Online marketers work hard to create a flurry of activity in order to drive traffic to their site. This traffic might include things such as articles, press releases, AdWords, and other types of traffic drivers. Each one is a way for businesses to find prospects and the link from that traffic driver is a conduit to the business itself. But what happens once the person gets there? Are they presented with the offer to buy? Probably. But if that is the only thing that happens then the business is missing out on something big. When prospects click to your site, what options are they given? In nearly all cases, they are given the choice between buying and not buying. If they buy, you have a customer. If they don’t buy, they can click away somewhere else and you’ve lost a customer.

But there is a third option which some businesses implement well while others miss out entirely. The list.

When someone goes to your site, give them a third choice: To add their name to your list. Offer a free newsletter or an e-course or an ebook or something. But collect their name and email address and you can market to them later. This will help you to increase the amount of sales while decreasing the effort and expense of marketing.

Seth Godin calls this “permission marketing” and it is far better than cold marketing. When you collect someone’s name and email address you are getting their permission to send periodic (high value) messages to them as a way to market to them. Since they willingly left their information, they are more likely to respond positively. This takes far less effort and expense than creating more articles or Squidoo lenses.

Obviously, you’ll want to continue marketing to drive people to your site but you’ll want to acquire the names and email addresses of people you’re marketing to so you can keep in contact with them.

Here’s how you can do that:

First: Decide what you’ll give people in exchange for their email address and name. It might be a newsletter, e-course, or ebook.

Second: Sign up with an autoresponder company like Aweber.com, ConstantContact.com, or StreamSend.com (there are others, too) and use their easy form-creation software to create a sign-up for your website. When they put their info into the form, it will be collected by your autoresponder and you can create lists and send them information.

Third: Create and deliver the high value content (which you decided in the first step).

Fourth: From time to time, remind them of the value you provide and offer your products or services to them again.

By collecting names, you can create a valuable business asset that can be used to market to again and again.

photo credit: Cali4beach