Would like your advice on adswaps...

Great advice, thank you - something to definitely consider. I always try to cover my back with the company I keep, so that's a must.

Most definitely, don't want people to get sick of the sound of me

Something I hadn't considered - and something I'm definitely going to pursue.

Most definitely - will be split testing multiple emails and sending out the best candidate for anything I do.

Thanks for the advice so far, really appreciate it.

Great advice. Ad swaps can be soooo overdone! I know of some marketers that swear by doing four or five swaps a week and the other days marketing a product.

Where these people fail is by not ever offering anything of value. Sure, some of the freebies that they promote through swaps can have some value, but where is the value from them personally?

If you are going to ask people to buy something from you, then they need a reason to value your opinion. Give them valuable information. Give them a reason to trust you. Simply sending your list members to another opt-in page again and again is no way to build a trusted relationship.

Be careful who you swap with... if you don't already know them, either directly or by reputation, get some references from people you do know. I've been burned a couple of times by people who didn't mail out when I did, and stopped responding to emails afterwards.

Both times I had gotten careless and hadn't checked them out as thoroughly as I should have, so it's not that hard to avoid this problem.

Hey Karl,

I've used ad swaps successfully and they can really send you a lot of new subscribers and sales quickly.

I mean when you have just one person send you 500+ new subscriptions literally over night from just one email recommendation and dozens of sales sent through your funnel, you can begin to wonder why you hadn't done it before.

But then the issue of "list dilution" can come into effect.

For example, if you keep sending your own list all these emails telling them to go hop on someone else's list every day,

eventually if they follow each of your daily suggestions,

they're now on 100 other marketers' lists.

Now picture yourself in their place.

You open your inbox and see 100 "must open" email subject lines
all from other people who said you just gotta subscribe to this other list.

You'd have to pay a full time assistant just to read them all each day!

So what can you do to reduce the list dilution while still maximizing
the results possible?

Ideally, that's what we'd like right?

Okay.

If you can limit yourself to just a small core group of people you trust,
you can set up regular swaps with them to get that initial boost
without having to dilute yourself by spreading your subscriber's attention divided between 100 others.

The reason this works is because if you only have 5 regular people
you are swapping with,

You can still receive the traffic from each of the five each week
or month but you have also greatly reduced the list dilution too because there are only 5 other marketers they're receiving emails from.

This is provided those other 5 aren't swapping out daily which would mean your subscribers would now be wading through the 100 other marketers emails recommended by the partner you sent them.

So it's a good idea to choose only the partners who are using other methods for growing their business instead of just ad swaps as their primary source.

This way you greatly reduce the response-killing "list dilution" side effects while you still get to enjoy the business building benefits of more traffic, subscribers and sales.

One good way to track your progress and hold yourself and other partners accountable for your results,

is to create an excel file that you name,

"Karl's Stats"

You list each of your five partner's names there.

Then for each one, you list:

1. the date of the swap with them
2. the number of clicks they sent

This will help you keep track.

You can also use it as a scheduler by booking the date and time
with each one in advance so you can have it on file for easy reference.

Of course you'll want to have your pre-written email you send to your partner so they don't have to do any other work except personalising
it with their own signature.

It's a good idea to have this ready to send to them as soon
as you discuss it so that you show you are professionally on top of things and ready to do business you take seriously.

(It also helps you to "get it done" and out of the way so you don't put it off until the last minute and then scramble to crank out some email copy!)

The truly beautiful thing is when you begin to split test different versions of your:

*subject line

*ad copies

*different dates of sending

*different times...

...because now you have this ultimate response version you can have partners send on your behalf for months (or even a year or more!)
and be somewhat confident of what results you can expect because
you have tracked your squeeze page opt in conversion rate and number of clicks along with the other metrics.

You may or may not decide to put up a one time offer to redirect your new subscribers to immediately after they subscribe.

But if you do, you can also reasonably project how much money you'll make every time a partner sends out your email swipe for you because you now know:

for every xxxx # of clicks sent, you make xxx # of OTO sales
and earn $xx per click!

The important thing is to just get started with it so you can test how it fits your own business preferences.

One of the reasons I suggest starting with no more than 5 partners at first, is because if you don't like the way it works for you,

-you can just begin to purchase solo email ads or use other means of generating new subscriptions without going to the "point of no return".

On the complete other hand, I know of some who use ad swaps daily and they just continue to send thousands of clicks from new visitors to their websites daily and just depend on that burst of new traffic and sales then rinse and repeat--fully aware of the list dilution.

To me, that way of doing it seems like you would always have to continue to schedule more and more swaps just to keep your head above water at your current level, but then again, they are introduced to new trusted partners from the ones they have swapped with regularly before so it doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.

Whatever you decide is the best approach for you I hope this may prove to be helpful to you and wish you the best as always.

-Doug

Both adswaps and solo-mails have worked for me.

Here are some tips from my past experience:

1. Do about 4 adswaps a month. However, don't agree to do adswaps with anyone. Check out their offer first. See if it's really good stuff before you announce it to your list.

2. With the adswap copy, don't be afraid to tell the list owner that you will change the wordings of their ads. Tell them that doing so will increase the response.

Your list will know when you send an email that sounds out of character.

3. Always check the response rate of your adswaps. It's an excellent way to improve your copywriting skills. If you find a good offer or a particular title that your list responds well to...put this in your marketing or create new products from it.

4. You have to be careful with solo-mails. Don't buy a solo-mail based on number of subscribers. I've seen students of mine getting 22 subscribers from a list of under 60,000. He got ripped off.

Buy a solo-mail based on the number of clicks...which is what matters most.