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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

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You’ve probably read in many places online, and have come to the conclusion that, the easiest way to make a living online is to have a list of subscribers.

A list of people who are chomping at the bit to whip out their credit card and buy your next product.

But here’s one of the questions you have to ask: HOW do you go about doing that?

You can have a huge list of 100,000 people BUT if they aren’t ‘buyers’, you ARE NOT going to be having any cash funneled in to your paypal account.

On the flip side, you can have a list of just a couple of hundred people that are very responsive and they can lead you down the path of prosperity.

You CAN have that type of a list by following the strategies that I will outline as I add to this series and also in List Building From Scratch.

First and foremost, as I mentioned, you MUST have a list that is going to be responsive to your messages.

So…

Again… HOW are you going to get that list?

Well, the ‘gooroos’ out there are going to tell you it boils down to three ways, of which you can only use two:

The Fast way, The Cheap way, or obtaining High Quality subscribers

You can do it fast and cheap but the results will be low quality. MYTH #1!

You can do it the expensive route and have very high quality subscribers but it’s not typically going to happen fast. MYTH #2!

The third strategy is the most effective they tell you to do it, inexpensively – generating high quality subscribers, but it’s going to take patience. MYTH #3!

In List Building From Scratch, I dispell those myths and spell out a strategy that you can use to build your list fast, build it with very little cash coming out of your pocket, AND generate high quality prospects.

While there is definitely more than one way to generate an income online, the most effective way to do it for long term results is this: you drive highly targeted traffic to a site (or several sites), have an optin form to capture name and email address, and you present relevant offers on the backend.

Get that process right and you have the makings of a very successful online business.

Get it wrong and you’re a statistic. Someone that sees ‘easy button’ stamped all over things, lays out bucket loads of cash, has nothing to show for it and claims that Internet Marketing is a farce.

In the next post I am going to go into some of the ways you ‘encourage’ visitors to fill out that opt in form and be added to your list.

One of those ways is the ability to write copy that will convince the visitor to fill in their name and email address and click submit.

If you think that you don’t have that ability, check out this resource from a fellow marketer that I have learned a lot from; Robert Plank.

In his Fast Food Copywriting, Robert reveals a quick and painless formula for writing compelling sales copy that will have your emails written, your products launched and your web sites up and running in less than an hour!

It’s a formula that I follow and it will definitely help you out.