Capture the Client

Posted Thursday, December 9, 2004

A website may generate hundreds of hits a day and not produce a single sale. In this case, a thousand hits is as good as no hits. In order to increase sales from your website, you must "capture the client." Capture their atention, capture their e-mail address and capture where they came from.

Capture Their Attention
Market the product not the company and make your product unique. What makes buying from you better than the next person? Offer an incentive, something to make them act now. Offer a discount for a limited time only, use the "you also get" method, give away a free ebook or access to a members only page -- anything to entice the surfer's attention and make them act now.

Capture Their E-mail

It takes a person to be exposed to a message seven times before the message is completely registered. Most of the visitors to your website will simply visit once for a brief time and never return again -- sale lost. In order to prevent that, offer periodic updates or a valuable weekly newsletter for your visitors to subscribe to. When those e-mails are captured, you have the ability to expose them to the message again and make additional offers.

When a large subscriber base is generated, people will contact you to place ads on your newsletter, which you can now charge for a bit more profit on the side. Speaking realistically, a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers can generate $400 or more in advertising + $200 every issue in sales from your own promotional efforts in the newsletter. That's an extra $31,200 a year just from publishing a weekly newsletter. (www.topica.com) is a free e-mail management service if your web hosting service's mailing list program is insufficient.

Capture Where They Came From

The most important lesson in Internet marketing is tracking. Every ad that is placed, every link that you submit and every marketing technique that you perform must be traceable. The value of tracking is greatly underestimated and can be the difference to what makes or breaks your business. Failing to track results is the biggest mistake an Internet marketer can perform, and it is so simple. In order to track, place a unique code at the end of your web address.

Suppose your web address is (www.widgets.com/index.html). Place a unique code at the end of the address for each advertising campaign you engage in and make a log of your codes on a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel. For instance (www.widgets.com/index.html/001) may be used for a banner ad placed on a specific website, whereas (www.widgest.com/index.html/002) may be for a link that was placed in your weekly newsletter. Note that the code need not be a number, words and letters work just fine, but as your marketing campaign expands, you will have hundreds of codes and quickly run out of short unique words. The traffic analyzer supplied by your web hosting service should allow you to view the statistics.

Another way to code your websites is to make clones of your website and give the clone a slightly altered name, such as (http://www.quickwidgets.com) instead of (http://www.widgets.com), and use an alternate address for each campaign. To view the results, set up a separate web tracker or hit counter on each page. (www.hitbox.com) has the best free hit counter.

Without tracking results, your marketing campaign's success has gone down the tubes, of course unless you only place one ad one time. Large corporations spend thousands of dollars adding evaluative campaign to their marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns, and is as important as the campaign itself. Knowing exactly where your leads were generated from will allow you to use the most effective marketing technique at the best cost.

This article is an excerpt from Internet Endeavors E-book. Download the book free at: (http://www.free-ebooks.net/ebook/internetendeavors.exe) (c) Ryan J. Dombrowski. All Rights Reserved. (www.ezinfocenter.com/1301371.04/free)

About the Author
Ryan Dombrowski is a recognized member of Six-Figure Income Marketing Group. Learn how to generte multiple income streams at (www.webnow.com/bizstrategies)