“Can’t touch this… dun duh ta ta… ” All right, that’s old school, but believe it or not there was technology back then and robots were becoming popular…

See, it used to be that people would call a business and surprise, surprise, a real human being would answer the phone. Yeah, I know it’s surprising to hear that a flesh and blood creature actually worked, but companies wanted to increase profits and when they can’t charge more for products, get new customers or create new products, then they focus on expenses.

So imagine a 15-20 customer service department disappear overnight and replaced by a robot…

A robot who answered the phone and transferred people to the right department or just answered a frequently asked question… The best part, the robot did it flawlessly… it never called in sick and did exactly what was told to do everytime… answer the phone with a happy greeting, thank the customer when the customer gets their problem solved, take a message when they don’t…

And the even better part… it worked 24/7 365 days a year and no need for the robot to even take a potty break…

Well, it wasn’t long before marketers got hold of this technology and started using it to get business and make sales. What marketers started doing (and still do) was use recorded messages to generate leads… When a marketer understands their customer, they know exactly what to tell the customer to get them to take action and instead of taking phone calls from people calling to inquire about something, they would use robots…

Say a home buyer saw an ad about a free list of bank foreclosures. Instead of the real estate agent taking the call, they would record a message offering a free service or free report in exchange for contact information… yep, information marketing…

And because the message was proven, a robot was the perfect one to take the call, deliver the message and request the information from the customer…

Once the prospect left their information, a salesman (knowing very well the person was already interested in what they were selling) would simply have to return the call at their leisure and follow up…

So this is old school, and the only reason I used it to introduce this post is because I’m seeing many young entrepreneurs who’ve never seen or heard about this and don’t realize that a squeeze page, or a website is nothing more than a robot that shares your message with hundreds or thousands (millions?) of people…

And because they fail to realize this concept, they build their websites without much thought… just slap on a few articles here and there and point to a few links and voila, they’re good to go…

I can’t tell you how many websites I come across that are not well designed to bring in business… now I’m not talking about websites that are just a hobby for people, I’m talking about websites in which clearly the website owner is trying to monetize the website, yet the business owner has not taken the time to design a sales funnel and build everything with the goal of getting more people (the right people) to enter that funnel…

So here’s how this business model has evolved into the internet.

Squeeze pages became extremely popular and one of the best examples comes from Eben Pagan’s double your dating websites, which acted more or less like a recorded message on a phone would… it delivered a simple message and requested information from the prospect…

And then came the best part… instead of a salesman having to follow up, the online business model allowed autoresponders to follow up.

What really gets me is that many autoresponders are also built without much thought…

See, when it was all about phones, one could not waste a phone call… one could not call a prospect just to say hi and talk about random stuff because the actual sale could potentially be lost… then why, why, why??? why are people building autoresponders that do exactly that? Send messages that say nothing useful and don’t help to make a sale, or improve the relationship with the customer?

Things are changing rapidly… and while squeeze pages still outperform just about every other form of website, it’s abuse and overuse by marketing dumb entrepreneurs is reducing it’s power.

People are starting to demand that website owners don’t hide behind a squeeze page. They want to know there is a real human being, a flesh and blood creature working on the other side of the screen.

The result?

Social media and blogs…

Squeeze pages are being replaced by blogs like this one… and a blog, should be like a recorded message on the phone… it delivers the same message to the prospect that has already been proven to work… and the purpose of the blog is the same as the purpose phones had a while ago… to build a list, a customer database…

Once you have a central hub that converts web traffic into leads and sales, then it’s time to hire new robots to drive traffic to that central hub.

There are two ways to get traffic…. one is free and the other is not in terms of money…

Unfortunately free traffic is also what we call ‘grunt labor manual work’… stuff like article marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, etc… the nice thing is that if you secure good rankings with these is that you get free traffic almost indefinitely since these sources have staying power when done right…

On the other hand paid traffic is not only less work intensive but it’s also instant… you can slap on a couple ads on Google, Facebook, or buy media elsewhere and get traffic instantly…

The beauty of this is that once your hub is built with a proven message that sells, then getting traffic to flow into your hub automatically is just a dream come true as you see your bank account grow… So don’t take your website lightly and build it right the first time…

Tags: blog marketing, build better autoresponders, leverage business online, online business, social media marketing