A few posts ago I promised you that I was going to go into the ways that you can eliminate the mistakes in your list building and really start to make the money that you were ‘promised’ when you came online.

So you’ve been following Guru A or Guru B and soaking in what they are telling you. I mean, if you’re anything like me you soak this stuff up like a sponge… and hopefully take action on it.

Gooroo is telling you that in order to make money you MUST have your own product to sell… and for the most part, he is absolutely correct. What he’s NOT covering is how to go about creating the buzz for that product or how exactly to launch it and follow up.

I mean, you’ve put your heart and soul into a creating a kick ass product. You’ve made sure it has professionally written content (whether you did it yourself, or outsourced it). You’ve marketed it diligently, using social networking, article marketing, guest blogging (well maybe not that), but you get the idea.

You’ve even created a semblance of a follow up ‘plan’.

Launch day comes and ….

It’s not working. The extra sales ‘gooroo’ promised you haven’t done much more than trickle in.

And you’re left wondering what went wrong. What happened?

Well, here are three reasons you are ‘guilty as charged’ when it comes to creating that followup action plan:

1. Your content is great – but it’s not content your reader is drooling to get. In other words, you skipped the research stage. You didn’t find out what he was ‘really’ looking for. Why would he buy from you if it’s not something he’s interested in?

2. Your subject line is limp… there’s no sizzle… no curiosity. There’s nothing there to entice him to open the email and read the message. Your subject lines are suffering from E.D. (email dysfunctionality) and they need a boost of email Cialis or something like that!

3. You have no affiliate program. Think about it… you’ve found a flippin fantastic ebook about butterflies and after some research you discover that marketer A has no affiliate program but Marketer B does. AND it pays 85% commission or better! Who are you most likely to buy from? Um, no brainer? And if it took more time to make your decision than to read that sentence, you’re in the wrong business.

Now, I admit that I am guilty of this one (not having an affiliate program), but I am working on that as you read this.

4. You have an affiliate program – but you didn’t bother to mention it in your follow up emails. Probably one of the best ways to make those extra sales is to have a good paying affiliate program and make sure you let your customers know about it. Tell them in the first or second email you send out… you know, something like ‘I hope you have enjoyed (Name of product) and if you would like to get $xx deposited directly into your paypal account each time you refer another customer to me, click here to get the information need to do this. Simple as that!

5. You’ve outsourced your follows up to someone who isn’t qualified and you may or may not know it. You may be using them because your budget is tight and they were cheap… or you may be blindly trusting someone without having checked their work (or even credentials.)  Even if you do outsource, you need to provide the people doing the work a set of instructions and explain exactly what you are looking for and if they fail to follow them, they fail to get paid. You want your customers feel as if the product is really is coming from you. They DON’T need to know you are outsourcing.

Ooops, ok, I gave you five reasons… but I think you get the idea so far. My next post I am going to go more in depth on the follow ups and how you are going to connect with your reader…

Til then… try to avoid the E.D.