If you have an online business but are not happy with the present level of income being generated by your website, then this article is for you. Most webmasters do not fully understand what it takes to close a sale, and as a result, they simply put up a website, post their products or information about their services, and expect their website to do the selling for them. However it often takes more than that to convert site visitors into buyers of your products or services.

The solution is to use autoresponders. An autoresponder is a program that sends a series of emails to someone after they have submitted their email address on an online form. Depending upon what you are pitching, you may need to send three, five, or even more emails in order to hook a certain customer and persuade them to make a purchase.

The best way to convince someone to submit their email address on your website is to basically compel them to do so in order to receive certain information. You should have a simple online form on your homepage with a brief introduction as to what you are offering, and then you should make an enticing claim about your products or services, and then immediately after that there should be a short, simple form that requests that the visitor provide his or her name and email address in order to receive information about the claim you are making.

For example, if your website provides search engine marketing advice, then you might want to make a claim that you have put together a full-proof way to climb to the top of the search engines. You would then prompt the visitor to provide their name and email address on the online form so that the information can then be sent to that person via email.

Subsequent to their submission, the autoresponder, which you will need to install on your website with the help of a programmer, immediately sends out an email that provides some information and then offers a product or service related to the information, such as software or any sort of product that relates to the subject of the email.

Your autoresponder needs to be programmed to then send out another email to that same person after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Depending upon what you are selling, you may want to wait 24 hours before the next email is sent, or maybe longer. The autoresponder continues to follow up with the customer on a regular basis without you actually having to send additional emails on your own. If the emails are persuasive, you might eventually be able to close the sale.

In order to install an autresponder on your website, you will need to either hire a programmer who knows how to create the program, or you can pay for an outside service service such as AWeber or GetResponse. The outside service provides the form and collects and stores the email addresses for you, and sends out the emails for you. These sorts of services normally run between $15 to $30 per month.

I recommend that you hire a programmer to install an autoresponder directly on your website rather than using an outside service. Those email addresses are like currency; every time someone submits their email address to you, that email address should not only go into the autoresponder program, but it should also be stored in a separate database. Later on, after a succession of emails has been sent to a certain person through your autoresponder program, you can send offers for other products and services to all of the email addresses you have collected.

I hope the information presented here has convinced you to start using autoresponders. Just remember to make sure that the autoresponder you are using provides the person receiving the emails with a way to unsubscribe from your mailing list, otherwise you will be accused of sending spam. It is possible to build an entire business on using nothing but autoresponders to do the selling. Just make sure you use a persuasive subject for each email you send so that the recipient will be so enticed by the subject of the email that they will open the message rather than hastily deleting it from their inbox.