Scrapebox and xrumer are close cousins to what I wrote.

You know those billboards that say "get your [benefit] by turning at the next exit"? Same concept, replace billboard with webpage, and exit with google search.

I wrote it myself.

Average snippet:

"Hey, have you heard about [product]? (google [keyword] to see what I mean) It might help you with your [problem]."

As for scaling it up, I've done that. That's the point of the software. What I'm asking is for ways to increase the value of my visitors. 0.08/visitor isn't very valuable. And for all intents and purposes I'm just direct linking to those offers from the SERP.

The next component in my funnel needs to be some way to warm up this traffic to the offer. I honestly don't have a clue about this aspect.

A possible alternative component would be some sort of viral script. Traffic Zombie comes to mind. (google it ). The problem is the lack of certain features preventing me from putting it on some of my sales funnels.

I did. It has since been closed after a week in the wild.

I understand the benefit of building a list. For a simple monthly maintenance fee, you are able to repeatedly drive people to whatever offer you want. I have seen the results of listbuilding efforts, and cannot deny its effectiveness.

My problem is lack of knowledge on how to properly apply listbuilding. I have gone out, set up an email account in Google Apps for one of my domains, and signed up for every possible list that I could find. If there was an e-mail opt in, I signed up to that list in the hopes of finding some sort of nugget in reverse engineering a list.

My experience has been as follows:

A particular fellow--Matt Bacak (sp?)--sends a short e-mail out every day to his list promoting some new product. He hasn't repeated a product in about three months except for that one time he was promoting his own product.

A lot of WSO promoting list owners seem to do the same thing. They are pushing each others' WSOs pretty hard.

I don't really see to much in the way of examples on how list owners are building relationships with their list. Alex Jeffreys is the closest I can think of. He keeps pushing his list to sign up for his webinar which sells them on his $5,000 private mastermind/coaching course.

Amish shah seems to be in the middle of some sort of product launch as he has released another series of free videos. I don't think he has released a product in the sub 4-figures in a long time. The mobile app company he is a member of (Bitzio) hasn't really improved in price on the stock market much since the launch of that product. That suggests that the apps the company have been developing and marketing are not generating enough revenues. The example apps presented in his webinar promoting his product either do not belong to Bitzio, or are no longer making money. The fact that his company Digispace and his mobile app company have both seemed to sell for low multiples of their earnings suggest that their earnings have either decreased, or Amish is a bad businessman.

Ryan Deiss seems to be following the same track as Alex Jeffreys. His e-mails push people toward webinars. He talks for a fairly long time in his webinars about his multiple membership sites, or high revenue ventures. When I look him up, get a background check, and do more due diligence on the companies where he is definitely associated, I can only find a handful of websites. Some of his more recent forex products in particular were outright scams. He is excellent when it comes to painting a rosy picture, from which I have been learning for my own product releases.

Lee Murray's initial list was full of semi-useful content. After about e-mail #5 or #6, it dissolved into the same cycle of promoting product after product.

This balance between offering good free content and monetizing the traffic you can generate is unclear to me. Can anyone suggest a good example of a list owner's relationship with their list? I'd love to subscribe.

This is partially why I am looking for ways to generate viral traffic instead of building a list. Viral traffic methods leverage my visitor's ability to spread the words to their friends. The trust factor between friends is higher than the trust factor between me--a potential expert--and this new prospect. In a way, I retain the same benefits of owning a list by leveraging other people's contacts and relationships with their social networks.

superwarrior's WSOs are good examples of setting up viral traffic--in theory. He uses tell-a-friend scripts or tweets in exchange for discounts off of some PLR that was pulled together. My implementations are not as successful. Most of the viral traffic WSOs I've seen here are excellent--in theory. When I try to implement, I am not as successful as they are.

I'm currently using Aweber. I have a couple lists on there which combined add up to 3,900 double opt-in emails. I have a basic autoresponder sequence in there for each of the niches I'm promoting in. They generate some opens (5%) and some clicks (<1%). According to one of Frank Kern's videos those metrics mean my subject isn't working, and my body isn't working. I don't know how to improve either.

I don't know how to measure the quality of the traffic. But I can say that each of my visitors actively searched on google for my website. The extra effort it takes to copy and paste a search term into google as opposed to clicking a link suggests enough curiosity that they are slightly warmer to my offer than the 'clickers'







The biggest obstacle--I think--in getting my visitors to turn into buyers is the lack of pre-selling them on the offer. I currently enjoy 100% CTR. my own testing shows that I need help preselling visitors, or otherwise getting relatively cold traffic to do what I want them to do--convert.

I say this almost every chance I get...people are going to start thinking I'm paid to get people to go to their sites before too much longer! I think you should subscribe to Pat Flynn and Spencer Haws. I've been on Pat's list for a year and a half, and I can't honestly remember a single time when he has promoted anything. He might send an email a week, or sometimes just two in a month. It's the infrequency and the personal tone he takes that keep me opening them.

Spencer is the same way, except he does occasionally promote something. I think I've only seen him promote his own stuff though, and he only has a couple of product lines. All the rest is just really good reading and then links back to his site.

Pat Flynn: Passive Income: The Smart Passive Income Blog
Spencer Haws: Niche Pursuits | Find Business Ideas, Niche Websites, and Much More!

Maybe those will help you out some.

-- j

if you want to be on a good list, I highly recommend signing up for Talkbiz.com run by our very own Paul Myers. His newsletters are very well written, and he does not bombard you with offer upon offer, like many marketers do. In fact, I can honestly say his are the emails I always open, without fail.

and no, I have no ulterior motive here. Just stating my opinion.

Most list-owners don't know how to keep their readers happy, I'm afraid, or at least that's been my experience.

It's been done.

Where were you when it happened? :p

I'd have to agree with everyone when it comes to offering something for free. It works both online and off, people simply can't resist something that is free.

I'd say you should offer them some free ebook, report, course or PLR material and then send them to the CB offer after they've signed up or downloaded the free offer. This will likely also make your traffic driving efforts more effective as you can tell people to "Google *term*, that should help, they have free information." or something like that.

This can also be a way to build your list.

Alternatively, you could offer free membership to a member's area on your site. You could then treat this like a blog and post useful information periodically. This increases the value for the visitors as they aren't only getting one ebook, they're getting a free subscription to an "insiders only" style website. You could say that membership is $10 a month but they get it free.

This will also let you keep them interested through both the list and the website. The constant updating and increased return traffic should also help your website ranking.

It just an idea, if you're still looking for a great writer then feel free to contact me.

My current CPA efforts earn about 0.06/visitor. Conversions are higher, but earnings not quite as high as clickbank.

RonnyRaygun,

Fascinating thread.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

People talk about the fixation that "make money online" type people have with making money, and how it blinds them to everything else, but I've never seen quite such an example.

The reason that you can't figure out how to build a list -- even though you have the technical skills to manipulate thousands of people and the search engines -- is because you apparently have no concept of providing something of value.

Building a list (and "how list owners are building relationships with their list" which you are wondering about) is a matter of providing your subscribers with something of interest to them that they consider valuable.

So what would that be? It would be information about the topic of the list. If it is poodle grooming, then information about poodle grooming. If it's dating or penny stocks or potted plums, then information about that.

When you do this on an ongoing basis they feel they know you and come to like you and then value your judgment. So they are more willing to buy from you.

But you would need to care enough about the subscribers to be willing to do this for them, and usually care enough about the topic to persevere. If it is only money that you are interested in, it is unlikely that you will be able to do this successfully.

In fact, if you were to look it up, this is almost the definition of marketing. And internet marketing is what this forum is all about, after all.

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All of those are valid concerns.

1. Google webmaster tools, and google analytics show that people are coming to my website after googling it. Do I know how many? No. Every campaign posts about 1200 comments. If targeted correctly, those 1200 comments generate at least 1200 visitors to my website within 24 hours. I don't know how many visitors see my snippet. And I honestly don't care. I do know that they're googling my term. That's what matters the most.
2. Traffic to my sites spikes whenever I run a campaign. It tends to drop off a little bit--from 1500/day to 200/day over the course of two weeks. At which point I rerun the campaign.
3. As for the regional results, what surprised me most is the bulk of the clickbank sales did not come from the US. So I suspect I'm still ranking #1 or very close to #1 for my search term across most other regional google sites