Your job as an online marketer is to turn a skeptical, mildly interested (at most) prospect into a wildly excited, trusting and loyal fan who will become a lifelong customer of yours eagerly awaiting the added value they anticipate you will deliver to help them achieve greater gain or reduce pain in their lives.
There’s only one way to take your prospects through this process, and that is to deliver multiple messages through content over time. It may only take a few days, or it may take months depending on your consistency and your prospect’s timing.
When we changed the focus of our business to be entirely driven by this single principle – to capture attention and deliver incremental content over a long period of time – our business suddenly took on a life of it’s own.
Instead of trying to convert the majority of our prospects to customers on the first visit – we altered all of our systems to "drip" useful content over and over again until our prospects purchase – the results were nothing short of incredible!
These are the same principles and tools we include over at InfoMarketer’sZone.
You can deliver your message via opt-in, where your prospect has trusted you enough to give you their contact information in return for expected, ongoing value or you may communicate with them through RSS (your blog or Web 2.0 site, forum or other vehicle)
But what do you deliver to your prospects?
Should you just write an ezine, publish a written blog or would they prefer to see videos or perhaps audios?
Understanding what content to deliver to your prospects each week becomes much easier when you consider your role as an information product marketer.
You are in business for one reason ONLY, that is to deliver end results for your customers. Everything you publish is designed to ease pain or improve their lives in some way. So, each week you should easily be able to come up with a dozen different questions or ways that you can improve their lives – once you have the content in mind, the delivery method usually takes care of itself.
I’ve found mixing it up is definitely best. In fact, when you think of it, each week you likely have things to share with your subscribers that could best be communicated visually (through screen captures or emphasized with a personal video), while other information such as lists, directories or just basic information could be communicated through writing.
One of my recent newsletter included links to articles and blog postings that contained written, audio (podcast) and video information – went over very well.
Don’t worry so much about how other people deliver their messages, or even how to deliver the message in the beginning – your first priority needs to be on making sure you are delivering the right content to your audience.
Once you have achieved that step, you will find the content (and your readers) will help you sort out the best delivery format.
Jeff
