Your online business, large or small, relies heavily on the use of email. Almost immediately, the volume of emails that must be responded to will become overwhelming and take up a huge percentage of your time. At some point you begin to realize that investing in an autoresponder has become a necessary business expense.

With the aid of an autoresponder, keeping up with emails becomes much less of a chore. Once it’s installed and a few scripts have been written, your business begins to run on autopilot, freeing you from an onerous task and allowing you to spend your time more productively, creating products, researching money-making opportunities, building partnerships, or cultivating the connections you’ve already made. The efficiency of an autoresponder not only gives your business an edge, and allows you to maximize your time to better effect, but also makes your customers feel as if they’re being treated with consideration.

visitors to a website expect an immediate response when they send you a business related email. If you delay or procrastinate in replying, the visitor you’re hoping to convert into a paying customer may conclude that you’re too busy, too uninterested, or too unprofessional to give them the courtesy of a swift response, and will turn their attention elsewhere. With an autoresponder, they will get the instant acknowledgment they want, as there is no lag time between their request and the automated email reply.

When you are ready to purchase an autoresponder service, bear in mind that they aren’t all built the same. They will differ in terms of exactly what they offer, and you need to shop around, keeping your personal situation in mind as you review the features in each individual program. Of course, price is a consideration as well. But there are many different programs you can compare and contrast, and finding one that meets your unique needs and budget is no problem. Take the time and do your research into what’s out there; it will pay off in the end if you do your homework first.

This is your business – your livelihood. You don’t want to cut corners when it comes to customer service. Email is the best way to communicate with customers and visitors to your website. While there are certainly impulse buyers who feel no need to contact you before buying, there are many who are reluctant to part with their cash until the questions that will help them in their decision making process are answered. Your providing them with a prompt acknowledgment of their request for assistance will go a long way toward impressing them and persuading them to give you their custom.

So, you have a new terrific looking Website. You’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it is Search Engine Friendly, you have great content and you are sure that you are what the Search Engines have been waiting for! Your big launch date comes and goes, and nothing. But it takes time to show up on the generic Search Engine results, you might say. So you try an aggressive marketing campaign, and still, your sales are almost non-existent.

What is happening? Your keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your online success. Because the competition is so great, choosing general or broad keywords is almost a guarantee that either you will not show up on the Search Engine results, or if you do, your target audience will not be looking for what you have to offer. Your keywords need to be as specific as possible to get you the results you are looking for. In other words, shoppers ready to buy your product or services are your target and the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will face.

Choosing the right keywords when your Website is new can be tricky as well as time consuming. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. You might not think objectively. Ask your clients, family members, or friends what they would look for if searching for your product. You might be surprised at what insights they can give you.

2. Get personal with your keywords. Take the obvious general keywords that come to mind, for this example we will use “toys”, and try narrowing it down. Try “toy trucks” or “infant toys” or “water toys”. Now go even deeper in your category and try “infant rattle toys” or “baby teething toys”. You see how you are now targeting exactly what someone might be searching for?

3. Do a manual search for the keywords you choose, and see who your competition is. Is that your target? Also look on the upper right hand corner of your search results. Typically, Search Engines will display the number of found results. The more specific the keyword, the less results displayed, the better your chances of obtaining results for that keyword.

So now you have all these great keywords, what do you do with them? Knowing what your keywords are is not enough, you need to keep a few critical points in mind:

1. Continually evaluate your keywords, keeping in mind that trends come and go, and what is “HOT” today may not be what people are looking for tomorrow.

2. Keep track of where your visitors found you. If you are doing a paid campaign, this is easy to do, but if you are looking at generic results, you can use a tracking software to show you what your best resulting keyword searches are. Google Analytics is an example of a free service, and one of the best to track your traffic, visitors’ keywords and behavior.

3. Your visitors should never have to find what they are looking for on your Website. This applies mainly to your PPC programs. Point them directly to where they need to be. Whether it is the page where they can purchase your product, fill out a form or subscribe to a service, land them directly to that page. If you simply send them to your home page, you will lose that visitor because they did not immediately find what they were looking for.

4. Lastly, optimize your pages to your keywords. Take time to carefully write your meta-tags. Properly written Titles can make the difference if your generic result is clicked on or not. Edit the individual pages to have a keyword rich description. This does not mean stuff your keywords anywhere you can find space for them. Read it over, and make sure it makes sense to you. Keep in mind that you not only want to score a lot of points with the Search Engines so that they deem you content “valuable” to their users, you also want to make your visitors keep coming back to your Website .

All this may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But to put it bluntly, “what you put in to it, is what you get out of it”. If you put the time and effort into your keywords, you will eventually be rewarded with the results you are seeking.