A BETTER WAY TO SELL
by: Cary Christian
 

You purchase an ad in an ezine, craft a wonderfully catching headline, and exhibit marketing mastery as the body of your ad teases the reader to visit your website to check out your goods. The ad brings 1 out of 100 readers to your website where they glance over your offering. Some buy. Most don't. They leave. They're gone.

What's wrong with this picture?

This is the way most of us sell on the web. It's been done that way for years and, for the most part, it works. But there is a way you can at least double the effect of your advertising, and it doesn't take long to put this methodology into action.

What is it?

Use an autoresponder to give your reader a free report, course or other materials that will allow you to contact them more than once.

"Oh brother, here we go again," I can hear you say. But hold on and give me a moment to convince you.

Let's say you sell an investment course on your website. Prepare a free seven-day email course that somewhat parallels your investment course, but naturally, the information in the free course is designed to make the reader hungry to get to the good stuff in your main course.

If the free course is well written and provides some valuable information, the reader is going to be far more interested in your investment course when they do visit your site. This is an excellent way to presell your visitors before they ever see your website.

Another advantage to this approach is that you get more opportunities to market to the individual, seven in this case rather than one. You've heard that it takes at least seven contacts with a potential customer before they buy, well, that is why most free reports, courses, and so forth delivered by autoresponder are usually in seven parts. Of course, you can go for more if your subject matter supports it.

You can do this with literally any product you might want to sell, and you should consider doing it for EVERY product you sell.

So instead of using your ad to get the reader to visit your website, get them to sign up for your autoresponder report instead.

Another benefit of this approach is that you should get more people signing up for your free report than you would get visitors to your website. Remember that many people are reading their email online. It is simply easier for them to send an email to subscribe to your report than it is for them to pull up your website.

Yet another benefit is that you get the opportunity to emphasize different benefits of your products in each installment they receive. This gives you more opportunity to find any given reader's "hot button" than you will have in one single ad.

Don't have an autoresponder? You can get one free at GetResponse - http://www.getresponse.com/index/43791

Try this out and see how well it works. It might just change the way you advertise from now on!


Copyright (c) 2002