Many marketing experts may tell you simply to put an opt in box asking for a name and email address in exchange for some free report or gift, but the real way to build your list is to offer value that is so awesome that it makes it impossible for anyone to not come back.

Think for a moment of a great TV show that got your attention. Quite often, these successful TV series would have a “cliff hanger” at the end of an episode that perks your curiosity of wanting to know what will happen next if you tune in tomorrow for the next episode. Get the idea?

You need to be more creative in the process of what your blog can do to market to your target audience.

Yes, it is true to have an opt in box to gather names and email addresses, but more importantly, you need to show more than one reason why a first time visitor or even a repeat visitor should keep on coming back to your blog.

Inserting an “opt in” box in either the upper right corner or within the header of your blog site is the “tried and true” way to maximize the chances of growing your customer list online.

If you were to check the upper right corner of our blog, Blog Marketing Experts, you will see our opt in box. We offer a free report on how to grow profits in your business if you were to enter your first name and email address. We pledge to keep you, as a subsciber updated on the lastest things in the business blog world as well as notifying you of our products and services at substantial discounts.

There are many advantages to both you and your subsribers in this method of marketing. First, the subscriber gets to keep in touch with you and is available to give you direct feedback on your business since they now have a way to contact you. Second, it gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with your subscriber that will eventually turn into a paying customer.

The greatest advantage is that both you and your subscriber become long term connections and therefore help to perpetuate your business way into the future. With a solid customer base, you stand to generate sales through any economic climate.

Email marketing is an easy way to keep in touch with your customers giving them timely news on your business and products as well as giving you the opportunity to sell products through links provided within the emails. Of course, you want to give them great value of information within each email that your customer can use immediately that can benefit them.

Check out the informative video below.

Here are 5 ways to get visitors to interact with your blog:

1. Invite visitors to make comments on your blog posts
2. Insert an opt in box on your blog to solicit subscribers
3. Hold contests for a 30 day period to make comments on your blog in order for them to have a chance to win a prize
4. Offer a limited time coupon on your blog that will allow visitors to get a steep discount on some item in your store
5. Insert a multiple choice poll on your blog sidebar that takes votes for a compelling question your customers would be interested in voting for

Of course there are many more ways to get visitors to interact with your blog, but these appear to be the most common one’s used in many blogs today.

The object is to get people to do something that they can be interested in on your blog while have some fun. Interacting with a blog should not be so hard. If you can be creative, I am sure you would come up with at least 5 more things that help make it an interactive experience.

If you post information daily, even if it is useful information, if there is no other feature in your blog other than getting information, you will lose your audience.

As mentioned before, your blog is like the daily newspaper that gets delivered to your door and is meant for consumption by the reader. But if you are to get people on your email list or to come by to visit your store, you need to keep it interesting. You will find that blogs are very beneficial to your business.

On the surface, it is not going to get you a list just because you have an opt in box on it. You have to do some promoting to get people to your blog and then to sign up as a subscriber. Here is how it’s done.

First, you must offer something of value in exchange for the visitor to receive for opting in to your list. Second, you must have an “end” in mind to give you your subscriber. It can be in the form of regular emails of your discounts you offer on your products or services. Or, it can be representing other company’s products and services that your subscribers would be interested in from other companies.

In either case, the old saying that the “money is in the list” holds true for marketing from your blog.

Always remember that marketing your opt in should only be one of many things you should do to market your business simultaneously. It is very important that you promote both your blog and your business with several methods on a consistent basis.

Actually, many of my clients that have been trained by me have said that they have now become aware of the many channels of marketing that they have to do at the same time. Yes, it can get tedius just to think of all the online and offline methods you have to use to make a successful marketing plan happen, but it is now more necessary to start this kind of promotion and marketing technique sooner than later!

What better way to raise your revenue with simple recontact with your current customers to either remind them of an upcoming sale you are having or introduction of a new product you have and give them first dibs at purchasing.

You are “leaving money on the table” if you are not regularly following up with your current customers. As marketing guru Jay Abraham said, “you are doing a disservice with your customers if you are not constantly staying in touch with them and selling them more of your products and services they truly deserve.”

Jay goes on to say that as a business owner, we have an obligation to our customers to sell them more products and services because we are their trusted advisor and that is the capacity in which we serve them. Pretty heavy material here! This article on Jay was written years ago but still rings true today.

Yes, it is important that we go after new customers on a regular basis, but we need to be aware of the current customer list. It could mean just making a phone call to say hello or send an email to remind them of your business.

Another thing that we work with our clients is going over the “non-active” customer list. How many of you have a very old customer list that you haven’t bothered contacting for months even years? Did you know you are losing money just by not “reactivating” these customers?

Here’s an experiment; send out an email blast to your “non-active” customer list with news of your latest product sale. End the email with asking if they want to stay on the list, you will give a substantial discount on that new product. If not, tell them that they can unsubscribe by clicking on the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email, which will already be there since most reputable email autoresponder companies include this.

Even if you got a 4% return from subsribers wanting to take advantage of the discount and stay on your list, you just raised your revenue by quite a bit just by doing a simple task of sending out email to the non active list. What would that mean to your bottom line profits this year?

For autoresponder services that are excellent at helping you in this task we use Aweber. Check out this service below:

Blogs are a “natural” to build your list because of the “optin” box that can easily be inserted into the front page of your blog.  It’s main purpose is to capture new subscribers to your list. Your immediate obligation is to serve up valuable content within each email to keep your subscribers interested.

Be sure to plan out your ongoing message sequence with your list so that it is a consistent pathway to selling them more of your products and services.

If you do your job right in keeping the interest of your subscribers as well as successfully selling them over and over, you will have guaranteed repeat sales from happy customers.

If you are an online business, make sure your call to action is getting their name and address for your list. Online marketers make most of their money from the list. Once on the list, you can keep them “captive” by giving them very valuable content and recommendations of products or services that can benefit them in your specific niche.

At the beginning, it will be hard to write a good blog post with the “end” in mind, but as soon as you write about your business, your product, or industry, it won’t take long to get routine going on how you compose your blog posts.

Remember that blog posts are the “bread crumbs” that lead your customers to your place of business!

With your email list, you can keep your list informed on promotions your business is having or updating them on what you have to offer from your business. It helps to build a relationship with your customer base.

All successful business blogs and websites have a way for a visitor to enter their name and email address to subscribe. This is usually done through offering some incentive such as a free report in exchange for their email information. This type of list building is very effective today.

Secondly, everytime a customer walks through your door, get their name and email address, even their physical mailing address in exchange for a chance to win a gift certificate at your place of business. Anything that the customer thinks is a perceived value, they will gladly give their name and address.

With these two simple marketing tools in place, you can dramatically increase your business 5 fold. You now have permission from these people to sell products and services to into the future.

All content in your blog should give direct benefits to our customers who use your product.

Visitors should have a way to subscribe to an email list that you create. This way you generate a way to keep in contact with your customers for promotions, special pricing, and announcements of imtportance.

If you can, make videos showing either yourself or a spokesperson that tells a little bit about your business. It can also be a video slide show. The reason why you want to do this is twofold; first, it makes your blog more interesting and visitors will stay on your blog site longer. Search engines give higher rating for sites with video on them. Secondly, video is usually hosted on other sites such as Youtube video sites which are in themselves, give a lot of exposure to people making searches for your products or services. It gives added “juice” to the added number of visits coming from other parts of the internet.

Finally, you should have a product or service that you can sell directly from your business blog. Say, a new visitor to your blog has not have a chance to visit your physical location yet. But if you have a “loss leader” product that is sold directly from your blog, you can make sales sooner rather than later.

With the purchase of a product directly from your business blog, that customer has more of a chance to visit your physical location to see more of your wares.

Here is a great video that shows how to attract and “remind” your blog visitors to give up their name and email address so you can keep in contact with your subscribers and eventually sell them your products and services.

For many people and businesses who has never “blogged” before or even used the internet to market their physical place of business, this can prove undaunting to say the least. You have to go in having a plan and working it or else nothing gets done and you are frustrated to no end!

Where do you start? You start by making an outline of your goals. What do you want from the internet? The most common place to start is “more customers and more sales.”

To get that, you have to know the various ways to attract traffic once your blog is up and running. Better yet, you need to plan what you want to have on your blog to make the “trip” worthwhile to your visitors.

Here is a quick run down of what works for me:

1. Research target audience for what they want
2. Research this audience for what they actually buy
3. Plan out products to sell this audience
4. Figure out ways to put these products on your blog
5. Make an outline of your content topics to serve your audience
6. Plan a way to get your online visitors on your “list” (aka opt in box)
7. Plan ongoing promotions exclusive to your blog that brings in customers
8. Make a list of at least 5 different ways to attract traffic to your blog

In the next couple of blog posts, we will go over a list of 5 ways to attract traffic to your blog.

As with any marketing website, you always should have a call to action, a way to guide the visitor to opt in to a newsletter, or sign up for a trial membership or click on an affiliate link to a product or service that your readers would be interested in.

The “call to action” is the oldest, but most effective way of marketing your business. Since you are online and have a blog to complement your marketing efforts, every effort should be made to tell the visitor what to do.

A simple thing like asking people to make a comment on your blog, will dramatically increase  your blog comment count.  If you position your newsletter opt in box to the upper right or upper left column will increase your opt in rate. Better yet, putting the opt in box all the way up in the header will make even more opt ins’ happen.

Granted, you are still having a “conversation” with your audience, and they enjoy reading your content. But, without guiding your visitors with a “call to action” of either purchasing a product or service from you, the only other direction you should take is to keep the “conversation” going with an email newsletter that you can start with your customer list by way of the “opt in” box that leads to your list building.

The beauty of having a list is that you continue the “relationship” with your audience. Autoresponders, which are a program that enables you to pre-write emails, can keep your subsribers interested in what you have to say about you or your product and service. Yes, we get much too much email, but believe it or not, email marketing is still an effective way to keep communicating with your visitors because it comes from someone they already know…..which is you.

I often am asked about what to write in these emails in advance because most of the time you have to plan very far ahead to keep subscribers interested and engaged in your future offers. This is when you have to make an outline and plan out months in advance, where you want to lead your subscribers.

For instance, say you started your email campaign exactly one month before Valentine’s Day. The first email, of course, should focus on thanking the new subsriber. The next batch of emails should focus on valuable information such as tips and tricks from your business that makes life easier or able to solve a problem that the customer has. Still yet, the next batch of emails should focus on selling of one or two items that are either from your business, or a product from an affiliate that you represent.  Rule of thumb is to sprinkle giving valuable content, selling items, and informing them of promotions or other reasons to visit your brick and mortar business.

Your list should be treated as “gold!”