When it comes to succeeding online it is vitally important that people can find you quickly and easily.
Even if you are an affiliate promoting someone else’s product, being able to send people to your own home base is vital to your success.
You simply must have a home base, a platform from which you can launch all of your business ideas and promotions.
Just like you would not build a house on rented land, the choice of where you put your home base matters greatly.
The vast majority of people get this wrong.
They lose the chance to build their list and make sales simply because a person can’t find them when they are interested in learning more.
This is why it is vitally important you have an online presence that is easy to find, easy to remember and helpful when people visit.
Think about this – if you were in an elevator with your perfect prospect and needed to tell them how to reach you how would you do that?
- Give them an email address?
- Or a phone number?
- Or tell them which product you are promoting?
- Or send them to your Facebook page?
No – you want to give them an easy to remember website URL so they can visit, get in touch and buy from you.
Let’s look together at five ways to help people get in touch with you, and which one works the best by far.
Your Own Blog
As you know, everyone is in a hurry. Attention spans are down to 8 seconds. Some say 3 seconds.
Very few people will take the time to read a sales letter or even an entire article. Instead, they read the headline and skip to the bottom, trying to get the “bottom line” of price or point being made.
This is why having a blog of your own with an easy to remember domain name, is a must today.
With your own blog, you have almost unlimited options.
Just look at a few of the things you can do with your own blog. By the way, I do all of these with one blog.
- Publish articles.
- Build your list.
- Run a membership site.
- Create squeeze pages.
- Host videos.
- Run surveys and polls.
- Develop community.
- Launch new products.
- Take orders.
- Have a forum.
I’ll stop there but the list can go on and on.
My best advice to anyone wanting to succeed online is this – have your own blog, on your own hosting account, and use an easy to remember .com domain name.
The good news about your own blog is that it’s incredibly cheap and easy to accomplish. Most of what you need to do can be done with free or very low-cost plugins.
And blogs can look fantastic. Many of the top sites online are blogs and they don’t look “bloggy” at all.
Whether you are new to working online, have an offline business you need to bring online, or are a veteran looking to consolidate into one powerful point of contact, a blog of your own is a must.
Social Media
Social media is great for staying in touch with friends and business associates. Fun and free, Facebook, Twitter and LikedIn can be wonderful ways to make contacts, find prospects for your offers and more.
But social media fails miserably as the main point of contact for your business. Here’s why.
You have no control over how social media sites will change in the future.
It’s true. Just ask anyone who has had their Google AdWords account closed and could not even get an answer as to why.
Or the person who has their Facebook profile pulled for no known reason.
I like social media. I do. But I am not going to put my entire businesses future in the hands of someone who can change the rules without notice and then gives me no way to find out why or how to fix it.
Email Address
Remember when email was fun? I literally remember the old “You’ve Got Mail” voice when I used AOL. And just like in the movie I was excited to receive email.
Fast forward to today and people are drowning in email.
One customer said this to me only a few weeks ago. “I get over 300 emails a day and read them all. I know it’s dumb but I just do not want to miss out.”
Not surprisingly, there is no time in his life to get traction on building his own online business. He is trapped in a cycle of reading offer after offer, all made to sound like something he just can’t live without.
By the end of doing that, there is no energy or peace to work on something worthwhile.
I get it because I have been there too. I remember the confusion and feeling of not wanting to miss out on something that could turn things around.
But it is a siren song that will only cause you to crash on the rocks.
For the reason of overwhelm alone email is not a reliable main point of contact for your online business.
Combine the sheer volume of email with the impact of filters and you can see that email alone will not work anymore.
Another factor is multiple email addresses. I have one customer who was upset she was not hearing from me. When I dug a little deeper I discovered she had nine email addresses but only checked one on a regular basis.
Sure enough, I was replying to the address she wrote to me from, which was one of the eight that she never checked.
Happily, we got it resolved and now we can stay in touch.
Phone or Skype
The phone is a great supplement when you want to stay in touch with prospects and customers, but not good enough anymore as your main point of contact.
Skype is a wonderful service as well. Fun and free, there is no easier video conferencing online.
But you are not on Skype all the time nor can you answer the phone 24 hours a day.
And that has become a problem.
People today want to communicate with you when it is convenient for them.
What that means is this – while prospects and customers are perfectly happy to leave a message, they do not want to wait until you are on Skype or will answer the phone to reach out.
They want to initiate contact when their question or concern is fresh on their mind.
I have a client who called me at 2:30 one morning. Now I’m old enough that a ringing phone at 2:30 is simply not a good thing.
When I answered he was surprised and said he only wanted to leave a message so he called when he was free.
Use the phone, and Skype, by all means. It is especially important to put them on your site. But don’t rely on their for your business.
While there are other methods of having a home base, like support centers or forums, nothing is more powerful, or flexible than a blog of your own.
Your home base is like your country. It is your home. A dependable location where you can always be found. A warm and inviting place where people can get help, ask questions and find solutions to their problems.
If your blog is like your country then all other forms of contact, including Skype and social media, are like embassies.
Let people make contact there. Have a vibrant presence there. But never mistake it for your home base, or use it as your home base.
People want to do business with you. They want to connect and stay in touch. They want to ask questions and get help.
The easier you make it to do that the more business you will do and the happier your customers will be.
And happy customers are one of the most beautiful things indeed!
