There are very few internet sites these days that can claim a monopoly in their respective areas. Competition exists just about everywhere and is continually growing stronger. Accordingly, one of the most basic doctrines for internet success is to try to develop a sense of loyalty in your visitors. That way they won't play the field, but will return directly to your site whenever they require the type of service you're offering. Even if you are offering the best products for the best prices and are maintaining a web site far superior to those of your competition, there are still a number of steps you can take to build a stronger relationship with your customers. Autoresponders, an automatic response to your customer's inquiries can increase customer loyalty.

Use these tips for increasing viewer loyalty:

• Anyone who sends you an email that solicits a response must receive one.
• Whenever possible, the response should be sent within a couple days, should answer any questions they raised, and should include the name and contact details of the person who sent it in case they wish to ask a follow up question.
• To make your email responses even more effective, you should consider getting an autoresponder.

Autoresponders immediately send a response upon receipt of an email. This response is usually quite basic. It informs the sender that you have received their inquiry, that you will get back to them as soon as possible, and thanking them for patronizing your site. The benefit of the autoresponse is that it lets your visitors know their emails have been received, keeps your site fresh in their minds, and gives you an opportunity to pass along any other information you may wish to convey.

Many hosting services, such as the web hosting service we use, allow you a certain amount of autoresponders as part of your hosting. We set up one so that you can see how it works. Just send email to respond@virtuallyignorant.com to get a polite autoresponse telling you we got your email.

To put autoresponders on your site if you don't have them with your hosting, you will need to outsource. There are free autoresponder services, but you will have to worry that they might sell or otherwise use the email contacts that are sent through them. In other words, you are putting your user's trust in the hands of another service which is offering you a "free lunch".

In order to avoid this worry, you can go with a well known paid autoresponder service which even the most finicky anti-spam webmasters use: Aweber.com.

Another great use of autoresponders is email courses. For a good example of email courses run by autoresponder, treat yourself to some top-notch marketing advice in your mail. Ken doesn't spam or sell your email address, we know, since we ourselves have subscribed to several of these free courses. They're delivered by autoresponder - just send a blank email to request one or all of these free courses:

• Affiliate Masters
• Netwriting Masters
• InfoProduct Masters
• Pricing Masters

A more involved but extremely effective way of building relationships with your visitors is to offer a newsletter. The disadvantage of a newsletter is that you actually have to take the time to write it. The benefits make it worth the effort:

• A newsletter allows you to say more or less anything you want to a group of visitors who have been sufficiently impressed by your site to ask to be put on the list.
• You can use the newsletter to keep this group up to date on your latest product offerings and updates to your site,
• You can describe in greater depth the way your products or services operate,
• Or you can simply use it as another opportunity to remind them of the services you offer and how they can best take advantage of them.

To effectively maintain your newsletter lists, we recommend using some kind of email list software that will allow you to easily add and delete names. Two such products are:

1. List Power is free to join for webmasters and website owners. List Power allows anyone to set up a free mailing list in minutes and earn a significant revenue stream from their lists. Try it for free!
2. Lyris ListManager. They offer both a free version of their software for those compiling small email lists and a professional version for those maintaining larger lists.
3. Bravenet.com has free email list services. Of course, the service is monetized by ads, so your viewers will get ads with their newsletter. You can always upgrade for a fee to remove the ads.

Once you're publishing material, whether on your website, or in a newsletter, you can use it in other forms as a way of advertising your site content. One exciting method is to compile your material into an Ebook. What can you do with an Ebook? You can

• offer the Ebook as a free download,
• offer it to other webmasters to also use as a free download,
• offer it as a free incentive for signing up for your newsletter.

The easiest, cheapest way to produce an ebook? Download OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org, write your ebook, and export it as a PDF file. Yes, that's right, free PDF production software for you next ebook.

• InfoGenerator
• List Power
• Ebook Helper