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Answers To Many Of Your Biggest Online Challenges: In Two Words

By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | October 3, 2006

Auto-Piloting Your Web Business IS THE ANSWER. Here’s how…

I like to routinely answer my subscribers’ most pressing questions and challenges related to marketing on the Internet, and I discovered something incredible:

A huge portion of them can all be solved with the same two-word answer!

Let’s get to it… There’s some pretty surprising stuff here, so definitely read all the questions…

Question: I’ve heard it’s important to follow up with prospects and to publish a newsletter. What autoresponder and/or liststerver software should I use to make this easy and automatic?  

Answer: Use WebsiteAutopilot.com. They can handle up to a million subscribers with no problem, and you get unlimited personalized autoresponders to “follow up” with prospects, and to send personalized newsletters weekly, monthly, or as often as you want.

It also gives you a lot of advanced “integrated” features… Like when you track sales from your paid advertising with WebsiteAutopilot’s tracking function, it’ll also tell you how many subscribers you gained through that particular promotion…

That’s very important! Because if you lose $100 on an ad but it gets you 400 new subscribers, you built your subscriber base for 25 cents apiece, which means the ad wasn’t a total loss.

Other advanced list features with WebsiteAutopilot are that you can unsubscribe someone from one list when they subscribe to another of your lists (like take them off the “pre-sell” list when they’re automatically subscribed to the “buyers list” when they purchase something. These advanced features are very powerful.

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I’ve heard pay-per-click advertising like Overture can be really effective. I’ve set up an Overture account and have bid on my keywords and it seems to be going pretty well. I’m making sales on my website, but I don’t know for sure which keywords are responsible for which sales and I’m afraid I’m wasting a lot of my advertising dollars.  

Answer: With WebsiteAutopilot.com you have unlimited “ad trackers” that you can use to find out EXACTLY what advertising is making money and which isn’t. It’s really simple. Let’s say with Overture you’re bidding on the search terms “dyslexia treatment breakthrough”. Instead of just typing in the URL of your sales letter when setting up the campaign on Overture, you create a tracking link with WebsiteAutopilot named “Overture - dyslexia treatment breakthrough” (or whatever you want to name it so you remember what it is).

You are then given a unique tracking code/redirect URL to paste into your Overture bid which instantly redirects the person clicking to your sales letter. Now here’s the cool part: WebsiteAutopilot automatically tracks how many hits and sales result from that Overture keyword, and even calculates the value of each click to you!

In other words, if you’re bidding 30 cents per click on the keywords “dyslexia treatment breakthrough” and your WebsiteAutopilot tracking link tells you each click is worth 25 cents apiece, you know you’ve bid too high, and you need to lower your bid. If it tells you each click is worth $1.75, then you know you can choose to profitably bid a higher amount if you so choose.

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I sell an “instant download” product but I’m worried about security. Right now I just have my product available for download, but when I look at my website “hit logs”, I can see my product has been downloaded many times more than people have paid for it. I think I’m getting ripped off by people downloading it for free! What can I do to protect myself?  

Answer: Get WebsiteAutopilot, it has an easy-to-use “automatic delivery” system for downloadable products. When you’re setting up the product code for a product, you just check on “This product is a download” and click on the file on your harddrive.

WebsiteAutopilot automatically uploads the file and creates unique download links for each customer purchase that are only good for 24 hours! That solves the theft problem of your file’s download location getting picked up by search engines (it happens!) or being passed around on newsgroups, etc. Instant added security!

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I want to be able to make special discount offers to my subscribers without upsetting previous customers who have paid full price! Also, I want to follow up with paying customers to offer them additional upsells later, etc., but I want it all to happen automatically.  

Answer: One of my favorite features of WebsiteAutopilot is with it’s list management… Not only can you set up special customer autoresponders that start being sent out to people as soon as they purchase something from you, but you can also set it up so that customers are automatically REMOVED from the regular “non-buyer” subscriber list!

In other words, let’s say you’d discovered that the best way to make the most money from your free subscriber list was to keep making a better offer every week for 6 weeks.

Whew, sounds like a lot of work, right? Not with WebsiteAutopilot!

All you do is set up your new subscriber autoresponder list to send out 6 messages once per week, set it up to make the above offers, and watch the money roll in. That’s right, WebsiteAutopilot can even break up payments automatically into 2, 3, 4, 10, whatever you want… And it’s all automatic.

Not only that, but let’s say somebody buys at a 20% discount on Week 4: You can have them automatically unsubscribed from that non-buyers list and moved into your buyer’s list, so they won’t get emailed the subsequent 50% off offers.

It’s a beautiful thing, it all happens automatically, and it allows you to maximize your profits without extra work.

Not only that, but as soon as a new buyer is moved to your “buyers’ autoresponder list”, they’ll start getting your series of follow-ups for buyers only…

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I know I need to test different versions of my sales letters against each other to find out what headlines, guarantees, etc., get the best response. I KNOW that, but what’s the easiest way to do it? I’ve seen “split-run ad” software packages available but they look confusing, and there’s services that charge you monthly for it, but I may not be TESTING something every month, and money’s tight. What do you suggest?  

Answer: WebsiteAutopilot has a split-run ad tracker built right into it, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Here’s all you do. You just set up an Ad Tracker (I talked about that earlier regarding how to track pay-per-click sales like from Overture), and instead of adding one URL for the Ad Tracker to redirect to (like “salesletter1.html”), you add two or three URLS, like:

salesletter1.html
salesletter2.html
salesletter3.html

…Each one of those will be different versions of your ad (different headline, different guarantee, different bullet-points, whatever), and WebsiteAutopilot will automatically rotate each of your visitors to those 3 different URLs and show you how many sales each salesletter version makes!

It’s all included, all integrated, and all accessible from one location.

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: Are popups still an effective advertising tool? I don’t want to annoy my visitors, but also I’m worried there are so many “popup blocker” programs around that they may not even work if I DID use them.  

Answer: Yes, popups are definitely still a useful tool. Our hit counter usage indicates that a full 2/3 of regular popup windows do pop up, meaning that only about 1/3 of people use popup blocking programs right now. That’s a large amount.

As far as not annoying your visitors, it’s all in how you use them. You definitely should not attack your visitors with multiple untargeted, irrelevent ads. First, that will annoy your visitors, and second, it won’t be effective!

The best ways to use popups are to:

Most of your visitors would want to know about the above things, so popups wouldn’t be annoying in that case to the majority of people.

Setting up popup windows to work exactly like you want them to can be confusing. WebsiteAutopilot has a popup generator built right in. With a simple point-and-click interface, you can configure a popup window to pop up when:

…Not only that, but WebsiteAutopilot’s popup generator automatically will add a subscription box to your newsletter/autoresponder

In addition, WebsiteAutopilot’s popup generator can create the new “Fly-In Popups” that popup killers can’t stop. (That’s because the popups aren’t actually in a separate browser window, they’re an active part of the main page.)

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I’ve heard that recurring monthly billing subscriptions are a great way to make more money online. What do I need to do to set up an automatic billing cycle that rebills my customers a monthly fee automatically?  

Answer: With WebsiteAutopilot, you do it with the click of a button. Just check the “recurring billing” option when you’re setting up a new product code, and your customers will be automatically rebilled monthly.

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: I’ve had a tough time making paid advertising work for me, and I want to set up an affiliate program so I only pay for a sale after it is made instead of risking money out-of-pocket and hoping for sales. What affiliate program software should I use?  

Answer: There are several options for setting up an affiliate program, but the easiest way is to use the one already built-in to your WebsiteAutopilot account. That way, everything’s integrated together, you get order/sales stats and affiliate commissions all listed in the same place - You really can’t beat it.

Get An Overview Of Features | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Question: It really sounds impressive, but I don’t know anything technical, I don’t even think I can even set up the basics of WebsiteAutopilot no matter how simple it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s click-a-button and cut-and-paste, I won’t be able to do it, I need help!  

Answer: Not to worry. Customer support is excellent, and if you want it all set up and done FOR you, you can HIRE their techs to do it FOR you for just $60/hour… and best part is, it’s so easy to set up, they can get it all done for you AND TRAIN YOU ON IT PERSONALLY in less than 30 minutes (on average).

Listen: If you’ve already got your own merchant account and you don’t have all the capabilities I just listed, this is a no-brainer, you’d be an idiot not to try it out free for a month and find out how easy it is and how much money it can save you.

If you don’t already have a merchant account but you plan on getting one, once you sign up for the free trial they can assist you in setting up one that integrates with their real-time processing system.

Read More | Start Your Free 30-Day Trial Now

Conclusion: Yep, I’m laying it on pretty heavy-handed, it’s true. Here’s why:

I’ve spent a huge amount of time reviewing different automation programs, online software, scripts, etc., and while there’s some really good individual modules out there (IE, JUST a listserver, JUST an affiliate program, JUST a shopping cart, etc.), getting them to work together is a nightmare.

So yes, if you use (or plan to use) your own merchant account, it’d be foolish not to try the 30-day free trial and find out how much easier your life can be with this all-in-one solution.

Hope that helps!

To your success, Tim Gross

Topics: Marketing | Trackback URL

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