The best method to sell online

I know you have read seen hundreds of pages that promise you magical methods to sell online. This post isn't anything like that. I'll not offer you any magical method. I just want to talk about the most important thing about selling online.

It's not about driving the most traffic or offering the lowest possible prices. It's about keeping in touch with these visitors that came to it.

One of the most efficient methods to do that is to obtain their email addresses and save them in a database. Later you can mail them with useful advice, tips, tutorials and of course - promotional offers for your products or services. Technically you can achieve this by subscribing to a free newsletter service like FeedBlitz (quite a poor service!), using a paid one like GetResponse (cool but expensive) or installing your own email newsletter software - usually based on PHP (affordable and cool, but requires some basic knowledge for installing scripts).

Another good method to keep in touch with your visitors and turn them from one-time passing through visitors to customers and fans is to get them subscribe to RSS feed. RSS has some great advantage over email - it's a thing that resides on your host and you don't need a service like the ones above and the delivery rate is 100% (unlike email where some emails always get lost or blocked as spam). Many CMS or other popular systems provide RSS out of the box - for example if you have Blogger or Wordpress blog you don't need to do anything - your RSS is automatically created. In some other cases you may need to do some programming work to create them.

Finally, another cool method to improve your customer relations is to get your visitors follow you on Twitter, become friends with you on Facebook or other social networks. This way you can gain a lot more from each of your customers.

In the near future I'm going to post some good tips about methods to get more users subscribing through any of these channels.