I just wanted to chime in here and say that if you are not using an autoresponder on your landing pages then you are losing money! An autoresponder will capture email addresses from your visitors. They will then receive a series of emails that you pre-wrote and added to your campaign. You can set it so they receive an email every day, every other day, etc. You can use an autoreponder to give away a free 5 day course or something like that. Each email should have your hop links so that they can buy right away. You can also send emails to them about other products that you promote. I use Aweber. It has all of the features that you need and once you set up one campaign you are a pro. You can set up any amount of campaigns, so you can have a different one for every product that you market. Aweber does everything for you as far as the form goes. Once you set up your campaign, you just drop a snippet of code into your page and the rest is taken care of. Most of the biggest marketers use Aweber and you should too. By the way, I have no affiliation with Aweber and am not an affiliate. I just wanted to share this obvious tip in case you have overlooked it. Even if you only got 5 signups a day, that's 150 new people a month that you have a direct line of contact with. It adds up fast!
Yes, 100% agreed - I have seen it from both sides - I have made more money as an affiliate when I have used my newsletter, conversions to my own products are 2,3,4x higher than other sources on traffic from my newsletter, and as a vendor my best affiliates convert better, and in MUCH bigger quantities than any other type (i.e. ppc / article marketing) without a list. I see all these great landing pages, blogs, websites without lists and I literally cringe when I realise they don't have a list and think of the money they are losing because of it. On an older site of mine that used to get 30k traffic a month I had a list of 20k+ and used to do ad swaps, with a similar size list in return I would be looking to get 2000+ people onto my site and grow my list substatially , and also send my traffic out and make $500-$2000 in affiliate commission. I once contacted a site who were receiving 30-50k traffic a month about doing an Ad-swap - I didn't even realise they didn't have a list, but when they told me they didn't then there was almost no point in dealing with them - the $500+ I would make by mailing out for them wasn't worth it without the traffic I would get back from their mailing, so even though they had been in business years longer than me, had great conversions, and solid products it wasn't worth me getting involved with them - I'm still in shock when I look at them as literally their business could be 3... 5x (?) bigger if they had started getting a list a couple of years ago. In the same light I would rather be promoted by an affiliate who had a list of 1000 but only 100 new website traffic monthly than an affiliate who had 1000 new traffic to their site each month but no list.
i used aweber and had 20 people sign up my first month from my site. not much but out of the 20.....8 bought from me after at least 4 contacts of email to them. at $30 commission each sale that was $240 i would not have gotten. as of now...just 5 months after starting the autoresponder, i have 3,000 people in my list! if just 5% buy that is an additional $4,500 in my pocket...all for $19.00 a month
I would agree it's a good idea, but only if you have something of real value to offer. If not people will just opt out or not respond to the request to opt in the first place.
I do agree that a list is powerful, but what if you don't really have something to offer them that ties in with the product you're promoting? For example, I am focusing primarily on the gaming market right now and the main keywords I target are ones like "how to unlock XXX system" and similar words to that. They are most likely looking for a solution right then and there so I give them some information on my landing page and send them to the product that will unlock their system or whatever. I can't think of anything I could offer the person in exchange for their email address that ties into this since the only real answer to their "problem" is the software that I am sending them to. Anyone have any ideas? It's much easier in a market like muscle-building because you can give them a free report on tips to build muscle or a diet plan or something along those lines and then send them to the product. If someone is looking for software or files though as opposed to information, what sort of "free report" could I possibly give them?
You don't have to offer them something in every contact, in fact, it is best not to. Send them a newsletter with tips, info, or opinions. When you do have something to sell them, they will already know and trust you as the guy that gave them free info so many times in the past. You can also use your newsletter to "continue the discussion" in your forums.
At the very least "exclusive discounts" ?, I don't know the gaming market / vendors but do they give away any ebooks, or any simple tips you could put together into one yourself? or a "Free Chapter"? Or how about.. "Breaking methods of unlocking and the latest news" "Our must have exclusive report which tells you how to not destroy your xbox in the process" / "exclusive report: 3 mistakes people make when chipping a playstation and how to make sure you avoid it" .... can things go wrong? if so tell a story about how it can / has and offer the vendor product as a solution - step by step, safe guide etc. "Our exclusive Xbox Cheats eBook" (easy enough to get from somewhere probably?)
Thanks for all the tips guys. I didn't even think of offering them an ebook with game cheats in it for the console that they play. That's a really good idea. I'm sure I could throw something like that together pretty easily or even find some PLR stuff online about it.