How’s that list building going for you?

Do you check your stats each day, or at least once a week to find out IF your efforts are paying off?

Here’s what I mean

Regardless of what autoresponder service you are using, you should be checking your subscriber stats regularly. What you are looking for is a trend.

An upward trend.

Do the people who sign up to get your gift unsubscribe right away after they download or do they stay on your list for any length of time?

If they are staying on for any length of time, you might be doing something right

but if they are steady (meaning you’re not increasing your numbers each week), or they are declining, you’re probably destroying your business slowly.

Granted, you may be making a few bucks here and there depending on how you have your signup funnel set up and whether or not you have relevant one time or affiliate offers on the back end, but I would venture to say that unless you have established yourself as someone who people are going to learn things from, you aren’t making the cash you expected to make and your subscriber list is dwindling.

Why?

Well, here are three main reasons that your list building efforts are destroying your business:

Your ethical bribe is stale

Stale? You mean like bread?

No… I mean that your ‘offering’ or the product that you are giving away in exchange for their name and email address is old… stale… “I’ve seen it before”.

Why do I say this?

Believe it or not, I participate in a lot of giveaway events and up until about 6 months ago was going whole hog on email swaps… what I see in both of these venues is the same gifts being offered as the bribe.

When I first started out my list building efforts, I had no clue what I was doing, so what I did was download just about everything I could find and I would literally read through all that I could and soak in the knowledge. After about 6-10 of these events I was seeing the same ‘gifts’ being offered by the same people and sometimes even the same gifts being offered by multiple people.

I ended up finding a plr product that was out there and that I hadn’t seen in any of the events, grabbed it, made some changes to make it ‘my own’ and started entering these giveaways.

The first few months my list grew steadily and I realized the power of these events so I sought out to find another topic that I could find plr and do the same thing.

What I see others doing right now is banging away at the giveaways and swaps but they are not changing things up… they are using the same old stale bread and expecting to attract new birds. And then they wonder why their list isn’t growing steadily.

Blasting your list with ‘offers’ everyday

I think this is self explanatory.

Ok, I have a confession, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but of the numerous emails I get each day (I am unable to put an exact number on it because I haven’t really counted, but I would venture to say it’s over 100 consistently) from ‘marketers’ who are out there trying to make this business work, 98% of them are ‘offers’ for ‘the next great thing’…

Some of the emails are fairly well disguised, but a vast majority of them are of the ‘hey,  my good friend so and so just released his brand new ebook and he’s actually given me permission to send you over to it… and he’s giving it away for free!!!’… type of email.

It’s an email swap… they have ‘teamed’ up with someone to trade lists… you know, you send out to your list for me and I’ll send out to my list for you. If your list is bigger than mine, I’ll send out twice for you or vice versa.

Now, these are ok to do once in a while, but if you are doing them EVERYDAY, where’s your content? As I mentioned in my last post, are you one of the ones that are guilty as charged?

Now, you’re asking… how do I know this? Well, remember above I said that I get a ton of emails each day… some of them I will click the link, go to the opt in page and depending on the offer, I’ll opt in. Of course, I don’t opt in with my personal email addresses because they have my name in them, I opt in with a valid email address that I made up to do exactly this…

Believe me when I say 98% of the lists I opt in to, blast me (and probably you) with email swaps  almost on a daily basis and probably 70% of them are offers that I saw last year or longer ago… it’s rare that I see something new.

Why? Lack of creativity maybe… I don’t know.

Which brings me to the final reason you’re destroying your IM business and probably don’t know it…

Follow-up Failure

How many emails do you have loaded into your autoresponder?

One

two

four

twenty?

How many of those emails contain content related to the topic the person signed up for?

You don’t have to answer that…

Now, I am NOT saying that you are like every other marketer out there, whether you just came online yesterday or have been at this for a while, but here is what I see. Nobody is original. You’re bombarding me with worthless crap that has no content, or worse, no content!

I’m not saying this is right or wrong, what I am saying is that MOST marketers are operating under the impression that if they don’t bombard their readers with offers, they aren’t going to make any money!

I am going to go out on a limb right now and say that there are thousands of newbie marketers that have been ‘taught’ that they must continually send out emails for others to build their list and make money.

That is the number one way to absolutely destroy your ‘business’, if you even had one to begin with.

That’s why I asked the question at the beginning of this section… how many emails do you have pre-loaded into your autoresponder?

If you don’t have any… and you’re working from the seat of your pants just blasting your ‘list’ with promo emails, you’ve got a hole in your boat and you’re gonna eventually sink your business!

Stay tuned for my next post where I am going to start talking about how you can use your autoresponder to your advantage (actually what it’s designed to do) and do some things that virtually NOBODY is doing…

if you’re a subscriber to my list, you’re gonna find out about this later today, because I am giving my readers a sneak preview of my next product… sign up before 9pm Eastern tonight to get the sneaky preview….

or wait…

Anyway… Am I way off base, or am I dead on the head of the nail? Leave me a comment with your reaction…

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged with: • •

Filed under: Rants

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!