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How to Build Huge Opt-In Email Lists By Terry Dean The key to Internet marketing is building your own lists...find out our 7 strategies for quickly and easily building our own opt-in email list Web Gold. We grow by over 500 new subscribers a week. A major key in the development of my web business has been building up my 85,000 person Web Gold email list. Without an opt-in list, you are forever limiting the potential profit of your Internet business. You'll always find it difficult to go beyond a certain level of sales without having an opt- in email list of your own. Having your own opt-in email list means that you can generate instant cash whenever you want it. Simply run a special on one of your products or joint venture with someone else to sell their product to your list. The money just comes rolling in. Our last two "campaigns" like this which simply consisted of finding a product and sending one email to our list generated $10,000 and $31,000 in sales in less than 72 hours each. If you want to talk about instant cashflow for any business, that's definitely it. So, over the years I've used numerous strategies and techniques for building opt-in email lists in my own business and in the business of clients I've worked with. Below are my seven favorite techniques you need to start applying today to build your own lists. Before we get to that, I want to cover a few important keys that will help you instantly increase your profits from any opt-in email list. Technique One: Personalize Your Emails. In opt-in marketing years ago (1 to 2 years to be exact) it was very difficult or very expensive to use personalization for your opt-in email lists. You either had to use software such as Mailloop to run it from your own computer system (way too slow for large lists) or you had to pay very expensive monthly hosting fees for Lyris type listservers. Now there are a slew of possibilities for you to personalize your list. You could use Postmaster Online, NetOfficeToolBox, or virtually any of the other major autoresponder follow-up systems which give you full access to your list. You could also use CGI programs which run on your own web server...although this is a little bit more technical of a solution. In the past I've used Wes Blaylock's Mail Master Pro and I'm currently testing OptInLightning. People suggest free systems such as Listbot.com but I recommend you move away from these as soon as possible so you can personalize your emails. You will notice at least a 50% increase in response rates through personalization...at a bare minimum. You'll also greatly cut down on the chance that some of your subscribers may mistake your emails for unsolicited bulk email (spam). In my newsletter, I personalize both the subject line and the very beginning of the letter by personally writing to my subscribers...You can also use personalization capabilities to put your subscribers names into ads you run in your publication (think of this as a response enhancer or as a more expensive service you can offer your advertisers). Technique Two: Build a Brand. Don't just be a nameless faceless machine. Large corporations and a lot of Internet beginners try to run their opt-in email lists without showing too much of their personality. This is probably the biggest mistake I see publishers making. You want to add your opinions into your publication. Let them know about your daily life. Tell them where you live. Mention things you enjoy doing or what you're doing later on today. These types of things sound real corny to talk about, but they have a strong effect of building a relationship with your readers. They let them know that you're a real person. They get to know you. People buy from people they feel a familiarity with. If you do these types of things in your publication, you will increase your response rates over anyone who just runs articles. Technique Three: Provide Good Content. You would think that this tip would go without saying, but I've seen people mess it up more times than I can count. Your opt-in list is not just about sending out sales letters to your audience. It is about helping them and giving them value first...so they reciprocate by buying products and services from you. If you only send out sales letters, then your readers will quickly tune you out. Even if they don't unsubscribe from your publication, the fact is they just won't be reading your emails anymore. You must give them value if you expect them to invest their hard earned money in what you have to sell. For Web Gold, we publish a main training article and search engine answers in every issue along with several ads throughout the publication. We only send out special offers about every 3 months. We could easily increase the frequency of these, but we prefer to run this kind of schedule. The regular weekly issues earn a very nice income (an income great enough that I could quit every other project and only do them), but those infrequent special offers really bring in the sales. Seven Techniques For Building Your List Below isn't everything we do, but we really focus our main attention on these seven ways of building up our subscriber base...Follow our lead and you'll quickly be building huge subscriber lists in your niche market. 1. Put a Subscribe Form On Every Page Of Your Web Site Make building your subscriber list a primary goal of your web site. People will be entering your web site from many different doorways and turning them into subscribers is one of the easiest and most lucrative goals to have on their first visit. It's hard to make a sell on a prospect's first visit to your site unless you're going for very low ticket sales (such as products $20 or less). It's much easier to get their name and email address by giving them a "bribe" and then go after the sales later on down the road. The "bribe" is the key aspect to getting their email address that you need to be thinking about. Just having an email publication really doesn't convince most visitors to subscribe anymore. You need to give them something of value for subscribing. I've noticed a lot of web sites giving away free ads or free consulting for subscribing, but this wouldn't work in a majority of markets...and it would become very difficult to do once you start adding thousands of subscribers monthly. For my business, I've found it best to give away some type of free ebook...For Web Gold, we use our "brandable" ebooks which they can brand and give away from their web sites once they sign-up. See http://www.bizpromo.com for more information on this. If you do this, make sure that the ebook you give away is a good enough value that you could actually be selling it for $19.95 or more if you weren't using it as a bribe for subscribing. Giving away a worthless ebook will actually detract from your offer and hurt your sales later on down the road. 2. Use Pop-Ups. Many web surfers claim that pop-ups annoy them...and I've been annoyed by pop-up boxes on more than one occasion. What can't be denied though is the ability they have to increase the sign-ups for your free opt-in email publication. Pop-ups flat out work...no matter what anyone says about how annoying they may or may not be. If you use a pop-up, make sure that it is only for the purpose of giving away something free and getting their email address. Don't use a pop-up to try to sell another product, take your visitor to another web site, or anything of that nature. That is when a pop-up becomes most annoying. Give a freebie and you'll notice your complaints stay to a minimum compared to any other format. The three types of pop-ups are below: Pop-Up #1: First Pop-up - Click here to go to the Java code to insert in your web site for a pop-up box which appears on the first visit to your web site. This type of pop-up is most useful for giving you maximum number of subscribers to your opt-in list on their first visit...and then never bugging your visitors again. Pop-Up #2: Pop-up on Exit - Click here to go to the Java code to insert in your web site for a pop-up that comes up when a visitor leaves your web site. For example, we are currently using this on the main page of Netbreakthroughs if someone clicks away from our site without going to the order form or entering the membership section. It's almost our "2nd chance" at getting them to take action. Pop-Up #3: Opt-In Lightning Pop-Up - We're just beginning to test out this program at the moment and it has a very cool feature in that it makes it easy for people to subscribe (one problem with it is that a lot of people don't have their real email address programmed into their web browser so it won't always work right) by using a windows menu pop- up. You can see an example at the programmer's web site by clicking here. 3. Submit to Free Ezine Databases Free Ezine databases have been disappearing lately just like most other forms of free advertising online. A lot of the older free ezine databases are now becoming co-registration companies where you pay per new subscriber. In our experience, you will usually get more subscribers from one co-registration company than you will from using a multitude of free listings. Below are a list of web sites that have been offering free listings although we don't know how long they will continue to do so. http://www.liszt.com/submit.html http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/submit.html http://www.lifestylespub.com/ http://www.list-city.com/ http://www.e-zinez.com/cgi-bin/hyperseek/hyperseek.cgi http://www.published.com/index.html http://www.homeincome.com/search-it/ezine/index.html http://ezine-universe.com/ http://www.disobey.com/low/addere.shtml http://inkpot.com/submit/ http://catalog.com/vivian/intsubform2.html http://paml.net/submissions.html http://www.ezinestoday.com/freesubs/ http://www.diysearch.com/ http://ezineadsource.com/submit.htm http://www.ezinesearch.com/search-it/ezine/ezine-add.html http://www.ezinesplus.com/ezines/cgi-bin/add.cgi http://www.published.com/add/ http://www.infojump.com/publishers/pub/submit/ http://www.site-city.com/members/e-zine-master/ http://listtool.com/cgi/listTool/addList.cgi http://www.newsletteraccess.com/database/reg.html 4. Trade Ads With Other Publishers A very effective way to build up your subscriber base is to trade ads with other ezines. You run their ad in your ezine while they run an ad for your ezine in theirs. Everyone wins..and it doesn't cost you a dime. Ezines aren't the only ones you can trade with either. I've had very good experience trading ezine ad space for other types of advertising as well...for example, I traded a top sponsorship in my ezine for 100,000 targeted banner impressions recently. You'll find that trading ads is a major growth mechanism for most smaller ezines. Once you get to a certain size level (10,000 or above), you'll find there are a lot less ezines that you make fair trades with so you do a little less ezine ad trading and think of other ways to trade space for publication. Here is one resource for finding ezines to trade ads with: http://www.bizpromo.com/ezinetrades.htm 5. Advertising - Banners, Ezines, Pay-Per-Click Search Engines No one says you have to sell a product in your advertising. As a matter of fact, you'll often find that you get better response rates offering a freebie in your advertising and then start following up on your prospects with the first few messages of your ezine. In other words, go for the email address first in many cases...then start going for the sale in the follow-up emails. You will find higher response rates will often occur through this type of method. For example, we've found higher sales for Instant Cashflow by sending people to our autoresponder 115tips@aweber.com than sending them directly to the sales letter at http://www.allthesecrets.com This isn't always the case...but you will find it more valuable as your item price increases. If you are selling something over $100, then I would say you would usually want to follow this type of system. Go for the email address first...then go for the sale. If your product price is under $100, then you need to test both approaches to see which one works better for your product. If you're using this method of building your list, then any form of online or offline advertising can prove itself to be very effective: ezine advertising, banner ads, pay-per-click advertising, postcards, etc. 6. Joint Ventures You'll be shocked at how quickly joint ventures can help you build your ezine lists. Simply put, a joint venture for ezine building is when you team up with other ezine publishers to work together at building your lists. Let me tell you about three of my past experiences with joint ventures to give you a few ideas about how you could be using them to build your ezine list. JV Case Study #1 - We're still using this method. Please go to http://www.ezinehits.com which is owned by Kris Stringham. What she did was very ingenious. She created a contest and contacted several of the top ezine publishers online: Jim Daniels, Kevin Needham, Rick Beneteau, Mark Joyner, myself, and others. Each of us would donate ad space to the contest and then we would all receive the subscribers who signed up through it. It started generating hundreds of new subscribers for all of us without any additional work on our parts. JV Case Study #2 - Greg Schliesmann organized 5 of the best ezine publishers together and I did an article about how these were the best ezines available on Internet marketing at the time. With my resource box attached for Web Gold, we each published the article and then allowed other ezines to also publish the article. This promotion created over 1,100 new subscribers for each of us in under 10 days...plus the article generated additional sales down the road from other publishers using it in their newsletters. JV Case Study #3 - I organized with 4 other ezine publishers and we all made a page offering each other's ezines on our thank you pages. When you subscribed to my ezine, you would then receive a thank you page showing these other ezine publishers. When you subscribed to theirs, you would then recieve a thank you page offering mine. At the time I was generating around 15 subscribers a day from my site and this promotion quickly gave me an extra boost to generating 50+ subscribers a day because of all of us working together. There are really no limitations to how this type of method could be applied to helping you build your online business quicker. For example, I also did some advertising at another period which I organized 4 publishers to go in with on a co- op type of ad. They each paid $250. I then collected the money and spent $1,000 on advertising to build all of our newsletters. Guess what? I got my share for free, and all of the advertisers received 1,500 subscribers each for only $250! That's a Win-Win situation. 7. Co-Registrations This is a newer method of building ezine subscription lists very quickly. We've experimented with this type of marketing before for building our list, but it is only recently becoming a major force in online advertising. The basics of how this method works is that one web site will run a contest...and then they will have 5 to 20 ezine publishers pay them a deposit to be listed on the contest page. When someone enters the contest, they then also have the option of subscribing to any or all of the ezines. They then subtract money (25 cents to $1 for each subscriber) from the deposit until your ad runs out. You get guaranteed subscribers. This method builds lists very, very quickly...but it also has several major drawbacks. Drawback #1 is that these lists will not be as targeted as the ones you build on your own. They are mainly interested in entering a contest. So the response rates and income you'll earn from this type of list will be lower than what you build on your own. The second drawback is that some of the subscribers may forget they subscribed to your publication since they've never actually visited your web site before. You will want to make sure your list is personalized to help avoid this concern before you even consider trying this method. http://www.zmedia.com http://www.profitinfo.com http://www.ezinecentral.com/ http://www.myfree.com http://www.funezines.com http://www.internetfuel.com http://www.bay9.com ZMedia also has their own extensive directory of Co-Registration Companies you could work with at: http://www.zmedia.com/zm/directory.html Terry Dean, a 5 year veteran of Internet marketing, will Take You By The Hand and Show You Exact Results of All the Internet Marketing Techniques he tests and Uses Every Single Month" Click here to Find Out More: http://digitalprofits.com/goto/nbt.htm |