PPC is a complete waste of time and money. Unless of course you're willing to spend 50 cents or a dollar per click. At that rate you would spending about $20 to $50 per subscriber. Ask around but that's been my experience with PPC. Stick with forum marketing and other free techniques. But solo ads can work if you have a great freebie.

Hi willisk,

It doesn't really matter how or where you get started with a paid campaign, so long as you're sure of a few things.

1. Decently priced clicks ($0.60 a click is good)
2. Quick delivery of clicks (you don't want to be waiting a month for them to come through)
3. Good, relevant traffic source (you don't want uninterested visitors)

The rest is up to your sales funnel. How well does your blog/squeeze convert traffic into leads? Here's a little example I like to use. You invest $500 in paid traffic at 60 cents a click. That's 833 pageviews on your highest converting page which may be your blog or squeeze depending on what setup you're running and how well it converts. You want a 35-50% opt-in rate here, but for the sake of modesty, let's say you're getting 33% opt-ins.

Of those 833 views, you're getting 275 new subscribers. The key here is NOT having a cheap product. Using PPC to sell at $7 product is going to be ineffective unless you have ridiculous conversion rates. I'd recommend a product priced around $47.

Your goal now is to warm these leads up through an excellent email series. You should be able to get 8% conversions now if you do it right. That is, 8% of your subscribers will buy your product when you send them to the sales page. With our 275 subscribers, we're going to make 22 sales. At $47 a pop, you're looking at a revenue of just over $1,000. Subtract the $500 investment and you've pretty much doubled your investment.

The key is twofold. You want a good squeeze page (40% is your target conversion rate here). You want an even better email campaign that converts a minimum of 8% of your subscribers into buyers. If you can do this with a $47 product, up-scaling can make you incredibly rich very quickly.

Once you're hitting those numbers, you can start your paid ad campaigns. Until then, I probably wouldn't worry about it unless you know you're going to be making at least 1.5% profit.

All the best,
CTL

These are probably your best bet in the IM niche. PPC for IM keywords is insanely expensive.

The best type of traffic to build a list is paid traffic from, PPC and banners.The reason this is true is because you can target the traffic so that you know what the people are looking for and what they want to buy.

Youtube traffic is great but it is not very targeted and has a lot of Freebie seekers. It also takes a lot of time and is not a steady source of traffic for most.

Forum traffic is good because it is alot more targeted. For example lets say you are selling golf swing stuff. There is forums that the only thing they talk about is golf swings. So the traffic that is coming is very targeted.

But the best is still paid traffic because you put in the exact subject you want your list to be about. It is also very steady and there is a unlimited amount of it. The great thing about paid traffic is that it you can just go get more traffic when you want, unlike SEO, affiliate's, and youtube.

I would also do lots of solo ads too because it builds your list quickly. While there is many optins thare lower quality optins

Building a list with banner ad?

If you're talking about using those as your method of driving traffic in the hopes you'll receive a new subscriber then sure, as long as it's targeted and depending on the site it's placed on, it may be great or bad for subscribers.

See, what the majority of people fail to realize, is that it's not the size of the list but it's the quality of the list. Everyone is so stuck on the idea of squeeze pages and forced e-mail sign ups but how many of them can you honestly expect to buy anything? Sure, they're semi-targeted but there are people who will sign up to a list they don't care about just to see a price tag or a sales page. You also have people who use throw away or fake e-mail accounts to sign up as well and they'll never receive a single one of your newsletters or promotions.

The best way to do about building a list is to simply show them or offer them the option of signing up, and if they do happen to sign up, they're truly targeted. Sure, you can offer a free bonus if you like but in my opinion, forcing people to sign up or "paying for subscribers" is one of the worst things you can do to acquire new customers.

As far as your method of traffic goes. As long as the website you're getting traffic from (since you're using banner ads) has extremely targeted traffic, then you'll be fine. There are occasions where people place banners on spam or garbage websites (usually because they're cheap) just so they can get some hits and they hope for some signups.

depends on the niche, you can do forums, offer free product, do a solo ad or swap, ppc, media buying, etc.

Start with forum posting, PPC, Social Media, Youtube, etc. and once you build a list just be ready to give content and once they trust you, they'll buy

Hi Willisk,

So far, the more effective way to use banner or ads is to place the banner or ad on the thank you page to cash in for sales. It is based on my testing and it works well for me. Hope it works well for you too!

Pay per click or PPC is one of the fastest ways to build a list or market whatever you want to promote. However, it is also the fastest way to lose lots of money without trying too hard when done wrong.

All I can say is that you will have to setup a proper campaign and avoids the common pitfalls that many people almost always fall into. Hope that you understand what I am trying to tell you.

I would use a combination of free traffic and paid traffic to build a list. However, for me, the best conversion is still in paid traffic if you know what you are trying to do. Some of the paid traffic I have used so far is solo ads and also here at this forum for lead generation. Facebook ads also did pretty well for me. As for free traffic, it will be doing adswaps and giveaway events, etc.

Hope it helps you!

Let me know if you need further assistance. I would be glad to help.

Talk soon,
Ray