The Autoresponder Course

As a webmaster you are interested primarily in three things:

  1. Getting someone to your site in the first place
  2. Keeping them there for as long as possible once they arrive
  3. Getting them to return back to your site as often as possible.

Sometimes getting them to your site is the easy part. After all, you can, if you want, just pay some money for advertising, pay-per-click and so forth, and viola, you've got visitors. Some good link exchanges and search engine optimization, and you can get even more visitors.

Keeping those visitors on your site (and perhaps getting them to buy something if your site is commercial) is a bit more difficult. Lots of factors will make your visitors decide to leave prematurely:

and any number of other reasons. In fact one of the key factors in designing a good web site is ensuring that you eliminate as many excuses for a person to leave your site as possible.

Even harder still is getting them to come back. The world wide web is huge, and the internet (which includes newsgroups, email, databases and many other things) is even larger still. There are countless distractions which will entice people to go somewhere else. It's a simple fact: if they didn't like your site to begin with, they probably won't be back. If they did like your site, they also probably won't be back. There are just too many other places to surf, and too many other things to do.

There are a number of things you can do to try and remind your visitors to visit your site again and again. Of course, the first task is to ensure your site has quality content. Without that basic ingredient nothing else will work. If you have bad graphics, recycled articles, poorly written documents or missing data, then you can be sure people most definitely will go elsewhere.

One additional thing is to get people to sign up for a newsletter, add their email address to your mailing list or in some other way indicate they want to get periodic mailings from you. If you can successfully get someone to sign up to your list (or lists), then you've already won the battle: you can remind them to come back.

Now the question is: how do you get someone to give you their precious email address? Well, you have to offer them something in return. This could be a weekly newsletter, an ebook or an entry into a contest. It could be anything which your visitors desire enough to tell you who they are and how to contact them.

One of the best ways to get them to sign up is to offer them an email course. This could be on any subject, from how to fix a computer to the proper way to cook Christmas dinner. As long as the subject matches the theme of your site, the subject doesn't really matter. It just has to be something that is desired enough that people will want to sign up.

The best way to do an email course is to:

  1. Find a subject of interest
  2. Come up with at least 4 and as many as a dozen different articles on that subject, preferably in a tutorial format
  3. Write those articles
  4. Add links back to your site for additional information, product offerings and so on (I personally believe it is best to only include links to your own site in these tutorials - not direct affiliate links.)
  5. Make sure the course offers true value to your visitors. After all, you want them to at least visit your site, if not make a purchase.
  6. Now, set all of those articles up in a autoresponder (GetResponse is a good one to use)
  7. Set the articles to start immediately on signup, and one per day afterwards. 
  8. You can also, if you want, set a few messages for longer periods of time. Say, an invitation to a survey about the course a week later, an invitation to another course in a month, and so on.
  9. Add links to the autoresponder all over your site. Be sure your sign up links include a checkbox indicating whether or not the email address can be added to your general email list (make it optional and give them the choice, defaulting to YES. Virtually everyone will indicate it is fine).

This is how this works: your visitors are intrigued by your course and sign up. They may or may not give your permission to receive additional mailings outside of the scope of the course. In any event, they will immediately receive the first lesson in their inbox, and each day afterwards they will receive an additional lesson until the course is complete. Thus, each day, they are exposed to your words and get invited back to your site. At the end of the course, invite them to start another (don't automatically sign them up - this will just annoy them).

Viola, you have now defined a method whereby people will receive your message for a period of time. Most of them will read that message, and quite a few will come back. If you are lucky, the majority of your visitors will also give you permission to add them to your general mailing list.

Now you've accomplished the hardest task - you've gotten a few visitors to not only visit your site once, but to come back. If you are lucky, they will come back again and again.

Additional Information

 

Internet Tips Contents
404 Errors Advertising Autoresponse Awardmaster Basics Browsers Careers Chatting Disasters Domains Email Emoticons Ezines Free Stuff Fun Stuff FTP Graphics Homepages HTML Reference HTML Tutorial Interactive Legal Links Msg Boards Microsoft Money Multimedia Networks Newsgroups Newsletter Products RFC's Ringmaster Searches Security Sticky Sites Surfing TANSTAAFL Telnet Viral Webmaster Your System