II. Thou shalt honor thy customers worries and problems, for that is what keepeth them awake at night.

III. Thou shalt focus thy copy on the customer, not thyself. Show them how you can help them end their wailing and gnashing of teeth, and thou willst be an answer to their prayers.

IV. Thou shalt not glorify thyself by making empty promises thou cannot keep. Indeed, thou shall back up thy promises with proof: case studies, testimonials, etc., of how how thou hast helped others like them in the past. In other words, thou shall put up or shut up.

V. Thou shalt not bore thy visitors, who art afflicted with a short attention span. Thou shalt trim the fat.

VI. Thou shalt ask for thy visitors’ e-mail addresses and permission to follow up in the future. But thou shalt not browbeat them with over-aggressive or over-frequent missives.

VII. Thou shalt offer value in exchange for their e-mail addresses. This may taketh on many forms, including expert guidance within thy field of endeavor. (Stone tablets optional.)

VIII. Thou shalt optimize thy website for the great god Google, lest thy website be cast into the wilderness and ignored by those searching for thy goods and services. Ditto for the lesser deities, Bing and Yahoo. Yea verily, these are false gods, but hey, business is business.

IX. Thou shalt optimize the layout of thy copy to pleaseth the eye of thy reader. This meaneth headings and subheads, wide margins, white space and bullet lists. Banish thy clutter to the dark, unspeakable places.

X. Thou shalt not bully, browbeat, or hard-sell thy beloved customer. Rather, thou shalt partner with them, embrace their problems as thine own, and help them achieve their goals.

A sign-up form is the first step toward building your own in-house mailing list. Without one, you have no way of getting back in touch with people who were interested enough to visit your website in the first place.

It’s like owning a retail store, watching customers come and go, and having no way to get in touch with them in the future. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happens in most stores. That’s another advantage a business website has over a costly bricks-and-mortar location.

Provide valuable content and they’ll want more

If your website content is strong and original, and optimized to attract search engines (SEO), you should see traffic arriving from Google, Yahoo, Bing and the others. If your visitors stick around long enough to visit a few pages of your content, or read a few blog posts, chances are they’re interested in whatever you’re selling. They’re probably not ready to buy, but they are interested.

So why let them leave without at least asking for their e-mail address?

Starting your own in-house mailing list is the beginning of what’s known as permission marketing or relationship marketing. The idea is to establish a relationship with prospective customers, and let them get to know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you. Then you ask for their e-mail address, and permission to contact them again in the future.

After all, it’s much easier to sell something to an existing customer than to a complete stranger. So get to know your customers, and let them get to know you.

May I call you again sometime?

A sign-up form is the quickest and easiest way to obtain their contact information. you can write the code yourself, but e-mail service providers like AWeber, Constant Contact and Mailchimp not only manage your mailing list, automatically adding new subscribers and removing old ones, but they even make it easy to create a sign-up form you can add to your website.

If you hate messing around with technical stuff and need help adding a sign-up form to your small-business website, contact me and I’ll be glad to help.

Then what?

The next challenge is making them want to join your mailing list. How do you accomplish that? We’ll cover that next time.

PS:

A few seats are still available for my E-mail Marketing for Small Businesses and Non-profits class beginning next Tuesday (Sept 28) in Sanford Maine. Click here for info and (if you’re in the area) to enroll.

A North Carolina restaurant has done just that — literally. They’ve banned crying kids. Ditto whining, screaming or hysterical tykes. Check out the sign on the front door.

The restaurant owner — a woman, by the way — says she got sick of customers complaining about parents who can’t or won’t control their kids during meals, treat the restaurant like a playground, generally misbehave or act like a nuisance.

They’re not being jerks about it, apparently. If a kid starts screaming, an employee will ask the parent to quiet them down or take them outside.

Talk about differentiating yourself from the competition!

Has it cost them customers?

Sure, but the owner says it’s brought in more business than it’s driven away.

via the Consumerist

This is one of those “old-fashioned” kinds of classes. You know — in-person, in a classroom, not online. So there will be plenty of time for questions and discussions.

I’ll cover why email is still an affordable, effective marketing tool for businesses and non-profits. You’ll develop a better understand of its benefits, and discover exactly where and how to begin.

Topics covered will include:

• Setting up and growing your own in-house mailing list
• Mail list service providers
• Opt-in vs. double opt-in signups: which and why
• How to eliminate spam problems
• Ways to use email: e-newsletters, email blasts, special offers, courses, auto-responders
• Writing emails that get response
• Landing pages: what and why

Drop me a note if you have any questions. Enroll here. I’d love to see you there!

Now a PR firm has agreed to settle charges it had its employees pretend to be unbiased videogame buyers and post gushing, rave reviews at Apple’s online iTunes store.

When I read that, I felt like the French police inspector who was “shocked, shocked!” to discover gambling at Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.

The same thing is happening elsewhere, of course, including Amazon and other high-profile online merchants.

My suggestion: take all reviews with a degree of skepticism. Look for more than a handful of reviews, Be especially wary if all of them were all posted within a few days or weeks of each other. You want to see 50+ reviews, spaced over the course of many months.

Two habits that will help clean up deceptive online marketing:

1. To keep the practice of phony reviews from spreading, simply never do business with a company that would engage in such underhanded practices.
2. Ditto for spam: Never do business with a company that sends out unsolicited spam. Period.

Zero tolerance. If we all followed those two simple rules, both practices would simply fade away.

Agree? Disagree? Maybe you’ve got an even better idea? Let’s hear it.