Building a list of email subscribers should be the overall goal of every Internet marketer. Most marketers start with affiliate marketing, this is the easiest way to start to earn money online, it doesn’t require you to have a product or even a website and it is simply a case of promoting other peoples products or services for a pre agreed commission.
This in essence seems like a great deal, the product owner pays you anything from 50% to 100% of the product value ( yes it is now common place to find commissions of 100% of the product value, but more on that later) and all you need to do is send visitors to the sales page.
If you do this and spend time and more importantly money in driving traffic to this sales page the only person making any real money is the product owner. The product owner is quite happy to give away the majority of their commission, as I said earlier, its now commonplace to find 100% commissions such is the competition for people to sell their products (affiliates like you), this is still very attractive to them because the product owner is collecting a list of BUYERS they can market to time and time again all in the knowledge that this customer is a buyer not just a subscriber, its a Conservative estimate a buyers list is worth 50 times that of a subscriber opting into get a free product.
This sums up the importance of building a list of email subscribers, product owners are so desperate to find buyers nowadays they will give the entire cost of the product away just to get a buyer on to their list so if its this important for them don’t you think you should also be collecting these subscribers?
I have covered how to find niche markets and identify keywords in other posts on this blog so for the purpose of this article I will assume you have identified your target market and product.
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The list building set up.
You are going to require some essential components to be able to build a list of subscribers. I will identify the steps required and the methods that work best.
- Auto responders
This is the system that collects your visitors details, name and email address in most cases (although it has been proven recently that collecting just the email address improves opt in conversions)
I personally use trafficwave although there are several companies that offer great services.
The auto responder allows you to add forms to a web site that collect your visitors details and automatically send pre arranged emails in a follow up sequence so once you have Set up this sequence of say 10-15 messages the system works without any further input. Be careful here to make sure you research this step thoroughly, once you have an autoresponder changing is almost impossible so choose wisely!
Starting out they all appear much of a muchness, most offer a free 30 day trial and all start around $18 – $20 per month, the crunch comes further down the line when you reach a certain number of subscribers, most services charge on a sliding scale of subscribers, the more you have the more the monthly charge is which is why I use trafficwave, they have a fixed monthly fee of just $17.95 regardless of the number of campaigns or subscribers and it is an extremely reliable robust service.
- The ethical bribe (gift)
The easiest way to provide a worthwhile incentive for the visitor to give you their email address is to provide a 10 – 15 page report focused on the product you are promoting. Make sure you research your market and provide genuine information that will enhance the product or make even more valuable. Alternatively you can find free software or PLR products, all of which are freely available online.
- The Squeeze page (Opt in form )
This is the page that collects the visitors name and email address. It is always better to use a pre sell page when promoting any affiliate product. Sending the visitor directly to the sales page has been proven to result in far lower conversions than a visitor who has been pre sold.
This can be in the form of a simple blog with a product review, you can get a free blog with several free platforms, blooger.com and wordpress.com being the most popular but ideally you sholu look to set up a hosting account as soon as possible to enable you to have multiple blogs hosted on your own sever. Hostgator have a plan that gives you unlimited domains and bandwidth with the best live support I have ever come across for just$8.95 per month so well worth the investment.
If you are going down the route of marketing your free offer first in the hope of getting the visitor to join your list a 1 page squeeze page which displays your offer is all you need, again this is easily put together using free software and is hosted on the same server with hostgator.
- Follow up email series
Many marketers make the classic mistake of trying to sell to new subscriber from the word go. Big mistake! Before you can Begin to sell anything to your new subscriber they need to know, like and trust you.
They can get to know you by providing insights into you as a real person. If you have a blog (highly recommended) send emails and refer them to interesting posts you have made, always provide unique content that will help your subscribers in whatever niche they are in, always try to over deliver in the quality of your content and slowly your subscribers will look forward to your emails.
This all adds momentum to then starting to like you, make topical posts and use humour, we all like to smile, so make them smile whilst all the time delivering worthwhile content and very soon you will have a list of subscribers that now know,like and trust you. This now results in high open rates for your mail and the trust now builds very quickly.
This doesn’t have to be over a long period of time by the way, it does depend on your chosen niche however as to how often you can mail, in the “Internet marketing niche” its common to mail out daily and some marketers adopt the strategy to mail out several time a day, this is very much a personal choice and you will do whatever you feel comfortable with.
I have found when building a new list that the first 6-8 emails I send are purely free content, interesting blog posts on how to find edu and gov back links for example, PLR downloads, and useful software which can all be found freely online. I make sure I give some background to me as a person and also very importantly I spell out what I do and how I do it. A lot of marketers fall into the trap of over delivering on too much free stuff and when the time comes to send a paid offer the subscribers are almost offended because they genuinely believed you were put on this earth to provide endless free gifts!
I am in the Internet marketing niche and I Begin by explaining exactly how this relationship is going to work, I tell them I will give them short cuts to success and several ways to make money online and I will ensure the receive at least 1 free gift of real value each week. I am an Internet marketer however, something they should also be aspiring to and I will be sending daily some times twice daily emails if I find information or products I believe will genuinely help their chances of success, I will never recommend the next big push button super system without full knowledge of how it works and all the products I do recommend will be used by me or will have been thoroughly reviewed by me.
This to me is laying out the ground rules, there is a far greater chance of retaining a subscriber if they know whats in store and I am a big believer in transparency in whatever route you take.
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Conclusion
Hopefully you now have far more insight into setting up a list building system and more importantly why it is so important. If you are starting out and need the basics, take a look at my list building product, “super sign up system, this is a complete system in a box and includes a good converting squeeze page, free gift of 7 ebooks, thank you page and download page and its priced at just $10! for my subscribers (Normally retails for $17) Take a look at it here, its professional quality and the perfect introduction to setting a complete system up, once you are up and running just look to add more gifts to ensure you are always offering fresh products.
List building can seem like the hardest thing in the world to achieve, follow these steps ans stay focused and you will succee