In my previous post I went over several different traffic generation methods. The next question is, once you have visitors coming to your website/blog, what’s the next step?
Step 4: RETAIN TRAFFIC (LIST BUILDING)
First, let’s find out if you have your company duplicate website or you have your own website/blog. If you have your company duplicate website, you pretty much don’t have to write any content as the content has pretty much been laid out for you. Also, you don’t need to figure out what structure to use for your website to get and retain visitors. All you need to do is generate traffic to your website. The drawback is you can’t do much to your company duplicate website because normally, you would not be able to gain access to your website back-end. And the reason is because your company want all its marketing materials to be standardized. Website included.
If you have your own website/blog, you are responsible to write good valuable content for your website. You are also responsible in making sure that your website content is structured in a way that’s logical and easy to follow. I have mentioned briefly in my previous article about what’s considered to be a good valuable content. A simple way to tell if your content is valuable for your prospects is if at the moment you are writing your article, you are thinking about your prospects’ needs rather than your needs first. If after reading your content, your prospects feel good, better, more informed and more empowered, you can pat yourself in the back for having created content that has changed some aspects of your prospects lives. Once this happens, more than likely your prospects will come back to read your latest and greatest article. And they will come back…and come back…and come back…They will become your loyal website visitors whom you can turn into prospects, then into customers later. While writing your content, don’t forget that you are writing for humans 1st, and for the search engine 2nd. You are not writing solely for the search engine. If it seems to be an overwhelming task to write for both, humans and search engine, I would recommend that you start with writing for humans 1st and forget about writing for the search engine. Once writing good valuable content becomes an easier task for you, you can start focusing writing for the search engine. Here’s why. The search engine may like your website content because it finds all the keywords that it sees as being relevant to the search terms that your prospects are searching online. However, if your prospects don’t like your website, possibly because of its content (or lack thereof), they will leave your website instantly and may never bother to come back to see if you have better content for them in the future.
In the Internet Network Marketing world, first impressions do count. On average, you only have 3 – 5 seconds to capture your visitors’ attentions the 1st time they visit your website. If they’re not impressed by what you have to say, they will leave in an instant and may never come back. Once you have visitors coming to your website/blog, it is really important for you to retain them. Here’s why. Your website visitors are your leads. They are not called prospects yet, because they have not gone through the proper qualifications. Sometimes your leads can be turned into customers straight (I.e. when they visit and purchase from you right away without asking you any questions). On the other hand, most leads need to go through the proper qualifications first before they turn into prospects. Your website content is your means to qualify your leads to turn them into prospects. How is that? Let’s say you sell diet products. Visitors that go to your website are your leads. You can turn them into prospects by providing them with the right content. For example, content such as “How to Lose 10 pounds in 1 Month”, “How to Lose Weight Without Depriving Yourself from Carbohydrates” would trigger your leads to inquire and express their interests in what you have to offer. They can do this by emailing you, calling you or subscribing to your website for more and more valuable content. After they do this, they have become your prospects. The next step is turning your prospects into your customers. You can do this, again, by providing good valuable content. The content in this step should be geared more towards turning your prospects into customers. Nobody, even the most awesome sales person, can turn prospects into customers the 1st time he/she interacts with them. So, in a nutshell, someone is your prospect after they have warmed up to your idea and started asking question about whatever products or service you’re selling. As you can see, you need ‘content’ to generate leads and you also need ‘content’ to turn leads into prospects and prospects into customers. Have you ever heard the term “Content is King”? It exists for a reason!
Once your leads visit your website/blog, you have to be able to retain them by doing the following:
1) Regular updates
I would recommend that you update your website / blog often. For a blog, daily updates is desirable, especially if you’re just getting started. If you can’t update everyday, a weekly updates is fine too, as long as you do it regularly. Why do you have to update your website / blog everyday or regularly? Because your visitors go to your website seeking for information and if the information that they find is the same as last week information, they may not want to visit your website/blog again in the future. It is your responsibility to make your leads visit to your website worthwhile. The your content will do most of the work for you, from turning your lead into your prospect and your prospect into your customer. Another reason why updating your website/blog regularly is a recommended practice is because the search engine loves website that’s updated regularly. By nature, a blog is structured to enable marketers to updates the blog content daily or weekly and add whatever add-ons easily. And this is why more and more businesses from small businesses to big corporations are currently blogging as blogging allows them to keep their content updated and get their message across to their customers. For an explanation of what “blogging” is, you can read my article .
2) E-Newsletter
An e-newsletter is very similar to newsletters, which are printed and distributed via mail or other avenues. The most significant distance is the method of distribution. While traditional newsletters are typically mailed to the recipients or distributed in person, e-newsletters are distributed exclusively online. These e-newsletters may be either emailed in the body of an email message or may be included as a link in an email which directs the recipient to the website for the e-newsletter. In either case the recipient can read the e-newsletter while online and print it out or save it to their hard drive for future use.
For this you will need an auto responder service like Aweber. Auto responder is automatic email response system that will take care of any emails you receive, and automatically deliver a response to potential clients 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. When your leads give their names and emails by filling out a subscription form in your website/blog, that information is sent to your auto responder service. Depending on your auto responder set up, you can send e-newsletters automatically to your leads weekly and bi-weekly. I wouldn’t recommend that you set up your auto responder to send e-newsletters to your leads longer than bi-weekly. You want to build a relationship with your leads to turn them into prospects and then later on customers.
3) Mini Lessons
Give free mini lessons to your leads! This will help you in positioning yourself as one of the thought leaders in your niche market. For this you will need an auto responder service like Aweber. Auto responder is automatic email response system that will take care of any emails you receive, and automatically deliver a response to potential clients 24 hours a day – 7 days a week. When your leads give their names and emails by filling out a subscription form in your website/blog, that information is sent to your auto responder service. Depending on your auto responder set up, you can send mini lessons automatically to your leads weekly and bi-weekly. I wouldn’t recommend that you set up your auto responder to send mini lessons to your leads longer than bi-weekly. You want to build a relationship with your leads to turn them into prospects and then later on customers. Getting in touch with them longer than every couple weeks would not help in building that relationship. Once you start sending your mini-lessons to your leads, if there is any part of your lessons that your leads don’t understand, they will ask you for some clarifications, whether it be through your website / blog or email. They may even decide to call you. And guess what…this is your time to shine by giving them the answers (I.e. solutions) to their problems. Once there is a good relationship between you and leads, it would be easier…much easier for you to turn them into customers.
Which traffic retaining method that you think you’d like to learn more and why?
