The problem is, you just cannot treat your list subscribers that way. They are people too, and many of them may be in the same sinking cash boat.

In order to keep your subscribers coming back to you as customers you need to cover a few basics first.

1) Understand the needs of your prospective subscribers. Know what it is that brought them to you in the first place.

2) Meet the needs of your list subscribers. If they came to you for help with marketing, then give them help with marketing, not with carpentry.

3) Build rapport with your list subscribers. Your subscribers are human. They all have needs, wants, and desires. Learn what they are so that you can better assist them in the future.

4) Treat your list subscribers and customers with respect. You’ve heard of “do unto others”. If you treat your subscribers like people, not just as some means to make money, then they will know the difference. People like to be well treated and in tern will treat you well.

5) Provide your subscribers with long term support. Subscribers become customers. Whether they do it today or next year does not matter. Always provide the same level of support from day one. They will appreciate your efforts to keep them happy. Happy customers make for a happy business.

1) Someplace to post a squeeze or lead capture page. While this should be at your
own domain, it does not have to be. Get a free hosting account to start with if you have too, once you get more subscribers and make money you can get your own domain.

2) Get an auto-responder service. This will make the process so much easier to manage. The auto-responder software will even help you build the section for your lead capture page where people enter their information.

3) Basic lead capture page. The page users land on where they will enter their name and email. It does not have to be pretty, but does have to be functional. Some of the best pages have a simple text blurb about the product and fields to get more information. Keep it simple, basic html, and copy and paste the capture part in from your auto-responder.

4) You should have a product or service. This product or service could be a book, audio, or video and should be relevant to your topic. You do not even have to be the author of the product. Many beginners feel they have nothing of value to give, but there are tons of things that can be provided as an incentive.

5) Traffic to your page. The simple truth to list building is that you need traffic to your pages before you can get a customer to subscribe to your material. You cannot just build the page and hope to gain a loyal following overnight. You will need to get peoples eyes to see your page

Above all else, the subscribers on your email lists are looking for good content, or else they would not have subscribed to your list.  They are also screening you and your emails for quality.  If your emails are terrible and grammatically poor and contain very little useful or fresh information, then expect your readers will simply assume that your product is also lousy, grammatically poor and has little fresh information.

Your auto responder series must be packed full of informative emails stuffed with useful gems that a reader can apply immediately, without having to purchase any of your products.  Once they apply some of your techniques, and they see that they work or make sense, they will feel much more comfortable sending you a check for your primary product.

So how do you do it?

1.  Write intelligently.  By writing intelligently, you are establishing that you are the expert in the field about which you write. Besides that is why they are reading your emails in the first place.

2.  Write comfortably.  They must be able to read and understand the letter with the same ease that they might be discussing your merchandise or the subject of the email with their friend over a cup of coffee. The language should not be unnatural or uncomfortable; it should simply be easy to read.

3.  Do not try to sell something around every corner or in every email.  Feel free to send an email or two that simply provides useful information and include a simple link to your web site.  You do not want to sell them on your product everyday.  They may get frustrated if you try. Let them actually take the time to enjoy reading your letters.  Think about some of the letters you read daily.  Are they long-winded sales pitches, or are they informative?

4.  Be sure to send a satisfactory number of emails.  In the beginning, when you are first getting to know your clients and market, and while they have the highest level of interest, mail more frequently, maybe 3-5 times per week.  When you have built a lasting relationship with your customer and they recognize you by your email or name, you can drop down in frequency.  Take into account that if you have informative emails that truly adds to their knowledge base, you can generally mail to them more often.  If you are sending out pushy sales letters every other day, you are going to be asked to unsubscribe them in a hurry!  So use good judgment here.

5.  Before you send out any email, read it and ask yourself what you would do if you received that email in your inbox.  Would you read it, click through from it, delete it, or unsubscribe from the list?

6.  Remember that your reader is a person, not an email inbox.  Be personal.  Be respectful.  Treat them like you want to be treated–remember the “golden rule”?–it works!

If you were to subscribe to a newsletter and then receive an informative newsletter every couple of days or once a week, are you more or less likely to open an email from the sender of that newsletter than one from someone you don’t know?

That’s right–and most other people online will behave in much the same manner as you do.  Sending emails to customers who are already familiar with your return email address as one that sends them useful and informative information will be more productive. So if you take the time and effort to cultivate a list of your own, will your emails be opened at a higher rate than they would if you bought a “safe list” or rented someone else’s list?

I believe the answer should be clear.  Your own list will always win hands down.  Keep in mind, when you purchase somebody else’s list, it is most probably being sold to many others people, not just you.  So the recipient not only gets your email but 30 or 50 others, all from email addresses they don’t trust. When that happens, who is going to read it? Not me.

You simply must develop your own list.  There is no better option.

So how do you do it?  At the very least, you will need to have a web site.  It does not have to be anything super fancy, just a simple, one page landing page for interested potential customer to sign-up for more information. You will do this by adding in your auto responder’s opt-in script.

You must have an auto responder account. You will use the auto responder account to deliver messages that help you build a relationship with your potential customers.

Your emails must be educational and useful to the reader in order to keep them getting read.  If you keep on providing helpful and informative material, people will continue to look forward to your email as often as you send it.  If you do not provide useful information, your emails will not get opened.

You must have patience when building your list.  You are not going to build a huge list overnight.  But as you build your list, you are also building your business.  A long-term business, with long-term repeat customers.

One note to the wise: Be sure you use the “double opt-in” feature you will receive with your auto responder.  This will ensure that anyone who opts in to your list will have to click through to a confirmation link before they receive any emails from you.  This helps protect you from SPAM complaints.

A word of warning to those who really want to buy a “safe list” and simply email your offer to the email addresses on that list.  Is it worth a one-time mailing to get your web site suspended for spam activity?  Don’t do it!  Build your own high-quality list and develop a strong long-term relationship with those leads.

I started this endeavor from the standpoint of a beginner, mainly to help those who are beginners to better understand the exact steps and issues involved.

Now that I can post more then 10 articles, I have gone and done so, but as of yet only have 6 related to dog training, the specific topic of the website case study.

Here is the break down to for a total of only seven pet training articles
Article ID               Article Title                  Views              URLClicks          Pub. Date   
         
709327 Doggy Treats or Pet Training Treats                39    2    08/30/2007
709325 Pet Training Videos Can be Worth The Cost    25    0    08/30/2007
707583 Dog Training Leash – Picking the Right One     53    3    08/30/2007
679082 Pet Training Partners Can Confuse Your Pet   21    0    08/15/2007
679074 Pet Training Two Dogs at the Same Time        72    0    08/15/2007
679067 Train Your Pets – Why More People Should    31     0    08/15/2007

Again, this is only one article directly. Over the last month I have had 6 articles have been read a total of 241 times.

I have not been as aggressive in posting articles for this site as I should be. I have been writing articles, but have been saving them for future submissions. More on that later.

But what you really want to know is how many times people visited my sites. A total of 10 times on seven articles. Sure it is not really a lot. But this is a numbers games.

I have submitted the same 7 articles to a total of nine directories. The total hits and opt-ins to the site is shown below.

Project Name: German-Shepherd-Obedience
Page Views: 151
Successes: 31
Avg. Conversion: 20.5%
Total Unique Optins: 31
Best Headline Conversion: 26.1%

Take note, that from seven articles, submitted to 9 directories, I generated 151 page views to the site itself, and a total of 31 opt-in sign-ups. That’s an average of just over 20%, and a single page headline is averaging 26% opt-in rate.

For the beginning marketer one of the hardest things to do is get started with your own opt-in list. I know, I have been there. Article marketing can bring in people who are highly targeted prospects because they have already read your article and are interested in what you have to offer.

Lets do a little bit of math for a second. I have 1 article directory that generated 10 views to my website on 6 articles. Assuming each site directory give me the same results, I would only have an average of 90 hits.

 6 articles = 10 URL Clicks per directory
 9 directories X 10 clicks = 90 clicks trhoughs

As you can see, I had 151 page views, that is a 68% increase over the average. I also gain the benefit of articles that will continue to increase in views. They are not going to stop working for me, even If I stop posting new ones. But that said, the more articles I post, the more visits I can get.

As I stated earlier, I used only articles marketing for this site. I did not do any search engine submissions or directory listing, no promotions of any kind, I did not tell anyone, you get the idea.

I then started writing a series of articles geared toward pet training as I have done it with my own dogs. Here is what I have so far.

First thing I did was decide on topics that I was going to write about. As this is an ever changing and growing list, I keep a copy readily available in my editing program. I wrote down a list of nearly 50 different topics that I could pull form and customize as needed.

Coming up with a list of topics in your niche should not be hard to do. Pick topics relevant to your site content. Pick it apart as much as needed. Think of things you needed to know and learn.

I then wrote out a total of 20 articles. My original goal was to write and submit 1 article per day and see what happened. Unfortunately time, energy, and other duties got in the way. Starting with my initial collection of 20 articles I then looked for article directories that I would submit them too.

If you do a Google search for article directories, you will find hundreds of them, actually closer to 200 at my last count. Before you go off the deep end, you will not need to submit to them all.

You can submit to directories one at a time, and it is a tedious and time consuming process. I only recommend that you do it once. The reason for this, is so that you know how to, and why you should automate the process.

If you want to make your life a lot easier, and who doesn’t? Then get the free version of Article Submitter

The main thing when considering where to submit your articles to are two factors: potential traffic and potential links.

Sure there are other factors to work on later on, but in the beginning you need links to raise your site PR and traffic to increase sales. The article submitter program helps with this as it gives you a list of sites along with their Alexa (traffic) ratings and Google PR rank of the site.

For this site I chose a combination of manual submissions and the use of article submitter. Using the article submitter I submitted a total article count as follows:

• Day 1: 8/7/07 – Submitted 3 articles to the EzineArticles directory
• Day 2: 8/8/07 – Submitted 2 articles to the EzineArticles directory
• Day 3  8/11/07 – submitted 1 article to the EzineArticles directory

Over the course of 5 days, I submitted only 6 of my projected 20 articles to this one directory. While I did submit these articles to other directories as well, I am only going to highlight this one directory at this time due to ease of statistical data.

EzineArticles only gives you 10 initial submissions until you get your account upgraded. This is a free upgrade, but you must submit 10 articles first, and then it can still take a few days depending on how busy they are.

Of 6 articles that I posted, 3 are live, and 3 are still pending approval.

These three articles have produced a total of 112 article views, and a small number of click-throughs at just 5.

Tomorrow I will go into more detail about other article directories I used, and the results from them. However a side note is that as of tonight I have a total number of 88 visits to the site and total number of new subscribers of 8.

Not bad at all, that’s an average sign up of 8.1%. I have one headline that is converting at this point at a rate of 13.5%.

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