You’ve put a lot of investment into your website and marketing to drive traffic. Now you need to turn those visitors into subscribers – it’s the only way you are going to make money from your online efforts!

The secret? Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. Here are five steps to help you do just that.

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“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” True. But you can surely increase your chances if that horse is thirsty in the first place!

You want your website visitors to be thirsty, too. Getting lots of traffic isn’t the point; you need traffic that is potentially interested in what you have to offer, and hence willing to subscribe. In online marketing, building a responsive list is how you are going to make money. It’s also the most time-intensive task, but extra effort spent on this step will also pay off handsomely. Read the rest of this post »

I thought this was a brilliant idea!

I attended a board meeting last week for the Georgia Coach Association. Our focus for the evening was growing the GCA revenue budget so we could continue to support our growing membership community and provide quality programs, and more.

Our esteemed leaders started the meeting by asking each of us to share 1 idea we are doing to grow out own businesses. First, of all it totally set the theme and focus for the meeting - brilliant! And, we all took away some great ideas!

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Are there ezines that you receive that you just can’t wait to read? I know I have 3 or 4 that I read as soon as they hit my inbox, and others that I print and put in my “reading box” next to my desk.

What do you think makes me want to read those few right away?

It’s the personal connection I feel to the author, even if I don’t know that person (some I’ve met, some I haven’t yet). Besides the valuable content I get each time I read their newsletter, I am most interested in finding out what’s happening with them, personally and professionally.

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Marnie Pehrson of IdeaMarketers.com published a great audio Q&A series addressing common article marketing questions: how to get started, where article marketing fits in your overall marketing strategy, using articles to increase traffic and find prospective customers, and more. Listen to the audio series here

If you, as many Solo Entrepreneurs, use email to keep in touch with present and prospective clients (always with permission, of course!), you know how hard it is to get emails through these days. Between spam filters, junk mail folders, and sometimes simply the black hole of undelivered email, legitimate small business owners are kept scrambling to catch up (while the spammers are probably laughing at us!)

We recently reviewed how we were sending email, and in addition to a number of security upgrades, we tackled the issue of spam filters and how to avoid triggering them. Read the rest of this post »

Open access only until Nov. 13! Includes advice on how to get more subscribers to actually READ your ezine (and not from their “junk” folder!) PLUS invaluable up-to-date “how to whitelist” instructions for 10 common email receivers including Blackberry’s that you can copy directly for your own website.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30194

If you’re reading this after Nov. 13, I’ve posted the whitelisting instructions at Solo-E. Feel free to copy the contents of
this page and use it on your website!
http://solo-e.com/mainfiles/whitelist.shtml

“Keep your subscribe form as short and simple as possible.” I’ve seen this advice a score of times, in various ebooks and articles. Most websites I encounter follow this mainstream advice (as does Solo-E).

So I was a bit surprised when I signed up for the Get Entrepreneurial newsletter, and was confronted with a form that asked for my gender, industry, year of birth and country. That’s a lot of information! Curious, I wrote the website owner to ask about their strategy — and got a lesson in turning conventional wisdom on its head. Read the rest of this post »

At Solo-E we have a wide range of experience and comfort using electronic communication. Here are a few widely accepted conventions for politeness.

Most people don’t want their email addresses publicized. If you are sending something to several people on your mailing list, put the addresses in the BCC box instead of the TO box. This will prevent the long list of names at the top of an email that breech privacy.

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I’ve always been a big proponent of double opt-in for building your potential customer list online. Primarily because it adds a layer of protection against frivolous spam complaints — it’s hard to argue that you didn’t sign up when I have a record of you clicking the confirmation link.

This week I’ve learned of two colleagues’ experience with double opt-in: one positive, one negative. The difference? It all depends on who your customers are!

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