Some Important Assumptions
I’m making some very important assumptions here, which means they are beyond the scope of too much “in-depth” discussion on this site. That is only because this site is meant to be primarily about follow-up marketing with your prospects and customers.
If you have not yet done the things discussed
First up, I’m assuming that you already done (or are about to do) some comprehensive market research to:
- Determine the market you want to promote in, and
- Establish that there ARE actually people in that market who are willing to buy!
As part of that research, you should have identified appropriate products you can promote to that market. These could be any of:
- Relevant affiliate products, (eg products sold through Clickbank or Paydotcom for which you earn a commission)
- Existing products with Resell Rights (which means you can sell them as long as you don’t make any changes)
- PLR products - Private Label Rights - written by others with permission to modify - which hopefully you HAVE re-written to put your own “spin” on it
Or, better yet…
- Your own unique information product - where what you say is fresh and different, allowing you to rise above the normal “noise” in your chosen niche!
Hopefully you’ve also got a couple of useful “freebies” which you can use as “ethical bribes” to encourage or reward people for signing up with you.
Again, these are better if YOU have written them yourself.
When choosing other people’s products with giveaway or resell rights to use as freebies or bonuses, consider how much linkage is in the product you might use. These include links:
- To products you could earn from - but now can’t.
- To products you personally may NOT recommend.
- Which build the customer lists of your competition.
Remember, you will be working very hard to build all sorts of things like credibility, traffic, reputation etc., so don’t readily send people away to other marketers!
In case you haven’t realised it already, it’s also going to be extremely useful (practically a necessity) to have fairly good writing skills.
As well as writing your own products, freebies and reports, there are LOTS OF OTHER THINGS you will need to write, including:
- squeeze pages, and opt-in forms
- confirmation, thank you and download emails and pages
- sales letters
- multiple emails in your auto-responder sequences
- customer newsletters
- promotional mailings
- advertising
- marketing
- web pages
- blog posts
Don’t panic if your writing skills aren’t too polished yet. By the time you’ve written, and re-written some of this stuff several times over, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a seasoned writer 
Writing skills are developed with lots of practice, which is one reason why “blog posts” are mentioned above. Try to set up a blog early on, and start to post regular stories to it. It’s an excellent way to develop your writing style and showing your passion for your topic.
Eventually your blog will also become a great mechanism for capturing email addresses to build your list, promoting your products, AND getting content indexed into the search engines really quickly!
Tip: If you’ve already got your own domain name and web server (with cPanel hosting) check out the included Fantastico suite of programs you can install on your site.
The program to use to set up your blog is called WordPress. It’s a great content management system, and is used on lots of my sites nowadays, including this one!
Let’s talk about generating traffic for a second or two, because it’s one of the topics lots of people seem to struggle with the most.
It might seem a little strange, but I really want you to FORGET ABOUT TRAFFIC FOR NOW!
It’s very important that you have your follow-up systems in place BEFORE you start worrying about generating loads of traffic to your web site or sales letter.
If you don’t, you’re just wasting time, effort and possibly money.
The traffic “reality” is that approximately 70-90% of the people who go to the “average” web site will leave, practically almost instantly, without doing or buying anything!
The vast majority of people rely on a first impression formed in probably less than ten seconds, before making a decision to either stay and investigate further… or (most likely) go somewhere else!
Of the minority who do hang around a little longer, what options do they have? They can either:
- look at what you’ve got to offer and take you up on it now, OR
- (most likely) they will “file it” for later reference to come back again (when and IF they remember)
So if that was your web site, and you have no follow-up procedures in place, how many of those visitors do you think will return?
Contrast that to another web site where a variety of opt-in, follow-up measures are already in place - free reports in exchange for email addresses, opt-in forms for your “newsletter”, RSS subscription forms, etc.
Now… How many of these visitors are likely to return?
So please… don’t worry about generating loads of traffic until you are actually ready to DO something with it!
Next up… if you haven’t already done it…. please do NOT rush out to organise your auto-responder software yet.
Because there are so many options available in the marketplace, with a confusing array of features and prices, that decision should wait until you know a lot more about what you’re going to do with it!
Which means we’ve got to cover a lot more content yet… so I better get to it!
Comments
Leave a Reply