A recent coach­ing ses­sion touched upon the grow­ing trend that some mar­keters have adopted to squeeze out sales from exit­ing traffic.

In other words, you visit a web­site and read the saleslet­ter. You decide it’s not for you, so you leave. But when you try leave (either as you close your browser or sim­ply hover your mouse out­side of it), the web­site attempts to make a last-​​ditch offer.

The com­mon prac­tice is to offer a dis­count, and a recent trend is to make it through vir­tual sales assis­tant just before the prospect clicks away from the screen.

(Vir­tual assis­tant or not, it is no dif­fer­ent than a one-​​time offer appear­ing in an exit pop-​​up or spawned browser win­dow once the vis­i­tor leaves.)

Not only is the prac­tice annoy­ing, it can be detri­men­tal to your sales efforts.

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Some peo­ple have asked what Web 2.0 tools do I use. Now, that ques­tion is two-​​sided. One is, what tools do I use with my copy? And the answer is, “not many.” I do use a few, and I’m test­ing a lot more, too.

Other than video and graph­ics, such as using YouTube​.com and Flickr​.com, which are the most pop­u­lar but not really impor­tant when you have your own ded­i­cated server like I do, there are some tools to allow my web­sites to be a lit­tle more interactive.

(If you remem­ber from my report, The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I talk about the rise in “sam­pli­fi­ca­tion.” If there are any tools that I would pre­fer, other than video and audio, they would cer­tainly be those that helped to give my read­ers more proof, and to make their buy­ing expe­ri­ences eas­ier and more secure.)

I will blog about those once I get more sta­tis­tics to share with you.

But the sec­ond part of that ques­tion is, when it comes to run­ning my busi­ness, there are a few Web 2.0 tools and ser­vices that have helped my life quite tremen­dously. Here’s a list of some of them.

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