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In today’s marketplace, you need to stand out from your competition to stay ahead of the game. The growth of online business has made competition far more fierce than it ever was in a brick and mortar business. You need to find ways to get your potential clients to take notice of you, and you need to be able to keep them once you convert them into customers.

autoresponders can help you accomplish both. You can bolster your marketing and increase profits by implementing an autoresponder system.

How it Works

An autoresponder is simply a program that automatically sends a message in response to e-mail from a client or potential client. The first autoresponders were messages notifying the sender of an e-mail that their message could not be delivered. You probably have received these a few times.

Today’s autoresponder systems can be simple or complex, depending upon your individual needs. There are two types of autoresponders you can use.

Outsourced ASP

This is a pay-for-service autoresponder, and is the most common type seen on the market. It is also the easiest to use, especially for those who do not have a lot of technical know-how.

You subscribe to a service and decide what you would like your messages to say, and how often to send them. The service does the rest. The cost varies depending upon how complex you decide to get.

Server-Side

These autoresponders are ones you establish and control on your own, using your own server. These are not seen as often, and require a good deal of technical knowledge on the part of the user. Companies that have their own IT departments or people who have a good deal of programming knowledge may find these types of autoresponders useful.

There are also two different types of autoresponders you can send out. One has the appearance of bulk mail, usually addressed to “Dear Customer,” or “Dear Sir.” You can send these out en masse, fairly easily.

The other type is the personalized autoresponder. If you are e-mailing to your list, these have a more personal touch. With this type of autoresponder, you are addressing your client or potential client by name, giving your business a friendlier feeling.

What the autoresponder Can Do for You

autoresponders provide several important marketing services. First, you can provide multiple exposures of your product to potential clients. The average person needs to see your product a minimum of six times before converting to a paying customer, and autoresponders can accomplish this for you.

You can use autoresponders to give an immediate reply to your customer when they decide to buy. Following up immediately with your customers gives your business credibility, as well as providing a personal touch. Both of these things will greatly increase your chances of keeping your new customer and having them make repeat purchases from you. Especially when you are operating an internet based business, loyalty cannot be underestimated.

Finally, autoresponders allow you to get your message or advertisements out at a far lower cost than mass marketing. With an autoresponder, you are replying to a current customer or someone who has expressed an interest in your product or service. For these reasons, you are targeting someone who wants your product, rather than just taking a blind shot in the dark. autoresponders for marketing purposes can help save you money in the long run.

There are many reasons you should consider implementing autoresponders as part of your customer service or marketing programs. Examine your business and your individual marketing needs, and decide whether autoresponders can work for you.

I would imagine what is going through many people minds reading this article is “What the heck is a blub?”

Easy enough, a “blub” is merely a term coined as using a person’s “blog” as being somewhat a central point for one’s online business which is commonly known as their “hub”. The simple and straight forward reason for this is that many people often do not think of their blog as really being a place in which much of their business can be centralized.

Blogs can make a great place for having a centralized point because it gives a lot of interaction between customers and subscribers of a business’ or marketers list a place to communicate directly on a more personal level. Many people go there to seek advice, or ask questions of the expert or product owner and get to know and trust them in a much more personal environment.

For the blog owner it gives him/her a great opportunity to brand themselves as experts in their field. A lot of the time, readers of certain blogs are looking to the owners for answers to certain questions. There is no better place than a blog to get the feeling of some good “one to one” interaction with your audience.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but in 2007 we saw more and more top marketers utilize their blogs in some amazing ways. They have used them for introducing videos, or audios, in the whole process of creating buzz for their new and upcoming projects and products. It’s become a medium that is being utilized more and more because of the level of comfort it brings between themselves, and their fans, or readers.

Targeting your traffic to your blog in which you are using as a hub for your business is very important, and there are a few tools available recently that help in this regard hugely. Until recently most of these tools could not find blogs that weren’t using “no follow” tags in their pages. Wordpress blogs hosted on the company’s servers have always carried the tags and it wouldn’t do any good in terms of improving your SEO posting on these blogs.

The Groovytastic Blog Digger, which is now available fixes this problem. It will seek out blogs based on keyword research, which will find not only your target market for your hub but also help because now you can get links going back to your blog, that are going to count in the search engines. The cool thing about this tool, is that it ONLY seeks out blogs that don’t use the “no follow” tags. The guess work of whether you are visiting a blog that is going to help with your rankings is gone. It’s a great tool to be using for finding the right customers in the right places.

One of the absolute best ways in which I’ve personally found to use my blog is for helping train other people in areas in which they have interest. Of course this may not work for all niches, but for me personally, I’m in the IM Niche.

Many of the readers on my blog are new to marketing online, and need a helping hand in knowing reputable sources for acquiring knowledge that will count in their efforts. It is a great way to help people, because it will save them from making a lot of the same mistakes that I have already personally been through.

It’s become acutely prominent to me of just how much knowledge I actually have to share with people because of mistakes. In a sense, although not knowing at the time, my past mistakes have been an ally in terms of learning how to market. Now, because of those mistakes people can benefit. It’s a great way to build trust with your readers because of what you share. It will also help you to sell more products because the trust you have built up, goes a long ways in terms of them purchasing your recommendations.

Using your blog as the hub for your online business gives you the chance to brand yourself as the expert in your chosen niche. Now is the time to begin to utilize your blog in this way. It will serve you well for many years to come!

While some people have access to sophisticated HTML capable e-mail viewing programs, many people don’t. Lots of people are still reading plain text messages.

To maximize readability of your e-mail messages, including your opt-in ezine, ads and articles, not to mention personal e-mail use these simple tips:

- Use short lines (65 characters maximum): Many people’s Ezine programs insert a line break after a set number of characters on a line. This can lead to your messages have odd line breaks, unless you plan ahead. Stick to a maximum of 65 characters per line, and you shouldn’t have problems.

- Use the asterisk character to emphasize words: Preceding and following a word with the asterisk, like this *example*, makes it “bold”. Some e-mail programs will recognize this and do the conversion for you when your message is read, but even people who don’t know what you mean will know what you mean.

- Use the underline character to italicise a word. Preceding and following a word with the underline character, like this _example_, makes it “italic”. You can even use this technique for _a_string_of_words_.

- DO NOT WRITE EVERYTHING IN CAPITALS! IT’S HARD TO READ - AND FOR THE READER FEELS LIKE THEY’RE BEING SHOUTED AT.

- Use white space to separate paragraphs or different areas of interest

- A line consisting entirely of = or - characters, can be used to separate different parts of your message.

- If you’re sending your ezine as text, avoid placing HTML tags in your text (for example if you’re writing a tip about HTML - it would be better to simply link to a web page containing the tip): The reason is that some people’s email programs, even when reading text messages, try to display things that look like HTML tags, as HTML. This can lead to some very odd and unpredictable effects when your message is displayed.

- Don’t use cool buzzwords or obscure abbreviations. If your message isn’t going to be understood, there’s not much point in sending it…