This is taken from Part 5 of the Linknet eCourse

Local Marketing Gold

Once you start getting traffic to your site you need interesting content to keep your visitors engaged. Memorable content, photos, videos, contests, surveys, information, etc. will make an impression on your visitors and give them an incentive to bookmark your site and return in the future.

But you also need a way to build a list of interested visitors who you can proactively keep in touch with. If you do it correctly you will eventually be able to successfully promote your products to your list. In order to build a list you need an email capture system.

The capture system has two important parts. First, you need an offer to entice visitors to sign up. This could be a giveaway of some kind (such as this course), a contest, a survey.
Or you could offer a dumbed-down version of one of your products.

Second, you need an online form integrated with an autoresponder. The online form is easy to create if you have the right autoresponder. You can either use one of the big boys like AWeber or GetResponse, or you can set up your own (on your own host) like ListMailPro (the
one I use for many different things.)

If you don’t know what an autoresponder is, it works like this…When someone signs up using your online form, the signup information is sent to your autoresponder. The autoresponder then adds them to your list and sends them back a pre-programmed email response.

What I recommend is that you start with a hosted service like AWeber. Use their service to help you build an opt-in list by offering giveaways, contests, ecourses, free software, surveys… whatever you can dream up.

Then if you find their service restrictive, consider setting up your own autoresponder, and use it for things that your hosted service is not very good at.

Once you have started building a list you then have to follow up effectively to start converting your contacts into customers. We’ll discuss that in the next segment.

Much more detail is available in the eCourse The Next Web Marketing Gold Mine.

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