When you get to a thank you page on the internet, one of two things just happened. Either you just bought something or you signed up to be on someone's email list.

In either case, you were successfully guided through the decision process and you trusted what you saw enough to buy or sign up.

What you may not realize is that once you get to the thank you page, you are now worth more than 500 random visitors to the owner of the site. Because the owner knows that if he can sell you on one thing it is much more likely that he can sell you on at least one more related thing.

I would much rather talk to 100 people who just bought something from me than 50,000 people who may or may not be interested in what I have to sell. Those 100 people are already in buying mode and already trust me. Put those two things together and you get a powerful combination.

So getting control of the thank you page and using it effectively becomes very important.

If you are involved in network marketing and you just promote the web page you were given, it is the company that generally controls the thank you page. They get the benefit not you.

If you own your own site (it's not that complicated or expensive to do), then you have a way of controlling the thank you page,

Most of the thank you pages I've seen are either boring or hideous. Boring is just saying thank you. Hideous is loading the page with a whole boatload of banners that take a long time to load and mostly don't look well together.

Here's a better way.

Generally one or two short paragraphs is enough for the thank you. For the rest of the page you want a product or a service that is somehow related to what your customer just bought or signed up for. The closer the match, the more likely your customer will cooperate with what you are trying to do.

The bulk of your thank you page should be a complete sales letter/sales pitch that you would see on a regular web site. If that is what it takes to sell your product if you were marketing it by itself then that is what it is going to take to market it to your customers.

Except that now, you have people who are in buying mode and who trust you. Big difference. Much less sales resistance.

So to recap, you need two things to make thank you pages work for you.

First, you need your own website. Godaddy.com is a reliable service I use for my websites. For $50 a year you pay for your domain registration fees and get a year of web hosting. For another $50 - $100 you can get some college computer geek to create your web pages and load it up to your site.

So for less than $200 and about a week of work (mostly by someone else) you can have your own web site promoting your product. There are many other reasons to have your own site that I won't go into here. But for now controlling your own thank you page is a big plus.

Second, you need two opportunities to promote. Obviously if you just have one opportunity then using the thank you page in way I just described is not going to be very helpful. The internet has literally thousands of different of business opportunities to choose from. Just pick two that you are interested in and you are off and running.

You should have the product that is either easier to sell or cheaper as the main product you promote. So when people come to your website, they see that first. The reason for this is that people aren't going to see your thank you page if they have sales resistance to your first product.

Remember that once you make the sale and the customer is in buying mode and trusts you, making the more complicated sale will be much easier than trying to do it the other way around.

So take a look at your marketing efforts and see where thank you page marketing can give you a boost.