IMPORTANT ALERT…(please respond)

Re: ACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT . . . <your email address>

Those are just two of the subject lines that have made it into my inbox the past few days.

Have you seen them too?

It begs the question:

Are your subject lines sending the right message?

As a marketer that uses email messages to send content and generate income it’s very possible that you may have fallen into the trap of your subject lines sending the absolute wrong message.

This is a disturbing trend that started a while ago and has progressively gotten worse.

You see, in today’s economic climate there are literally hundreds of people that are exploring ways to add some additional income to their bottom line each month. Maybe it’s just to pay a few bills or it’s to pay for a vacation or the kids college tuition. Whatever the reason is, they are searching for ways to make up for what inflation and the lack of pay raises at the day job are taking away.

And they come online to do it. Why? Because it’s the ‘thing’ to do.

They search…

and they find a ‘guru’ or someone who claims that they can teach them how to generate the extra income through some fancy-dancee, graphics hopped up sales page that claims they can make thousands each and every day.

Right.

Whatever.

Or…  they ‘discover’ (get told) that they need to be building a list and sending emails to create that income and they get sucked into someone’s promise to help them build that list by doing incessant & incestuous email swaps.

However it happens, they get on someone’s ‘list’ so that they can learn how to build their own online business a reap the benefits. The profits.

What they don’t get taught is the fact that they need to develop a relationship with the people that sign up for their own information.

Once that relationship is established through a very defined process, find out what those people need to advance their online business and create products to solve that problem. In a nutshell, that’s the ‘secret’ to building a profitable online business.

Part of what’s not understood is that in order to create that relationship they must have some basic copywriting skills which includes the ability to craft a subject line.

A subject line that, instead of deceiving the reader into opening the email with a promise it can’t deliver, creates curiosity and then gently leads the reader to click on a link to get to the information that they want.

Does that make sense?

So, here’s the question again: Are your subject lines sending the right message?

If you are you on the same lists I am you know what I mean.

Here’s a sampling of subject lines (and my commentary about the use of ‘it’) from the past couple of days that have slithered their way into my inbox:

Thanks <insert name here> – Here Is Your F’REE DOWNLOAD

duuuude, I’m already on your list and your freebie sucked. Why would I want to open up your email and get sent to ANOTHER squeeze page?

IMPORTANT ALERT…(please respond)

What??? What important alert? That you’re sending me to another ‘marketers’ list and I SHOULD be on HIGH alert? I’d like to respond to you personally, but you probably don’t monitor that email address!

{free video} If you “bought” this, I feel sorry for you…

yea, I’d feel sorry for myself if I bought that crap too, so why are YOU promoting it? OH, that’s right, you’re trying to put more subscribers on your list. How’s that working for you?

Re: ACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT . . . <your email address>

Activate my account??? WTH? When did I request an ‘account’ with you?

Or how about:

Re: Bank Depost #4733

Say who?? So you’re sending me a message to tell me you’re depositing money in MY account? Saweeeeet!

That one goes to a over hyped sales page with pictures of a brand new sports car, a house that even I wouldn’t want to live in (nice, but no thanks) and some jimmied up clickbank images.

INCOMING BANK DEPOSIT For <your email address>…

I’m not even going to add anything there.

Now, I must admit that these subject lines, while all real and all have come from my inbox within the past few days, are also being used by ‘marketers’ who have just come online recently (within the past year or so) and are being ‘taught’ that email swaps are a good business model and can create income for yourself.

I beg to differ. I’ve been down that road. It don’t work. It might work IF you are swapping with the right people at the right time.

But the way ‘these’ people are doing it. NO!

So… What does work?

I’ll get to that in my next post…

In the mean time

Is it just me?

Or is this irritating to you too?

Leave a comment to explain…

(p.s. there’s a bonus in it for you)

I’m going to beat on a subject here that everyone talks about but not a lot of people do right.

List building.

IF you do it wrong, you shoot yourself in the foot and you never make any dough online, or you make a little and then it dries up.

If you do it right.

It just works. It really does.

You need a plan. A blueprint.

A Blueprint For Lucrative List Building

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…