The Law Of 200 And How It Can Work For You
by: Jim Hart
There are a number of ways that you can promote your website from writing articles for Ezine magazine/article sites (like this one) to the more gimmicky methods like free newsletters, auto responders, etc. If you have been doing any research into website promotion you don’t need another repeat of information you have already heard—what you need is a new idea. One that has real potential to work without requiring a ton of technical experience and/or vast amounts of email addresses to Spam to. You want a simple method of getting your message out without requiring a significant amount of your time and energy—and you want to communicate for free too, right?
Ever heard of the law of 200? It’s a sales/marketing rule of thumb that we all know about 200 people on a first name basis. This is a powerful concept that can be applied to a simple email message to help promote your site and/or your offer:
The first question you must ask yourself: does your site have true value to people? What does your site do that will REALLY help people? Sites tend to fall into general categories encompassing products, services or information based. No matter what your site offers it should have value to your visitors. The more people it appeals to the better. Even highly specialized sites may be able to benefit from the following promotional idea.
Create a draft email with a headline and a brief, professional opening paragraph (the shorter the better)—pick up to 3 to 5 main points you want your email to communicate to people and provide a link back to your site for supporting information. For example; if you have a free ebook, highlight the free ebook and provide a link to download it (within the email itself). Do you have articles on your site that is relevant to the email? Link back to it! In other words use your site as the data-warehouse that stores the information you want people to have access to without writing long, boring emails. If people are interested in what you are saying or offering, they will click the links within the email to get more information. Now, hold this thought…
Creating a link-back email has several advantages and chief among them: 1) Keeps the emails brief eliminating large amounts of text which nobody is going to read anyway. 2) Eliminates the need to retype information that already appears on your site in the form of HTML pages. 3) Provides a way for people to get your information quickly without actually visiting your site. 4) Avoids embedding emails with data-hogging pictures that take a long time for people without high speed Internet to download. 5) Allows you to provide a link back to your site below your name when you sign the email (By the way, all your personal and business email should have a digital signature link to your site).
Why a simple email promotion can work:
Recently in the news was a story of a man who wrote a love letter to a woman and sent it to her via email. She was so impressed with the letter that she sent it to a few of her friends who were also so impressed with the email they forwarded it to their friends. The reason the story made it to CNN headline news was that this man was getting letters back from people all over the world (including gay men) who wanted to meet the person who originally wrote the letter.
That got me to thinking more seriously about the potential benefits of sending out an email that has VALUE. Not Spam…rather, a carefully crafted email that has VALUE links which you can send to the people in your recipient list including your friends and family. If you feel uncomfortable about sending your email to friends and family then your email is NOT a value driven email. Why friends and family? Because these people also have recipient lists they could forward the email to! If your email TRULY has value, people will forward it to other people. Especially if you give something away for free, like an ebook. How many friends and family should you send it to? That’s a judgement call, but I suggest limiting it to no more than 10 people at a time. It’s like being stranded on an island and throwing a message in a bottle…see where it will float….
Why does this have tremendous potential to work for you? If you send your email to 10 people who, in turn, send it to 10 people, who do the same to another 10 people, your email will be exposed to about a 1,000 people. And if these 1,000 people send it to 10 others, your email will be exposed to 10,000 people. And if this process repeats one more time, you are exposed to 100,000 people and once more, a million people! And if one (1) percent of those million people visited your site (10,000 people) and, only one percent of those people (100 people) purchased your offer, well, you get the point.
Think about it...
About The Author
Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved
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