Maillist cash Extraction Goldmine part 4

  Throwing Out Prospects Doesn’t Get 
You Organized

The bottom line is stop starting again. If you've done so before, it might be 

too late to revive your old subscribers without being reported or attacked, if 

you're thinking about it, don't do it. Five hundred people is a gold mine on 

its own, and hey, only fifty more of these and you're at 25k already. If you 

have no idea what I'm going on about with all this giving up lists stuff, 

great. Take note and fix your organization and your situation before 

starting anything new, or you might just find yourself in the above situation 

and wasting the last few weeks, or even months in severe cases of your 

promotion time and budget. (I’m still amazed at how many actually throw 

prospects away).

Am I Building My List by Doing This?

Next up, this is a great starting block to help you on your way to building 

your list as one of your main resources. Am I building my list by doing this? 

Ask yourself this question every time you carry out a task. In fact, you 

should really be asking yourself if what you're doing is helping you build 

one of your five primary resources. If it's not, then you shouldn't be doing it 

because it's likely you're wasting your time and your money at the same 

time.Always think in terms of your list. When you ask affiliates to promote your

site, are you gathering the leads that the affiliates send to you for your own

list? When you're discussing joint ventures, whether they're long term or

short term, are you thinking about whether it'll benefit your list? Heck even,

when you're mailing your own list, or contacting your affiliates, or placing

an e-zine ad, or dealing with PPC search engines, are you increasing your

leads, is your list getting bigger and being packed with quality subscribers?

Lead generation trumps immediate profit every single time. Never lose

sight of that.

Something I really want to show you now, and that's how the people with

established personal lists of their own customers are pure gold. You'll want

to give them whatever it takes to get access to them, even if it's just an ad

or two sent by them on your behalf. Imagine how awesome would it be to

be able to wake up in the morning with a new product, put it together and

immediately have an instant and free promotion tool at your disposal

where your product reaches not only top affiliates, but at the same time

people who are willing to part with their cash.

If they're not willing to spend on your products, then quite frankly you

shouldn't want them on your list. A way to ensure that the people on your

list do indeed part with their cash for peoples products is to get your

contacts from other private lists through simple joint ventures that allow

you to take parts of their list away and add it yours, a simple ad swap for

example, or joint venture that sends their list to your product/follow-up

system, or even better; through an endorsement. Joint venturing at it's

most basic, but at it’s most powerful.

Professionalism Revisited

So, moving on, how seriously do you take building your own list of contacts

that you can use as a very powerful bargaining tool and to grab free sales

from whenever you launch a new product? If you've been around for any

length of time, it wouldn't surprise me if you've been told list building is

more important than making sales, or even the other way around in some

cases, sales being more important than building your list.

The first quote you probably heard from some of the more experienced

marketers out there, is how building your list is all important and how it's

the be all and end all of your marketing. This is probably why a lot of

people get downhearted and quit, they believe that because their list isn't

growing fast enough, they won't succeed. This is simply not true. We've

got all those other juicy resources to build and compliment each other,

affiliates, customers, JV’s, long term customers and of course your list.

The second quote gives me the giggles. It's typical geocities marketer stuff,

where someone sets up a free site with popups all over, trying to show us

all that they know everything there is to know about marketing (I don't think

anyone knows everything there is to know about marketing), anyway, the

general trend of these types of sites is to try and persuade you that the

people earning big incomes from marketing aren't telling the truth, or don't

know what they're doing. This is where you'll generally be told that sales

are the most important thing a marketer can aim for. Totally wrong, but, I

digress.

Where Your Most Effective List Comes From

The problem with both of the above statements, is that while the second is

a totally strange conclusion to come to and is totally incorrect, and the first

statement is somewhat true to an extent, it still doesn't give you the whole

story. Where do the best parts of your list come from? Leads? Nah, e-zine

ads? Nope. Free subscription boxes? Nope again, it's your customers, the

people who buy from you. Think about this, if you've made a sale before,

where is that customer now? Are they on your list, or did you let them

escape? These are the people that should land on your list before anyone

else. The important ones that have bought from you before, and most likely

will again if you don't discard them or forget about them in a hurry. So this

is where the fun part comes in.

You'll notice that everything I talk about links into building the other four

main resources along with it, and this is no exception or coincidence. How

about making sales, and taking money for a subscription system or a

website for the simple aim of building your resources, in this case, your list

(although probably the other four along with it too).

Now here's something I see quite often from the top marketers, that you

could most likely overlook if you haven't bought into these products or got

involved before. Take this opportunity to think for a moment. If you could

set up a product with the sole intent of building your resources, what would

it be? At this point I'd expect replies associated with giving free stuff away,tell-a-friend scripts, and some sort of mass e-book library give away like

we see all too often nowadays. Boring!

The Ultimate Tried & Tested List Builder

How about doing something a little out there, that everyone seems to miss

because they don't get any immediate cash rewards? How about setting

up a single sale product, or a membership website with the sole intent of

building your resources, but not a free one? A profit-based website where

you will receive no profit, or very little profit come to that. Sounds strange

huh? On the surface of it, I can see how I'd be getting funny looks, and do

indeed get funny looks when talking about this. Think for a moment

though.

Remember again, we talked about pulling all your resources together, and

the five main resources that will join together to make you money? I'll take

one example here, using an affiliate system as home base. Up goes your

website, up goes your high commission affiliate program (abnormally high

that is, I'm talking 80% and upwards) then out go your JVs which you're

giving 100% commissions to. What’s the point you might ask? Well, whilst

Mr. Joe Nobody is out there with his site, and from the start trying to make

cash by selling stuff people through search engines and e-zines and the

like, you've just set up a huge circle of resource building goodness.

People are attracted by your amazing affiliate program in this example

(You can go other routes, like very well made products for a reduced price,or some sort of great offer, but this is the easiest to demonstrate for

numbers sake). Once you have people attracted by your affiliate program,

out comes the numbers of affiliate promoting for you. And already, you've

got people doing the work for you, although granted you're not getting paid

directly. Don't forget though that these guys promoting will not only build

your customers, your long term customers, and your list at the same time,

but they've just become your resource themselves adding to your affiliates

that will stay with you and promote your future products.

See how you went from a seemingly totally unprofitable idea that most

would throw out the window immediately, to an all singing all dancing

resource builder. Cool huh? Who'd have thought paying people to promote

something that you're not making a profit from would be such a powerful

method of marketing.

Now even though it's pretty easy to come up with such a site, something

I'd like to touch on here before moving on is your site itself, and specifically

how you're gathering your contacts (or not gathering at is seems some

prefer strangely enough). How about those lovely intrusive sticky out things

that pop up at you and make a “clicky” noise when you land on a website. I

don't know about you, but quite often I click off if I see one of them about.

How about the old dirty popups that attack me when I forget to enable my

blockers after downloading an update? They just don't work anymore, and

if they're not doing their job, there's absolutely no reason for them to be

there.

 Be Careful Not To Interrupt Your Sales
Process

The one thing I will say to you is don't interrupt your sales process at all if it

can be helped. This is especially true when you're selling a product to

make a profit, and you don't want a couple of off putting popup windows to

put your customers off. There's plenty of other ways that this can be done.

Maximizing Subscriptions Without Losing
Sales

There's plenty of ideas out there, such as the in a hurry system we talked

about earlier, where you have a separate subscription for either at the top

of the page and preferably down the side of the sales letter that offers

people the chance to subscribe to your list, either through conventional

means, offering something for the signup, or even through popunders,

which although I'm not a fan of, they're better than popups that detract

from your sales letter.

You can also offer your visitors the chance to receive the sales letter in a

split format through follow-up if they don't particularly have the time to read

the whole thing straight up. Any of these methods beats the conventional,

due to the fact that you're not interrupting the sales process. If you feel

you're losing out on subscribers you can always create a product purely for resource building like we mentioned above. The only time I'd consider

sales to be more important than plopping a dirty great subscription box in

front of your visitors and potential subscribers, and this is when you're

selling a high ticket item. I'm talking $250 upwards, because to be honest,

if you're selling something at this price, the people seeing the product

should already have you on their trusted list, and you should already have

them on one of your lists or as part as your resources, whether it be your

affiliates, customers, long term customers, your mailing list or even your

joint venture prospects.

Non-Profit Resource Building

Moving on from this, and developing the non profit resource building ideas,

there's another way to look at this too, the first of two being to sacrifice a

profit for resource building. Now ideally, you'll want to build all your

resources at the same time. However when this is not possible through a

specific circumstance joint venture for example, if you get the choice of

sales over resources, don't do it, resources over sales every time, unless

you've set out to sell a high ticket item.

Remember, like we talked about earlier, and I'm going to say again and

again until every single person reading this dreams about it, where do the

most powerful resources lie? JVs, other people’s lists, people that have

already spent money and are willing to spend more, the best affiliates, the best buyers, the best customers, all on other peoples lists already. You've

no need to go searching for new blood when others have done the work for

you. Scored a JV with a good list owner? Nice job. You better make sure

you gather them as leads over sales, because you may not get another

chance to sink your teeth into this particular valuable gold mine.

The second option relating to sacrificing profit for resources is through e￾zine ads. Oh yep, I have no doubt they still work, and there's plenty of

good well read publications out there that aren't there just to provide

another source of advertising for us all. Subscribe to a few and see what

they’re about before even thinking about sending ads to them. When you

know your target market is contained within, get out there and start hitting

the e-zines through paid solo ads (generally the only ones that seem to

work) with the sole intention of building your list.

I've seen some great examples of people actually selling a product, but

placing a kind of entry page, a taster if you will that asks for information

prior to them being able to read your sales letter. Whilst this doesn't

immediately interrupt a sales process already in motion, it can hurt profits if

you're not selling a lower price item, again with the intention of building

resources, and if you're not one heck of a copywriter that can persuade

people to move on and fill in details with the minimal of information about

you, get practicing and tracking or stick with alternative less risky methods.

On a random note, I saw a website the other that day that featured these

entry pages but with no lead generation forms. What’s worse is the website

owner’s affiliates are promoting these pages! So much scope and potential

wasted through a minor oversight. Don't do it.

A Few Final Notes

Lastly a few quick notes on how not to do things, and some questionable

activities that could be made better use of. First up is the Free stuff for your

subscription, does it work? Yeah it does put simply. Remember though,

quality over quantity. We’d rather have a 10k JV from a private list than a

shoddy 100k from a dodgy ad list or something like that. Don't give away

too much! Every day I see people giving away a free ebook library of a

hundred ebooks written in the early 1990's. I can tell you now, that if

anyone actually did subscribe to get these free gifts, it was the only

reason. I sure don't want a list of a million freebie seekers, and I'm

guessing neither do you. If you're giving it away, make sure it's not shoddy,

but make sure it's not worth hundreds of dollars too.

OK well, that’s all of it for now. We just dealt with the lead generation

specific areas here, but as you can see it's not the easiest thing to do when

all of the top five resources are tied into one and another. Make sure to

remember this above all else.

Summary

● List building is another one of those subjects that's drummed into us over

and over again through many different products and services, and rightly

so. It is one of the five most important aspects that will decide the fate of

your business.

● Most list building services, if you haven't spent a whole bundle of cash

on them already, I have to say, are useless and will cost you more than

they net you, or even get you into trouble. The old 100k mailing list by the

end of the week thing which I know myself and many others fell for during

our early days just do not work full stop.

● The reason is quality over quantity. Would you still want a 100k list if I

told you my personal list of just over fifteen thousand subscribers regularly

outperforms ads I've previously purchased to go out to hundreds of

thousands of subscribers?

● We don't want to get you a list of fifty thousand freebie-seekers or a

hundred thousand that have been paid a small sum to subscribe. That's

not at all what we're after. We're aiming for a highly-targeted, highly

responsive list that will respond to your offers again and again.

● I should say at this point that there are people out there who do make

their living through spam and unsolicited email, numbers over quantity They pick up servers in other countries that don't have anti spam laws, or

aren’t restrictive in any way, and send out millions upon millions of mails,

and sure they make money.

● In my eyes, however, this is not online marketing. It's not ethical, it

doesn't build a solid business base for your future, and it gives those of us

with legitimate lists a bad name, and just makes our lives harder than they

need to be. If this is the kind of info you're looking for, you won't find it

here. We're looking at real business.

● OK, tip number one, the hardest part is getting started. The number one

thing that I've seen relating to lists from the people I've known that have

come and gone over the years is that they were put off when they first

started out, quit and went searching for an easy option. There is no easy

option that works.

● List building however, done properly, with a solid product at it's base,

using the knowledge you've been taught thus far can however without a

doubt put you up, two, three, five or even ten thousand subscribers in a

few short months, so don't fret. It's not easy by any means, but it sure isn't

hard either.

● Before we go further, I want to assure you again that numbers don't

matter. So what if you only have 500 or a thousand subscribers? If they

trust you, know you and your products, and have either bought from you

before or knowingly subscribed being interested in what you have to offer, I'd much rather have this list than a purchased list of low quality leads ten

times the size.

● And on that note, there's something else I want to get out to you right

now, if you've done this before, or have thought about doing it, or haven't

done it yet, listen up, because it's amazing how many people I speak to

and on asking how their list building is going, and they say to me oh yeah, I

only had three, four, five hundred on it, so I ditched it and started again.

They weren't responding to me anyway. How to make them respond to you

is a different report altogether, but please, do not start ditching lists like this

to get organized again. Stop starting again.

● Next comes a great starting block to help you on your way to list building

and using your list as one of your main resources. Am I building my list by

doing this? Ask yourself this question with every site you set up, everyone

you talk to, every joint venture you score, every product you release, in fact

in every method of marketing you use.

● Always think in terms of your list. There are many different types of lists

of course, standard ones for promotion, lists packed with affiliates, or long

term customers that get that something a little extra special, but you should

always be building a list of some type.

● If people are landing on your site, talking to you, reading your stuff, or

buying your products and they don't have a chance to jump on one of your

lists, you might as well be throwing money down the drain because you're

losing quality subscribers imperative for future promotion and the growth of

your business. ● How awesome would it be to be able to wake up in the morning with a

new product, put it together and immediately have an instant and free

promotion tool at your disposal where your product reaches not only top

affiliates, but at the same time people who are willing to part with their

cash. This is our aim.

● If they're not willing to spend on your products, then quite frankly, you

shouldn't want them on your list. A way to ensure that the people on your

list do indeed part with their cash is to get your contacts from other people

private lists through simple joint ventures that allow you to take parts of

their list away and add it yours, through a simple ad swap, or joint venture

that sends their list to your product/follow-up system. Joint venturing at it's

most basic, but at it’s most powerful.

● A question I see asked over and over again is, “Are sales more important

than list building?” Some say no, but they miss the point entirely. Sales is

list building. The people that buy your stuff are the most important lists

you'll ever have. The list of people that have purchased from me before are

almost ten times as likely to buy from me again than to have a new

customer come along and buy my stuff. This is where the most important

list of all should be coming from.

● If you could set up a product with the sole intent of building your

resources, what would it be? At this point I'd expect replies associated with

giving free stuff away and a tell a friend scripts and some sort of mass e￾book library give away like we see all too often nowadays. Boring! ● How about doing something a little out there, that everyone seems to

miss because they don't get any immediate cash rewards? How about

setting up a single sale product, or a membership website with the sole

intent of building your resources, but not a free one? A profit based

website where you will receive no profit, or very little profit come to that.

Sounds strange huh? On the surface of it, I can see how I'd be getting

funny looks, and do indeed get funny looks when talking about this. Think

for a moment though.

● Remember how we talked about pulling all your resources together, and

the five main resources that will join together to make you money? I'll take

one example here, using an affiliate system as home base. Up goes your

website, up goes your high commission affiliate program (abnormally high

that is, I'm talking 80% and upwards) then out go your JV's which you're

giving 100% commissions to. What’s the point you might ask? Well, whilst

Mr. Joe Nobody is out there with his site, and from the start trying to make

cash by selling stuff people through search engines and e-zines and the

like, you've just set up a huge circle of resource building goodness.

● While everyone was cramming in the front door at the same time, you’ve

sneaked around the back and got in without a queue. It was smoother and

far less work.

● People are attracted by your amazing affiliate program in this example

(You can go other routes, like very well made products for a reduced price,

or some sort of great offer (but this is the easiest to demonstrate for

numbers sake). Once you have people attracted by y useour affiliate program, out comes the numbers of affiliates promoting for you. And already, you've 

got people doing the work for you, although granted you're not getting paid 

directly. Don't forget though that these guys promoting will not only build 

your customers, your long term customers, and your list at the same time, 

but they've just become your resource themselves adding to your affiliates 

that will stay with you and promote your future products.

● See how you went from a seemingly totally unprofitable idea that most 

would throw out the window immediately, to an all singing all dancing 

resource builder. Cool huh? Who'd have thought paying people to promote 

something that you're not making a profit from would be such a powerful 

method of marketing.

● Before we move on, I'd like to talk to you about your contact gathering 

and how you're doing it. How about those lovely sticky out popups that 

attack you every now and then? They do still work, but be careful where 

you put them.

● We need to avoid interrupting the sales process, especially when you're 

looking at selling a high ticket item. There's a load of ideas out there about 

how to do this. The 'In a Rush' system, that allows you to simply offer 

people the chance on your side or top navigation bar to receive the sales 

letter and info about your product through subscribing.

● How about integrating list building into your sales letter? if you can get 

them reading in the first place, it's a lot more likely they'll continue, even if they have to input some detail to get their hands on some sensitive

information sent directly to their inbox. I like to use additional proof here,

such as bank statements and sales figures from my business. Even entry

pages that are designed solely for lead generation as an entry to your

lower ticket items. There are plenty of ideas to be had, use them as an

alternative to popups if you can, and always be on the look out for new

ideas.

● Any of these methods beat the conventional, due to the fact that you're

not interrupting the sales process. If you feel you're losing out on

subscribers you can always create a product purely for resource building

like we mentioned above. The only time I'd consider sales to be more

important than plopping a dirty great subscription box in front of your

subscribers, and this is when you're selling a high ticket item. I'm talking

$250 upwards, because to be honest, if you're selling something at this

price, the people seeing the product should already have you on their

trusted list, and you should already have them on one of your lists or as

part as your resources, whether it be your affiliates, customers, long term

customers, your mailing list or even your joint venture prospects.

● Moving on from this, and developing the non profit resource building

ideas, there's another way to look at this too, the first of two being to

sacrifice a profit for resource building. Now ideally, you'll want to build all

your resources at the same time. However when this is not possible,

through a specific circumstance joint venture for example, if you get the

choice of sales over resources, don't do it, resources over sales every time, unless you've set out to sell a high ticket item or you already have an

established resource base.

● Joint ventures: This is where a lot of your powerful resources will come

from. Customers that are pre-qualified, targeted, have bought or promoted

in the past. The best buyers, the best affiliates, they're all already out there

on marketers private lists. Scored a JV with a good list owner? Nice job.

You better make sure you're gather them as leads over sales, because you

may not get another chance to sink your teeth into this valuable gold mine.

● Don't feel lost just because you've been given a choice. You're not losing

out by using any one of them. They're all as effective as each other at

fulfilling their roles. 

            

    Thanks for your time my blog post reading.....