Here are some List Building Secrets. The money is in the LIST. You’ve probably heard it before, and you’ll hear it again. In this article, I’m going to tell you how to rapidly grow your list to at least four figures over the next couple of months so you can really start to build your web presence.
Let Me Tell you About Tom…
Tom travels around the world working on his laptop, he never works more than 3 hours a day and consistently makes 5 figures per month with this rockstar lifestyle.
Who wouldn’t want to live like that?
Last week, Tom created a new product. The product took him about 8 hours to create and is an information product in his niche. Within a couple of days he had the product ready to go, the sales page written and the download page sorted.
He then sent an email out to his list of subscribers that he’d been building up over the past 3 years. Within the first three hours of sending out that email, Tom generated more than what most people make in an entire month. An extra $6,200 to his bank account for a couple of days work.
If you ever needed an example of why an email list is so powerful then this is it.
I Sat Down with Tom and Asked Him a Few Questions…
I won’t bore you with the whole interview, but here’s an excerpt:-
Me: “What’s the biggest mistake you made when starting out trying to make money online?”
Tom: “Not building my list from the outset…I wasted 6 months where I didn’t build my list and I’ll never get those prospects back”
Me: “What advice would you give someone who is starting out looking to make money online?”
Tom: “There is a tendency for people to believe that having 300 sites will generate more revenue than one. I see people spreading themselves far too thinly. If they concentrated their efforts with focus and rooted themselves firmly within one niche as opposed to thinly across many, then they’d have much more success. And, of course, they MUST build their list.”
What are the best ways to build a list FAST?
There are a few key components to building your list. The first is obviously traffic and the second is the offer.
Even though you’re not selling anything for money, getting people to opt in to your list IS a sale. Visitors are trading sensitive credentials for information and for that to happen you need to know how to create a compelling landing page and an attractive offer.
Let’s focus on the offer first…
1. Use a Squeeze Page
For those who don’t already know, a squeeze page is simply a one page web site with just one goal – to get visitors to enter their name and email address into the opt in box.
An effective squeeze page converts at 20% or more. This means that out of 100 visitors to your site, 20 should enter their name and email address. A really good squeeze page should convert at around 30% – 40% or more.
An effective squeeze page has the following:-
- An opt in box that sits above the fold (this means that the area where people enter their credentials and click the submit button is visible when the page loads – the visitor shouldn’t have to scroll down to see it)
- A list of benefits that are specific to your target visitor (remember that there is a big difference between features and benefits)
- A compelling headline (Short, concise and benefit oriented)
- A strong visual and verbal call to action (“Click Here” text and arrows that stand out and point to the opt in box)
One thing to note is that a well done video squeeze page tends to convert better than text only squeeze page.
2. A Quality Giveaway – More is not Better
The most effective way to get people to opt in to your list (as I’m sure you’re already aware) is to bribe them with a free giveaway.
Contrary to popular belief – more is not better when it comes to a free giveaway. Generally speaking, and it pains me to say this, but people are looking for quick fixes. They don’t want to spend hours trawling through a 200 page manual. Give them a free 10 page report, short video series or even an audio interview with an expert in the niche.
Great giveaways solve a common problem in the niche, get people curious to find out more, contain incredible value and are small.
Don’t do what I did and spend a week creating a fully fledged 120 page book. Whilst my giveaway is still working well for me because it contains so much value, it created a lot of unnecessary work!
3. Turn Your Profit Funnel on its Side
The “profit funnel” is a marketing concept used to model the flow of visitors, prospects, customers and repeat customers of a business.
In the the online world, the idea is that any given web business will have a certain amount of visitors to a web site. A certain percentage of those will subscribe and join the mailing list. A percentage of subscribers will become buyers and a certain percentage of buyers will go onto become repeat buyers.
As you can see, the further down the funnel you go, the more people leak out. Hence the “funnel” analogy.
Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo, has a great concept of turning the profit funnel on its side so that it becomes a megaphone.
What does this mean in practical terms?
Conventional list building is all about driving visitors to the “squeeze page”. A certain percentage of those visitors will become subscribers – this amount depends on the conversion rate. These visitors will flow down through the profit funnel and generate revenue.
However forward thinking marketers are now using their subscribers almost like a sales force to attract more subscribers. They make their profit funnel viral – they hand their subscribers a megaphone.
And on the web, a viral profit funnel is incredibly easy to set up. At the most basic level you’d ask your subscribers to socially bookmark your newsletters, however this generally gets a low take up level because people very rarely do anything unless there is something in it for them.
So, to encourage take up, you’d offer your subscribers a free “bonus” for spreading the word (either through Twitter, Facebook and so forth) and there are viral tools out there that you can install for that.
4. Think Outside the Box when Driving Traffic
A lot of marketers are in competitive niches. Niches like “make money online”, “FOREX”, “weight loss” and so on. And the majority of marketers really struggle to drive traffic in the midst of such competition.
What I’m about to tell you could be really beneficial to your business, so read the following very carefully!
When you’re in competitive niches you must ignore Google. As tempting as it may be to go after Google listings, you’ll find the whole process draining, tedious, time consuming and far from guaranteed. Those adjectives aren’t what I like to associate with my business.
You need to go to where the traffic is and figure out how to get your content and your offering in front of that audience. And no, the answer isn’t only to spend money paying premium prices for advertising listings.
The answer is to form joint venture alliances with people who have traffic but need something that you can offer.
Let me give you an example – many internet marketers in the “make money online” niche have large list sizes and have to provide continuing value to those subscribers.
These marketers have a few options – they can outsource the work. The problem with this is mainly that of expertise. Most writers don’t have the expertise to write a hugely valuable report for a targeted list.
Alternatively, they can write the content themselves. My experience is that most online marketers are very time conscious and will not spend their valuable time on creating something that’s not going to make a direct impact on their bottom line.
Here’s where you come along. Offer to write them a fully fledged report on a subject they want covered. The only stipulation being that your site URL is noted in the header, the footer and you get a mention in the email broadcast.
Your time is far better spent forming alliances such as this than to satisfy Google with their ever changing algorithm and ongoing battle against online marketers.
5. Increase Your Value per Visitor
To really put your list building efforts into overdrive you want to create a high value per visitor. There are a couple of reasons why this is so important…
Firstly, traffic is valuable and not easy to come by so you want to make sure that you are making the most of it, obviously.
Secondly, and arguably more importantly, when you create a high value per visitor you can start opening up the doors to paid traffic campaigns.
If you know that you are generating $2 of profit for every subscriber to your list, then you’ll have a good chance of being able to run a profitable pay per click campaign on Adwords, for example.
And, when you can start to use paid advertising sources and make a profit you are really on the road to success because then it’s simply a case of scaling everything up across multiple advertising platforms.
Don’t be a Sheep
I hate to say this but the majority of what ‘s being talked about in online forums is actually not good information to follow.
If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: Follow the basic rules of internet marketing (build your list and create a profit funnel) but beyond that don’t be afraid to deviate from what’s seen as mainstream practice.
If you tried to build a four figure list in a competitive niche by submitting articles to directories then you’d be here until 2020 but that’s what many would tell you to do. It doesn’t make them right though – they’re just sheep.
This article is written by guest author Paul McCarthy from paulmccarthy.co.uk. If you’d like to learn how to make a full time living working from home, then sign up at his site and he’ll teach you personally for free. He is a star guest blogger at QOT and you can read more articles by Paul. Get your own tag on our site by guestblogging here.