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Articles Index >> Marketing
Building a Highly Profitable Mailing List
by Michael Cheney
It's your number one job as a website owner to get people visiting your site
to raise their hand and say, "Yes, I'm interested. Tell me more."
This is basically permission marketing and it's the reason that the people who
are making a lot of money on the Internet are focusing on 99 percent of the
people who visit their site.
Ninety-nine percent of people visiting your website will not buy your product.
So what you need to do is to try and get them onto a mailing list so you can
educate them further about your product and convince them to buy your product
or service, or affiliate products or services that you are promoting. The idea
here with the permission marketing is to get their permission so you can send
them information and lead them along a path to the sale.
Since hardly anyone will buy from you the first time they come into contact
with your website, what you need are "stepping stones." Let's imagine
you have a river. Visitors enter onto one side of this river where they are
in a state of doubt.
They are not sure if your product is for them. On the other side of the river,
where you want them to be, is the state of sale where they trust you entirely.
They understand all the benefits of the product and they are willing to part
with their money to buy the product.
So you need to get them from one side of the river, the side of doubt, over
to the other side of the river, the side of the sale. In order to do that you
need to use "stepping stones." Stepping stones is a phrase that I've
coined which basically means anything that you can send a prospect that will
educate them, encourage them, and infuse them about your product.
For example, if you sell a golf book, people who first land on the site might
not be willing to buy that book right away. In fact, the statistics say that
99 percent of them won't be. So what you could do as the owner of this golf
book is get people on a mailing list and send them a free golf lesson every
week for seven weeks. Once they've got the seven lessons, they would trust you.
They would know what you are talking about, they would understand the benefits
of owning the full product and they would trust you enough to actually go and
buy your product or service.
That's how you go about building a profitable mailing list. You focus on the
long term. You need to offer people direct benefits and incentives on your website
so that they sign up through your opt-in form immediately. Once you've done
that, you need to send them at least one or two messages right away that are
extremely valuable and contain no, or very small, mention of your product. Don't
hit them immediately with your sales pitch. What you need to do is give them
testimonials and case studies. Demonstrate to them that you know what you're
talking about.
This method of internet marketing is extremely effective and the real website
marketing geniuses out there use this promotion method to generate thousands
and thousands in online revenue. Now you can use this technique too. Get people
on your mailing list. Use the "stepping stones" principle to build
up trust and educate them about your product and you'll make many, many more
sales as a result.
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