A lesson learned in list-building

Hey folks.

Just realised I don't give back enough on this forum, so here's a big lesson I learned in list-building.

All this shit you hear the gurus tell you about giving your best stuff away for free is just that - shit.

I tried my hand in list-building a couple of years ago. I gave 'em EVERYTHING! I took my product apart and gave away everything in my product for free!

That product was selling well (and still is). With a good video salesletter, it was converting at 2-3% at $37. I was sending traffic directly to the salespage and making a good living. It was painful taking that traffic away and directing it to my list. The list didn't make me a single penny. I tried so many different things, but people just wouldn't buy from my list.

So eventually I gave up and went back to SEO and driving traffic directly to my salespage.

Now though, 2 years later, I've come back to list building. I'm now approaching it in a whole different way, and it's working great.

The secret, I've found, is not just in providing good information, but it's about being inspiring, motivating and interesting to listen to. I'm in health & fitness, so not sure how much this applies in other niches, but in health & fitness, if you just give e'm step-by-step lists on how to do something, they get bored, stop opening your emails, and don't buy your product.

If, on the other hand, you are interesting to listen to, you give your readers powerful new ideas, new ways of looking at things using metaphor etc, and are fun and entertaining, motivating and inspiring, people will follow you and they will buy your stuff. Leave the step-by-step stuff for your products.

If you're into creating your own products, don't forget to also be inspiring inside the actual product as well. As Eben Pagan describes in his Guru Blueprint course, you should always seek to... educate, inspire and motivate.

I suggest you inspire and motivate in your autoresponder sequence, then, in your product, do some more inspiring and motivating, and then educate.

People don't take action on your educational points unless you inspire and motivate them first. Every good article for example, always starts with something motivating. A good weight loss article might for example start off by telling you how this little known technique was used by the great gama of india to shed 200 lb of fat, BEFORE going into the details of the technique.

So yeh, find your voice, get good at writing, become INTERESTING in your writing. See how the pros do it and copy 'em. Go read the highest circulated trade magazines in your niche. If people didn't find these guys fascinating, they'd be outta business.

I hope you find this helpful.