I've had an Aweber account now for about 3 years and failed to capitalise on it, probably I haven't even covered my costs. So now is the time! Other reasons: - inspired by ParthS's post here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1408183 - I know from my own affiliates that list building yields the highest conversion rate Now let me be clear here, with list building there are two ways to send emails to your list: 1. follow-up emails, set to automatically be sent to every new subscriber. You set the time gap (in days) between each email. 2. broadcasts. You send an email and it goes to the entire list. Now let me tell you. Like many others, I am not the kind of guy who finds it easy to update multiple lists, blogs or whatever on a regular basis. It's too much hard work and you get those days where you just don't want to do any work so your blog/broadcasts will suffer. So my own plan is to stick to follow-ups ONLY. The only exception I make to this rule is to send broadcasts when I want to SPAM an affiliate link, er I mean make some money (of course I don't spam, just a joke for anyone reading without a sense of humour!). So I've started off with an opt-in page with free ebook for a popular niche and already lined up about 10 articles posted as follow-ups at a 2 day interval. Each articles has links to 2 different CB products: one mid-way through and one at the end. I also do a bit of pre-selling after the user clicks on their confirmation link. I'm going to throw some EZA traffic at it to see how it goes. I'm going to wait until I have a substantial amount of traffic before I start trying to increase conversions by tweaking. Anyone else big into list building and can share some tips? It would be great to share ideas, tips and ongoing projects in this thread.
What niche are you building a list in. I have several lists and have had varying degrees of success with those lists. Different techniques work depending on the type of niche. If it is IM niche, I could definitely give you some insight from my experience.
I haven't gotten into list building yet in my affiliate marketing efforts but I do have some experience in my day job. Of course we send out email blasts when we have a big sale or special offers but some of our most effective campaigns are those that only have a vague sales pitch. In those campaigns we offer product tips, current trends and we feature one of our employees. Also, totally unrelated to our business we offer a recipe of the month and people have loved that so far. As a subscriber to many lists I can say I am least likely to buy from the guys that just keep pushing products to me. I am more likely to unsubscribe or not open mail from these types of marketers. The guys that incorporate some humor or some value to their emails I will give the most attention and consideration to. I think Travis Sago does a good job with this approach to his email campaigns. Anyway, I'll quit rambling. These are just some of my thoughts on the subject.
Hi Greg, actually I do have an IM list already. Having a lot of passion for it, it is broadcast only. But I only write occasional mails. Sometimes once per week, sometimes once per month. A bit like Allan Gardyne, I don't write often. I have made a few hundred through selling memberships but nothing spectacular. I personally don't think this effort is scalable across several niches though (I have trouble focussing on one thing as opposed to many) so personally speaking I still feel I need to crack the nut of doing many niches and using follow-ups only and concentrating on non-IM or "ordinary" niches so to speak. Interesting info squeezeplaycards, I see what you mean. And we all have our own favorite lists for all these reasons: the style, the humor, the regulars like quotes etc. Again I'm looking at follow-ups but you gave me a great idea: there are so many quotes sites these days that I can easily bolt one onto the bottom of every email. Hopefully will encourage some to always read through the entire mail to read it! Basically I can't reveal my niche yet but I will say the following: - an continuous improvement niche (David Allen Bullock touches on this in his free ebook). It is hard to write 100/200 emails on a very narrow subject - a niche easy to write for in a conversational style. The other day, I churned out maybe 10 articles in a day without using much reference sources. So I'm going to submit to EZA today and will report back with traffic such as unique displays, opt-in conversion rate, opt-ins per day and sales. I am going to have the same target as Parth: 150 opt-ins per day. This is sufficient to do some good split testing of email campaigns too!
Here's something else I might try later: recycle my website posts as follow-up emails. For example, I have a poker website with strategy articles. These are perfect for follow-up emails, each with a couple of ads interspersed. Some people use PLR as follow-ups but I feel that even the so-called high quality PLR is poorly written and lacking a personal touch.
Anyway, I've submitted 7 articles to EZA. Knowing how tetchy EZA can be, hopefully they'll approve at least 5 of them tomorrow/Tuesday. And I've got over a month of follow-up emails lined up.
I mentioned earlier that I'm putting 2 ads in every email. I remember someone telling me that if you put ads in every mail then readers are used to it and don't object to ads in future on broadcasts, for example. Anyway, to grab the attention of readers to click on the links in my ads, I'm using snippets of text from the sales pages and also from Adwords ads. Why invent new ones when someone has already done the work for me!
I agree about PLR being badly written, I just rewrite it slightly to use as content for newsletters though. Does anybody know how often you should send out emails to your list? I remember I read somewhere the time intervals. I think you mail them every few days at first, and then further apart as time goes on? Does anybody know the actual formula?
I have seen varying opinions on the time gap between mailshots, none of them conclusive. The only agreed principle is you should tell your subscribers at the beginning how often you will mail them and then stick to that. Anything else and they may get suspicious or leave your list. Back to my progress, I have been slack for a whole week on this. Today I wrote 3 articles/emails. Key Stats List1: 19 subscribers opt-in rate: 23.4% zero sales so far List2: 4 subscribers opt-in rate: 28% zero sales so far
Tempted to start list building myself, If I did it would most likely be a IM niche since I would personally find some products hard to keep on mailing about. Great post btw rolf seriously making me want to try building a list.
As Rolf said, there is no one-size-fit-all formula and what works actually depends on so many things. If I may list a few, they are here How fast you are able to drive the point home that they've got to buy your product How you want to regard your relationship (i.e; if you are not too much bothered of unsubscriptions, you can push harder and quicker) Demography of your subscribers and cost of your product Not all of you may agree, but to a little extent, your compulsions also have some influence on the spacing of follow-up mails As everyone has experienced, he or she will have to find out what suits them because it doesn't just concerns you but your list also. And, these are amongst the reasons for each email marketer having different results. PS: mine is a rather new list (not huge) but it is growing at a healthy pace
Not a problem. But there is not much to write about. Although my site is about 2 years old, I started list building just three weeks ago and it is still in beta, if I may call it so. My main traffic stress so far has been on article marketing and a little bit of link building and it is working fine to start with. I am planning a change to link building plan and start what I call forwardlinking which worked great for me in the past. The pages/sites I link to are going to be handpicked by me and me only and no need to underline that they will be in my niche. So far things are moving at a "military" pace but is steady. I am not in any hurry to test out broadcasting or pitching in the sales push just yet. I am hoping to create an environment for the leads to fall into place rather naturally than by pushing them. It takes time, but that's how my strategy is, for now. Rolf, thanks for your interest
Alevoor, a bit late but thanks for sharing. Now, I am going to come back to list building, just a heads up. My last effort tanked because I did not keep up with it. Now I have finished a handful of regular SEO affiliate sites, it is time to come back to list building. I'm going to get very aggressive with it and work like crazy over the next week. I have a lot to do, most of it will be traffic generation and writing initial emails and creating freebie reports where necessary. I know some people get disappointed when threads like this fizzle out (I confess that an older thread of mine: $1,500 per month in 60 days was a disaster!) but I have a strong incentive to succeed with this. I also have total buyer lists for my products of a few thousand (have not been collecting from the beginning) that I need to monetise (done nothing with them so far) so this will also be interesting. I've heard various estimates but 50 cents per subscriber per month should be an absolute minimum (and that's for a non-buyer list i.e. using a freebie incentive). Given that, I'm kicking myself about my lack of focus till now! So please stay tuned! thanks for reading.
Hi Rolf, Good to see you back. Hope these 3 months have been good for your list building. My list has grown to some size and I had paused the campaign after the initial month of promoting it. The opt in has really kicked off after I have added a OTO completely for free and even those who were not validating their emails have been doing it now. So I think the same goes for broadcast emails also. The bait has to be very strong and tightly worded to have higher CTRs. Now I can say that having a list is good. I have tested my list for traffic building and in my case it had worked out to something like 20% click through rate. May be not so good but I am still learning my ropes, you know. Mind sharing what you think?
Hey Alevoor, glad to hear you had progress on your lists. Can you share how much you made? Those 2 lists I made, I only wrote a handful of articles for and now have about 80 leads in total. Man, if I had just written a few more I could have several hundred or even a thousand by now! That's a few hundred bucks a month done properly. Damn! Sure. I went to Warrior Forum. I don't hang out there much these days because you just get bombareded with new ideas and WSOs and all that jazz - I prefer to keep a clear head. At least here on DP you just see a ton of affiliate links in the sigs But there is probably more "gold" nuggets there in terms of solid marketing info (less friendly place though than here) but I created my own swipe file, I am even thinking of turning it into a report to give away! Here's some of it, I knew a lot of it already but having it in one space is nice:
Hey Rolf, I think we both share a few common traits - Warrior forum is good but is too much for a newbie (purely my opinion). Well, my success with list building is not so big but worth the effort, I think. I started off with a 200+ uniques per day so it was a bit easy to kick start the optins. I ran the campaign for a month and had about 500 signups. What worked for me initially is (pssst...) I opted for single optin to scale up quickly although I knew it isn't strong as a business tactic. I am not sure if I would have opted for this strategy had I started list building 2 years ago but since I was in a hurry with list building (not that I had a big promotion lined up but probably I was all charged up to have a list) I have withdrawn the campaign (article submissions) once I reached 500+ and whatever optins I am getting now are purely incidental, nevertheless, it is still going. So, you know, my experience is small but for me, the satisfactory thing is I could pin point as to what worked for me and what not. Here is what I did through the campaign-- I had just added the optin form onto my original home page (obviously a naive move to have done by any serious list builder) After a week of lacklustre response, I removed the original page, risking my adsense campaign and SERP and replaced it with a short sales copy - complete with dramatic techniques, bullets, blatant headlines etc This increased the signups dramatically but without much affecting my adsense as I had retained the sidebar as well as the navigation bar. This went on for about three weeks SERP took a small beating but this was expected. What I think is you have to identify your priorities, and for that time period, list building was upper most for me. It was a kind of temporary compromise for me when you had to choose between the two. As for followup emails, I need to tell you two things. I didn't have a product to push, in fact I didn't wwant to start bombarding the leads so quickly (some people may laugh at me) Marketing is a psychological affair, Being professionally trained in marketing capital goods, the thing that has sunk into my mind is you can somehow sell ice cream to an Eskimo but not a CNC machine until he decides that he wants one I have spaced my followups very liberally (7 days, in general and 10 in between 4th and 5th). The idea is to get my message to the psyche of my audience, giving them enough time to mull over the topic at their chosen pace. Yes, you can make a few good sales by bombarding them every 2-3 days but there is also a good chance of scaring them away. There are always certain things in life that we think we can do better with them but still don't hurry with buying decisions. This doesn't mean that they will fade out of our minds. So, to keep your leads' interest level intact for long times, you need to make a good first impression, again a good second impression that are good enough to make them recognize you the third time, however long it may reasonably take. Okay, that's about my theory. There are failures also, in my story. I tried JVs unsuccessfully but that was in the very beginning when I didn't even have 100 leads. Withdrawing the campaign in a week's time might be another mistake but I had to look at the SERP and my adsense revenues too. Let me know what you think about this.
Hey Alevoor, interesting strategy. Rather than tinker now (when I have hardly any leads), I will split test later. I have decided my niches. Basically I will be sending 2 mails out per week. Now listen, I am notoriously bad at keeping blogs up to date. The best blogs for me are about timeless subjects. Anything has to be updated regularly like "news", I am a failure at. So basically, these lists are going to be the only "regular" things I need to do in my work. No more news blogs or anything like that. ONLY these lists. Now I've decided my lists. I know its crazy but I'm gonna have 16 lists! With 2 emails per week initially thats a total of 32 emails per week! Mind you, they are not as long as articles (nor as boring!!) Here's the breakdown: 4 buyers lists (health niche) that I already own (need to warm up these lists again probably with a freebie as I've never emailed them before, but potentially I am already on a goldmine here with a few thousand emails). 3 internet marketing lists (I already have a product creation one. I will also make a general affiliate one, and then an IM sub-niche. IM seems the most responsive so why ignore it). 3 health lists (already have 2 that I did for the beginning of this experiment, added one more. Also will do a twist for one of them) 6 totally different niches. Already have affiliate sites to put an opt-in in the sidebar but will still aggressively get traffic. Time will tell which of these niches are good and which are not. Now I need to carry my notepad around with me. I have been bad at updating in the past due to writers block. But I get most of my ideas when outdoors hence the need for a clean page for every list to write down topics to talk about. Today I only decided the above. I spent a little time doing a very quick new affiliate site around the 2012 niche Tomorrow is entirely list preparation. Next week is traffic. I am strongly considering PPC, there are a few tricks I will try out and maybe spend 50 Euros on to see what happens. btw David Allen Bullock has some cool info on listbuilding.
I've lost a small fortune just because of not paying more attention/ learning list building and email marketing... My first year with CB is soon ended, and 2010 will be a much prosperous one. Looking to become a vendor as well, and definitely list building will be one of the main keys in my business. Al./