The Spiritual Entrepreneur

E-mail marketing is probably one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to stay in touch with your prospective students on a regular basis. There is a statistic in marketing, which states that it takes on average of at least seven contacts to convert a prospect into a client and most people stop at two.

The first step is to build your email database and the easiest and quickest way to do this is to get email addresses from everyone & anyone that you meet. It is important to tell people what you do and to let them know that you have a great educational and promotional yoga newsletter and that you would love send it via email to them.

Most people will be more than happy to give you their email address if you present it to them in this fashion. Be sure to get their business card immediately and to add their name to your database as soon as possible.

Make a goal to add a certain amount of emails to your database on a monthly basis. A good number to shoot for could be approximately 50-100 per month through manual collections. Don’t worry if they are potential yoga students or not, because on one hand you never know and on the other they could forward the email to others that could be interested.

Another great way to build your email database is by adding an email opt-in form to your website so you can capture email addresses when people visit your website. Many yoga teachers/studios already spend significant time, energy and money driving traffic to their websites and one of the very best ways to capitalize on that traffic is to capture their email addresses through an opt-in form. The nice thing about this process is that it is completely automated and you will be building your email list without doing a thing.

Instead of just offering your visitors the chance to sign up for your newsletter through your opt-in form, up the stakes and offer some type of free giveaway such as an e-book or discounts to classes in exchange for them giving you their email address. You should find that your sign up rate will increase significantly by offering a free-bee incentive. Most of the free offers can be tied through an auto-responder which will once again eliminate the need for your involvement in the process. In order to receive more information regarding email opt-in forms and auto responders, inquire with your web designer.

Once you initiate your email marketing campaign, you should begin to use your email newsletter and/or email marketing campaigns to drive traffic back to your website. Here are some ideas of how to take full advantage of your campaigns and to increase your website traffic in the process:

* Send out e-newsletters on a consistent basis. Many people will not open the newsletters and/or click onto your site until they see it numerous times.

* Spend some time in coming up with interesting subjects for your email newsletters that will encourage the reader to open the email. If they don’t open the email they will never have the chance to click onto the website. Be sure to check your open rates after you send an email blast. If you are below 5% you have a problem with the subject.

* Include in your e-newsletter; incentives, contests, coupons, discounts, specials and promotions and be sure to add links to the specific pages that contain these offers.

* Use student testimonials/success stories in your e-newsletters in order to build credibility. More people are apt to click onto your website if they trust you.

* Initiate an auto-responder drip campaign touching your prospects on a regular basis. Remember, it takes seven or more contacts to convert a prospective student into a paying student.

* Include at least one educational article in each e-newsletter. Add just a few sentences as well as the title to the article as a way of whetting their appetite and then add a link to your website for them to read the remainder of the article.

It all begins with a quality website and then everything builds from there. Mikel Bruce with WebFlexor Yoga Websites (www.websitesforyoga.com) recommends investing the time into your website since it is the first thing that many of your prospective yoga students will see. You should find that over time as you build your email database your business will spike with each send.

When you have your own business at home, getting into internet marketing can quickly raise the status of your business. One of the most important facets to having success with internet marketing is how you are generating traffic.

With out traffic coming to your site it is impossible to have success. Therefore you must evaluate how you are going to generate a high traffic volume.

Why is article marketing important?

To generate more traffic to your web site, you need to let people know its there. When you write articles and publish them, you will find that, as long as you make the article relevant and interesting, they will be picked up by sites like E-zine’s that need fresh content and you will have a new permanent back link to your site.

How Is this important?

Well the more back links you have the better your site will show in the search engines organic (free) results which will generate more traffic to your web site and you’ll make more money!

By using a research tool like GistWeb you’ll be able to spend a lot less time creating the articles.

You’ll feel like submitting articles more frequently and by using a submission service like http:// www.submityourarticle.com you will benefit from having your article submitted to hundreds of publishers, and by using a very easy to master piece of software you can make almost every article submitted unique.

The way this works is that when you make your submission, you are invited to add alternative titles,and sentences, which when making the submissions the system uses in different combinations to generate multiple unique articles. When you submit more articles you’ll generate more traffic!

Blogs and comments

Another way to create links back to your site is to write great blog entries that people will want to post onto their blogs, you can even publish your articles on your blog. In the world of blogging, people very often use another blog as content for their site,and give the author a link or trackback.

This allows you to have a viral marketing source and you won’t need to do anything to generate this traffic. The beauty of creating a network this way is that the more you are on other people’s blogs and commenting on their posts, the more traffic you will receive.

The thing to remember is that people love to have visitors on their site and they want to know who those people are. If you’re commenting on posts they have written, you can bet that they are going to appreciate that and check out your site as well.

Whatever methods of web site promotion and marketing you use, you will need to know how many visitors or clients are attracted by each of the methods and what is the quality of the traffic generated from each marketing source. The reports and statistics of ProTrackerPlus.Com will provide you with the most complete information, so that you can concentrate your efforts on the most effective methods of web site promotion and increase the effectiveness of other methods.