In prac­ti­cally every major mar­ket­ing teach­ing, course, or sem­i­nar I’ve come across, I have found that almost all suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing on the Inter­net really boils down to two essen­tial fac­tors: traf­fic and con­ver­sion.

Sim­ply put, vis­i­tors and sales.

In fact, I’ve been to two-​​day Inter­net mar­ket­ing sem­i­nars and work­shops, where the first day focused on gen­er­at­ing traf­fic and the sec­ond day on build­ing sales.

That’s all well and good. How­ever, I believe there’s one more key com­po­nent. It’s one that’s grow­ing not only in pop­u­lar­ity, but also in need and impor­tance. It’s the one fac­tor on which the other two hinge. And it’s one that seems to be the least talked about.

In my career, I’ve seen the proof again and again. If you incor­po­rate this third ele­ment into your busi­ness model, chances are you’re going to see sub­stan­tial, con­tin­u­ous growth in your busi­ness — with a lot less effort than you’ve orig­i­nally thought possible.

What is it? What is this third, miss­ing element?

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As an online mar­keter, it’s impor­tant that you should take every oppor­tu­nity to elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers and chal­lenges to the deliv­ery of your mes­sage to your tar­get audience.

While RSS feeds, blogs, and social media are all the rage right now, noth­ing beats that long-​​reigning monarch of the message-​​to-​​market medium online. Good ol’ email.

As one Twit­ter user, Michael Kern, once remarked while com­ment­ing on one of my arti­cles, “Email is still king.”

For instance, at the time of writ­ing this blog post, this blog has close to 50,000 sub­scribers — grow­ing by about 100 new sub­scribers every day. How­ever, just 15% of that num­ber are sub­scribed to my RSS feed, while the remain­der are email subscribers.

My num­bers are far from being unique. They are the same with a large per­cent­age of blog­gers and social media mar­keters, let alone Inter­net mar­keters with blogs.

With the vari­ety of ways avail­able to deliver an opt-​​in email newslet­ter, such as plain text, text with images, embed­ded HTML, and attach­ments, which one is the best?

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As with sta­tic web­sites, the suc­cess of a blog depends on attract­ing a steady stream of new and return traf­fic. The dif­fer­ence is, blog pro­mo­tion tools are slightly dif­fer­ent, a bit more diverse, and largely much more effective.

Why? Because blogs are designed with inter­ac­tiv­ity and social net­work­ing abil­ity built in. They are ideal both for devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and for mar­ket­ing your brand.

How­ever, don’t neglect stan­dard pro­mo­tional activ­i­ties in favor of blog-​​only traf­fic gen­er­a­tion meth­ods. You can and should use both.

In fact, tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For exam­ple, and most impor­tant, you will still want to uti­lize your email list, and use your blog to grow it, too. Ask read­ers to sub­scribe, and let them know when you post a new arti­cle just as you would with a new fea­ture or prod­uct on a sta­tic website.

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One of my coach­ing stu­dents recently asked me whether it’s bet­ter to offer a free trial or a $1 lim­ited time trial as an incen­tive to sign up for a paid newslet­ter subscription.

The answer involves the vital role of track­ing and test­ing through­out your entire sales funnel.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, a free trial is likely to con­vert more vis­i­tors ini­tially, but the $1 trial may be the bet­ter choice over the long term. Such gen­er­al­iza­tions have lit­tle place in busi­ness. The only way to deter­mine the right answer for your busi­ness is to track and test the process from begin­ning to end.

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Long, scrolling saleslet­ters are dying. It’s a fact. There are two main rea­sons for this. Remem­ber, I said an evo­lu­tion and a rev­o­lu­tion are cur­rently tak­ing place. And both of these are con­tribut­ing to the death of the salesletter.

The evo­lu­tion is this: users are demand­ing for bet­ter qual­ity, more con­tent, more proof, less has­sles and greater inter­ac­tiv­ity. New tech­nolo­gies there­fore help to enable that expe­ri­ence. And really, that’s what it’s all about:

It’s about the expe­ri­ence.

As more and more peo­ple enter the web, get broad­band, and gain access to groups of peo­ple who they can con­nect and inter­act with, as well as with the pre­pon­der­ance of appli­ca­tions that fight for that person’s atten­tion and inter­ac­tion, the long-​​scrolling saleslet­ter no longer works as effec­tively as it used to.

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