Whether your business is small or large, domestic or international, online or offline, you are costing your business money if you are not aggressively capturing every visitor's contact information including their e-mail address.
A now readily accepted cliche states that the money is in the list. That is ever so true now than it ever has been before. By accepting this universal truth, you have just entered the world of competitive profits and professionalism.
E-mail, although it has gone through numerous changes and legal adversities over the years, is still one of the best forms of communication with your customer if it is done right and appears to them to be first class and not spam. This can be done inexpensively as well.
For example, every business owner needs a website ever it be so humble and the ability to capture your visitor's e-mail address preferably with a professional autoresponder. Why is this so important?
First, most people do not buy immediately and you want the ability to contact them later with your product or service. Second, this will make your life so much more easier because the whole process in getting their e-mail address is automated so that you can spend your time doing more important tasks.
The next important activity for your business is bringing large amounts of laser targeted traffic to your websites . Different avenues of doing this would be writing articles and using Hub pages, Squidoo, Digg to name just a few.
And one of the best sophisticated techniques that is starting to get more press attention is called viral marketing. Viral marketing if used correctly could literally bring thousands of buyers and interested visitors to your website(s) in record time.
I don't think enough is said or written about the importance of adding viral marketing to your marketing campaigns and the awesome power this proven concept has to destroy your closest competitors.
Attaining traffic not only by your means but also by the efforts of other enthusiastic marketers (partners as I see them) can take a website from 10 to 100 visitors a day to 500 to 1000 or more in very little time.
Brilliant business people in all walks of life will tell you that their wealth factor is directly tied to the success of others within their companies and organizations.
I think it would be safe to say that without these partner affiliates, they would not be where they are today. Remember this if nothing else.
To achieve massive size lists, there are many websites that successfully work on the premise that you join their organization, add simple codes to your website and every time a legitimate and professional popup or popunder appears, you get a credit.
These credits then allow your ad to appear as an unobtrusive ad on someone else's website and so on. This is one example of viral marketing that is welcomed and read by all these visitors.
Everyone is thus creating a huge list based upon everyone else's efforts all working together toward one common goal in internet marketing. Now I think the question is: "Are these types of websites a good thing to join?"
Yes and no. The concept is fantastic. But here lies a potential problem that requires your utmost attention.
You want to make absolute sure that if you are going to spend precious time and money in bringing traffic to your website, then please don't waste it. Always try to capture their e-mail address with an incentive, free ebook or something they can only get from you.
But you may ask: "How can I do this if I'm using their replicated website?" Simple. Join an organization that allows you to bring traffic to the replicated website (that is yours) then professionally captures those visitors' e-mails and then happily hands every one of those e-mail addresses obtained to you.
What? I can have best of both worlds? You sure can. In fact, there are a few companies that will periodically send you a list of all visitors who have joined through your efforts or with a membership they will automatically send these critical, cash-making e-mail addresses straight to your autoresponder.
How's that for automation. Now you are starting to build your massive e-mail list legally that will bring you untold financial rewards for the rest of your life.
But this is where you have to be knowledgeable about who to work with and those to avoid. Sadly, most companies will only allow you mail to this massive list that you've helped built every so often but will never give you rights to their contact information.
These companies have absolute say in how often you get to mail the very visitors you've brought to them in the first place. This can be very frustrating considering all your hard work. Only then do you realize that this large mailing list wasn't your list after all.
My advice: Take that first step and join the best viral marketing company that will provide their professional website to draw huge amounts of visitors but then rewards you with actually sending you this list of e-mail addresses directly to you or to your autoresponder.
That's what I call working smarter and taking advantage of viral marketing strategies that is working for thousands of website owners all over the world.
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