The Pareto’s Principle – The 80-20 Rule applies here. 20 percent of your efforts will produce 80 percent of your results.

If you have placed a solo ad, AdWords Campaign or an ad in the local papers, here’s how it’s gonna work.

Let’s talk about the ad in the papers specifically. Out of the entire circulation of the paper, only 20% is going to read or chance upon your ad. And out of that, 20% of that number will take action to respond. And out of that, only 20% is going to purchase your product or service. Sounds dismal? Yeah the truth hurts. But that’s the way it is.

On a brighter note, those are the people that you want to spend 100% of your efforts on. You know for certain that they are in the market for what you have to offer. Which comes back to my first point. Make sure that your systems are in place for capturing those leads.

Also, you can use different strategies to ensure that the conversion is higher once they enter your marketing funnel. This will help you to capitalize on your efforts and compound your returns in future.

Also, with the amount of noise online these days, it is vital to follow up with your prospects to clinch sales to whatever it is you are in business for.

Industry experts say that it takes up to 7 or more times before a prospect warms up to you and actually makes a purchase.

Here’s the good news, on the internet, we are able to automate this process via autoresponders.

Autoresponder software is essential to your success in your online business.

After much research, here are a few choice picks…

1) The mother of all autoresponders: Marketers Choice a.k.a 1ShoppingCart

http://www.themarketingcode.com/a/marketerschoice

2) GetResponse

http://www.themarketingcode.com/a/GetResponse

3) Aweber

http://www.themarketingcode.com/a/Aweber

Autoresponders can make your marketing much easier by automating your communication to your prospect and can close more sales quickly and easily.

This is also know as permission marketing. (When your visitors are actually giving you permission to send them emails to them tell them more about what you have to offer.)

Here are some ways you can increase your numbers and build up your list.

Put in more opt-ins boxes in your salesletter. Making sure that you have one near the top and the bottom.

Bribe them with free stuff of value. It’s a value exchange society. Deal with it.

Use a resource box in your ezine or newsletter so that you can allow them to rip off your content and still get credit for it. Remember to include your website url so that you will at least get a backlink.

Set up joint ventures with other publishers. Give them a good reason to distribute your content. Give them a report for free that they can use to send to their subscribers and/or make money from it. Think win-win. You get to build your list with it if you include some of your links in the report back to your website.

Get yourself listed in ezine directories. Google for them.

Co-registration. Buy the traffic you need to kick start your list engine if you have the means to do so.

Article marketing. Write up some good quality articles and send them to article directories. You get to establish yourself as an expert in that niche and build trust before others even come to your website.

DHTML popups. Use pop ups that can’t be blocked by browsers. Sparingly. Do not irritate your prospects.

Set up an attractive affiliate program to entice people to promote your products. Use Clickbank.

Use viral devices such as tell-a-friend scripts and viral ebooks to spread your content like wildfire.

Use Google Adwords to instantly get targeted traffic to your website.

Last but not least, you can use a combination of all the above techniques to dramatically increase your opt in rate.

Step 1: Define your audience or niche.

Assuming that you are looking to sell a product or service online, the first crucial step is to define who your audience is. You can never be everything to everyone. To quote Sun Tze in “The Art of War”, knowing your enemy (audience) is half the battle won.

Only when you know your target audience will you know where to focus your efforts on. This will save you lots of grief and coming back to square one later.

Step 2: Market Research – Test, Refine & Conquer.

The lazy way to do it is to first check out your competition. See what they are doing and refine a model to suit yourself. Online success leaves a trail of crumbs like no other medium.

Your competition also tells you that there is a market out there for your product. If you do not have any competition, it may actually be a bad thing as it may be an indicator that no one actually wants to buy what you have. Unless you are Google, which is an entirely different story altogether.

Needless to say you have to differentiate yourself unless you want to solely compete on price points.

Step 3: Ask them (your audience) what they want.

One good way is to test your product online first before laying out the ground work for your entire project.

Some of the lowest costs methods you can use include testing your product in a PPC (pay per click) campaign and gathering some response. Place an ad and see if it will sink or swim. Start with Google Adwords.

Another good method is to test it on Ebay.

Or one of the most effective is to literally ask them what they want by using survey tools like the popular Ask Database.

Refine your offer till you can get the numbers you want. In this process, you can define your price points and tweak your marketing by improving your copy.

This process also allows you to generate testimonials from satisfied customers which you can use to enhance your marketing.

Step 4: Seek and you shall find.

Brainstorm on this and list down methods which are known to work best in your niche. Very often, it’s right in your daily life.

I’m assuming that your business is something that you are passionate about and quite familiar with. Even better if you have once been a customer of your own product. Your circle of influence will reach your target audience if you know what they need, want or desire.

Note that behind each email is a real person and that you are looking to convert them into customers by giving them something of value in exchange for money. The rule of thumb is that if you can’t convince yourself to buy your own product, they wouldn’t even consider it either.