put all your sales messages on it and have them send
automatically. Or deliver answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's), (technical) support or courses (like this one)
Your visitor sees your messages over and all you have to do is preset the messages, time intervals and add the personalization code.
Autoresponders come in many ways. Some ISP's provide them, Host companies provide them and there are specialized commercial services.
But you know me by now. There are some free services too.
And as always with free services, they always include a small commercial message.
There's a good free service at:
http://www.getresponse.com/
And their advertising isn't that disturbing.
If you ever want a professional service, then there's no better one than this one:
Unlimited Autoresponders
- Regular Email
- As said before, you will communicate a lot via Email. There are some 'rules' about this issue.
- keep your lines short (60 characters a line), because every Email client (program) will wrap lines differently;
- answer Emails promptly or if you can't, send a message that you have received the mail and will answer in due time;
- always include a SIG-file; hey, it's free!;
- for the time being, just send text. It's also possible to send HTML, but many Email clients can't handle that correctly;
- be careful to include attachments. On one of my sites I sell garden pottery and manufacturers often send me pictures with their Email. These files are sometimes over 750K (more than 500,000 characters). That's too big.
- be careful opening attachments. They can contain a virus. Always try to be sure what's in the attachment before opening it. Be careful with embedded Email clients like Outlook, because they tend to open an attachment at the same moment you open the message.
More about this later.
- SPAM
- A strange word made famous by the British Monty Python program. On the Internet it stands for Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). A sales message you've never asked for. Spammers have special programs that surf the Net and harvest every Email address that they can find. Than the use a special program to send their Bulk Email.
Many of these people offer their addresses to you so you can send Spam too. Please do NOT SPAM!
It's illegal, it congests the Net and it's boring.
That's it folks.
If you can't solve problems just send an Email to:
Warm regards,
Case Stevens
Moderator
FREE Website Promotion - Top of Page
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