• Business and Finance
• Family
• Computers and Internet
• Auto and Trucks
• Education
• Health
• Hobbies
• Home Improvement
• Legal
• Marketing

• Home
• Arthur's Articles Home
• Browse Categories
• Browse Authors
• Submit an Article
• Search for Articles

Home » Marketing Articles » Your Customers Are Your Best Asset

Your Customers Are Your Best Asset

There is one thing that every Internet entrepreneur must focus upon, and that is their customers. That's the bottom line. The customer is what will determine the overall success of your business. If you treat your customers like royalty, then they'll come back for more. However, treat your customers like dirt, and watch your traffic and your profits dwendle down to nothing. Most all Internet marketers know this, but very few of them really use the strategies and techniques that are necessary to insure that their customers become lifetime customers.

Instead, they focus too much on the profits. That's not going to help any business whether it is online, or offline. If you really want to make your business work for you, then you need to focus on the customer, and what they want and need from you.

One sure fire way to insure that you get traffic to your site is to provide people with freebies. Yes that's right! People love free stuff, and it works! Just offer them a freebie that is really worth something of real value, such as an e-book worth $20.00, or more. If you offer that for free as a bonus for purchasing your paid product, then what you've effectively done is to increase the overall value of the paid product. Your customers will love you for it because they got something else other than the paid product.

You see, your customers are in fact, the backbone of your business. They are what will make your business successful, or not successful, depending upon how you go about treating them. Customer relations in your business is extremely crutial. You must be willing to not only sell to them, but you must also be able to communicate with them about your products and services that you offer. Communications is vital to any business structure, and without it, your business would not be able to survive.

One of the best ways to not only keep customers, but to also attract them is in how you treat them to begin with. If you start treating your customers with the utmost respect, and deal with them on a professional level that doesn't involve greed, then you have the chance of keeping that customer for life, and thus being able to gain new ones as well. Here's how this would work for you. Let's suppose that you have a customer who is thrilled about a product that they've just purchased from your site, and yo have also given them a free bonus gift worth about $50.00. Now that same customer will start talking about you, and your products, as well as about the fantastic free bonus gift that they've recieved from you.

The other person that the customer was talking to starts to think about what they may recieve from the product, and how they can use that product in their life, or business. Soon the individual tells the customer that purchased the product, "Hey what's the web address of that product?" At that point, the customer has become an instant spokesperson for you and your business, thus providing you with free advertisement, and publicity through word of mouth advertising.

The more that you provide to your customers, the more customers and profits you'll have in your business. Now let's look at another important factor in your business that has to deal with the customers.

If you provide quality technical support on your products through friendly, courteous staff, then your customers will rave about that too. You see, a company that has really great technical support, and answers the questions that you ask with enthusiasm, then you have a winning technical support team that provides your business with quality services to its customers.

One other thing that you must always do, is to be totally honest in everything that you do in your business. Never appear shady, or make shady deals, or anything of the nature. Always be up front with your customers and always treat them like royalty. Make sure that you keep in contact with them through e-mail, and let them know about special offers and insentives that you may have. Let them know that you really care about them and their needs. Make your customers the reason why you are in business in the first place. Don't focus on the money. That's a huge mistake. Focus instead; on the customers and what you can do for them, and how you can make them happy. If you do this, then you'll have a very successful business on the Internet.

Speaking of contacting the customers, you may want to add a form on your site that collects their name and their e-mail address. The form should be very simple, and not ask for personal information, unless it is necessary to ask for that bit of information on the form. this is known as permission based e-mail, and it works only if you ask for the name and the e-mail address of your customers.

Never ever use e-mail address harvesting software, or scripts on your site that captures the site visitor's e-mail addresses to build your list. This is extremely unprofessional. You should also never purchase e-mail lists either, especially when those lists aren't targeted lists to begin with.

The whole purpose of collecting the name and the e-mail address of your site visitors is to help to build your own highly targeted list that is unique to your business. Once you have those names and e-mail addresses, then you have permission to contact them because they have opted in to submitting their name and their e-mail address to you . This is what will help to build customer loyalty, and trust in you as a business owner.

Another thing is the site itself. The site must be easy to navigate and easy to understand. There is no need for all that complex technical stuff that most other sites have. All that your site needs is to be simple, and to the point. Links should be text based, and if you have any graphics, then they should be labled for accessibility issues. Don't use image map links, or graphical links, unless they are labled.

Your sales copy, or ad copy should be as professional as possible. Make it worth the reading, and don't sound too pushy, or too good to be true. Mention the facts, and provide the benefits inside the copy so that the site visitors can see just what's in it for them. If you do all of this, then you will keep your customers, and those customers you keep will tell others and so on. Pretty soon you'll have a flood of traffic and profits on your site, and all of this is because you treated your customers with the utmost respect and you have treated them like pure gold.

If you want free Internet marketing information, then please visit the following address here below.

http://www.freewebs.com/dbrwn/goldmine.html

You'll be glad that you did, and if you download the marketing piece on that page, you'll get even more great stuff.

Also please feel free to bookmark the site because new things are being added all of the time.

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

My Second Real Estate Investing Deal, A True No Money Down Deal

My second deal was a sandwich lease option deal and a true nothing down, no credit needed, real estate deal. I rented the house from the seller with an option to buy, and rented the house to my buyer at a higher rent and a higher price to buy.

You may remember that I did an all cash deal for my first deal. It took several months before I entered my next deal. While I did speak to several sellers and received many leads I was short on cash to do my next deal. I have been self employed most of my life and haven't had good credit for quite some time. I have paid my bills on time for several years but haven't done well at obtaining the types of credit that strengthen ones credit scores. I had planned on borrowing out the cash I put into my first deal but was never satisfied with what loans I could receive against it and never did put a mortgage on that property.

About three months after the first deal this second deal of mine came about as a referral from a mortgage broker who had contacted me about selling his own property. This referral was a client of his who had to move from Memphis to Minneapolis due to a job transfer. The home was beautiful and required no work. The only money I spent on the house was to have the leaves bagged as it has a half acre lot with mature trees and a beautiful pie shaped lot with 80% of the yard being fenced in the back. The home is 4 to 5 bedrooms with 3 and a half baths with a very nice open floor plan and good solid construction. The area the property is in was being over built by new builders and used homes simply are not selling. The average selling price in our county is around $175k and this home had been on the market for $225k and not selling. Without all the overbuilding in the area it might be worth $245k or more.

When the seller contacted me they let me know they owed $215k and had an $1850 payment including taxes and insurance. All they wanted was to cover the note. I had taken Wendy Patton's course on lease options and I knew that was a strategy I wanted to use. I agreed to cover the note once I had a suitable tenant/buyer and collected funds. I ran my first ads for the property in November which isn't a great rental month. At first I tried to ask for a $6k option fee and $2195 per month rent. Had it been Feb or Mar I may have gotten it. I had little inquiry about the property. I had a yard sign with flyers and pictures online and ran ads in the local paper. Typically I got a call or two a week and had someone look at the property every couple of weeks. I had someone fill out the paperwork and seemed ready to pay their money twice and they couldn't come up with the money and move in. Finally after almost 3 months I had a doctor and a nurse take the property with a $3000 non-refundable option fee and $1950 per month with a $100 credit for each month of on time rent. The agreed upon sales price was $249k which is the best part of the deal for me with a 24 month term on the lease. We did build in for the rent to go up to $2050 after 12 months. This tenant pays the rent on time almost every month and I think in the end they will likely buy the property. Most of the $3k option fee was eaten up with about $1500 in newspaper ads for the house. I make a $100 profit on the monthly rent. While I did spend about $1600 out of pocket I did get the $3000 up front. This is a very thin deal but if the current tenant doesn't exercise the option I think I will be able to go up to $260k on the next tenant and get a bit more rent and option fee.

What you can learn from this deal: 1. I agreed to pay too much rent on this property. $1850 was too much and should have been more like $1600 per month so I could have made better cash flow. I think if I had held out another month I could have gotten more up front and a little more rent. A good rent guideline is to not pay the seller more than .6 times my selling price which would have been $1500 in this case. 2. We filed a memorandum of option on the property title. This shows the world that we have an interest in the property and it cannot be sold or refinanced without our approval. 3. This sandwich lease option only works if the seller has good credit and should continue to do so. 4. This property was really too expensive for a lease option and is much better in my market on a property that would sell between $100k and $200k. 5. It is hard to find sellers who will agree to this but there are lots of them out there, you just have to keep asking sellers to agree to this kind of deal. 6. Lease options are great for selling as you get tax benefits, and multiple paydays.

How many deals like this do you need in your pipeline to close each year to be financially free if each one made you an average of $30k?