followup messages: should 1st message be a promotional one?

If you split your list in half and tested both sequences separately you would find out which one works better. This way; you would have a certain data to use on your future businesses.

But; building a relationship by using free information to get more sales later is a working strategy and should get you better results than promoting from the beginning.

It should be only if your subscribers expect it to be. It's all about expectation-setting and expectation-fulfilling, really.

That's exactly what I normally do.

No - they can't, really (not validly and helpfully, anyway!): not without knowing about your traffic demographics, niche, what you've given them for the opt-in, and what their expectations are. It really does depend on those things.

May I offer three posts/threads which might be relevant to your questions?

This one's about setting their expectations and branding yourself.

This one's about "how long to pre-sell for and when to send the first "offer"."

And this one's "the essentials of list-building".

Relationship first - then the selling. Makes your promotion come off better and more personal just because of the relationship part that came in first.

It's amazing how much a good relationship can do - people often buy just to maintain/enhance/reward/refresh relationships.

I currently have a list on my new blog that doesn't sell anything until around 7 emails in. I am trying to build a relationship with my list to begin with and am not in a great hurry to start selling to them, I'm hoping this tactic will serve me well in the long term.

OK I am going to give you some big tips.

1) People want more value these days, do not just sell them.

2) Get their trust, and offer real hard core value.

3) You should be testing where your value goes and then your offer.

4) Get inside your customers head, and really press their frustrations to them.

5) You need to give content with offers, so on your 3rd email works best, is give content, and then hit them wtih the offer 3rd or 4th.

6) People want proof these days, not to be sold to. Do not give them reason to buy your chit, give them reasons why the cannot afford to leave you and your product alone.

7) Again like 6 offer proof 'Hi, here is my client jason, who lost 96kgs in only 3 days' Here is a video of skinny jason and what he has to say, his story is absolutly amazing. Click play to learn more...... then have a video ready for them with a GET THE XXXXXX and XXXXX today.

See where I am going with this, soft sell them, do not fart arse around and wave offers in their face. Do it the frankie boy kern way. It works wonders!

Hi Manuel,

I would advise - Test and validate for yourself; and don't worry too much about making mistakes. You really can't avoid them so make them ALL as early as you can so you can get past them!


If everything you send to your list (AKA friends) comes from a place of sincerely trying to help them get what they are looking for, then you can ALWAYS make an offer to them. Sometimes the offer can be just to learn more of they click a link (Copyblogger does this with real elegance). I always try to push soft offers.

Here are some examples:
1) Top 10 reasons to do market research first (The content: list of reasons along with resources which include some items you would be affiliated with...)
2) What scaling can mean for your business (The content: how you scale big once you have an offer/traffic combo that converts profitably... BTW if this sounds hard I can help by providing a service/app/whatever...)

Save the "hard offers" for those "special occasions" that warrant a good excuse for a hard sale.

By special occasions:
I mean ones that come out of the normal "special occasions" we all get our inbox filled with (and mostly ignore) around the holidays - here are some examples.
1) Special occasion: I ran across this yesterday and thought of you - I wonder if you could use as new way to do your maker research? (The content: here is how I'm doing research to find new products to sell... BTW this is the tool I'm using, am an affiliate of, and it's getting me results because of these reasons HARDSALE, HARDSALE, HARDSALE...)
2) Special occasion: The server crashed yesterday because of all the traffic - It made me wonder if your servers were up to handling your traffic load? (The content: here are some tools to test and a service I've switched to and am an affiliate of and it rocks because it will help you in these ways HARDSALE, HARDSALE, HARDSALE...)

Useful even if they don't want what you're selling. If your content is ALWAYS useful to them they stick around. (If you're valuable to them - entertain and educate - then nobody will mind getting soft sold. Anyone who does you want off your list anyway because they become your "nightmare customers" if they do actually buy something).

I hope this helps man, I hope the best for you.