Why You Need to Believe in Yourself. Great reflection from Les Brown about how you won't live a great life until you believe in yourself. Do you believe in yourself?

The Number One “Buying” Emotion - a useful video to explain/remind you why people buy!

Are you scared to click!

I was reminded the other day just how frightening something you don't understand can be.

Many people find that fear stops them from doing certain things.

Obvious fears might be heights, spiders, death but the fear can be related to some very different things as well.

And we all have that fear of something at some point so you are not alone!

Many will say that a fear though is False Expectations Appearing Real (FEAR) and I think Mark Twain say I have had many difficulties in my life...and some of them actually happened!

My reminder of people's fears cropped up when the following simple interchange happened during a Facebook coaching session:

The question I asked was 'who spotted this little button on Facebook?' A few people nodded but not everyone.

My next question was 'for those who didn't why not?!'

But then I asked 'for those two of you who did spot it did you click it?'

For those who hadn't spotted it, they were intrigued about the button!

But for those who had spotted it, they shifted uncomfortably in their seat and then their response shocked me and prompted this blog post.

They looked at me and said 'No', they hadn't clicked it.

Naturally my next question was 'Why not?'

What do you think they said?

One said 'I didn't know what it would do'. Ok I thought, this is a bit like my kids (who copy Homer Simpson from the The Simpsons) when I ask them to try a new meal and they look at it and quote Homer Simpson - 'I only eat foods I have tried before'!

But the other said 'I didn't click it because I didn't want to break it'

Wow! I just love the idea that by pressing a button you can 'break' Facebook!

SO what did I learn from this really simple question?

1. That people don't try things out that are right in front of them

2. People imagine terrible results with no evidence that this is true

3. More than one person will feel the same as you

4. If people find someone who is kind and patient and can explain things then the joy on the face of the person you help is wonderful!

Autoresponders – what the heck are they and do I need one? (will they help me make money online?!)

Autoresponders – what the heck are they and do I need one?

I have written about autoresponders before but it is useful to revisit the topic!

An autoresponder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. 

They can be very simple or quite complex. Hmm, ok.

But do I need one?

Let’s go back to basics and work with the assumption that you are trying to boost your business and grow sales.

In order to boost sales you need more customers.

Imagine if all you emailed all your customers with an offer. They had to email you back to say yes please but you had to respond to each one.

Easy enough if you only get a few emails a day. But what if you advertised and 10,000 people wanted to email you about the latest product or to be added to your mailing list for your brochure?

Pretty obvious that you would need some help or you lose 9,900 of those possible customers.

What an autoresponder does is it helps you answer all the emails in ONE automated response!

Loads of people use autoresponders and at the moment I use Aweber

A bit of history…

The first autoresponders were created within mail transfer agents that found they could not deliver an e-mail to a given address. These create bounce messages such as "your e-mail could not be delivered because..." type responses. So that wasn’t very good! Today's autoresponders need to be careful to not generate e-mail this ‘backscatter’, which can result in the autoresponses being considered E-mail spam. Avoiding any emails being classed as Spam is vital – indeed some spamming is illegal in many countries.

So what do they do for me?

Autoresponders are used as e-mail marketing tools to immediately provide information to their customers old and new. Autoresponders are also incorporated into electronic mailing list software, to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.

They are also used to send follow-up emails with info, offers and reminders at preset time intervals.

Such follow-up autoresponders can be divided into two categories (and here are the rather dry definitions!):

·       Outsourced ASP model — these autoresponders operate on the provider's infrastructure and are usually configurable via a web-based control panel. The customer pays a monthly usage fee. This is easiest to implement for the end-user.

·       Server-side — enables users to install the autoresponder system on their own server. This requires technical skills.

Autoresponders are also incorporated into electronic mailing list software, to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.

CONCLUSION:

Do I need an autoresponder?

If you only send emails that are individual and to a few people at a time then no.

But if you are trying to build a business via increasing customer numbers and more sales then absolutely YES!

Remember that in the digital marketing world, one of your main points of contact with your customers is via email. And it doesn’t take many customers before individual emails becomes unmanageable. At that point you need to systemize your emails with an autoresponder.

I use Aweber (click here to try it) but there are a lot of companies that provide the service.