The Most Critical Strategy to Your Survival, and Prosperity, Online

January 26, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: Email

For the sake of your long term survival and your short term

profitability online, you’ve got to think of your business

as more than just one or more products or services. Getting

customers is the hard part, so the best strategy is almost

always to gain their business long term.

Ask yourself or find out from your subscribers what wants

and needs they have in common. It’s commonly known that the

online environment is especially suited to this because it

costs you nothing to keep in touch with them. When done

correctly, these contacts can be very profitable to you for

a long time.

What’s not as well understood is that for this very same

reason, your survival may easily depend on how well you

execute this strategy. When online businesses get more out

of their traffic by doing this, they’re willing to pay more

for the traffic and so the cost of traffic increases

overall.

And it doesn’t matter whether the traffic is free or not.

Because when it’s free, there will be more businesses out

there willing to put in the time to get this free traffic,

which leaves less of it for you, at least for the time you

put in. All other things being equal, if were to continue to

get the same amount of traffic, you would have to put in

more time.

And on-line businesses WILL be doing more of this as word

gets around that this kind of strategy is the way to go. So

your survival online will increasingly depend on how well

you do this.

For those reasons, opt-in marketing done correctly – where

relationships with your prospects and customers are a top

priority – becomes more important every day. These

relationships are not much different than any other. They

require time. They require the trust of your opt-ins. And

they require that the opt-ins see more value in what you

send them than most other things they run into online or in

their inbox.

That last part can be pretty tricky without the personal

element. As an individual, even if you do have people

working for you, you’re able to use this to your extreme

advantage. When you throw this into the mix, everything you

do carries more value – both to you and your subscribers and

customers. It becomes easier for you to develop trust and

establish credibility this way. These are important because

as a marketer, the highest level you can attain is that of a

trusted advisor.

You personally become be most important element in your

marketing when your subscribers rely on you for your

recommendations and your guidance.

All of a sudden, the role you take on with your list allows

you to take on a whole new perspective in your daily life

because if you’re tuned in, many things in your work or life

outside of that could be informative or serve to illustrate

a point to your subscribers. This is stuff your readers just

can’t get anywhere else!

When the sight of your email in your subscribers’ inbox

triggers the idea of you as a person in their minds, you’ll

naturally get more of your emails read… which translates

directly to more sales. This happens naturally. Your

messages will have more of an impact because the readers

aren’t putting up their defenses as they normally would. The

message can be taken at face value.

You might think you have to be an expert to attain this kind

of position. You really don’t. You can still bring value

without overstepping the bounds of your knowledge. Anyone

can use these elements to build these highly profitable

relationships in their list.

Although I’m limited to what I can show you in this article,

I cover these things in more depth in my ebook “How to Win

More Customers That Buy More Product More Often,” which is

completely FREE. You’ll find the link in the resource box

below.