What I mean is, try to think what your average visitor must be thinking when he comes to y our site. Then write down three or four things that would be helpful to anyone thinking that. OK. Next, jot down 100 or 150 words of helpful information on each point.

Your notes could be as simple as:

• a list of three or four web sites you know of that have helpful information on the topic.
• a review of a book on the topic.
• your comment on a news item on the topic.

Anything. And just seven or eight short sentences.

Done that? Good … you now have an autoresponder series. Put an intro onto each one, and a one sentence ending that reminds the reader of the benefits of your site.

Promote your helpful information series on your home page, link it to a good autoresponder program and watch your visitors get help. You’ll see the results in return visits and more sales.

Of course they are not. Your sequence of emails was written before your customer emailed you. They are canned messages. And your readers will probably realize this. But a chatty, personalized e-mail is certainly going to work more for you than a cold, formal, official note with a stern, no-nonsense tone.

Am I right? Which of the two would you prefer to receive?

You can make your e-mail messages look personal by doing two simple things.

First, write with one, real customer in mind. Think that you are writing to them, specifically, when you write your autoresponder sequence. My old drama teacher at high school used to say we should speak from the stage as if we were addressing a little old lady in an old, frayed coat sitting in the back row, clutching her handbag. Not to the audience in general, but to one particular person. He said when we thought about our lines that way, we would find ourselves delivering them effectively to everyone in the hall. And a few years later, at journalism school, our broadcasting tutor used to tell us to read the news bulletin as if we were speaking to just one listener. This would make our delivery personable. If, instead, we spoke as if addressing an audience of tens of thousands, we would sound wooden and, he taught us.

Both these men were right. And you should apply what they taught when you write your e-mail sequences. In your mind’s eye picture a single reader, and write for them.

Second suggestion is to make use of all the information fields in your autoresponder. When a visitor fills in your e-mail form on your web site you will certainly be asking for their name and e-mail. But you can ask them to give you more information about themselves. Consider asking for more, personal information. And then when it comes time to build your autoresponder e-mail sequence you can put some of these personal details right into the body of the message. Just what details are appropriate will vary from business to business. But they might include things like location, age category, preferences and so on. Merge them with your message, and while people will know your e-mail has been generated by the computer yet they will appreciate the warm touch.

Try this and see what difference it makes.

For example, a year ago there were 2,733 million searches a month being made just on Google. that will be much higher now.

At the same time, however, you know of web sites that are getting a miserable trickle of visitors, or a reasonable number who don’t buy much. Perhaps your own site is like this, and you’re wondering why. It’s enough to get depressed over.

Don’t.

And don’t let yourself be carried away by the enormous number of people who use the Internet to get information or buy what they need.

There is just one, simple thing you need to do: get in front of people who want your product and will pay you for it. Step into your niche. Find your target market. And you will make your sales.

Even if there are more than 100 million searches a day on Google, so what? How many of them will buy your product (or service) from you? Only those people who are ready-made customers.

Here are two tools that will help you find, and keep, people who will pay for your product.

(1) Get the keywords people use to search for products like yours and optimize your site for these words.

There are tools you can use to find keywords that people are actually using right now as they search on the Internet. Dozens of these tools are evaluated and reviewed at this , which I recommend:
www.keywordworkshop.com

That is step one.

When you’ve optimized your site, begin search engine marketing based on these keywords. If you need some help with this get in touch with me — I help people like you get on page one of Google.

(2) Offer your visitors a useful, free report on your industry or topic

People look on the Internet for information to help them make their buying decisions. This is a fact. And you know this, because you do it yourself.

There are two comments I’d make about this: one, people looking for information are usually will to pick up useful, free reports; and two, people who come to your site can quickly move away to another one.

Even though they fully intend to return, you may never see them again. You need a way to automatically make contact with a visitor who has left you.

Here’s how you can get visitors returning to you. Offer them a useful report in return for their name and e-mail address, then send it out by automated e-mail on an autoresponder. Set up your autoresponder so that the initial report gift is followed up by a short, personalized series of emails helping them with the report and reminding them of your web site and your services or products.

The report needs only be a short four or five page document, saved as a PDF, that you or your office can whip up in an hour or two. Not much work for you, since you know your industry. But valuable for a visitor, perhaps, who is thinking of making a purchase of a product offered by you and your industry competitors.

The autoresponder service I recommend is Firebirdpro. Because it’s priced below the big ‘name’ autoresponders, but delivers the same features and has been set up to get past the spam filters of all the big e-mail services like Hotmail and Google mail.

1) A product people will pay money for

Something that people actually want. That is not the same as something that you want to sell. Many people stumble onto successful ‘Net businesses, or grow them out of a thriving offline business. This makes web success seem so effortless!

But it’s not like that for most of us. We have to experiment and test until we find the gold. And many people die of exhaustion two feet from the well. (As Bob Dylan said.) Make sure you are offering visitors something they actually want.

2) A way to consistently contact lots of these people to your site

Here are two things that work. The first will get you high up on the search engines and the second will get your first-time visitors coming back.

Put a blog on your site
Write something about your business and your products every day. And publish it on a blog. Do this religiously. There is something about putting fresh material onto your site that gets the attention of the search engines. People who do it see their site rising in the search engines. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to bolt a Word Press blog onto your site and put up a post — every day. It is one of the best Internet marketing investments you can make with your time.

Write an e-mail newsletter
They are hard work. But they tie you and your business to your subscribers, and they only cost time. Publish one.

I’m a great believer in publishing original interviews in your newsletter, because we run out of things to say unless we’re doing endless product reviews. A story about a person will always interest a reader.

You can either write a fresh, current newsletter every week or month. Or write 40 or 50 general newsletter issues that will have a shelf life, putting them onto an autoresponder like Firebirdpro, and when a visitor signs up for your newsletter they will get the first issue. Next week or month, the second one. And the third. And so on.

3) A web site that convinces these people to buy, stay in touch, and buy again (… and again …)

Your web site does this when the visitor:

• is sure of your credentials
• has enough information to answer his questions and educate him
• signs up for a newsletter that will continue to help him after he’s made his first purchase.

Try to build these factors into your site.

This is because when a person asks a search engine to find a site about a certain subject, the engine lists all the sites in its data bank that seem to have content about the subject.

Not just a one-word mention, either. Google has come to the top of the search engine pile by working out ways to accurately assess content so that users are happy and will use Google again and again.

A key-word rich article is a perfect way to show the search engines your site has the content it’s sniffing the Internet for.

If you are selling wedding crackers, for example, you could write a short article (200-400 words, say) about ‘wedding crackers’.

Make that phrase repeat through the article.

Don’t talk about other things, just home in on writing about wedding crackers.

Write it for a person, not the search engines. Make it informative. eg. the history of wedding crackers, the way people use the crackers at weddings, surprise wedding crackers, or the world’s biggest wedding cracker, or … but you get the idea.

Then put the article on your site and register it on the search engines.

This will give you influence.

But there are some things you can do to make the job a little easier.

Here’s three you could try from your web site.

1) Give away a mini-course

A mini-course is a useful set of notes and resources, broken up into five or six parts, and emailed out automatically each day (or at whatever frequency you want) to those who sign up.

While he educates his readers during each lesson, the writer also promotes his products or services.

Everyone likes this.

The reader, because he’s getting valuable education in a manageable stream and small chunks, for free.

The writer, because for several days in a row he is able to gently remind his reader about his web site and the benefits of his product. And also because he has a name and an e-mail he can use again, sensitively, in the future.

This is so simple and effective we MUST all do it.

The Firebirdpro autoresponder will deliver these courses for you. Just set it up and let it run on automatic.

2) Use tiny web sites to get good search engine rankings … then link them to your main site

It is possible to build a tiny 10–page web site with interesting content, highly optimized for one or two key search terms.

A tiny site like this stands a better than average chance to rank high on the search engines, because:

- it has useful content

- it’s been very carefully written, keeping in mind those two search terms (and a few other significant things.)

Link one of these highly ranked sites to your site, and you have a stepping stone for an extra stream of visitors who might not find you otherwise.

A tiny site like this is not a trick to try and fool the search engines. Everything about a tiny site is legitimate.

So, they have a large potential to bring an endless stream of good quality visitors to your site.

I said ‘potential’. Because building them is an art as well as a science and there can be no guarantees.

The secret of why the micro site works so well is the content. It’s carefully written, specific content, of considerable value to people searching for your services.

Of course, your main web site pages will also be optimized for the search engines. But those pages are general, and it will never be possible to optimize them as effectively as a tiny, precision site.

I recommend you develop several at appropriate times in your product and budget cycle.

3) Get relevant sites linking to your site

How do the search engines know your site is valuable? One way is to listen to what your peers say. And they do that by seeing if your peers are linking into your site. Because a link is like a vote of confidence in the content on your web page.

The experts agree on this.

Some people actually do it. You can do it with free tools like Directory Submitter. Click and pick up the free version

Email is cheap and easy to use, so Internet businesses are using it all the time. But if a business is unorganized, the owner may find themselves having to revert to “Dear Sir” or “Dear Madam”. Or even worse, to “Dear Sir or Madam”.

Can you imagine how that would work if you were doing it on the phone?

Email gets the same response as a phone call. So resist the pressure to simply use email because it is cheap; even if you don’t have a name to match with the email. Instead take the time to put a system in place in your business so you will always have a name to link to an email.

With an autoresponder, this is easy, because you can set them up so a visitor to your site will have to leave their name as well as their address before they can get onto your subscriber list. Then the autoresponder software will send all the emails in the sequence to “Hi, John” or “Dear Robyn”. Its automated.

And of course, you can do a lot more than just personalize autoresponder messages with a first name. You can require your visitor at the time he signs up to give almost any personal information you would like to have. Their city, their age, their income band, the organization they belong to, their marital status. Anything, as long as it doesn’t deter the visitor.

Once you have these details, you can easily set up your autoresponder to send out to only people in a certain city, or only to married subscribers, or just to low income names.

Can you see how personal and specific some of your sales messages can now become? And can you sense how effective these messages could be?

Make your business emails personal.

You don’t always want to be exposed like this. Indeed, a clever autoresponder strategy ought to be one of the foundations of your online business.

Here’s two things you might like to try to make your customer connection really sweet. They are two simple tactics that will keep a small business well ahead of big competitors who will never be able to offer fast, personal customer service like this.

First one: keep your promises.

That means, only promise what you can deliver. Sure. But it also means make realistic commitments on things like quality and delivery times — and bending over backwards to meet your commitments.

Just a few days ago I told a US client, on the phone, that I would complete some work by ‘this time tomorrow’. Well, that turned out to be a little harder than I had anticipated. Never-the-less, I had a time zone difference that worked in my favor a little (I work from down here in New Zealand) and I was able to put other things aside to meet my deadline. (Actually, I missed it by about half an hour, but that was almost certainly close enough.)

Big companies find this difficult. You can differentiate your business right here.

Another thing: fix problems right away.

Customer absolutely love this. If you can find a way to do it you will quickly rise to hero status in the eyes of your clients. And they will recommend you to everyone they meet.

Problems will arise in any business. If you have caused them, then certainly you need to make corrections quickly. But even if you didn’t, there are many problems that can be put right quickly. Fix the mistakes fast and you will have a lot of happy customers. And customers who know you know your work are on top of things, and can act when you need to.

They will have no trouble seeing your service is better than the sluggish, bigger businesses who have departments dedicated to work and (usually) no-one allocated to problem solving. Your business will shine.

Actually, they must do this. If they don’t the big companies will roll them flat. But because they are small and probably know many of their customers personally, a small business can give pleasant, personal service that has a real person’s face on the business end of things (the customer is not dealing with a nameless worker somewhere out on the floor, or in another office) and a reassuring, fast way of handling problems.

Here’s two ideas that will help you keep your business right on top of customer service.

First, answer the phone or your e-mail as soon as possible.

In fact, why not drop everything to answer customers when they contact you? They will quickly appreciate you are different, very different, from the big companies in this respect. The mammoths out there find it hard to give quick, personal service like this.

Of course some customers will bombard you with a series of questions and side notes, and suck large amounts of time out of you, if you do this. So there is a risk.

In fact I know small business people who deliberately answer emails later in the day, so their clients never expect an immediate reply.

But because the quick reply is such a powerful, reassuring action (especially with prospects) it is worth doing, even if you just touch base with the caller or customer and say you will get on to their query later in the day.

I’m not talking about setting up an autoresponder that replies to every incoming email with a message saying the message has been received and will be answered quickly. You could have one of those. I’m saying in addition make a personal, quick reply to your callers and those who send an email.

Second suggestion, exceed expectations.

Do more than you promise. Try to do more then the client expects. I’m not suggesting you do more by a large margin. No. Just do small, extra things. But do them, because customers will notice. And it will register with them as a ‘major’. Many of them will want to business with you again.

This is a simple, well-used technique that will almost never fail to impress and assure the customer that you are the best.

So there are two ideas you might be able to use to keep your business ahead of your bigger opposition.

It begins with the remark that it’s not easy to optimize a site for the search engines; that its difficult to put things in place so the site is right there, high up in the results, when people look for the product or service selling on the site.

And then he expands on this with a couple of hard-hitting paragraphs. Ending with this magnificent statement:

“Knowing how to rank is far different from actually ranking … the missing ingredient is that little detail of hard work. But the good news is that everyone can work hard.”

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