The Mistake that is Costing You Thousands - Your Most Important Asset
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Now, you put a form on your front page letting people know about it and asking them to sign up. Once they do that, send them the ebook and you've taken the first step to maximizing your web site.
Before I go any further, let me say this: an email list (that isn't spammed) is THE most important asset an online business can have. However, to truly "take care of it" you have to regularly (at least once a week) send the list some good, strong, relevant content. Once a month you can also send a "special offer" to that list.
This works so well simply because you are contacting the people on your list with some regularity. This means you have a constant "relationship building" process going on. The people on your list are regularly getting your content delivered to their door without them having to go out of their way to get it. They don't have to visit your site (but they will when you send an offer), they don't need an RSS reader, nothing like that.
At this point I think it's also important to say that the information (other than that first ebook) absolutely SHOULD NOT be the same thing that goes in your blog UNLESS it is a particularly good blog posting. The reason for that is simple: you don't want you blog readers to unsubscribe from your list as a result of too much content duplication. By having some differences in the content from your blog to your mailing list, you make it significantly more likely that someone will be a regular blog reader AND will also be on your mailing list.
Now, I know I've said that an email list is important, but the question becomes, why? Why is it such an important asset to build and take care of?
Most well put together websites find that AT THE VERY BEST, traffic from a search engine will get you one sale for ever 200 unique hits delivered from the engine. Most sites get more like one sale for every 2000 hits.
However, sites with mailing lists (that are well cared for) often find that when they send out an offer, the traffic from people from their list will get two sales for every 10 hits -- and that's being conservative. I've seen offers go out to lists where 30 percent of the entire list responded, not just 30 percent of the traffic the list brought to the site.
So let me ask you, how much more money do you think you can make if you change your conversion ratios that much?
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