I'm Gonna Get Flack For This...

Who knows.

All I know is that he who has a strong opinion, as I do here, must be good at dodging gunfire.

Thanks for adding to my post, Stuart.

I want to clarify something I didn't make clear, and I should have...



What I meant was, if you're starting out, ANY ACTIVITY YOU DO should lead to an optin.

If you don't have the SYSTEM (report, squeeze)... create it.

If you have the system (report, squeeze)... PROMOTE IT (Traffic).

My post wasn't one intended to teach process. It was ore of a blip to evoke thought, Clearly, it has compelled Stuart to reflect on HIS experience... And he was generous enough to take the time to share those thoughts (and facts) here.

Thanks Stuart..... everyone, he has very good points here.

True. If you've nothing to SELL, you won't make money.

On the flip side, if you've got something to sell but NO AUDIENCE, you'll make no money.

Thanks to affiliate marketing, stuff to sell is the easy part.

For many, the audience part remains elusive.

A LIST is one way to solve the audience part. (The list needs to be RESPONSIVE but that's another post for another day.)

Hi Ben
yes list building is one of the major things that people should do.

We started with no list, no products and no clue.

We created a product for our niche. We also created a FREE give-away product that had tremendous value.
We then created a squeeze page with Video and text, we spent time on this to make it convert. We then contacted possible JV partners in our niche. We offered them a large % commission to promote our product. The way we did this was got them to send traffic to our squeeze page and get the traffic to optin for the free offer.

I think this bit was an important factor for us - as part of the free offer was an email service that gave them the details of how to profit from the free book they downloaded. This free email service was sporadic and was only sent out when they needed to take action to profit from the original ebook. Because of this we got huge open rates and built a lot of trust with our list. We did this for a while and then made the email service a paid service and this converted really well ( giving the JVs affiliate commissions in the process). This did two things.

1) We had two lists - Free list and a buyers list
2) We had happy JVs as they made money

We then started promoting a high ticket item to the lists we created (when I say high ticket it was £99) and again we gave the original JVs commission on this from their original efforts and this then gave them incentive to re promote our new product.

This again went well. So now we just go through the same process every time. We give something of value away that allows us to keep emailing the list to ensure huge open rates (we get between 50 -80%+) We then turn off the tap and make it a paid service and we then get big conversion rates on clicks to sales as we know they will open the email and as we have delivered really good valuable content we get very high sales rates.

This approach takes time and effort. We can make good money off relatively small lists due to the high conversions.

We look at it like training our subscribers to buy from us. If you try and hit and run you will get low open rates and even lower conversions. I would rather have a list of 1000 people and know that we can sell 150 products at a time at £99 to them then have a list of 100000 people and sell nothing - its not the size of the list its the quality and how you have nurtured the list that counts.

I get emails every day from marketers that are two lines long with an affiliate link in saying "This is the best thing since sliced bread go and buy" Its lazy, its sloppy and its pointless. They think that if they build a massive list of freebie seekers and then blast them with crap they will make a fortune.

Thats my two pennies worth anyway
Cheers
Mark