Bought traffic and free traffic can both be developed into a continuous income stream by way of what is called an "auto responder".
When your targeted traffic visits your website, you should be capturing their name and email address so you can send them weekly emails. In order to capture their email in an organized fashion that also protects you against spam complaints, you should be using an auto responder service. There are many such services available at affordable rates - anywhere from $10 to $30 per month. Two popular services are Aweber and GetResponse; both can easily serve your email list needs.
To encourage visitors to "opt in" for your newsletter, you can offer them something free for joining your list: "Get my free report when you sign up for my weekly newsletter!" Visitors will then enter their information, verify their email address, and be given instant access to your free book or report. This is basically "incentivizing" your opt-in list and is an extremely common strategy among marketers.
Building a list is relatively easy and doesn't require any technical knowledge whatsoever: once you have your auto responder account, just copy and paste their code into your web page and the necessary form will be visible to anyone who visits your site.
Once you have your list of targeted visitors, you can create weekly emails that will be sent out like clockwork from the moment the person verifies his or her email. Your newsletters should be informative and provide useful information to your email list. In addition to the free information you give them, you can recommend they purchase a product or service. You should include your recommendation and your purchase link at the bottom of your email.
It's debatable as to how often a marketer should try to sell something to his or her email list. Some people say once every two emails while others say only once a month.
Personally, I think as long as you provide useful information in each newsletter, it's perfectly fine to throw a link or two at the bottom of every email. If you are providing free information that helps them further their business or personal goals, I believe they will be OK with a marketing link (or two!).
Building a list is a method of building a long-term business. You can market to this list on a continuing basis and generate revenue indefinitely without having to ever pay for traffic again.
A friend of mine has an extremely responsive list of 10,000 members. He emails them on a weekly basis and offers both free and paid advice. His best 24-period of revenue from his list was $41,000! Would you like to generate $41,000 in revenue with one email campaign? Of course you would!
A marketer who wants to build a long-term business that he or she can earn revenue from for years would be well advised to look into building, maintaining, and marketing to a highly targeted list of customers. It does take work and (as you can imagine) you will need to be well informed about your particular niche. After all, you will need a lot of content in order to mail out weekly letters indefinitely!
The individuals that seem to generate massive amounts of revenue with an auto responder seem to focus on only one subject or niche, and they take great pride in providing sound, free advice to their list.
From our series of highly informational articles, companies will learn: how to treat innovation as a cross-functional business process, how to align innovation execution and business strategy; how to create sustainable innovation; how to train your senior executives to successfully execute innovation initiatives; how to effectively manage process and project management; how to measure performance of your processes; how to ensure broad stakeholder buy-in; how to understand the importance of product roadmaps; how to provide the tools necessary for successful product innovation; and finally, how to ensure that portfolio management coincides with process management.
Here is one of the ten practices that leading innovators use to increase the payback from innovation spending: Understanding the Importance of Product Roadmaps
Understanding the Importance of Product Roadmaps
Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. Most new product ideas are connected to or dependent upon other projects in the development pipeline. By having visibility to the entire product portfolio and all the proposed projects on the table, decision makers can instantly see the impact of adding or removing a given innovation initiative.
For example, let's imagine that a proposed product is expected to be a large revenue generator, but it is dependent upon the completion of a technology development project that has been delayed by a lack of resources. It follows that further steps must be taken to ensure that the faltering initiative is completed on time.
One proven technique for addressing this challenge is to create visual roadmaps of the inter-relationships among projects, including high-level graphical markers identifying the following components that could impact the timing and delivery of a particular product: ?External market, ?Technological events, or ?Customer events
This allows decision-makers to quickly assess the overall effect a decision will have on the project and guards against unwitting sabotage of connected initiatives.
Software-based roadmapping and portfolio management solutions are available that provide this kind of visualization and also help companies link their long-term roadmaps to their short-term product pipeline. Assessing the best roadmapping and portfolio management solutions for your company should include a thorough analysis on all components as it relates to your processes in which success relies heavily on: ?Product and technology roadmapping, ?Idea generation and management, ?Stage- or phase-based product development methodologies ?Resource planning, and ?Portfolio management
Once you have determined the best solution, implementing the necessary tools and software is the next step to moving forward with prospective products and realizing profits for those deemed profitable. In our next article, we go over how to provide the tools necessary for successful product innovation.
While more than half of senior corporate executives have recently indicated (through recent studies) their dissatisfaction with the returns their organizations have generated from investments in innovation, some organizations are realizing as much as forty to sixty percent more revenue and profit from new products than their industry peers. How are these companies set apart?
For more information on the top practices that leading innovators use to increase their returns on innovation spending, look for the next article in our ten-part series: Providing the Tools Necessary for Successful Product Innovation.
Both Jonathan Zemeckis & Bryan Seyfarth are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.