If you have a website that sells something online, whether it’s a product or service, then making money by selling your items is the main objective of your site. However, if you want to remain competitive in your niche and see long term growth, then providing good support for your customers and potential customers is important for your online business, just like it would be in any other type of business.

Unfortunately, this is something that is often overlooked by many online business operators, especially those that provide services such as web hosting resellers. Here are some great tips which will help you provide a very good customer service experience for your website visitors:

• Provide good information on your website

The issue with contacts to a website’s service staff is that many of these contacts could have been avoided if the necessary information was included on the site and featured in a prominent way. Therefore, you should provide clear information about how your products work, as well as help files about how to use them if this would be relevant to your products. Creating video tutorials on how to accomplish certain things with your products would also be a great idea. On your contact page, you should include a link to the relevant help section of your website, which will encourage your customers and potential buyers alike to first check out the information to see if the answer to their question can actually be found there before they contact you.

• Offer good self service features

This is a move that has been well understood by many large businesses operating in plenty of different industries everywhere. It’s less costly in terms of money and resources to let your customers do certain transactions and see some information by themselves rather than having them contact you. If you run an e-commerce site that ships products, for example, you could include a section on your site that keeps track of your customers previous orders. You can then update it with shipping and tracking information, which would cut down on the “when will my order get there” type of inquiries. This also applies to service based sites as well. Try to implement features that would let your customers make their own changes to their account, such as changing their service plans, adding a new subscription under their main account, changing their billing information, canceling or suspending a service they have with you, etc. By doing all of this, you will reduce contacts to your customer service, sometimes even in a significant way.

• Send a follow up/confirmation email on every new order

With the email, provide the relevant information, such as order number, tracking number for any shipments, as well as a link to the help section or the account management section of your website. Doing so will encourage your customers to use them to see if they can find the answer to any question they have there before they get into contact with you.

If you want to make some money online by promoting affiliate offers, then there are various ways for you to accomplish this. You could building landing pages for each offer you push, or even link directly to the offer depending on which advertising channel you use. But one of the ways to push affiliate offers online is by simply creating a blog.

Blogs have many advantages. They make it very easy to add unique and new content, which will help them remain interesting with readers and also make SEO easier. With blogging platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, creating your own blog has never been easier. So how do you make one for affiliate marketing? Here is an example scenario:

Let’s say that you are promoting web hosting affiliate offers. The main topic of your blog will be web hosting, or issues that are of interest to other internet marketers or webmasters. You would make regular posts such as: web building tips, reviews of particular web hosts, comparisons between different types of web hosting, SEO advice, etc. Basically, anything that is related to being a webmaster.

There will be various ways for you to “plug” the affiliate ads into your blog. You can, of course use classic banner ads, or text ads placed in prominent locations. But it is also possible for you to include affiliate links inside the text of your blog. For example, you could link the name of a web host that you talk about in a blog post to the affiliate offer.

But one important thing to remember when you are creating a blog for affiliate marketing is to not make it look like this is the only purpose of your blog. Sure, for you the main objective of your blog would be to generate money for you. But your readers come to your blog in order to be informed about something they care about, not simply read post after post that is singing praises of various different companies and products.

So back to our example of a web hosting blog. Sure, it is fine to have certain posts talk about how great a certain web host is, or that inform readers of a special promotion that a hosting company is having at this time. But you also need to include some informative content as well. So you could make some posts that talk about web design tools or posts that explain how VPS web hosting is different from shared hosting, etc. If your readers notice that your blog is nothing more than an advertising platform, chances are they won’t trust it very much. They will probably leave to go to another site and the chances that someone would click one of your ads and sign up for one of the web hosts that you are pushing are quite remote if your blog is structured that way. Basically, the key to success is having regularly updated and informative content.

Keeping your email opt in page clean and professional is important to showing your users trust and respect. Make sure you emphasize privacy and the purpose of your list. List the benefits of being a member of your email list such as giveaways, free information, gifts, or whatever benefits your list might have. This helps gain trust right away from your users and makes them feel like they will benefit from joining your list, rather than giving away their privacy to a third party. Trust is the most important thing you can build on your opt in page.

The opt in email page takes some time to perfect, but the main objective is to keep the person interested enough to want to give you their personal information such as an email address to offer them solicited information. This is known as opting in to receive the information and allows you to send them related information. Most people will not simply put in their information if they see no incentive or gains that they would receive for doing so. This is where you would provide a free gift for giving you their information. This allows you to provide a free gift as the ethical bribe to earn their email address information.

This means that you will be tasked with gaining the trust of opt in subscribers. The more that you work to gain the trust of the potential subscribers, the more likely they will be to opt in. Once you do get their trust to give you their information you will have to continue earning their trust. Sending them the free gift via auto-response scripts is important to utilize. Do not bombard them with spam and offers they do not need.

Delivering on the join request is very important. You will have to ensure that they will be receiving important information that they will want to read without asking them to buy anything at first. Once gaining their trust has gone on for a few days to a week, your email responses could be tailored to ask them politely to purchase a product. If they do not continue on, the next email should outline why they should buy it. After this, the emails should explain why not using the product is less effective than other products or methods. This will usually provide them with a reason to purchase within a set time frame if their interest is caught well enough.