Automating Your Internet Business with 5 of the Best Marketing Tools and Services Available
| Category: Website Design and Development | Date: 2003-10-05 |
How many of you have a website? If you do, you understand the sheer hard work that it takes to build the site and then to maintain and update it. It is such hard work that most sites get built and then never ever get a facelift. This is the wrong way to go about maintaining your presence on the web. But, it is the way that most webpreneurs go about putting up their site. Then when they dont make any sales they wonder why. I want to give you an overview of what it takes to create a dynamic website that practically operates itself and brings in sales for you automatically with low to zero maintenance so that you can concentrate on marketing and developing new products.
First let me say this: if you think that you are going to get into any business, especially this one and money is just gonna fall out of the trees while you lounge on the beach, I have to burst your bubble. It aint gonna happen. But, if you are willing to invest your time and your blood, sweat and tears into creating your website and automating it from the start, then your downtime spent answering email and configuring your website can be cut down to almost nothing.
One of the first mistakes my wife and I made with this business was trying to maintain everything ourselves. We put in countless hours designing and redesigning and finally building our site and it has been a very lucrative venture to this point. But, it could have been smoother. Certain methods of automation could have been put in place that could have made the maintenance and administration of our site as smooth and seamless as possible and we could have spent our time marketing instead of programming.
What Does Automating Your Internet Business Mean?
It means taking advantage of the technology that is available right this moment so that you can have tedious, manual tasks handled by technology rather than yourself. There is much to be said about relying on technology: most of it good but there is always one warning: What is designed and maintained by a machine has a tendency to fail. As long as you are aware of that and accept it, you will be OK. If you become totally reliant and are in denial about technologys potential for failure or mishap then you will be in for a shock when it does. Do not let that scare you away from using technology, use it as a guideline to understand the potential for disruption.
The tedious, normally manual tasks that you should automate to make your life easier are:
Credit Card Processing:
This is one of the smartest tasks that you can and should set up from the beginning to make your life and that of your customers much easier. If you had to process transactions manually, it would be an administrative nightmare once you get to the point where you are receiving more than an order or two a day (and that point often arrives quicker than you expect). The confidence that a secure transaction instills in your prospective customers is often an instrumental factor in getting them to do business with you.
Put yourself in the customers shoes as you imagine these two scenarios:
You visit a web site that focuses on a topic you are interested in, read a killer sales letter for a product that gets you all juiced up to buy and just as you pull out your credit card and get ready to place an order you see a button that says email me with your credit card information. Or even worse, fill out our non-secure credit card form and we will process your information. Do you risk it? I doubt it. Most customers would not waste their time with this kind of operation.
Same scenario, only when you get to the order page, you get transported to a secure site that accepts VISA, MC, AMEX and Discover and you can process your order immediately, get confirmation and a receipt and know when you can expect your order to arrive. I know for a fact that more customers would purchase from this site then from the site in number I.
Accepting credit cards and processing them automatically is an essential element to automating your website.
It inspires credibility for you as the merchant.
It makes tracking and processing orders easy.
It deposits the money straight into your bank account.
More and more people from all over the world will order.
A secure website inspires trust from your potential customers.
These factors make automatic credit card processing such a vital part of your automated web business model.
The company that I use for my merchant account transactions for the past 2 years has been E-Commerce Exchange. They are fast, dependable and hassle free. They approve anyone regardless of having bad or non-existing credit, and they can set you up with their automated credit card processing virtually overnight. I highly recommend that you go through them for your Merchant account. You can fill out a form here and be set up within 24 hours time:
Quick Commerce Merchant Application
Autoresponders:
The second most important automation tool that you should implement is an autoresponder. If any of you dont know what this is, you surely will after this lesson.
Basically, autoresponders are computer programs designed to automatically send a document, or documents, to anyone in response to a request made via email or via an online form. The document(s) usually arrives in the requesters inbox within minutes.
Because autoresponders handle requests 24 hours a day, 7 days a week practically on auto-pilot,they are extremely powerful Internet communications tools. They can be utilized with or without a web presence, and they can be integrated with other online and offline communications tools as well.
You see putting up a website is not the be all and end all of Internet Marketing. It is a focal point, a retail store if you will or even your office. The point is to get people to come into your store or your office. You should do many things to get people to come to your store either offline or online. Sometimes, people will contact you about your offerings. They may see you post on forums, they may have seen one of your classified ads, they may have heard about you from a satisfied customer. The point is: they will contact you for more information. Nine times out of ten when you are doing business on the internet, they will contact you via email. It is very important that you follow up these leads. An autoresponder can make your life a lot easier.
Many times you can get bogged down answering or responding to email. It is difficult to answer every question, especially the ones that get asked over and over again. This is where an autoresponder becomes all the more important. If you begin to notice the same questions being asked over and over again, why not use an autoresponder to do your work for you? Create a file that answers these Frequently Asked Questions and have prospects who want more info request a file from email. You can set up a plain autoresponder that handles these tasks for free. Ask the people who host your website to help you out.
Automated Follow-up Management Tools:
Autoresponders can work great if all you need to do is send FAQ information or if you are trying to send a sales letter by email (another very popular use for autoresponders). But, what if I told you of an even better use for autoresponders. How about utilizing an automatic email follow-up system?
Before I get into the particulars of this system, I may need to explain a Direct Marketing principle: The Rule of Seven.
The Rule of Seven states that statistically, your prospect must be exposed to your offer SEVEN times before they seriously consider purchasing it.
Can you imagine that? Sometimes it is less, sometimes it is more but traditionally it has been a total of seven times. Could you imagine how awesome it would be to be able to contact everyone who raises their hand and says, I am interested in what you are offering. Folks, that is downright impossible for me, for a lot of the subscribers of this newsletter and for a lot of you in the very near future. You see, in any successful marketing business you can expect a lot of leads. If you do not follow up on them, bye bye!!
In the traditional offline direct marketing world, follow up is carried out by mail or by hiring sales people to conduct outbound calls (AKA cold calling or telemarketing). This is a very expensive, albeit worthwhile business practice.
On the net,you can utilize technology to simulate this follow up and make it even simpler for yourself through automation.
An Automatic Email Follow-up System does the job of dozens, even hundreds of commissioned sales people for you. It handles hundreds, even thousands of leads for you.
I highly recommend getting this automation tool set up from the start so that your follow up is not left to other, less reliable methods or worse yet, not done at all.
One of the best tools that I have ever seen is the Profitconnect Automatic E-mail Follow-up Marketing System available from Profitstream corporation. Follow this link to find out more about this amazing tool that is taking online marketing to another level:
Profitconnect Automatic E-mail Follow-up
Internet Faxing:
As the digital age takes over from the industrial age, certain tools that were absolutely essential to business a few years ago have been redesigned to work with the digital age.
Take for example the fax machine. At one time this was an important if not absolutely necessary tool for conducting business. With the advent of the internet, email has taken over as the main method for business contact. However, there are still quite a few reasons to utilize a fax machine.
Hundreds of thousands of prospects who are not hooked up via email yet and can be contacted via fax machine.
There are a lot of people who have both email and fax. As people become more and more inundated with email messages, you may need to utilize a fax machine to get your message to these prospects.
When you are sending or receiving sensitive, important documents, a fax is still the most sensible tool to use.
Given these three facts, a fax machine would still seem to be an important tool to have. A few months ago, I discovered a company that has created a service that can set anyone up, anywhere in the world with a fax number that sends all the faxes you receive to your email box. The service is called JFAX and it is great.
For example, my JFAX number is 1-212-898-9048. If you fax a document to that number, I will receive a message in my inbox that a fax has come in from whatever number faxed it to me.
I click on the fax and software opens up that allows me to read the contents and print or save, whichever I choose. If you are saying big deal, wait it gets better. That very same number is also a voicemail number.
So, this great tool lets me receive not only faxes, but also voice messages in my email. You need sound on your PC to listen but you can receive both faxes and voicemail right through your email. If that wasnt enough JFAX is starting a service where you can call a number and have your email read to you over the phone.
JFAX is great, there are competing services on the web but I think that by far, they are the best. The ability to automate and combine these services into one package is very cool. Check em out:
JFAX
Affiliate Software:
The fifth tool that all internet marketers should be using to automate their web presence is affiliate software. As many of you know associate programs are the new trend in internet marketing where you have people sign up to become your salespeople and "refer" visitors to your site in order to sell them something which they in turn make a commission on. Ok, before you panic and think that affiliate software is something that you would only need if you offer an affiliate program; not so. Here is what you can also use it for:
Tracking your advertising results and setting up Joint Ventures. Using affiliate software to track advertising results may sound like providing yourself with overhead that you dont need but read on and you will find out why I suggest that you do this.
If any of you have ever seen codes at the end of webpages similar to this one: http://www.wherever.com/t.cgi/554 (dont click it by the way it doesnt exist) that is a code that tells the website owner which "affiliate" referred that visitor to the webpage. This is a way to "track" who is referring visitors and or sales to your program so you can pay out commissions.
However, for this idea you will use affiliate software to assign unique tracking codes for your ads so that you can determine which are the most profitable and continue those and dump the ones that are not profitable.
Direct Marketing is a science and people have been adding tracking codes to their advertising for as long as there has been advertising. Have you ever responded to an ad where you were asked to provide an extension number when you called. This is Direct Marketing at work here. They are tracking their ad response and believe me there are some serious statistics at work computing ratios of number of ad responses and number of sales. This business is purely scientific at its best and marketing on the internet should be no different.
Lets say that you are starting a new advertising campaign and you want to track the results to determine the most cost effective places to advertise. Place 25 ads for the same product in 25 different sources, Ezines, banner ads and classified ads and assign each ad a different affiliate URL so that you have it set up like this:
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/1
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/2
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/3
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/4
etc.
You would probably want to choose more unique numbers than above but you should get the idea.
Then use the affiliate softwares administrative tool to track the hits and sales of each affiliate URL so that you can determine which ads to keep and which ones to scrap.
You can use this technique to test different ads, headlines, sales letters and even webpage designs to see which ones bring in the best response. Testing is another very scientific and crucial aspect to marketing.
One of the best affiliate software programs that I have seen to this date is Paul Galloways YOAP program. I highly recommend it:
Your Own Associate Program
These 5 Internet Marketing Tools will save you an extraordinary amount of time and money which you can then use to invest in promoting your business instead of filling out orders or answering email. As your business gets more automated the money will come rolling in and your life will be made easier.
About the Author
Article by Marc Goldman, Goldbar Enterprises subscribe to The Marketers Resource Weekly: The Free Internet Marketing Resource for the New Millennium. Subscribe at http://www.goldbar.net Discover the exclusive members only website that will propel your business to dizzying heights.
webmaster@goldbar.net
http://www.goldbar.net
First let me say this: if you think that you are going to get into any business, especially this one and money is just gonna fall out of the trees while you lounge on the beach, I have to burst your bubble. It aint gonna happen. But, if you are willing to invest your time and your blood, sweat and tears into creating your website and automating it from the start, then your downtime spent answering email and configuring your website can be cut down to almost nothing.
One of the first mistakes my wife and I made with this business was trying to maintain everything ourselves. We put in countless hours designing and redesigning and finally building our site and it has been a very lucrative venture to this point. But, it could have been smoother. Certain methods of automation could have been put in place that could have made the maintenance and administration of our site as smooth and seamless as possible and we could have spent our time marketing instead of programming.
What Does Automating Your Internet Business Mean?
It means taking advantage of the technology that is available right this moment so that you can have tedious, manual tasks handled by technology rather than yourself. There is much to be said about relying on technology: most of it good but there is always one warning: What is designed and maintained by a machine has a tendency to fail. As long as you are aware of that and accept it, you will be OK. If you become totally reliant and are in denial about technologys potential for failure or mishap then you will be in for a shock when it does. Do not let that scare you away from using technology, use it as a guideline to understand the potential for disruption.
The tedious, normally manual tasks that you should automate to make your life easier are:
Credit Card Processing:
This is one of the smartest tasks that you can and should set up from the beginning to make your life and that of your customers much easier. If you had to process transactions manually, it would be an administrative nightmare once you get to the point where you are receiving more than an order or two a day (and that point often arrives quicker than you expect). The confidence that a secure transaction instills in your prospective customers is often an instrumental factor in getting them to do business with you.
Put yourself in the customers shoes as you imagine these two scenarios:
You visit a web site that focuses on a topic you are interested in, read a killer sales letter for a product that gets you all juiced up to buy and just as you pull out your credit card and get ready to place an order you see a button that says email me with your credit card information. Or even worse, fill out our non-secure credit card form and we will process your information. Do you risk it? I doubt it. Most customers would not waste their time with this kind of operation.
Same scenario, only when you get to the order page, you get transported to a secure site that accepts VISA, MC, AMEX and Discover and you can process your order immediately, get confirmation and a receipt and know when you can expect your order to arrive. I know for a fact that more customers would purchase from this site then from the site in number I.
Accepting credit cards and processing them automatically is an essential element to automating your website.
It inspires credibility for you as the merchant.
It makes tracking and processing orders easy.
It deposits the money straight into your bank account.
More and more people from all over the world will order.
A secure website inspires trust from your potential customers.
These factors make automatic credit card processing such a vital part of your automated web business model.
The company that I use for my merchant account transactions for the past 2 years has been E-Commerce Exchange. They are fast, dependable and hassle free. They approve anyone regardless of having bad or non-existing credit, and they can set you up with their automated credit card processing virtually overnight. I highly recommend that you go through them for your Merchant account. You can fill out a form here and be set up within 24 hours time:
Quick Commerce Merchant Application
Autoresponders:
The second most important automation tool that you should implement is an autoresponder. If any of you dont know what this is, you surely will after this lesson.
Basically, autoresponders are computer programs designed to automatically send a document, or documents, to anyone in response to a request made via email or via an online form. The document(s) usually arrives in the requesters inbox within minutes.
Because autoresponders handle requests 24 hours a day, 7 days a week practically on auto-pilot,they are extremely powerful Internet communications tools. They can be utilized with or without a web presence, and they can be integrated with other online and offline communications tools as well.
You see putting up a website is not the be all and end all of Internet Marketing. It is a focal point, a retail store if you will or even your office. The point is to get people to come into your store or your office. You should do many things to get people to come to your store either offline or online. Sometimes, people will contact you about your offerings. They may see you post on forums, they may have seen one of your classified ads, they may have heard about you from a satisfied customer. The point is: they will contact you for more information. Nine times out of ten when you are doing business on the internet, they will contact you via email. It is very important that you follow up these leads. An autoresponder can make your life a lot easier.
Many times you can get bogged down answering or responding to email. It is difficult to answer every question, especially the ones that get asked over and over again. This is where an autoresponder becomes all the more important. If you begin to notice the same questions being asked over and over again, why not use an autoresponder to do your work for you? Create a file that answers these Frequently Asked Questions and have prospects who want more info request a file from email. You can set up a plain autoresponder that handles these tasks for free. Ask the people who host your website to help you out.
Automated Follow-up Management Tools:
Autoresponders can work great if all you need to do is send FAQ information or if you are trying to send a sales letter by email (another very popular use for autoresponders). But, what if I told you of an even better use for autoresponders. How about utilizing an automatic email follow-up system?
Before I get into the particulars of this system, I may need to explain a Direct Marketing principle: The Rule of Seven.
The Rule of Seven states that statistically, your prospect must be exposed to your offer SEVEN times before they seriously consider purchasing it.
Can you imagine that? Sometimes it is less, sometimes it is more but traditionally it has been a total of seven times. Could you imagine how awesome it would be to be able to contact everyone who raises their hand and says, I am interested in what you are offering. Folks, that is downright impossible for me, for a lot of the subscribers of this newsletter and for a lot of you in the very near future. You see, in any successful marketing business you can expect a lot of leads. If you do not follow up on them, bye bye!!
In the traditional offline direct marketing world, follow up is carried out by mail or by hiring sales people to conduct outbound calls (AKA cold calling or telemarketing). This is a very expensive, albeit worthwhile business practice.
On the net,you can utilize technology to simulate this follow up and make it even simpler for yourself through automation.
An Automatic Email Follow-up System does the job of dozens, even hundreds of commissioned sales people for you. It handles hundreds, even thousands of leads for you.
I highly recommend getting this automation tool set up from the start so that your follow up is not left to other, less reliable methods or worse yet, not done at all.
One of the best tools that I have ever seen is the Profitconnect Automatic E-mail Follow-up Marketing System available from Profitstream corporation. Follow this link to find out more about this amazing tool that is taking online marketing to another level:
Profitconnect Automatic E-mail Follow-up
Internet Faxing:
As the digital age takes over from the industrial age, certain tools that were absolutely essential to business a few years ago have been redesigned to work with the digital age.
Take for example the fax machine. At one time this was an important if not absolutely necessary tool for conducting business. With the advent of the internet, email has taken over as the main method for business contact. However, there are still quite a few reasons to utilize a fax machine.
Hundreds of thousands of prospects who are not hooked up via email yet and can be contacted via fax machine.
There are a lot of people who have both email and fax. As people become more and more inundated with email messages, you may need to utilize a fax machine to get your message to these prospects.
When you are sending or receiving sensitive, important documents, a fax is still the most sensible tool to use.
Given these three facts, a fax machine would still seem to be an important tool to have. A few months ago, I discovered a company that has created a service that can set anyone up, anywhere in the world with a fax number that sends all the faxes you receive to your email box. The service is called JFAX and it is great.
For example, my JFAX number is 1-212-898-9048. If you fax a document to that number, I will receive a message in my inbox that a fax has come in from whatever number faxed it to me.
I click on the fax and software opens up that allows me to read the contents and print or save, whichever I choose. If you are saying big deal, wait it gets better. That very same number is also a voicemail number.
So, this great tool lets me receive not only faxes, but also voice messages in my email. You need sound on your PC to listen but you can receive both faxes and voicemail right through your email. If that wasnt enough JFAX is starting a service where you can call a number and have your email read to you over the phone.
JFAX is great, there are competing services on the web but I think that by far, they are the best. The ability to automate and combine these services into one package is very cool. Check em out:
JFAX
Affiliate Software:
The fifth tool that all internet marketers should be using to automate their web presence is affiliate software. As many of you know associate programs are the new trend in internet marketing where you have people sign up to become your salespeople and "refer" visitors to your site in order to sell them something which they in turn make a commission on. Ok, before you panic and think that affiliate software is something that you would only need if you offer an affiliate program; not so. Here is what you can also use it for:
Tracking your advertising results and setting up Joint Ventures. Using affiliate software to track advertising results may sound like providing yourself with overhead that you dont need but read on and you will find out why I suggest that you do this.
If any of you have ever seen codes at the end of webpages similar to this one: http://www.wherever.com/t.cgi/554 (dont click it by the way it doesnt exist) that is a code that tells the website owner which "affiliate" referred that visitor to the webpage. This is a way to "track" who is referring visitors and or sales to your program so you can pay out commissions.
However, for this idea you will use affiliate software to assign unique tracking codes for your ads so that you can determine which are the most profitable and continue those and dump the ones that are not profitable.
Direct Marketing is a science and people have been adding tracking codes to their advertising for as long as there has been advertising. Have you ever responded to an ad where you were asked to provide an extension number when you called. This is Direct Marketing at work here. They are tracking their ad response and believe me there are some serious statistics at work computing ratios of number of ad responses and number of sales. This business is purely scientific at its best and marketing on the internet should be no different.
Lets say that you are starting a new advertising campaign and you want to track the results to determine the most cost effective places to advertise. Place 25 ads for the same product in 25 different sources, Ezines, banner ads and classified ads and assign each ad a different affiliate URL so that you have it set up like this:
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/1
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/2
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/3
http://www.whatever.net/t.cgi/4
etc.
You would probably want to choose more unique numbers than above but you should get the idea.
Then use the affiliate softwares administrative tool to track the hits and sales of each affiliate URL so that you can determine which ads to keep and which ones to scrap.
You can use this technique to test different ads, headlines, sales letters and even webpage designs to see which ones bring in the best response. Testing is another very scientific and crucial aspect to marketing.
One of the best affiliate software programs that I have seen to this date is Paul Galloways YOAP program. I highly recommend it:
Your Own Associate Program
These 5 Internet Marketing Tools will save you an extraordinary amount of time and money which you can then use to invest in promoting your business instead of filling out orders or answering email. As your business gets more automated the money will come rolling in and your life will be made easier.
About the Author
Article by Marc Goldman, Goldbar Enterprises subscribe to The Marketers Resource Weekly: The Free Internet Marketing Resource for the New Millennium. Subscribe at http://www.goldbar.net Discover the exclusive members only website that will propel your business to dizzying heights.
webmaster@goldbar.net
http://www.goldbar.net
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