My List Building "Success" After A Month..Any Thoughts?

I'm not sure what the articles and youtube videos do...do they drive traffic to your opt in page and can I assume that if they opt-in they get the 30 page download?

See, to me, the most important thing to list building is the quality of the list and how passionate they are about the subject matter.

You are in a huge market place, what do your competitors do? And is the product you offer as an affiliate really TARGETED to this list you are creating? I'd guess not based on your results, at some point you have to sell something.

I'm not sure about your process for building a list. It just seems like an awful lot of activity that isn't producing sales.

Make a checklist of all that you've done and question each one, like, are my articles bringing traffic?

Are my videos being watched? Which one is most popular? etc.

Try to ANALYZE what you've done already and perhaps, you need a little more salesmanship in whatever you are giving away.

The fact they are going and looking at the product shows some interest, but, why not ask a few of them why they didn't buy? You might get some valuable feedback from your would-be customer.

I can't tell you exactly what parts aren't working, but you can tell yourself if you dig into the data you have and ask why.

Good luck with your list building, the purpose is to get customers, anything short of that and it's not working. Careful examination should help you out.

gjabiz

why not just buy some quality solo ads and save yourself a lot of effort?

I would throw more money into paid advertising. What is your advertising budget like? How much are you charging for your product? Also, you have a good marketing plan, but if you want to see sales immediately... you will need around at least 200 opt-in subscribers.

My advice would be to contact ezine owners in your niche and ask if they do solos. You could even do some kind of split with them on any profits.

Just keep working like you're doing and it will start to happen
for you. The Gurus like to boast of extremely rapid list-building
but it's not so easy for most people starting out to do that
due to lack of technical sophistication and experience. Focus
on delivering quality information and people will respect you
and be more open to buying from you. It can take awhile
but you have to persevere if you want to succeed at this
IM game.

I think it becomes easy once you have a fairly big list built. As you can just start doing solo swaps and what not (granted you don't get burnt).

Focus on your copy, autoresponder copy, subject lines, inboxing, do you have a list of all the spam words that trigger filters? You definitely should.

Is it single optin or double optin?

I'm also kinda curious what autoresponder you're using.
Don't forget to back your lists up once a week encase something happens.

For now I think you're having good conversions but you can definitely double them afaic. So keep tweaking things untill the page is converting a bit better, then dump more money in PPC.

Let us know how it goes because I just started building my own list and am loving it so far. No incredible results yet but this is one of the more practical ideas in internet marketing. Before people use to just come to my site, a small percent would call, most would leave.

Now because I'm collecting their info, I bombard them with emails, and am already noticing increased conversions compared to not having an autoresponder. I'm just happy this wasn't something I waited on. I've been in marketing for 6 months so if I can learn how to build a list at this point I'll be a very happy man -Red

No - it actually works. Almost all the people here who are making a living from affiliate marketing are doing so by list-building.

It's terribly, terribly difficult to make affiliate sales any other way: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5210243

A little early to tell, with only 60 people on your list, but I do hear you, and maybe you will get a sale any day now?

Unfortunately, whether you're doing anything terribly wrong is something that nobody can tell without seeing what you're doing. I know it sounds really unhelpful, but I'm afraid it's true.

The three main questions that immediately occur to me, after reading the details you give, are:-

(i) Why are you trying to use an article directory as a source of traffic? This isn't how they're supposed to work, at all (explained here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872), and it's a mistake to try to use them that way. If you have 20 articles, why not put those on your own site and try to draw the traffic directly to your own site, instead of letting it come via an article directory where'll you'll be losing a high proportion of it, as explained in this post?

(ii) Why does your squeeze page convert only 13% of its visitors, if you're giving away a 30-page freebie? Is it because the traffic isn't targeted, something has gone wrong with the squeeze page itself, or because there's a mismatch between the offer and what the visitors are looking for (not a question anyone can answer for you from the information you've provided, sorry! ).

(iii) Does the product have a leaky sales page? Is it actually possible that someone on your list has bought the product but you haven't been paid? (I have no specific reason to suspect this, but very often in similar conversations, when the identity of the product has eventually emerged, all too often it's been one I wouldn't promote myself, because of "leaks" on the sales page - so it's natural for me to wonder about that).

Sorry to sound vague and unhelpful and to offer only guesses, but realistically this is all anyone can do, in these circumstances.

It may still be that nothing's seriously wrong and that your sales are about to arrive, of course - and I hope so.

Nobody can possibly make realistic, specific suggestions without seeing everything you're doing. Sorry. We can only guess.

(If you want to send me, by private message, a link to one of your ezine articles and to the product's sales page, I'll happily have a quick look and offer any comments I can, either by return of private message or in the thread, whichever you prefer.)

First you have done god amount of work, so congrats..

Now your next steps will be to add kindle books, mobile apps, web 2.0 links and social media interactions and these will push you over the cliff for making sales down the line ....

This niche is very competitive, and as in other niches involving heavy hitters with deep pockets for promotions, you barely have a snowball's chance in h*** by using such relatively wimpy marketing methods.

Simply stated, you need to target your prospects where they expect you to be, and in the marketing manner in which they are accustomed. In general, such prospects are not effectively wooed by EZA, YouTube, squeeze pages, banner ads, or even free "reports".

Your best chance of obtaining convertible traffic is by establishing yourself as a reputable, knowledgeable expert in publications (online as well as offline) that are read by your target audience.

For example, getting those 20 articles syndicated in reputable outlets confers a subtle but very powerful implied "endorsement" by the publisher to their readers. It really does not take many articles at all to drive floods of highly convertible traffic when those articles are distributed to relevant publications. And in this niche, there are literally tens of millions of suitable online/offline outlets for your articles.

Just my 2 cents.

Stick in there mate sounds like you're doing all the right stuff you just need to persevere only the toughest survive in this game.
all the best
Darren

Really appreciate you sharing your experiences of list building, I've not used Youtube before for driving traffic to a squeeze page.

Don't be put off by the size of the market...Its definitely one big frikkin pie. There is definitely room for you to manouvere in here. Yes the big wigs are making a killing here but you always most definitely have something in your favor for which they don't, your geographic locality.

If you're genuine about your products and/or recommendation and stand by them, there is no reason why you cant target your local area first off to get people in through the door and work that way, try some paid local ads in a magazine or newspaper, its how my buddy got started with his website. Plenty of contacts who were into health and fitness, gave them a trial of his fitness product in return for a review and or testimonial and offered them a free premium upgrade if they got x number of people to sign up for it too.

Whatever you do, keep at it, your on the right course. I have a ton of fitness related articles sat on my hard drive that I found easily online with the rights to reproduce. I put two or three of them together and filtered it down to the barebones containing the essential info people want to read and put a motivational spin on them. His subscribers have really enjoyed reading what he sends out. I think his list is now in the early thousands, maybe 2 or 3, and he gets between 40 and 60 sales per week average from that list and its grows every week by 50 to 75 subscribers.

Best of luck buddy keep at it.

Hi bbjumpman, you have started an great thread. I am going through the same as you as I also realized (finally) that without a list one is going to perish. I believe you are doing great as far as the list is concerned. 60 signups in a month seems pretty decent to me. Hopefully, you will see some sales soon.

I was wondering, where did the signups come from? The articles, the videos or the advertisements? can you let us know.

Best of luck

When confused about when to send to content and when promotion. I follow this formula
Content-->Content-->Content-->Promotion-->Content-->Content-->Content-->Promotion.

As about not getting any sales I would say 60 subscribers is too early to judge anything.

Anoop Chawla

try to invest in advertising. I think your traffics are not really targeted that's why its happening. actually its a natural thing. you can't get success if you don't have targeted traffics.

These 3 things caught my attention, and here's why.

13% conversion isn't very high for a squeeze page. You
might be doing something wrong either on these lines:
-- Your traffic isn't targeted enough, it's cold
-- Your squeeze copy isn't converting

An ideal rate to hit could be 40%+. I've hit 70%+ on very
rabid markets, but slower ones can range still at 40% if
you drive warm leads to good squeeze copy.

12 FU messages? Firstly, you need to try and use the
Broadcast message instead, and do split-tests before
you cram them into a follow-up sequence. You always
want to do split-tests, because only then can you
quantitatively determine what goes and what doesn't.

Tracking is extremely important.

0 sales. And that's where you get lost, because you don't
seem to have a good tracking system in place.

A good business system will always feedback on itself.

That means, you're going to need to test and tweak
every single thing you do until it improves...

Winston Tian

I think the list size is relatively small to get an real data... I think your focus should be on building your list... if you make a substantial number of subscribers and you provide value to them, you ought to get results

bbjumpman I notice you don't mention using email marketing to build your list at all. Definitely a place you could expand on. Safelists and viral mailers are a great place to get list signups and the fitness industry is a pretty universal one that people in all walks of marketing have an interest in. I see products such as 7 Minute Workout and similar ones being pushed heavy at these sources. If people were getting no results then they wouldn't be seen as much. Maybe try showing your squeeze page on a couple of the heavier populated traffic exchanges which I see tons of health and fitness related stuff on as well. Drop me a line and I could point you at some sites.