Autoresponders - Staying in touch with your audience

Time for the Weekend Tip!

Greetings,

Many have heard me say it, and the other day it was quoted to me by my wife :) "The Money is in The List!" The key ingredient of doing business on the web is "the list".

Business on the web is not all about the money. It's about building relationships and forming partnerships and providing a value for the time that people are taking to come and visit you. To that end I am going to provide you an immense value and help you to build "your list".

In the old days you could buy these lists of email addresses that came from those bottom feeders who would scrape an email address of whatever they could and put them into a large text file and sell them everywhere for whatever they could get. Now, every day you probably find something in your emailbox offering to enlarge or shrink some body part or waist size or award you some prize worth millions from Nigeria of all places.

The right way to get names or subscribers is to place a box or form on your website that channels those names into a file on a website known as an opt-in-list. Or in a lot of cases today, a double-opt-in list. Some people consider it bad to have to answer that second email. It's not bad. It's that business being respectful of you in asking you to confirm that you wish or desire to receive their information in a periodic form into your inbox.

So how do I put one of these on my website? Well you can always have your designer when building the site for you add one. They'll sell you a service such as a shopping cart or an autoresponder service at some price and then they'll add the code for you. If you are adept at website designing yourself, you could add one, and in some cases you can send emails out from the service you use that allows people a way to sign up or to opt-in to your list.

I am including an example form below from one of the most popular autoresponder services on the market. If I was not already using an autoresponder with my shopping cart, I would sign up for this one. It's amazing and virtually every affiliate program you will ever sign up for gives you code from this autoresponder to insert into your websites or emails since it's the widest used product around in this segment of the market. This form is active, so if you fill it out, you'll receive some great info through it:

<!-- BEGIN AWEBER WEB FORM -->

To answer your question, I did not design that form above. I merely copied the code and pasted it into this newsletter. It literally took 2 seconds, 1 to copy, 1 to paste it there for you to be able to use. Now, if you fill in your name and email address, you'll receive information from time to time on this great service.

The benefits of having an autoresponder at your service are numerous. Here's a couple though that are key:

1. Opt-in traffic for your mailing list
2. Easy method of distributing informative emails (such as this one)
3. A great way to tell people about a product or service you're offering or a sale.
4. Ways to update your list on things you're thinking about or methods that they can use to improve their marketing to others.

And the list goes one. Just remember this: Autoresponder = Ongoing Communications
and you cannot lose.

Well that's about it, and before everyone leaves for the weekend, I want to make sure to get this into my autoresponder and sent out to the lists so that everyone can benefit from this information.

To your success,
 

Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com

All information herein is Copyright 2006, Michael Murdock, DocMurdock, All Rights Reserved