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…

So I left you in the last post pondering what happens when your open & click through rates in your emails begin (or continue) to plummet and your sales have become non existent.

I see this concern being posed in some of the skype groups that I frequent. People are asking if others are experiencing the same thing. Open rates are down. Click through rates are equally down.

Yesterday I received an email from a fellow marketer that I follow and the theme of the message echoed what I am writing here. He threw out some numbers relating to the size of his list and his open rate and relatively speaking, it was pretty bad. His open rate in the past few months?

Less than 2%

What’s the reason?

I have a pretty good idea what it is, but it’s not the reason that is being bantered about in the chat rooms.

The reason I am hearing in the rooms is that the recession is still hanging on and people are just not spending money right now.

or

It’s the beginning of summer (at least here in the U.S.) and people just don’t spend money in the warmer months.

Everything is being blamed for the lack of opens/clicks/sales except for what the real reason is.

You see, there are a lot of people who have come online looking to supplement or displace their offline income and do it with very minimal effort.

They ‘buy’ into the dream, or at least they sign up for the dream. Whether that be a coaching program or an affiliate program or creating their own products.

One of the first things they are introduced to is list building. The ‘guru’ is telling them the same thing that you are hearing; ‘build a list, build a list’, you’ve got to build a list… and they are introduced to email swaps as a way to accelerate the list building effort.

As I mentioned in the last post, that is a great way to build a list and build it fast but here are three mistakes you may be making and the reasons that your open and click through rates are plummeting and you’re not making any money:

1. Not providing them with access – to You

How many times have you clicked on a link in an email that you have received and it’s dead? It goes no where. 404 error. What do you do?

Well first instinct is to ‘reply’ to the email and let the marketer know. Have you tried that?

Good luck with getting a response!

What you REALLY need to do when setting up your auto responder account is to use an an email address that you monitor on a daily basis your ‘return’ address. That way if a subscriber has a question about ANYTHING in any of your emails (especially your follow ups) all they need to do is reply to the email and it comes into your inbox.

So, provide them with easy access to yourself

2. Not thinking like your customers

Think about when you first signed up to get your first free report… what happened?

Did you get a ‘thank you’ email with a brief introduction to themselves and another link to the download page or did you get nothing?

Go back to that simpler time… what would you want… a nice little introduction to who you’re getting emails from or to get blasted the next day with an email from them ‘promoting’ ANOTHER ‘free’ product that you have to sign up for again?

Think like your customer… take the time to build a relationship with them. Segment your lists a bit and ONLY send out swap/promo emails after providing your new subscribers with some very valuable content or more related free downloads that they don’t have to opt in for.

There are too few marketers out there that do this and if you can do it, you will stand out as someone they will begin to trust and want to buy from in the future.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for once.

3. Being erratic and inconsistent.

How many messages do you have loaded into your autoresponder for new subscribers that will be sent out on autopilot when the subscribe?

2… 3… 10… 20… none?

One of the worst things you can do is to have someone sign up and then NOT send them quality, relevant content… I’m not talking about blasting with broadcasts for your next email swap or offer, but actually taking some time to load up with great content.

Be regular and consistent.

Are you making any of these three mistakes?

Leave me a comment or suggestion below and stay tuned for the next post where I will start going over how easy it is to eliminate these mistakes and having a plan to do it.

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Are you sabotaging your list building efforts without even knowing it?

Or, a better way to ask the question is; in your effort to build your list AND pad your profits, are you self sabotaging your efforts?

Let me explain what I am referring to and also in the same vein, let off a little steam about what I see going on in the IM business.

I am going to guess that you, and probably 99.9% of the people who have ventured into the Internet Marketing realm within the past five years (including myself), have heard over and over again until you are ready to barf is: you need to build a list, you need to build a list…

And that’s true. THE ‘secret’ to creating an income that is going to replace your full time income so that you don’t have to go to work everyday, is building that list.

But…not just ANY list. A RESPONSIVE list. A list of buyers.

You can build a list of 100,000 subscribers and if the overwhelming majority of them don’t even open your emails, how are you going to get your copy read?

Wouldn’t you much rather have a small list of readers who respond to the emails that you send out and purchase from you on a regular basis than a ginormous list of readers who are indifferent?

If you didn’t answer that question in your head with an EMPHATIC yes, then my friend, you might as well just cancel your autoresponder, webhosting and domain registration accounts and go back to your 9-5 ‘workin for the man’ dead end job!

Because you don’t ‘get’ it!

I’ve mentioned in the past that I subscribe to numerous ‘marketers’ lists and I get, on average, a few hundred emails a day. I use these emails as a learning experience.

I typically will skim subject lines and unless one catches my attention, I will bypass it. But if it’s from a marketer that I know provides good content, I WILL open it and read, regardless of the subject line.

Why do I skim subject lines?

I want to see what the others are doing…

what can I learn from them?

What are they doing?

Why are they doing it that way?

Should I be doing the same?

If I see the same subject line from several marketers, it probably means that there is a launch going on for the next new shiny object… I may open one of those and read the copy and click through to the sales page just to check it out… If it catches my interest, I’ll make some notes on it and copy and paste some of the sales copy for future reference.

Do I buy? Maybe… if it will help my business out…

but in most cases, No.

More often than not, here’s what I, and probably you also, see for subject lines…

“Confirmation Required – please save this email”

“Your Confirmed Download Link”

“Re: Your Download”

“URGENT: open immediately (critical)”

“Thanks (YOURNAME), Here is Your Download Link ($XX Value)”

the same subject lines over and over and over again…

Now, I don’t know about you, but unless I have just signed up for someone’s gift or another resource from someone, I know for a fact that these subject lines are attempting to get you to open the email…

and if you want to be really straight forward about it

under false pretenses

I WILL say that almost all of the subject lines above are from email/adswaps. Meaning that two marketers get together and decide that they are going to mail out for each other so that they can ‘share’ and ‘build’ their lists respectively.

In theory that is a pretty decent way to build your list fast. Here’s how it works

Let’s say you have a list of 1,500 subscribers and you are working with a person who has a list of 2,500 subscribers.

Both of you send an email to your respective lists, and depending on the responsiveness, you can theoritically increase your list by a bunch.

Let’s look at that.

You both exchange subject line and copy to send out. You know that your’s is optimized because you have tested it and it converts…

you have tested it, haven’t you?

You get subject line and copy from your fellow marketer and you can only trust that he has done the same… at this point you should, as a practice, go through their sign up process. How are they doing it? Do they have a One Time Offer in place or are they just using default autoresponder pages… maybe they have something set up different than you do and you can implement into your process at some point… the point is, you want to see how they handle the sign up process. Plus, if it’s a decent ebook, you might learn something.

Anyway…

Just taking some basic numbers… you have a list of 1,500 and typically when you send an email out 20% open it. That’s 300 readers who open your email and read it.

Now, let’s presume that out of those 300 people, half of them are interested in the content of the email and click on the link, that’s 150 clicks… and if the other person’s squeeze page is set up correctly and converts at 80 percent, that’s 120 new subscribers for the other guy! Not bad.

So let’s flip it around… he sends and email to his list for your offer. He’s sending to 2,500…20% is 500…half is 250…you already know that your squeeze page converts because you have done everything in Squeeze Pages On Crack! and your page is optimized… guess what? You’ve just got 200 new subscribers! Again, not bad.

These numbers are purely theoretical and are not typical. Your results may vary significantly.
But I think you see the potential with adswaps. You can build your list very quickly if you are exchanging with people who have responsive lists and they are interested in what you have to offer.

BUT, there IS a downside and you may just be self – sabotaging your own efforts:

Most people are NOT copywriters and haven’t got a clue on how to write a subject line much less the content that makes up an email that readers are going to click through. So they are resorting to ‘deceptive’ tactics to get you to open the email and read the copy.

So, you’re going to end up sending out emails to your readers with the subject lines that I have listed above… and your readers are going to become very wary of those subject lines and they are going to stop opening your emails.

What happens when they stop opening your emails?

Your messages aren’t getting read… and what happens when your messages aren’t getting read?

Your click through rates plummet.

And when that happens… guess what happens when you send out a legitimate email with an offer for an affiliate product? Or, GASP! a plr product that you have flipped and have for sale…

You get very few opens…

Sales are non existent or very few…

And if sales are ‘slow’… that means you aren’t making any money… and if you aren’t making any money…

Well, we don’t want to go there, do we?

How do you combat this dilemma?

Come back tomorrow and find out…

See you then