5 Reasons You MUST Stay in Contact with Your Customers

As an internet marketer, you know you have to make sales to stay in business and make a profit. Without sales, you don't have a business. But staying in contact with your customers after the sale is just as important (if not more so) as making the sale in the first place.

Too many internet marketers focus solely on building a list of paying clients, without using existing clients to generate more sales. This means that they continue to spend advertising dollars without even seeing an increased return on their investments.

Rather than just focusing on getting new clients, you should focus on staying in contact with existing customers. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. Customers that buy from you once are much more likely to buy from you again. You've already sold them a product that solves one of their problems. Most people have a whole host of related problems that need solutions. You've already established yourself as an expert by solving one problem - why not use the trust you have built to sell additional products?
2. Repeat customers are much more likely to refer other clients. If you've stayed in contact with your customers, you've built a relationship that will make them look to you as an authority in your field. And when their friends and business associates need help, they'll know who to recommend. This is a great way to build your client list without additional advertising.
3. Your existing clients can help you build testimonials for your sales pages. Stay in contact with your customers after the sale. Ask them what they liked about your product. Offer them a free report or other product if they will let you put their comments on your website. They'll be happy to see their names in print, and you'll get to build stronger sales copy to attract more clients.
4. Staying in contact with existing customers lets you know how to improve your products. Ask your buyers what they would like to see changed. Use these comments to revise and improve your product, and offer them the new version for free as a "thank you" for their input.
5. Finally, staying in contact with your customers reduces the number of refunds you will give. People are more interested in keeping a product if they know a seller is interested in finding out how well it worked. Most clients ask for refunds because they don't understand how to use a product. You may be able to avoid this by simply providing a tutorial. Or, you may be able to answer a few questions via email. The few minutes you spend helping your clients learn how to use the product can save you thousands of dollars in refunds.

So don't just be content with making a sale. Stay in contact with your clients, and invite them to contact you at any time. You'll generate repeat business, gain more referrals, and pay out fewer refunds. Plus, you'll build a client base that can provide you with substantial income for years to come.

Original article : http://anthonyvicenza.com/wordpress/list-building/5-reasons-customers-contact.html

Anthony Vicenza is a professional affiliate marketer. He now provides mentoring/hosting and free advice to wanna-be internet entrepreneurs at http://www.AnthonyVicenza.com

How Writers Can Master The Internet

This is not hype. You are a writer. You browse the Internet almost every day now, looking for both entertainment and information. You see other writers having blogs and web pages on the Internet.

And you wonder: where does that leave you?

Here is the most startling current piece of information there is now in 2007.

The Internet, the World Wide Web, has become the publisher of choice for the world's information needs.

THE INTERNET IS THE BIGGEST PUBLISHING HOUSE AND THE PREFERRED PUBLISHING HOUSE IN THE WORLD BY FAR!!!

Do you doubt this?

You don't feel the Internet has the prestige that having a book published with a big publishing house would bring you, and maybe you are right.

However, those places at the top of the traditional publishing world are few and far between. Interesting metaphor.

While at the same time organically the biggest publishing house by far has developed just next door!!!

Is it not time for you as a writer to claim your niche on the World Wide Web?

A writer is a packager and conveyer of information, even if you write successfully sold novels.

People in the millions look to their computers and the Internet for most of their information needs.

This is natural since the Internet publishes information quickly and in a relevant manner, and with more experts per subject area than any paper book publisher can muster.

WRITERS EARNING MONEY SELLING THEIR WORK

An economic analysis of what writers are paid in the traditional publishing world shows that all but the top writers are getting screwed royally. How is this?

Writers traditionally are paid eight percent about of the retail price of a book. The author does the big labor creating a book and the publisher and book sellers take over ninety percent of the cover price the consumer pays for that book.

We don't complain that this is totally unfair. We say to the writer: move to the Internet, the biggest and best publisher in the world.

On the Internet selling your work you will get at least fifty percent of what your electronic books sells for after expenses are paid.

There are no printing and paper costs, or if there are they are taken up in the Print On Demand, POD, publishing service. You get even here twenty to forty percent of your book cover price.

So that almost suddenly now paper book publishers, their editors, their printers, your agent, your publicist, and any other people such as sales people, have become limited or irrelevant.

The world has gone largely Internet for its information needs, free and paid for.

It will only get worse for writers who rely on paper book publishers. You, the writer, will never make much money there unless you are one of the very few.

You will have to go Internet now. These are some of the key ideas you need to know and follow to survive and grow as a writer making a living from your work.

1. Create a web site or a web blog site where you make your presence as an author known.
2. Don't rely on your web site or blog to sell your books in paper for you.
3. You don't make a pretty, author-like, book-cover like, web site. These pretty sites do not sell books or products. They just look nice, but few of these pretty sites have that many paying visitors who will buy your books from them. I as an author with a pretty website, dreamwork2000, since 1999 know because very few of my paper book have sold from this website.
4. You don't just create a website. You create a marketing website from which you give away good information you are expert in through short articles, and also through which you sell expert information as downloadable books, fiction and non-fiction.
5. You as a writer are not selling your style. You are selling your expert knowledge. Therefore, you must position yourself successfully on the web as not just an author but an expert in a certain subject also. THIS IS THE KEY!!!
6. Check out what we say here. Go to author's pretty web sites. Do you read them and buy from them? Do you? Go to Internet marketing websites and note the difference in how they are designed and written. March 15, 2007 - you feel a pull to read some of their free articles, and also to buy some of their reports and services.
7. This is the marketing pull. As a writer these days you are responsible for also marketing your work and writing it in a style that alerts people to the fact they may need your information.
8. This article comes from a working writer who has sold over 350,000 books published in paper. He has now moved his writing and publishing career to the Internet.

He has changed also how he writes some of his information, including fiction and non-fiction to formats that work well currently on the Internet.

He has bought marketing reports and services that help him get sales through the Internet of his work. He has produced new work Internet style in his effort to become relevant to this new way of publishing information with the biggest publisher in the world, the Internet.

You will find these and a lot more ideas and resources in a full report for sale at a reasonable price at this author's regular website: http://www.creativewritingandwriters.com

See his other free information articles and paid-for reports, plus examples of his own fiction-writing work. Strephon Kaplan-Williams is a well-published writer and expert psychologist now selling his new work solely from the Internet. He offers solely his own experiences as a resource for new writers coming on the Internet.

Search Engine Optimisation: Why Not a Flash Website?

Yeah why not! They look good and can be very creative with a lot of visual effects. But the truth is they are not very search engine friendly. For those who have just spent a lot of bucks on creating a flash masterpiece, no need to panic, there are a few ways to help improve your websites search engine visibility.

To give you a quick rundown as to why flash websites are not favoured by search engines, they are seen as a one page image file with no text based content. You will notice that when you navigate through a flash website, the URL address will always remain the same. So here you have a website with no text based content, is a one page image file and has no internal link structure, translating into a search engines enemy.

Unless you have an extremely popular name within your industry or have an enormous amount of relevant incoming links, then you will get away with having a flash website for the obvious keyword phrases i.e. company name. Who would fall into this category? An example would be Coca Cola, ever heard of them? So for those who fall into the other category, and that would be about 90% of us, fortunately there are alternatives to help boost your rankings.

There are three suitable methods that I would recommend. The first method is by far the easiest and cost efficient. It involves optimising your Title and Meta tags for the single page to the best of your ability and then including optimised text information beneath the flash image. Some may see this as a form of spam, but given the scenario, I would recommend this method provided that the text is written accordingly and avoids keyword stuffing.

The second method can be quite costly and might not be favoured given the fact that you have spent a lot of cash on your flash website. It involves developing a second site designed in HTML. When a visitor visits your site, they would be presented with two links, one to your flash site and one to your HTML site. That way search engine crawlers will access all the content and pages via the HTML website.

The third method is by far the most preferred. It works by developing an HTML website with your flash images embedded on the page, and all content is written in text based form. This allows you to have multiple HTML pages which will give you more Title and Meta tags to work with, as well as keyword rich content to write for each page.

To sum up, depending on your time and budget constraints, there are ways to help you avoid the search engine pitfalls of having a flash website. Any of the methods I have discussed, along with a strong incoming link structure, will help you get that extra exposure in the search engines. If are thinking of designing a flash website, make sure you look at implementing a search engine friendly strategy to avoid complications in the future.

About the Author: David Touri works for SEO Sydney, the SEO Consultants. He has worked on various projects and offers search engine optimisation in Australia.

How Important is PageRank, Really?

Webmasters can spend most of their waking hours doing everything they can to raise their Google PageRank. It is common knowledge that PageRank, which is largely based upon the number and quality of backlinks a webpage has, is an important factor in how well a particular webpage ranks within the Google search results. Since webmasters spend so much of their time worrying about PageRank, an important question is: how important is PageRank, really?

Many webmasters will tell you from experience that other factors besides PageRank, such as keyword density and placement, have recently taken a larger role in website ranking. No one will argue that PageRank has become irrelevant, but there is significant evidence to suggest that PageRank is not quite as important of a factor in website ranking as it once was.

To illustrate this point, I utilized a very useful tool you can find at prlookup.com. The tool returns regular Google query results with one interesting addition they also give the pagerank for every webpage. Thus, you can type in any word or phrase and see the pagerank of those webpages that rank well (or not so well) for that keyword. Looking at the results, you probably notice something almost immediately. Some sites with low PRs do surprisingly well in the results, while some higher PR sites do quite poorly. Some of this difference can be contributed to sheer content that is, how many times, and in what manner, the keywords you entered actually show up on the webpage. Google takes a close look at keyword usage and density in determining ranking. However, some pages clearly have very close keyword densities, yet in some cases the page with the lower pagerank will somehow still receive a better ranking.

Let us take a more quantitative look at this. Taking 20 of the most popular keywords from rankpulse.com (for this particular day), and entering them in prlookup.com, it is possible to get a better feel for the importance of pagerank. Looking at the first five results only, I wanted to see how many followed in order of highest PR to lowest PR. Surely, out of the results for 20 keywords, a good portion of them will display such an order, right? I have listed the number of webpage results that appeared in correct PageRank order for each keyword (i.e. 5 would indicate that 5 out of 5 results were in order of highest to lowest pagerank). You can see the table with results at Google Advisor.

Although limited by sample size, the results indicated that PageRank is not an overwhelmingly dominant component of website ranking on Google. If it were, the average of correct PageRank order for these keywords really should be somewhere around 4 to 5 (the real average was about 2.15). Thus, other factors including keyword density in webpage content, title, and even the URL, play a significant role in webpage ranking. I want to mention that, while looking over these results, I noticed that about 4-5 of these keywords came up with at least one webpage within the first 10 results (first page on Google) that had absolutely no PageRank at all (PR 0). In addition, a couple keywords came up with results with exactly reverse-order PageRanks that is, the first result at the lowest PR and the fifth result had the highest (for example, PR8, 7, 6, 6, 5 or something similar).

So what does this all mean for the average webmaster concerned with SEO? The first lesson is that keywords and other non-PageRank factors can be absolutely crucial. They can put a PR6 site above a PR8 site (if you don't believe me just use the tool I mentioned above). Does this mean that website owners should not worry about links? Not at all. It's just that all the time people spend on exchanging and acquiring links for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank may be better spent developing website content and keyword strategies instead.

As far as keywords are concerned, we discovered that having keywords in the website title and URL can help a site rank much more competitively. Good content tends to have the fortunate effect of both increasing your one-way in-bound links (people like to link to sites they find interesting, thoughtful, informative, or helpful), thereby improving your PageRank, while at the same time producing keyword rich webpages good for both human viewers and search engine spiders.

The take home message here is that PageRank is important, but it certainly is not worth obsessing over; there are many other factors involved in website ranking that should be given nearly equal consideration. In addition, simply building a good website is the best thing you can do to attract visitors, even without a great PageRank. PageRank, however, will likely follow consider it a welcomed byproduct of your hard work.

Bradley James is Webmaster of GoogleAdvisor.org, an informational site providing free information to casual searchers and Webmasters about the Google search engine.

Article Marketing - An AMAZING Technique That Pumped My "Click-Throughs" From 0.82% to 15.64%

OK. Let me ask you a really SIMPLE question. Why do you write articles? Is it to:

• amuse yourself?
• give you something to do when you are lonely?
• present yourself as an authority on something?

Well, maybe. But for the vast majority of article writers the ONLY reason is to drive traffic to your website. Correct? Correct!

So, I would assume that you would be interested in a little thing that I have discovered that has shot my click through rate from a paltry average 0.82% to a very healthy current average of 15.62% - and in some instances even way beyond that. Yeah? I thought so.

Oh, damn it! Let me brag for a moment, some of my articles are averaging 28% to 35%. Do you have that? Want to know the secret to it? Yeah, I thought so.

Before I even start let me say one thing that should be as obvious to you as the nose on your face - write about something that people are INTERESTED in. Why would you write about the catalytic converter on the Gumball Space Machine? Huh? NOBODY except some geek will be even remotely interested in that. If you got even 10 views I would be AMAZED. And if you got even a single click-through I would be DOUBLE AMAZED. In fact, I'd be shocked!

Obviously the most popular subjects are those that are sexually oriented (surprise, surprise). But not everybody is interested in writing about having a giant horse penis or shaving all their pubic hair off or having a blazing affair with a 48DD hooker or Johnny Donger. Excuse my attempt at humor. I'm sure you know what I mean.

Pick a subject that has good interest and that you have some expertise in. Also, write about something that your website promotes. Now, having said that, I don't have a website about "Article Marketing" but I do have a website about making money and, after all, we write articles to get clicks to our websites to sell products and I do have an excellent e-book on... Anyway, on with the show...

It's all there for you in the statistics. Pretty much it will be staring you right in the face if you care to take a look.

You should try to get at least 30 articles up before you can start analyzing your statistics. The more articles the better. When you have over 100 articles the results will become more glaring. Personally, I have over 250 articles and they have been syndicated all over the web in all sorts of languages. So, I have a good spread to look at. Here is what I did...

First, go to any article site that collects statistics. A good one is (ahem) Ezine Articles.

Look at your top performing articles and compare them to your worst performing articles. You'll find them easy enough. Look at the subject of the articles, the headline, the teaser summary, the keywords, the number of views, the click through rate and the resource box. What is the difference between your best articles and your worst? I'll tell you one of my stats.

My worst article - 1304 views for ZERO clicks - yep - a big FAT nought.
One of the best - 2667 views for 400 clicks - wow! - a 15% click-through rate!

Now what does that tell you? I'll tell you what it tells me...

The headlines and keywords were both pretty good. The teaser (or summary) was also pretty good. I know all that because, in both instances, I got pretty good viewing rates and I continue to get more views. So what else? One article enticed 400 people to want to know more while the other enticed nobody. The loser article was just a tell all, feel good piece of writing. Also, the resource boxes were drastically different between the two.

So, you see, by examining these statistics you can learn a lot about what will encourage people to click through to your site for more information. If you ignore it you will stay in the click-through doldrums.

Examine your statistics. Look at headlines, the teaser summary, the keywords, the article body (copy) and the construction of your resource box for the greatest number of click throughs. Replicate what works and chuck out anything that just hangs around like a stale bottle of beer. You will be amazed, like I am, at what you can refine when you know EXACTLY what is working for you and what isn't. My click-throughs have risen dramatically from 0.82% to 15.62% and some are much higher.

You can do this too. It just takes a bit of analysis to see what causes the statistics that you receive.

Like I said, I don't have an Article Marketing website. But I do have a wealth creation website so if you like what I have presented in this article and want to know how to make a lot more money and increase your personal wealth then click HERE

Motivational Marketing and Customer Loyalty Strategies for Business

Marketing has changed dramatically during the past decade with the advent of the Internet and Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo. In simpler times, the approach of creating aggressive strategies to propel sales, was very Pavlovian Stimulus Response, you placed the ad, generated the demand and the sales happened, not much focus was given to the customer. The new style focuses on developing a service-oriented business and marketing plan dedicated to solving customers' problems. Too often businesses only focus on providing customer service, but customer loyalty is the one we want to engender with our clients, the difference between the two is: Customer Service Is An Attitude, Customer Loyalty Is a Behavior. And customers vote with their wallets!

When we define customer-centric marketing, it requires providing Customers with real solutions and a good deal of research and insight into the motivational marketing and customer issues that they are facing. Many businesses too often adopt a quick-fix marketing and customer service response convenient for them and call it customer-centric. For example, 24-hour service lines are easily set up and seem customer-focused, research indicates that what a firm's customers actually need is a toll-free number, one that is not outsourced to substandard, underpaid, unmotivated representatives, but highly responsive, well-trained professional technicians who can solve the customers problems. In short, paying mere lip service to customersupport is not enough. Organizations must look beyond their internal challenges to focus the true needs of the customer.

The other challenge in customer-centric marketing and customer service is that it must also be competition-centered. The reason, say Al Ries and Jack Trout in Bottom-Up Marketing, is that the only way to pry customers loose away from your competitors is to offer better solutions than they do - and explore new market niches and newopportunities your competitors haven't thought of. This means being constantly aware of what the competition is doing.

The Riches in Niches Try Niche Marketing

Most successful companies have stopped broadcast marketing, taking out a full page ad in a national newspaper to advertise their product and hoping the product flies off the shelf. Instead they reach out to narrowly-focused groups, using a strategy called niche marketing. Niche marketing gained wide popularity through Donald K. Clifford, Jr. and Richard E. Cavanaugh's The Winning Performance, which studied 6,117 small companies that had grown four timesfaster than the Fortune 250. Ninety percent of these firms, the Authors found, competed in small market niches. All were customer- rather than sales-driven. All developed new products with the end-user in mind. And all concentrated on advertising to - and generating repeat sales from - not just any customer, but a small, credit-worthy, qualified group.

Clifford and Cavanaugh present a series of steps companies can take to adopt niche marketing for themselves: Compile a comprehensive list of your prospects and customers. Narrow the list to a profitable group you believe you can serve better than the competition. Create a profile of the traits common to these customers, such as sales volume or location. Use this profile to tailor products, services and advertising to your niche market and qualify new prospects. Be prepared to experiment with several niches before finding the one that fits your company best.If you follow these tried and true suggestions to improve motivational marketing and customer service you will see a dramatic improvement in your companys bottom line and in the satisfaction levels of your customers. Thank you for allowing me to share with you my thoughts on motivational marketing and customer service!

Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts on Motivational Marketing and Customer Loyalty. Cordially Yours, Doug Dvorak (847) 359-6969 http://www.dougdvorak.com