So, you’ve got an opt-in page in place. You’re driving traffic to it. And folks are joining your list.

Congratulations!

Now what?

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How do you keep these people ON your list?

You need to do several things, but there are four CRITICAL things you must do:

Let me briefly introduce them, and then I’m going to change the way you look at your list and give you an incredible advantage over most other list owners in “making money” from your list.

Really, there are only four basic “kinds” of mailings you might send to your list members.

1: INFORMATION

Content. Stuff that your list members can use and benefit from reading … directly related to the “theme” of your list. And, I might add, information is the REASON they joined in the first place.

2: PROMOTION:

Secondly, there are promotional pieces. Advertisements. In other words… offers. These include things like solo mailings, new product announcements and paid advertisements. This is where you are going to make your money, whether through your own products or through that of others.

3: A COMBO PLATTER: There is a type of mailing that might best be described as “combination”. It’s a mixture of both promotion and information. A newsletter is a perfect example. It has both advertisements and useful (it better be!) content.

4: PARTICIPATION: Last, there is what I call “participation”. This type of mailing is rarely used because most ‘marketers’ (and use that term very loosely!) don’t recognize the incredible opportunity in using it. A “participation” mailing is any message to your list that gets them “involved” some way in building your business.

So, those are the “kinds” of mailings that you probably send to your subscribers… information, promotion, combination, participation.

It’s all about “offering a proposal”.

Now, it doesn’t take a real rocket scientist to figure out the first three.

While there are a variety of different ways to share information with your list (articles, special reports, mini-courses, interviews, videos, for example), and I think you get the idea. It’s all about content.

There are a variety of different ways to send promotional mailings (solo mailings for your products, affiliate products, reprint rights products, services, subscription sites, and such) you get the idea here as well. It’s all about selling something.

There are several different ways to interweave content with offers (an article that promotes a product, a video tutorial that shows how to use a paid tool), once again, you get the idea. It’s about blending content with an offer.

The problem comes in on that fourth one: “participation”.

Most people don’t see the value in it.

Most people don’t use it.

Most people don’t know HOW to use it.

At least not effectively.

In my next post, I am going to go over the ways you can get your readers to interact with you…believe me, you won’t want to miss that one. I’ll share some of the responses I’ve received from some of my readers….(don’t worry, names will be changed to protect the guilty…)

Hey, if you liked this post, leave me a comment and let me know (it’s that participation thing, ya know;))

Til then…

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In my last post, I went over a few ways that you can entice, or encourage your readers to sign up for your list. Today, I am going to cover the four components of the signup process that you absolutely must use. Skip one of these steps and you are leaving money on the proverbial table for one of your competitors to take.

Building your list is simple, once you know how to do it. One of the more popular ways to do it is through the use of a squeeze page. This page serves one function and one function only; to get your visitor to sign up to your list. This page can be as simple as an opt in form loaded on to an html page. Generally speaking though, it’s a ‘little’ more complicated than that.

The first thing you absolutely must have is an account with an autoresponder company. I recommend Aweber and I also use The Ultimate Marketers Center. It is a good idea to have accounts at two company’s, just in case one of them ‘disappears’ for no reason all of a sudden.

You need the autoresponder account so that you can generate the form that you are going to ‘install’ on your page that visitors will fill out to subscribe to your list.

The next thing you need is a bribe. An ethical bribe. Typically this is in the form of a report, an ebook, a piece of software, just something that is going to pique the interest of your visitor and they will provide their email address to obtain this ‘gift’. You actually don’t need their name but most marketers use the name field so that when they are sending emails out, they can personalize the message with the reader’s name in the subject line or the body…this isn’t necessary but it’s a decent idea to collect their name too.

So, how do you ‘encourage’ your visitor to fill out their name and email address? First off, you must have something that interests them and they are willing to provide you their email address in exchange for the product. Secondly, you need to have short, concise, curiosity driving copy. There is no need to have long copy with many different points to try to convince them to sign up. It’s much easier to have a headline, a couple of quick lines of text explaining the product, 3 bullet points highlighting features and then the optin form. That’s it!

If you are providing more than a page worth of information about your product, it’s overkill. You want to have them curious about the content in the product and that will be enough to get them to optin.

Once they enter their email address and click the submit button, that’s where a lot of marketers are missing the boat. You absolutely must change the ‘normal’ chain of events that happen after they have clicked submit
button.

I have opted in to so many peoples list for something of interest and find that they are using the default pages provided by their autoresponder company and that is where you are leaving a significant number of dollars out on the table!

You MUST monetize the process! I hear your question: How do you do that?

Let me explain. Once your visitor has clicked the submit button, you need to change the ‘redirect’ link in your autoresponder form to go to a different page than the default page. The absolute biggest reason you MUST do this is for the purpose of generating more income. What you need to do is build a page that has links for affiliate products that you are promoting and that are related to what you are giving away OR if you have your own related product, add the image and a link to that. It’s basically free money. If the person who has just clicked submit is interested in the offers that are listed on this page and click on a link and buy, guess where that cash goes?

In your paypal account! How do you like that?

The next step that you must do is to monetize the confirmation page in the same way. When you are using the confirmation step in your autoresponder system, the person requesting the report/ebook/softare will receive an email that will require them to click on a link to confirm that it was them that requested that information. It’s that page that you will also monetize in the same way you did the ‘thank you’ page.

You will do this in the same manner. When they get to that page, the headline will read something like ‘thanks for confirming your address, your download is at the bottom of the page, but before you get there, here are some related offers you might be interested in’. Doing this increases your odds of generating additional income during the entire signup process.

Now, it’s up to you to keep that subscriber on your list. I will cover some tips on how to do that in the next post.

If you liked the video, I created with Camtasia and then used Easy Video Player to upload it…easy peasy!

See you next time

Ron

Hey, welcome back!

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In the last post I was covering some of the ‘Howze’ of building a list and I went over briefly doing it quickly, spending a lot of money, or just plain getting quality leads…

Well, today I want to cover ‘encouraging’ your readers or website visitors to sign up to your list.

If you are using any traffic generating methods at all (and you should be), you are driving people to either a blog, a squeeze page or a sales page that SHOULD have some sort of an opt in form.

Now, I am saying SHOULD because I have seen my share of pages that DON’T have this component.

Let me ask you – If you don’t have that component built in to your site, HOW do you expect to build a list?

Maybe your content is good enough that people are going to bookmark and keep coming back again and again…

I kind of doubt it…but even so, if you don’t update your blog with new content on a regular basis, HOW the heck are they going to know that you have posted?

Hmmmm…maybe encourage them to sign up to your list to get an update email everytime you post new content.

What a concept!

BUT, I (or you) don’t ‘just’ want to sign up and clutter up my inbox with emails from every Tom, Dick & Harry everytime they post something…I NEED some incentive.

How about you?

THAT is where the ‘encouragement’ or the ‘ethical bribe’ comes in.

You NEED to provide something valuable for them to type in their email address and their name.

‘What’ is that going to be?

Have you written a report about a topic in your particular niche?

Give it away…

Do you have access to some ebooks (that have giveaway rights) that you can provide for your visitors?

Give them away as a package deal…

Have you developed some software that is going to help people do something faster, easier, better?

Give it away…

Getting the idea?

Good…

If you are looking for more information about building your list, check out List Building From Scratch – The Report where I go into more details, tactics and strategies on building a list from nothing.

Next message I am going to cover the concept of building your list with a squeeze page and the process you MUST use.

til then