10 Basics for Starting Your Online Business

9. Recurrent Marketing Efforts

Don’t think that once you launch a single ad campaign, your efforts are
finished. Marketing your products is a never-ending task that has to be factored
into the continued growth of your business. Even after you’ve made the sale, the
show must go on – your goal is to keep these customers for life, if not longer!

Whenever you create a product to sell on the Internet, you must have a
way to capture and store the contact information of your customer – preferably
through email – and let them know they will hear from you from time to time. So
long as you provide a way for them to opt out of receiving your emails, this is
standard procedure.

When someone becomes your customer, the next time he hears from you
will be right after his first purchase – thanking him for becoming a valued
customer. From that point on, you can occasionally contact him to alert him to
other special offers, upgrades, or complementary products that are available to
him at a special discount because he’s an existing customer.

Your new best friends will be an auto-responder and your mailing list
software. Auto-responders usually come with a mass mailing function, which is
very convenient. With auto-responders, the “after-the-sale” marketing is done for
you automatically – contacting the customer periodically with various “drive ‘em
back” messages. You can either write these messages or hire a professional.

Your mailing list software (or the mass mail feature of your auto-
responder) allows you to contact your customers “on the fly” with up-to-the-
minute information that would not typically be loaded into an auto-responder.
This can be in the form of special reports or a newsletter you send out regularly.

Keep your eye on the media – newspapers, television, even radio – and
send your customers a message whenever you find information that could benefit
their lives in some way, relevant to their relationship with you. These reports can
be drafted in a matter of hours, and can be anywhere from one to five pages long.

For example, if you sell an eBook on lowering telecommunications costs,
and you see a story about it on the 5 o’clock news, whip up a short report and
send it to your customers. They will appreciate knowing you’re on top of the
situation and looking out for their best interests. At the same time, you’ll be
positioning yourself as an expert in your field.

Out of all the tools you’ll want to use, one clever tool
Empowerism
provides its members is the ability to plug your name and URL into existing
material that you can give away to future prospects and customers. The data is
already there – you just substitute your contact information, and you’ve instantly
produced a quality product.