Your List Will Make You Rich

Want to know the ONE REGRET almost ALL successful internet markets have?

Not starting their list sooner!

In the blog lesson I discussed how acquiring blog subscribers is a crucial asset building activity for your business. Well when it comes to online asset building there is one asset that trumps them all and that's the mailing list.

I'm not trying to be all dramatic here. It's just the reality of online marketing and you're going to have to get in the game if you want to start pulling down real money.

Capturing Leads (asset building ... again)

In the blog lesson I discussed why capturing leads is so important when we talked about RSS subscribers, but it's so important I need to flog it once more from a slightly different angle. Please don't skip this part ;)

If you're not capturing leads then you're not really building a business.

Think about it ... if all you are doing is referring your traffic to your affiliate merchants without capturing that traffic on a list then you're not building YOUR business you're building THEIR business. At the end of the day your merchant has a list of leads he can contact over and over again and all you have is a commission. Can you see how you're building their business and NOT yours?

Trust me; if you wait to start list building you will regret it once you do in fact have a list. You will look back and kick yourself when you realize how much money you lost by not starting a list sooner.

By the Numbers

Let's say you've finally decided to start your mailing list and after 6 months you now have 5000 people on the list (and yes, lists can be built much faster than that). Now, after a number of promotions you realize you've made about $8K in total from your list promotions over the past 2 months. What does this tell you

1. You made $4,000 / month from your list
2. Each person on your list is worth $.80 per month
3. If you can add 125 new people to your list this month you should be able to increase your income by $100/month
4. It tells you that not only back then did you leave huge amounts of money on the table, but it's still costing you money today. Why? Because every lead you failed to capture back then is a lost opportunity that is still costing you $0.80/month today

Why a List Lead Beats an RSS Subscriber Lead

If you don't have a mailing list then capturing RSS subscriber is the next best lead capture. But it's still a very distant second. Why?

First, if you can get your subscribers on both RSS and email that's even better, but given the choice, email is the best option for a number of reasons

1. Email is two way. Your list members can communicate back with you. This is of course a double edged sword in that it's not easy to respond to every email from your list as the size of your list grows. With 10,000 people on a list, depending on the nature of the business, you're bound to get a couple dozen emails a day. Having said that, there are ways of working with this which I'll describe later. The important thing is that two way communications allows you to build trust and a sense of community. Remember, people buy from people they like.
2. Email is not web. Well that's not entirely true given the prevalence of web based email programs these days like Gmail. But the key is that the web is very distracting. Your attention is always being pulled this and that way. But with email people have a tendency to focus a bit more. There's a subconscious switch that goes on in many people that says "OK, now I'm reading email, I'm NOT surfing". Email has a way of snapping people out of their current train of thought for a second while they read your email.
   
   Next time you're surfing and decide to check email make a mental note of this and you'll see what I mean. This is a very powerful mental break that you can use to your advantage because it's very difficult to grab someone's attention as it is and an email will actually help you do that
3. As you'll read later in the lesson, email provides far superior stats tracking and segmentation possibilities
4. You can automate the sending of a headline summary of your blog posts to your email subscribers. This way you don't have to worry about your email subscribers not being up to date on your blog content
5. Lastly, people forward email more readily than they do RSS feeds simply because email makes it easy to do

Is It Spam?

If you don't currently have a mailing list then your first reaction might be "arrrg SPAM!". You need to overcome this reaction because a mailing list does NOT equal spam. It's all about how you use it.

Mailing lists are used in many ways such as newsletters, course content delivery or to deliver anything else that you do not want to make open to the web at large. Most importantly, they let you communicate directly with the community you are building around your business. This is extremely effective as you will see later in the lesson.

A mailing list is simply a list of emails, while an opt-in mailing list is a list of emails from people who have given you permission to email them. See the difference? It's the permission aspect of the opt-in that separates the spammers from the non-spammers.

If you fill out a form on a website giving them your email address you're giving them permission to email you. It doesn't matter whether you like what they send you or not, their email is NOT spam because you gave them permission to contact you. If you're not happy you always have the option to unsubscribing using the link provided at the bottom of every email. It's called an opt-in because you have the option to decide whether you want to be in the list or not.

That's how it's supposed to work. If you unsubscribe and the list owner does not respect your wishes and continues to send you email then at that point they've become spammers. PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS! It's bad for the industry and it's bad for your business.

Unfortunately the opt-in form alone does not fully prevent spam because there's no guarantee the person who owns the email address is the one who submitted the email.

You combat this with something called a verified opt-in. A verified opt-in is simply a confirmation email sent to the person who signing up that asks them to verify they have indeed submitted their email and signed up for your list. Once they click the confirmation they are added to the list and good to go.

Aweber Autoresponder

Mailing List - Features and Functions

Modern, leading edge mailing list services come with an incredible amount of features that are designed to put more money in your pocket with less effort. That's their business model and they're VERY good at it.

The Signup Sequence

Let me first take you through the basic features surrounding the signup process that is largely taken care of by Aweber. Here's a typical signup process

1. Aweber makes it easy to capture emails by providing you with the signup form (opt-in form) templates to place on your blogs and other web pages. Of course these are customizable
2. You specify a thank you page that the person signing up will be redirected to. You can use a default or create your own. I'll show you later why creating your own will increase your sales
3. While the submitter is redirected to your thank you page (#2), the information is sent to Aweber indicating a potential new subscriber
4. A confirmation email is sent by Aweber to the user's email asking them to confirm their wish to join.
5. If the user confirms then this information is sent back to Aweber telling them the subscriber has confirmed their subscription. This is the verified opt-in feature that keeps your list clean
6. Once the user clicks the confirmation button in their email they are redirected to a "confirmation thank you" page. Again, you can use a default page provided by Aweber, but not using a custom page is an opportunity lost
7. While the user is being redirected to the "confirmation thank you" page Aweber sends out the very first email in your email followup sequence. This first followup email is generally a welcome email telling them a bit more about what they just signed up for and perhaps providing a link to their signup incentive bonus

The Followup Sequence

The signup sequence described above will clearly save you a ton of time since it's a set up once and forget procedure (aside from perhaps some testing). The followup sequence, however, is where your autoresponder begins to really shine.

The followup sequence is a feature that lets you queue up a series of email messages for each new subscriber. You can specify which emails get sent to which subscribers and at what time they are sent. For example

1. Day 1: 1st followup sent immediately after confirmation of signup is received. This is usually your welcome message along with links to your promised bonus gifts
2. Day 2: Send them some really good additional information that will l help them with their problem or whatever it is they signed up for. No sales pitch here
3. Day 6: Send them some more info that is helpful and not sales oriented. No sales pitch here
4. Day 9: You've built some trust so no you can send them a recommendation for a product you really like (mild sales pitch)
5. Day 13: Send them more useful info. No sales pitch

Notice how the emails are spaced out a few days. This is a pre-created followup sequence where you can create a series of emails, spaced out however you want, that will be sent to the new subscriber as per the sequence of your followup. Every person that signs up to your list will receive each email but at different times because the email sequence is based on intervals from the time the person signed up.

This is hugely powerful because it allows you to create an entire email campaign and put it on autopilot. Once the signup sequence and followup sequence is created then all you need to do is get people to your page with the opt-in form.

Some strategies for setting up mailing intervals etc will be discussed later in the lesson.

Email Broadcasts

In addition to the standard email followup sequence just described there's also the email broadcast. A broadcast is just what it sounds like. It's a way to send out an email that is not part of the standard followup sequence. This is used when you want to reach a different group independent of where they might be in the sequence.

Typically the way people use follwoups and broadcasts is to send the non-sales pitch type email, the pure content and good will building email through their followup sequence. Then when they have a product they want to tell people about they broadcast it to everyone who has had at least a few goodwill emails behind them. In otherwards, send it to perhaps everyone who is past the 3^rd or 4^th followup already.

This brings us to segmentation and what is probably the most powerful feature of Aweber.

List Segmentation

Your email campaigns need analytics so you can track your mail-out stats and make better decisions. While most autoresponder services will offer some sort of email stats tracking, Aweber goes well beyond anything I've seen from any other company.

Here's a short list of some of what Aweber can track for you

1. Who opened which email
2. When they opened the email
3. If they clicked the link in the email
4. Which subject line performed best. (You can split test a message by creating multiple subject lines that get divided up to the recipients. You can see the stats and quickly learn which ones performed the best)
5. Demographics on where the person lives using IP address. This can usually narrow your subscriber as far down as a city

These statistics are hugely powerful because they let you segment your list. When I send out an email (usually a broadcast) I can create a segment of my list that I send the email to rather than sending to the whole list.

There's no point in selling snow shoes to a guy who lives in Florida. You can avoid this with segmentation.

Here's another example to illustrate the concept.

Let's say you send an email about a product that's on sale for the next week to your whole list. Some people open it, some don't. Some who opened it also click the link, some did not. Now a couple days go by and you want to send a reminder email. Here's what you could do

1. The people who never opened the first email will get the same email, but with a different subject line. Perhaps the first subject line was not catching their attention
2. Those who did open but did not click were clearly not enticed enough by the content of the email to click through. So you send them an email with some additional info on the product that will hopefully entice them to click through. The wording in the email is selected to encourage click through
3. For those who did click through on the first email you know they're somewhat interested and have seen the product. So the email you send them can be about additional benefits of the product or other material that might serve to dissipate any objections they might have about the product

Of course this is just a general idea of what you can do with segmentation. The truth is that you're limited only by your imagination. The most important thing to remember is that you'll have all the stats you need to determine if what you're doing is working or not working.

As a further example, imagine after 6 months you decide to send out a promotion for a new video tool. With list segmentation you can send an email out to all those on your list who opened emails related to video in the past.

Segmentation allows you to track and target your list with incredible precision.

Split Testing

In the last section on list segmenting I mentioned split testing. I just want to touch on this briefly because it's one of the most important things you can do and it will propel your campaign and your bank account with incredible speed.

No matter how well you think you know people and how good you think you are at predicting what will work best in an email there is simply no substitute for testing.

When you send out a broadcast email you have the option of creating up to 4 different subject lines. Aweber will then divide the emails sent out using the different subject line. The open rate and click through statistics you get back from this will instantly tell you which subject lines worked and which ones sucked.

Learn from this! It will take the guess work out of your email campaigns and improve your bottom line very quickly.

Blog Broadcast

Having your readers subscribe to your email list rather than your RSS feed doesn't mean they will miss out on your blog content. With Aweber, and other services that are white label Aweber, there is a feature where you can have an automatic mail broadcast to your list with the recent headlines from your blog.

By configuring it to send out a broadcast every time there are 3 new blog posts you're not being too intrusive and you're simply keeping them informed about what's going on with your blog. Of course you can configure it based on many parameters and you should set it up according to what works best for you. If you write 3 blog posts a day you may want to set it send every 9 posts. Get my drift?

If you configure your blog to Aweber in this way you can encourage people to subscribe to your blog via email and this way they receive the blog content as well as any extra bonus material that would normally be reserved for email list subscribers. For both you and the reader it's the best of both worlds.

Putting Your List to Work
$7,000 in First 60 Days

OK so now that I've done an overview of lists, the basic feature set offered by the top providers and how they work in general it's time to talk about exactly how I set mine up to generate $7,000 in my 1st 60 days.

The Incentive

Let's face it we ALL get far too many emails as it is. If you want people to subscribe to your list you need to give then a darn good reason to do so. You need to give them some sort of incentive. People will only give you their email if you can answer their biggest question.

"What's in it for me?"

An incentive, or bonus, can take many forms but is usually some sort of information, often in the form of an ebook. The most important thing is that the incentive not only compliments the product or service you're marketing, but actually improves upon it in some way

Having my subscription incentive actually improve on the product is one of the key reasons I was able to make so much money so quickly. A lot of people think that any old ebook will do as long as the ebook is somehow related AND gets the person on your list. This approach is to your incentive not only leaves a bad impression but also makes it harder than it needs to be to get your readers to buy from you.

Here's an example to illustrate my point:

Let's say you're marketing Jake's Acne Away Cream. Which of these two eBook titles do you think will get more subscriptions to your list?

1. 10 Things You Should Know About Acne
2. Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide - Cleaning Up For the Weekend

To be honest, without some testing I'm not sure which would get you more subscriptions to your list, but I'm quite confident the second one will sell more Jake's Acne Away Cream for you.

Here's why...

The second incentive is specific to the product being considered and therefore adds value to the product being considered.

Simply put,

Jake's Acne Away Cream combined with "Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide - Cleaning Up For the Weekend"

will be perceived to have far more value as a package than

Jake's Acne Away Cream combined with "10 Things You Should Know About Acne"

If you're thinking "If only I had a bonus like that I'd be set ? ", no worries because I'm going to talk about that shortly, but first I want to show you why this is so important.

Why Does This Incentive Produce More Sales?

There are so many ways in which a directly related incentive can drive sales. Here are a few of them

1. Increased Perceived Value
   When you incent people with a bonus that is not only relevant to the product, but actually appears to be made specifically for that product you increase the perceived value of the product considerably making the overall offer more appealing
2. Legitimacy
   The fact that there exists another bonus that is talking about Jake's Acne Away Cream must mean that the product is good. Believe me, people will read a lot into something if they want it to be true
3. Extended Marketing Copy
   The guide itself becomes an extended marketing tool. Inside the guide you provide valuable supplemental material on acne that is useful in its own right. This ensures the bonus guide has value on its own and leaves your reader in a happy place in their mind ? but not too happy! What you also need to do is make reference to certain sections or information in the product that without having the product will leave the reader curious and wanting. This nagging curiosity will drive them to buy the product! Here's an example of a line you might have in the guide
   

   "When Jake talks about the 7 step daily ritual to cleaner skin I've actually found that if you use vinegar between steps 4 and 5 you'll get the same results but faster!".

   Of course what you say and how you work it in depends on the product you're marketing. I have no idea what vinegar will do for acne so don't take that as a recommendation ;)
4. Keywords That Will Literally Steal Your Competitors Money
   If you recall earlier in the course I said we wanted to target people in a later phase of the buying cycle? The keywords we've been focusing on earlier in our campaign have been centered on the actual product name, in this case it would be Jake's Acne Away Cream.
   
   What's a better keyword than Jake's Acne Away Cream?
   
   How about Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide !!
   
   With an incentive like this all of your efforts should be focused on Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide as your primary keyword, not just Jake's Acne Away Cream.
   
   When you focus on this as your primary keyword rather than just the product name alone you are in fact covering the product name as well. Not only that, but anyone searching for the product name is also going to see Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide come up in the search listings too. Which search listing do you think most people will click? Exactly!
   
   If you're already searching for a product by name and you see something about a bonus guide how could you NOT click it to see what it's all about? NO ONE wants to buy something and not get all there is to get regarding the product. Believe me; people will be forced to click your link by their own curiosity!
   
   And when it comes time to buy, given all the places they could buy from, where do you think they're going to go?

Where Do You Get Your Opt-in Incentive?

You may be having some doubts right now about how you're going to come up with this magic incentive bonus guide, but the truth is it's not really as difficult as it might appear.

In the second lesson of this course, The Campaign Outline, I mentioned that I wanted to pick a product I could write about, a product category I already knew something about. This was important not only because it made writing my articles easier, but because it makes it easy to come up with your super targeted, magic bonus guide!

The reason the articles you wrote for your campaign were supposed to actually be helpful wasn't just because they will create more click through, but also because they form the basis for your bonus guide. Once you've written a number of articles all you need to do is take those articles and repackage them into a pdf (eBook) guide with a fancy title like Jake's Acne Away Cream Bonus Guide.

OK, there's a bit more to it than that, but not much more. The different articles would likely have been driving different points relating to the product so you may need to modify the articles a little to create some flow between them. There may be some redundancy in some of them which needs to be removed. Or you may need to add a bit of filler to help each article transition more smoothly to the next.

Just remember that this bonus can be anything you want it to be as long as it ties into the product, which is what your articles were supposed to do to begin with. Also remember that it's a free guide you're giving away and there is no obligation to make it perfect. Of course the better it is the easier it will be to sell the product, but the most important thing is to get it out there.

Keep these tips in mind and you should be fine

General List Tips

Mailing lists building and management is a huge subject that could easily fill entire courses on its own. In fact there are many great courses on the subject. To get you started here's a short list of tips to keep in mind when building your list

1. People buy from people they like and trust
2. Always offer valuable information to your subscribers; they tend to like you for that ;)
3. No one is perfect and you don't have to be either, but you do have to be honest. Be genuine and you will gain their trust
4. If you are genuine and honest your list will be more forgiving when you screw up. And you will screw up because no one is perfect. Sometimes things just go badly, but always do your best and it will show
5. As a general rule I think mailing your list twice a week is ok. Three times at the most, but you'll have to test the waters. It all depends on what you're sending them
6. Be sure to send them valuable non product related info at least 3 out of every 4 emails. The ratio of pure info to marketing info should be high
7. When you do send a marketing piece make sure you only send products you really do believe in and that you believe your readers will care about. If you send junk you will lose trust
8. You will get people unsubscribing from your list. It happens and there's nothing you can do about it. It's simply impossible to make everyone happy. Again, if you're genuine and honest and trying to be helpful then you're doing what you promised. Just roll with it and carry on
9. NEVER EVER SPAM

What's Next?

In this lesson I spilled the beans on how you can pull in a ton of money in a very short period of time using a product specific bonus (Jake's Ance Away Cream Bonus Guide). The great thing about this technique is that it will work regardless of your niche!

In order for this technique to work you must of course have a mailing list which was the focus of this lesson.

So what's next?

I'm going to try to tie the concepts all together again with a big picture overview / wrap up lesson that will fill in gaps and resolve questions based on feedback I've been getting throughout the course.

So please send me your feedback and questions so I can try to cover them in the wrap up lesson. I may not be able to answer every question, but based on the feedback I've been getting so far I suspect there will be a common set of questions that I can address.

Also, your feedback will be very much appreciated as it will help me improve the course which benefits all of us :)

I know there was a lot of material in this course and for some it might seem a little overwhelming, but the important thing is to just get started. It's always easier to learn when you're also doing!

Additional Resources