Your website can have one million “eyeballs” checking it out, but if the visitors don’t become customers, then those eyeballs are worth very little. You must pay attention to conversions you’re your businesses to survive.

In general, the basic ecommerce formula works like this:

Step One: Drive traffic to the website.

Step Two: Convert those eyeballs to leads.

Step Three: Convert leads to customers.

Step Four: Generate repeat purchases.

Bonus products are an essential variable in this formula. However, offering bonuses isn’t just putting the words “But wait – there’s more,” in your offer. The key is to know what types of bonuses will have the strongest effect on your prospects.

1. The Eyeballs to Conversions Process.

As a business owner, you have several tasks to make your business successful. First, you must drive traffic to your website. In addition, once you have website visitors, you must convert those visitors into clients or customers. While a lead does not necessarily equal a sale, it does equal a future potential sale. Once you have a prospect’s name and email address, you’re able to move into step two – converting them to customers and making sales.

Bonus products work very well as a tool to build this opt-in list and free giveaways in exchange for an email address are a common lead generating tool. What you offer and how you offer it largely depends on your target audience.

In cases where you’re selling an expensive product, a substantial bonus product or a series of bonus products can help convince your prospects them they’re making the right decision.

You can use bonuses to build your sales in a number of alternative methods. Here are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

One way to do this is to tier rewards so that the more the customer buys, the more bonuses the customer receives – for example, increasing membership status from silver to gold and gold to platinum.

Consider giving away bonuses to customers who help you build your opt-in list. For example, you could reward every email a friend gives leads toward a bonus.

Consider giving away bonuses to prospects and customers who are active and participate in your online community.

2. Why Do Bonuses Work?

In general, bonuses are defined as products or services you give away to incite a purchase, a subscription, a referral, or even an opt-in. You’re probably very familiar with bonus items, so let’s take a look at why they’re so effective. Bonuses tap into several psychological triggers, including:

Reciprocity. Reciprocity is the tendency we have as people to respond to something in kind. Bonuses are the epitome of positive reciprocity. Customers receive a free guide, a free video, a free e-book as an opt-in bonus – now they’re feeling grateful.

Commitment and Consistency. Psychologists tell us that we’re more likely to say yes to something big if we’ve already said yes to something smaller. In short, it gets your prospects in the habit of saying ‘yes’.

Liking. Who doesn’t like someone who gives them something for free? People buy from companies they like, and from personalities they relate to.

Scarcity and Urgency. Use a limited bonus or give an extra bonus to customers who act quickly. It motivates people to purchase now rather than wait and possibly change their mind.

3. How to Create Bonuses for Your Target Market.

Even though your business may involve a niche topic, your customers are probably diverse and have diverse personalities, interests, and technological capabilities. We all have our own motivations and behaviors influenced by our personality. Learning to meet the needs and wants of the characteristics can help you create bonuses that cover a range of personalities. Keep in mind that your customers will likely include many or all of the following:

Emotional Personalities – Many of these people make decisions based upon their feelings.

Thinking Personalities – These are the people who like to plan, schedule and solve situations.

Extroverted Personalities – These are the folks who tend to be open and comfortable in new environments.

Introverted Personalities – These want to take it slower and make personal connections.

Intuitive personalities – They have a natural ability to think outside the box.

Remember that each prospect has their personality. Give them options and consider creating one great bonus to be packaged in a number of different formats.

4. Creating Your Bonuses.

This is where many people drop the ball – they throw together sloppy bonuses or simply by resell rights to something that’s been distributed by a million other websites – in short, they stop taking their prospects into consideration.

Let’s take a look at three primary ways you can create eye catching and valuable bonuses.

Resell Rights/PLR: The internet is full of companies and websites that mass-produce bonuses for you to give away on your own website. Although these can be beneficial, they can also be a slippery slope. You want to have bonuses unique to your niche and specific to your products or services.

Creating Your Own Product: While creating your own eBook, video tutorial or software program can be a bit of work, it can also be tremendously rewarding and you’ll be sure you’re creating the quality products your prospects and customers deserve. If you already have a stockpile of great content, you can repurpose it to create new and valuable bonus products. Creating multiple bonuses from one packet of information is a great way to accomplish that task.

Outsource The Job: Hire A Company Or Individual To Develop Your Bonuses. When outsourcing there are a few success tips: Determine in advance exactly what you want the freelancer to accomplish. Outline your project in advance – it will ensure communication is clear and the project is done the way you want.

Armed with this information, you can start planning and preparing the bonuses that will give you more paying customers.

To Learn More CLICK HERE

In a previous article, we talked about how you can best use the “Freemium” model for business success. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the tactics and strategies (we refer to these as “Secret Ninja Tactics”) to significantly increase the response rate on your already successful Freemium based sites. The Freemium model will make you money, but using these Secret Ninja Tactics could double or triple that amount.

1. “Hide” Your Free Entry Point

The first Secret Ninja tactic is to hide the fact that your “entry point” is free. Why would you want to make it harder for people to get your information? First, people often associate the word ‘free’ with ‘no value’. You certainly don’t want this. In fact, the word “free” probably shouldn’t appear anywhere on your website.

In addition, if someone visits your site and find that it’s totally free to sign up, then they might think “Hmmm…. I can sign-up anytime, and it’s free. There’s no rush – I’ll just come back later.” At that point you’ve probably lost them forever.

So they’ll see that there’s a fee to access your site (reaffirming the value of your products), and you’ll put the “free access” page somewhere deeper in your website structure. The next step is to only grant access to your free sign-up page when someone does something for you first.

2. Start Building a Relationship Through a Little “Work”

Here are some examples of what you might do to make the customer work to find the free entry point:

Make them buy a product (this can be anything but it works best if it’s something low price or low risk).

Make them buy a product via an affiliate link (again, this should be something low in price and risk).

Make them sign-up to one of your newsletters (and confirm their opt-in).

Make them post a comment to your website blog.

Make them join another one of your network sites (which might be a free sign-up).

Make them solve some kind of puzzle or riddle (even simple Flash-based jigsaw puzzles can be very effective).

Make them Tweet something for you

Making it a little harder to get to the free content does three things:

First, requiring some action reinforces the perception of value. Since they have to do something to get your product, the offer is no longer “free”.

Second, making the prospect jump through a hoop lays the foundation for a sense of mutual reciprocation. They do something for you, then you give them a “gift”, and now it’s their turn again.

Third, structuring things this way forms a relationship. That person has to meet you at a point that’s beneficial to you both – you’re communicating and getting to know each other.

Each of these concepts contributes to what happens next – when you make them an offer to access the “premium” content of your website.

3. Reclaiming the Lost Upgrades

Your goal, ultimately, is to sell premium content to your free members. But you’ll always have a number of visitors who won’t take you up on your initial sales offer. So I’ll outline a few of the Ninja Tactics you can do to persuade people to upgrade at some point – these can be great to recover these “lost upgrades”.

If you can send your new website visitors three or four messages in the first week after their initial visit, then you’ll persuade a number of them to upgrade and that’ll increase your conversion rate.

Structure your free content as “part one” of a series. When you make it a natural lead in to “part two” (the paid information), your conversion rate will increase.

Curiosity will beat the “hard sell” – get your visitors hungry for the information that you haven’t given them yet, and they’ll want to pay to access it.

4. Let Them See, But Don’t Let Them Touch (Yet).

Using specialized software like MemberSpeed can help you make the digital equivalent of a salesman’s “puppy dog close”.

An unpaid member can see the links to the premium content, but when they click on it, they see a page that says “Sorry, you’re still a free member” and “You need to upgrade your membership access that material.” It’s almost like holding the puppy in the pet store – once you get close to taking it home, it’s hard to let go. So you end up buying.

5. Stop Making Your Premium Content a “One-Time” Offer.

Think about why people might not sign up on the original offer. Perhaps when they first joined the site they didn’t have the budget for a paid membership. Maybe they first needed to see the free content to evaluate it. Or maybe it’s taken some time, but now they trust you enough to purchase.

So instead of just a “One-Time” offer, give this a try – say something like “As a welcome offer we’d like to give you a 20% reduction off the cost of upgrading today – CLICK HERE”… However you can also upgrade later directly inside the member’s area.” Sometimes making something a one-time offer will work against you.

6. Envy is a Powerful Motivator

Another Ninja Tactic is to make your free members envious. Let them see what kinds of things you’re giving more to your paid members. One way to do this is email your entire membership database (both the paid and free users) a new piece of valuable content.

The key is to make sure your free members get to see what they’re missing out on. Nobody wants to be the person who loses out. It’s very powerful – Just remember to be subtle. Don’t smack people in the face with it – but make sure they know they’re not getting the same perks and advantages.

For more information CLICK HERE

In this article, we’re going to discuss “membership marketing”, and how it’s almost a requirement for a successful website. If you’re selling anything online, whether it’s ebooks, digital products or anything of that sort, then the membership system we discuss below can deliver those products in the most effective and profitable way.

Business Success Means Avoiding Churn and Increasing Revenue Per Customer.

To be a business success, you’ll need to avoid is customer churn (or “turnover”). If you get 100 new members, but 99 of them quit after 30 days, it’ll be hard for your business to survive. In a membership context, it’s the period of time someone will keep paying their membership fees. So while it’s vitally important to constantly acquire new customers, it’s just as important to maximize the revenue of each customer you already have. So what we’re talking about is the backend, and the marketing funnel you have in place.

With a subscription membership model – where you have a recurring billing system in place – the backend is the recurring fee itself. The issue becomes keeping people as members of your membership sites.

Let’s see examine how this plays out in the context of three popular business models:

Traditional Product Sales

Let’s first consider the traditional Internet marketing (publishing and sales) model, which is used by most online business owners. In this model, you create a product and a sales page, drive traffic to that page, and hope the traffic converts into sales. The average for that conversion rate is somewhere around 1% to 2%.

Assuming you have a $37 product at a 2% conversion rate, it means that for every hundred people you send to that page you’re going to sell two of those products at $37 ($74 total), and you’ll have a visitor value for each of those 100 people of $0.74.

Recurring Membership

The average conversion rate for a recurring membership site is often less than the traditional one product sale model; it’s generally 1% or less. So let’s now assume now that you’re going to charge $17 per month, rather than the original $37 product price point. But we start to encounter churn with monthly billing. In our experience, the average membership stick rate is between three and five months.

So for every 100 visitors, we’ll get one membership sale, and that customer can be expected to stick around for approximately four months. That means you’re going to generate $68 in revenue from that one signup (four x $17 = $68). That gives you an average visitor value of $0.68. When you use the membership model, you can also put backend offers in place. So once you already have a paid member, you can assume additional backend sales and commissions from that member – around $5 per month.

Now you have that one member, and they’re paid the $17 for the first month – will likely do so for about four months – and they’re also worth an additional $5 per month over that same period of time. So now you have $88 from that signup, and the average visitor value for the 100 visitors is $0.88.

Single-Payment Membership

The next structure is a paid membership with a single payment. Your conversion rate will increase because you’re asking people to make less of a commitment, and a membership generally has a higher perceived value than a simple product sale. You can expect a conversion rate of 2.5% to 3%.

Because there is less commitment, you can charge more still keep the conversion rate up. So let’s assume a one-time fee of $37 instead of that $17 recurring. Now your churn goes way down. The customers have already paid, so very few of them will actually terminate their membership. You’d be safe in calculating an average stay of 12 months.

So the calculation is as follows: You’re going to see a 3% conversion rate, and the total one-time fees are going to be 3 x $37 = $111. Factoring in the backend offers ($5 a month per paid member), and over 12 months you’re looking at $180 in backend sales and commissions, for total revenue of $291. This brings your visitor value up to $2.91.

But there’s an alternative model that blows all three of these out of the water when it comes to down to making money for you – the Freemium model.

The Freemium Model.

The Freemium model is basically a free membership with an upgrade offer. It works like this: you put a “free” offer in place on the front end of the site (in a later article we’ll discuss how to make this free offer not appear to be “free” – and why you’ll want to do so), and you’re likely to see a front end conversion rate around 35%.

If you then place a compelling offer on the backend, you’ll see a conversion rate between 5% to 10% on that offer. It’s often much higher, so let’s use 10% for our analysis.

This means that for every 100 visitors – you’re going to get 35 free members, and then a 10% conversion rate on these 35 members on the backend. So what you end up with on average is 31.5 free members and 3.5 paid members.

On your front end that’s 3.5 x $37 = $129.50. The paid member back-end value is $5 x 12 Months x 3.5 People = $210. The free member back-end value is $1.50 x 12 Months x 31.5 People = $567. Adding these amounts and you have $129.50 + $210 + $567 = $906.50, so your average visitor value is $9.06.

That’s a big difference from the more “traditional” models we discussed above (and more than 10 times higher the most common product sale model)!

Here we’ve opened the doors, we hope, for a lot of people to recognize that this Freemium model is a very profitable model.

Click Here to Learn More about the Freemium Model

Time for the 5th and final article in my step-by-step list building series. In the first 4 articles I have focused on setting up a full list building system, monetizing the sign up process, and putting up a great follow up series, featuring good affiliate programs (you will find links to the first 4 articles at the end of this post). Today we’re going to take what you’ve learned so far, and explore how you can take it to the next level.

So How Do You Get Filthy Rich On The Internet?

Following the steps in the first 4 articles is a very good start. Building your own list is extremely important if you want to be successful in internet marketing, and you can make a very decent income just from promoting affiliate products… But in order to take your internet marketing career to the next level (the filthy rich part), you really need to have your own products. As you are about to discover, setting up your own product isn’t that difficult. But first lets take a look at some of the benefits from having your own products.

Leverage Your Affiliate Program

If you have your own product, you can also have an affiliate program. By giving your affiliates an incentive (usually cash commissions) to promote your pages – you can move from just you promoting your squeeze pages, to having hundreds, even thousands, of people driving traffic to your site. Sure you give up a percentage of each sale, but the extra sales will outweigh that by far… Being able to run an affiliate program is one of the biggest reasons why you want to have your own products.

Leverage The Power Of Joint Ventures

With your own products you are also poised to do joint ventures with other marketers… You can promote their products to your list of customers/members, and they can return the favor. You can find products related to your service and add them to your auto responder follow up series. Not only will you earn commissions on any sales you make, but you can get your JV partners to turn around and add your product to their follow series. You can also do various other forms of integration marketing with your JV partners, including swapping thank you page ads, log in/log out ads, exit pop ups etc. Doing joint ventures like this is arguably the fastest and most profitable way to grow an internet business.

Leverage Your First Product To Expand…

Launching a product, doesn’t matter if it’s a free or paid service, ultimately comes down to building a list of customers/members. Chances are that your original customers will be the people most likely to buy from you again. In other words you can leverage your original lists to launch new products and services. This particular strategy is very well covered in Robert Puddy’s Mastering The Membership Model ebook, you can download a free copy here.

Setting Up Your First Product…

… Is actually quite easy. In line with Robert’s ebook above, I highly recommend that you set up your first product as a free to join membership site. I use and recommend the full version of the Launch Formula Marketing Script. But if you purchase the one time offer at either Floating Action Button or TweetMyBlog you will actually get a free copy of the LFM Lite script, which is perfect for setting up your first product.

Creating a free product, that people want to sign up to get, is very similar to the process I described in How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process. Here’s a rough battle plan for you.

1. Create a free product that has enough value to make people want to sign up at your membership site to get it.
2. When they sign up for the freebie you present them with a one time offer. This could be for an upgraded version of the product, some related products, rebrand rights to the ebook etc. This will of course generate some profit that you can reinvest, and thus grow you site faster. But the real purpose of the OTO is to generate commissions for your affiliates and JV partners – keep them happy and keep them building your list.
3. Then you have your follow up series for your new customers. With a free to join program you want to monetize it the same way as I explained in How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy. Of course now that you have your own product, with an affiliate program – you should put more effort into finding JV partners, so you can swap auto responder emails.
4. Use your new list of members (and affiliates) to launch new products and services.

Using something like Launch Formula Marketing, makes all of this very easy. It has an inbuilt affiliate program (every member is automatically an affiliate), it automatically integrates with your auto responder and it presents the one time offers to your new members.

Some Ideas For Your First (Free) Product

Write a short ebook on a topic people in your niche are interested in. If you don’t want to write your own ebook you can go to elance.com and hire a ghost writer. You can get a super quality ebook written for under $500. If you go the ebook route, it’s pretty simple to come up with a good one time offer – you can offer rebranding rights or maybe resale rights, plus some related bonuses.

Doesn’t have to been an ebook, you can give away software, scripts, plugins etc. TweetMyBlog is a good example of free to join site, giving away a free Wordpress plugin. Again you can go to a freelance site like elance and get a programmer to create something for you.

Another (very simple) option is to grab one of the many private label rights products out there, and put your own spin on it. New graphics, edit the sales letter a bit, maybe bundle a few products together. Resale Rocket is my favourite place to hunt for good PLR and resale rights products.

You should also consider making your first product an interview product. Get on the phone and interview some marketers on a topic your target market would be interested in. By interviewing successful marketers you get the benefit of becoming “famous by association” – and if they are willing to do the interviews in the first place, chances are that you can also get them to promote your product (instant high profile JV partners right there). I highly recommend that you grab a free copy of Bob Jenkins’ Teleseminar Formula – It will show you step by step how to get an interview product set up in 10 days or less.

I also recommend the Dominating Clickbank Videos. They will show you step by step how to take a resale rights product and turn it into your own successful product. I actually used Dominating Clickbank as the blueprint for one of my first product launches, and as you might have guessed, that turned out pretty well for me

We’re At The End Of The Series

I hope you have enjoyed these list building articles… And that following the steps, have gotten you started building a list and that you are starting to see some profits from your efforts. As I said the first 4 articles deal with laying down the foundation for internet marketing success, and it’s something I believe everyone should set up… before even starting on creating their own product. But as we have discussed here today, creating your own products is the key to taking it to the next level… and possibly getting filthy rich on the internet.

Here are the first 4 articles, in case you missed them:

1. How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page & Monetize The Sign Up Process
2. How To Write A Killer Follow Up Series That Converts Like Crazy
3. How To Drive Massive Amounts Of Traffic To Your Squeeze Page
4. How To Drive Even More Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

What About The Ebook?

As I’ve said before, I’m going to take this article series and turn it into an ebook. However I have a bit of work to do before you get to see that. I want to add some more content, make the ebook rebrandable and add a killer affiliate program to it. In other words, you’ll have a to wait a bit, but I can promise you it will be well worth the wait.

Got Any Comments, Requests Or Rotten Eggs You Want To Throw?

Feel free to leave a blurb below if you have any questions or comments about todays article (or the series as a whole) – or maybe a few suggestions for what you would like to see in the final ebook – thanks

In last week’s list building article I was discussing how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your squeeze page. Though very effective, the traffic sources I listed were also very beginner friendly. Today I’m going to take it to the next level and show you have to drive even more traffic, with some more advanced resources – note that these aren’t supposed to replace the resources in the last article, they are meant to be add-ons to your overall traffic strategy.

But before we get started on that we need to take a close look at your conversion tracking…

Conversion Tracking & Split Testing

Hopefully you have set up your conversion tracking after reading last week’s article. As I mentioned there are a couple of reasons why you want to pay close attention to your conversion tracking stats, let’s take a close look at two of them…

1. With proper conversion tracking you know the exact cost of one new subscriber to your list. If you (on average) pay 25 cents per subscriber at source A, and 50 cents at source B – you of course want to focus your advertising budget on source A (all other thing being equal).

But since you have monetized your sign up process and have a good auto responder follow series – you also know roughly how much money you make from each new subscriber going through your follow up series.

So if you earn $1 per person going through your follow up series (that’s a very realistic number btw), and we take a look at the example above – you would of course keep purchasing as much traffic as you can from both source A and B, for as long as the conversion rates and earnings stays up.

And that’s the beauty of doing proper conversion tracking and knowing your numbers. You can pretty much automate (pay for) most of your traffic generation and still be in profit – and that leaves you with time for testing and tweaking your pages, emails etc. to improve your conversions and earning, and for developing new systems and products.

2. But just because you are in profit doesn’t mean you should be satisfied. You should use your conversion tracking to continuously improve your squeeze page. That way you can raise you conversion rates, decrease your cost per subscriber and in turn allow you to build your list faster, for bigger long term profits.

What you want to do is run some simple split tests on your squeeze pages. I’m not talking about advanced taguchi testing, although you can do some pretty advanced stuff with a free Google Analytics account – I’m talking about simple A/B split tests, here’s what you want to do:

1. Make two versions of your squeeze page (for each different traffic source). Rotate the two pages so each of them get 50% of the traffic. This is very easy to manage using Hitsconnect as they have both have conversion tracking and rotators.
2. You want to test simple changes, like a different headline, changing one of the bullet points, changing the font style or background colour etc. You ONLY want to split test one thing at a time, otherwise you won’t know what is causing the change in conversion rates.
3. When you have collected enough tracking stats to determine e.g. which headline is converting the best. You toss out the losing squeeze page and keep the winner.
4. Then you try to beat the winner by creating a new squeeze pages testing something else, like changing a bullet point.

This sort of split testing is an ongoing process, that will continue to improve your conversion rates and thus both speed up your list building and earn you more money.

If you want to know more about conversion tracking, I recommend that you download this free ebook “Tracking Your Way To Profits“.

And now it’s time to start generating even more traffic to your squeeze page…

Step 1: Using JV Giveaways

I have been using JV giveaways for years, and as a result I have added thousands of new subscribers to my lists. Contributing to a giveaway is one of the fastest and most effective list building techniques I know of.

Essentially a giveaway is a huge co-registration/list building JV… All the contributers upload a gift and then promote the event to their existing lists. The members, who sign up for the giveaway, can then browse all the gifts, and if they find something they like, they need to sign up for that particular contributors list to get the download link. As a general rule gifts will rank by the number of referrals contributors put in – and the higher your rank is, the more subscribers you will likely get from the event.

If you have followed the steps in the first two articles, it should be easy for you to get started using JV Giveaways. The squeeze page set up and follow up series are perfect for this – and as you build your list using the other traffic methods, you can leverage that list to rank well in the giveaways, and thus bring in even more subscribers.

Power Tip: You want to be on the first page of the giveaway, but you don’t want to put more of your own subscribers in there, than absolutely necessary to achieve it. I tend to use safelists and list builders a lot when promoting giveaways. That way I can still build my gift rank and get a lot of new subscribers, without having to share my existing list with all the other contributors.

Here are a couple of recommended JV Giveaway resources.

JV Giveaway Secrets an excellent free to join site with some good information on how to best use giveaways. But the main reason I’m recommending it, is that they will also keep you updated on new giveaway events that are worth contributing to.

My Giveaway Secrets a great ebook by my good friend Derrick VanDyke. It’s an excellent step-by-step guide for people who want to start using giveaways to build a profitable email list. You can read more about the book and Derrick’s affiliate program here “Giveaways, Paypal Payments & More“.

Step 2: Using Article Marketing To Build Your List

Article marketing is a long term strategy that can build a consistent flow of traffic to your squeeze page. Here’s how it works:

You write some short 400-600 word articles on the same topic as your squeeze page, free gift and follow up series. Whatever you write about make sure it does not read as a sale letter, your articles should be purely informative. If you don’t want to write your own articles you can do like me, and go to somewhere like elance.com to find a ghost writer.

You then submit your articles to all the popular article directories, my two favourites are Ezine Articles and Isnare

When webmaster and ezine publishers look for free content to reprint on their websites and in their newsletters, they turn to the article directories. In exchange for the free content, the publishers agree to leave the article intact and include your resource box. This is where you get your traffic… Every time someone reprints one of your articles, your resource box is included, with a link to your website. Because the article directories often have a good search engine rank you are also likely to get some search traffic to your articles – provided that you write about a topic people actually search for (and use a headline + keywords that are optimized for the search engines).

The key to getting good results from article marketing is to write an awesome author resource/bio box. This is an incredibly crucial part of the system, that you need to spend some time on. Don’t waste the efforts of your article writing by slapping down an ineffective bio box like,

Joe Schmo is an expert in golf. Click
here to find out more info on golf
–> www.golfmastery.com

Consider the author resource box like an ultra-small salespage where your one goal is to get that reader to click on your link. You only have a few sentences to hook the reader with curiosity and then give him a powerful reason why he should click on your link.

In our example, I would probably use something similar to the following:

Joe Schmo is a golfing expert who recently developed an
eCourse that details a step by step process for adding greater
distance to your long drives. If you are interested in learning
more about his “5 Ways To Add Distance To Your Drives” eCourse
and shedding strokes of your game, please go here:
=> www.golfmastery.com

Power Tip – The 2 Part Strategy: Consider breaking your articles up into two parts. You can then post the first part to the article directories (include “Part 1″ in your headline) – in your resource box you then people to click the link to get part 2 of the article. If you articles are good, that will give your click trough rate a significant boost. You can either post part 2 on your blog (which would then have some form of lead capture on it) – or you can send them to a squeeze page where they opt-in to get part 2 (and probably another freebie to convince them to part with their contact details).

If you want to learn more about how to use article marketing effectively, I recommend that you download these two great free ebooks: Free Traffic Secrets and The 22 Step Plan

Step 3: Using Your Blog To Build Your List

Using a blog is the absolute easiest way to rank well in the search engines. Set up a Wordpress blog and start posting articles on the niche topic you are trying to build your list in. I’m not going to write a whole lot about how to set up your blog and get traffic to it – I’ve already covered that in this article: How To Setup A Profitable Blog

The key is to convert some of the search engine and web 2.0 traffic, your blog will be generating, into subscribers for your list. I know I’m a bit biased But the most effective way I know of, is to add a Floating Action Button with an optin form to your blog. You can see the FAB script in action over at Mike Paetzold’s blog

If you want to learn more about blogging I highly recommend these resources:

FirePow
Wordpress Made Easy
7 SEO Tips For Wordpress
15 Minute Blog Traffic

Step 4: Building Your List With PPC Advertising

I’ve saved Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for last, because it’s one of the hardest traffic generation methods to master – also I don’t use PPC very much, so I’m by no means an expert. But it deserves to be mentioned because it can, without a doubt, be one of the fastest and most cost effective ways to build a list. If you want to learn a bit more about PPC advertising I recommend that you download this free ebook: Adwords Made Easy

I’ve seen a lot of people waste a ton of money on Adwords, because they rushed into something they didn’t really understand. Here are a couple of warnings you need to pay attention to, before you start your first PPC campaign.

1. Remember that you pay for every click – it does not matter if people subscribe or not. Use the other traffic source to make sure you have a squeeze page with a decent conversion rate before you start running it in Adwords.
2. Figure out what you earn on average per subscriber going through your one time offers and follow up series. That number along with your conversion rate will determine the maximum you want to pay per click. For example, if you have a 50% conversion rate and you earn $1 per new sub you could afford to pay up to $0.50 per click and still break even.
3. Google will assign a quality score to your landing page – basically the better your quality score, the less you have to pay per click. The short squeeze page we have been using so far is not that good for PPC campaigns. What you can do is take that page and add an article beneath it (the article needs to relate to the keywords you use in your campaign)

If you really want to get into PPC advertising I highly recommend seeking out Perry Marshall, he is THE authority on PPC advertising.

So Was That All The Traffic Sources

Nope… Not by a long shot. As I have said before there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to generate traffic to your squeeze page. What I have highlighted here, and in the last article, are the methods I use the most. As a list builder the key is to look at all the different traffic generation methods and think, “hmmm… how can I use this to build my list?” And again, I highly recommend that you also read the Free Traffic Secrets.

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

We are approaching the end of this this article series. If you have been following my suggestion so far, you should now have a fully monetized squeeze page system, a great follow up series and a steady stream of traffic that converts into new subscribers. Your job is to keep that flow coming and to keep testing and tweaking, so you can keep increasing your conversion rates and earnings.

With a constantly growing list of subscribers you are well on your way to true internet marketing success – in the final article in this series, I’m going to discuss how you can leverage that list to get in on juicy JV deals, create your own products etc. This is where we start talking about getting “filthy rich” on the internet. Stay tuned for the next article

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the traffic methods, a comment on the article – or maybe there is a particular aspect of JVs and product creation you want me to talk about in the next article? Thanks for reading – I hope you found the information useful.

Written by Andrew Hansen from FirePow

Step 1 – Niche Research

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog – which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you’ve found this valuable.

Step 2 – Site CreationOnce your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched – by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines – and monetization – the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Step 3 – Traffic GenerationLets look at how to drive traffic to your blog or mini site – the element of online marketing that most people get stuck at.

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important – we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money – we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content – you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.

Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you – or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

I hope you’ve found this traffic generation article helpful. Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Step 4 – ManagementThe final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in previous articles, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this series informative and helpful.

Welcome to the third article in my list building series. In the first two articles I discussed “how to set up your squeeze page” and “how to write your follow up series“. Today I’m going to show you the next step – how to drive traffic to your squeeze page, and how to make sure that traffic converts into new subscribers, and thus money in your pocket.

There are hundreds of ways to generate traffic – I’m going to focus on the ones I use the most, which of course also are the most effective for me. As with the other articles I’m going to rank theses step by step – note that it does not mean that #1 is the best, it means that I believe #1 to be the easiest to master and get results from. You don’t have to use all the traffic sources, you need to figure out what works best for you and how many sources you can use effectively. But at the same time you don’t want to limit yourself to just one source.

You will always hear a lot of people say that this and that traffic source does not work or does not create results. I couldn’t disagree more, there is no such thing as bad traffic. It’s what you do with your traffic that matters – what offer you present and how you do it. Sure you will likely get a better conversion rate from PPC than you will from traffic exchanges – but at the end of the day, what matters is your return on investment (money or time). Comparing conversion rates across methods is like comparing apples to oranges, but you can compare cost per sign up and use that to find the traffic methods that work best for you.

Tracking Your Conversion Rates

I mentioned this briefly in my first article – It’s very important that you track your conversion rates, because you want to know:

1. What works, so you can focus your time and money on the traffic resources that performs best for you.
2. What to change on your squeeze pages, in order to improve your conversion rates and what version of your squeeze page works best with a given traffic method.
3. The cost per sign up – You can then compare that to what you earn (on average) per subscriber going through your follow up series. Knowing these 2 numbers will allow you to put your list building into overdrive, because you can basically use this to “buy” unlimited traffic and still be in profit.

In my next article I will go into more detail on tracking, how to split test and improve your conversion rates. But for it will be enough to say that you need to track your conversion rates – here’s how to do it…

You need to use a tracking service that allows your to track conversion rates. I use and recommend Hitsconnect (you want a partner membership, so you can do conversion tracking).

When you set up your tracking link, you will get a small piece of code that you can add to your thank you page. You will then be able to see how many subscribers you get , where they are coming from and what that cost you. As I said this in invaluable information – you need it to build a truly effective and profitable campaign.

I recommend that you add the conversion tracking code to your download page (or whatever page they go to after clicking the verification link) – that way you will be tracking what matters, new subscribers. Not much point in advertising somewhere that brings in a ton of (fake) sign ups, if none of them verify their subscription.

If you want to know more about conversion tracking, I recommend that you download this free ebook “Tracking Your Way To Profits“.

And Now The Traffic Generation Methods

Here are 4 very simple traffic generation methods you can start using today (and they are all free to low cost). I have chosen these 4 today because they are the easiest to get started with, and because they are the best suited for the squeeze page set up, I taught you in the first article. In my next article I’m going to show you some more advanced strategies, if you can’t wait, there are links for a couple of extra ebooks in this post. But for now lets get started driving traffic and building your list with…

Traffic Method 1: Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are one of the most misunderstood traffic sources out there. A lot of people will tell you that they don’t work and that they provide worthless untargeted traffic. Nothing could be further from the truth, but as with other methods you have to make them work for you, by using them the right way.

First off all we know exactly why people are using traffic exchanges. They want to make money online, they want free traffic, and they are likely using that traffic to promote a “make money program” of some sort. As you can see the traffic is very targeted if we provide what people want e.g. “how to make money online”, “how to get tons of free traffic”, “how to recruit more people to their biz opp” or any combination of these 3. On the other hand you will be wasting you time marketing other niche products on traffic exchanges, people might be interested in e.g. football, but they are not surfing traffic exchanges to learn about football. If you want to promote niche products on exchanges you need to spin in from the “make money” angle.

And since we know people are busy surfing to generate traffic to their own pages, we can’t expect them to read a long sales letter. You only have a few seconds to catch their attention before they click on to next site so you need to get their attention fast – then you want to get their contact info so you can follow up and make the sale. It’s extremely difficult to sell directly on a traffic exchange, because people are not searching for products they are advertising their own business… So always use traffic exchanges to build a list and then go for the sale on the back end.

The squeeze page and monetization plan outlined in my squeeze page article, is perfect for traffic exchange use. For a bit more info on how to optimize your campaigns for traffic exchanges you can read Mike Paetzold’s Using traffic exchanges article.

With a good traffic exchange optimized hook and squeeze page, you are ready to venture into TE land. But before you go I must warn you that there are thousands of exchanges out there, but very few of them are actually worth using. I highly recommend that you focus your efforts on 5-10 of the big ones – basically you want to have your site shown 24-7 in the exchanges and if you are just starting out you can’t do that with 30 (you will just dilute your efforts). Furthermore, the people surfing the smaller exchanges are likely also in the big ones, you might as well grab them there… As your advertising budget expands, you can start testing more exchanges and adding the good ones to your list.

Here are a few of the best traffic exchanges:

1. Dragon Surf
2. Traffic-Splash
3. I Love Hits
4. Advertising Know How
5. Traffic Bunnies

These 5 exchanges are a good starting point, and you can then expand with the exchanges that make it into the top 10-15 over at Affiliate Funnel.

At first you are probably aiming for 1 new subscriber per 200 views on the exchanges, but over time you will be looking to bring that down to 1 per 100 (or better) – That may not sound like much, but when you factor in the low cost of traffic exchange credits, this is actually very cost-effective. If you have implemented the monetization steps from article one and have a good follow up series in place, you will very likely turn a profit, when you buy credit packages from the 5 exchanges above.

Of course you can also surf a bit to get some extra free advertising, but I don’t recommend surfing too much. Time is money and the time you spend surfing is better spent tweaking your squeeze page and follow up series – and on using the extra traffic methods below. For more info on this you can read the “Surfing or buying?” and “Missed the point?” articles by Mike Paetzold.

Traffic Method 2: Safelists

Safelists are another great source of free advertising and leads. They used to be extremely effective, but the emergence of auto submitters, inbox cleaners, validators etc. almost brought the industry to it’s knees. And you will hear a lot of people tell you to stay away safelists. They are partly right, you need to stay away from all the automated rubbish, but…

With the invention of credit based safelists, the industry has gotten a real revival and safelists are once again a very profitable advertising venue, if you use them the right way.

Most of what you just read about traffic exchanges also applies to safelists. It’s basically the same kind of users (target market) and it’s very important that you use them to build your own list. Here are a few extra points that will help make you a successful safelist advertiser…

The basic principle behind safelists is that advertisers get together and agree to receive email ads from each other. Therefore you can expect a lot of email especially when you start using a lot of different lists. So under NO circumstance should you use your main email account when you sign up for safelists. Quite a few companies will try to sell you “safelist friendly” email accounts, but don’t waste your money – nothing works better for safelists than a free Gmail account.

As with traffic exchanges, there are thousands of safelists on the market and most of them are worthless. They are either small “hobby” lists run by amateurs or they a populated by auto submitters with no real people reading your ads. You need to focus on 5-10 good solid credit based safelists, and then post to these as often as possible.

As I said it’s the same target market as on the traffic exhanges. Work at home/make money people, who are often just getting started. They are looking for free traffic and for information on how to “make it” in internet marketing. With the the squeeze page and follow up series you created after reading the first two articles, you are poised to give them what they are looking for.

You don’t want to write long ad copy for your safelist ads, and you certainly don’t want to send people directly to a sales page. Here’s what you need to do:

1. You need a good strong, and interesting, subject line to increase open rate on your ads.
2. Your ad should be short and to the point – you just want to create enough curiousity to make people want to click on to your squeeze page. A good strong sub headline, a few benefit laden bullet points and a strong call to action is all you need.
3. Understand that most reader will only open your ad because they need to get to the credit link at the bottom. Your job is to either stop them before they reach it and send them to your squeeze page, or to at least pre-sell them on what they will see when they click the credit link.

Focus your safelist advertising on capturing leads. Link to your squeeze page both from the ads and from the credit links

Many get overwhelmed with the amount of emails they receive from safelists, and by the time it takes to use these programs. You need to follow a good system that will minimize the amount of time your spend and maximize your results. In the Ultimate Safelist Survival Guide you will discover how to become a super effective safelist advertising machine, generating thousands of leads from free traffic.

Recommended resources:
Ultimate Safelist Survival Guide
Affiliate Funnel Safelists
Traffic Hoopla Top 10 Safelists

Traffic Method 3: Viral List Builders

These programs are even more effective than safelists. You can’t mail all the members like you can on a safelist, you can only mail your own downline. That means that people receive fewer emails from these lists, and therefore they are much more likely to use their primary email address. That translates into a better conversion rate for you. The downside is that you actually have to build/start a downline you can mail. But with most good viral list builders you can upgrade and instantly be able to mail thousand of people.

Like with safelists you should use these viral list builders to promote a squeeze page, so you can build your own list, and you do it in much the same way. However you should note that there are usually no credit links on viral list builders, so you subject line and ad copy is much more important for conversion rates. List Bandit and ViralURL are two excellent viral list builders, and taking up then one time offer in both of them was one of my best decisions ever.

There are a couple of credit based viral list builders out there, I guess you can say they are a crossbreed between the viral list builders and safelists. List Joe and List Auction are both worth joining and upgrading in. And you can see more list building programs in Affiliate Funnel.

Join a few of the better list building programs and upgrade (you get the best deals on the OTO when joining). Then mail them as often as possible, always linking to your squeeze page. I can guarantee you, that this will build you a nice list fast.

Mike Paetzold also wrote a short article about safelists and list builders, you can read it here: Generating traffic – Safelists, List Builders etc.

Traffic Method 4: Signature Links

Email signature: With most email programs you can automatically set up a signature link. Put in a couple of lines of catchy text and then link to you squeeze page. Once you set it up, it’s a very hands off form of advertising. It can really compound over timer (just think about how many emails you send a day). It also gives you a good reason to pass on those funny emails your annoying friends keep sending you. Forward them to yourcontacts and hope they go viral, just remember to include your signature ad

Forum signatures: can be one of the most effective forms of advertising generating highly targeted traffic. Simply add a line or two of text and a link for your squeeze page. It’s very important that you don’t just rush in and spam forums. Pay attention to the rules, participate in the discussions, network with the other members etc. If you become a part of the “community”, people will be more than happy to click your link and sign up for your list. To put your forum advertising into overdrive I highly recommend that you get your hands on Cindy’s Forum Traffic Gold

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

If you have been following these articles you should have a fully monetized squeeze page system and follow up emails series set up. Start implementing the traffic methods above and put as many people as possible through your sales funnel. Remember to track your conversion rates, so you can focus on the traffic sources that works best for you. Read the “Free Traffic Secrets” ebook for more ideas on how to drive traffic to your squeeze page.

In my next article I’m going to go into more depth on the conversion tracking, showing you how you can easily split test your way to better results from any traffic source. And I’m going to give you the skinny on a few advanced traffic generation methods.

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the traffic methods, a comment on the article – or maybe there is a particular traffic generation method you want me to talk about next time? Thanks for reading – I hope you found the information useful.

Welcome to the second installment in my survey based, list building article series. Today I’m going to show you how to write a great email follow up series for your auto responder.

But first of all… the strategies I’m about to reveal won’t make much if you didn’t read my last article. Afterall it does not make sense to write a follow up series unless you are actually building a list. So, if you missed it last week – please go read How To Set Up Your Squeeze Page… first.

The Meat & Potatoes…

Your follow up series is the meat and potatoes of your internet business. It’s where you will pull in consistent sales and commissions. For myself the goal is always to make the follow up series turn a profit – meaning that it should at least cover the cost of getting new subscribers. For example, if I spend $1 on average per new subscriber, I want my follow up series to at least generate $1 per subscriber. Fortunately that is not very hard to achieve. In fact I can often turn a handsome profit on the follow ups – that of course makes the revenue from future broadcasts and promotions pure profit.

In this article I’m going to give you the step-by-step blueprint for setting up a great follow up series – But there are a few topics we need to cover first, so here goes…

Training Your Subscribers

Your follow up series has one main purposes (a part from making sales), and that is to train your subscribers to perform the tasks you want them to (e.g. click, read, watch, join, buy etc.). I recently wrote an article about this, it expands a bit on some of points in this article – You can find it here: The 3 C’s Of Affiliate Marketing.

Train them to click: you always want to make your readers click a link when they read your email. That means that even if you just want to deliver some content, you should always put it in a PDF or on a blog. If people always anticipate that they have to click something when you mail them, they will get used to it, and it will boost your conversion rates.

Tell them what to do: Don’t be afraid to tell people what to do (in fact most people like that, although they may not want to admit it). Tell your readers to click that link, to go to the blog, tell them to go watch this video or download that ebook. Getting into the habit of telling people exactly what to do will significantly increase your conversion rates. At the same time you need to limit your emails to one action. Don’t promote more than one product in a single email and don’t give people multiple choices of actions to take. If there really are multiple possible actions with you promotion, then let your email focus on one thing… Get them to click and then deliver the multiple choices in an ebook, video or on a blog.

They will follow systems: People may like to be told what to do, but there’s one thing they like even more, and that is to follow systems. If applicable you should mark the actions they need to take as Step 1… Step 2… Step 3 etc. It’s not a coincidence that what I’m writing right now, is broken up into several articles with a step by step approach.

Make them expect the pitch: Here’s as statement that often pops up in various marketing forums.

I’ve been sending quality content to my list for months, and then last week I sent a pitch for this great new product – my list went ballistic in a fury of unsubscribes.

The problem is not that they have been delivering good content. The problem is that they have been training their subscribers to only expect good content – no wonder they got offended when they got a sales pitch out of the blue.

There is nothing wrong with writing great free content (articles, blog posts, ebooks) for your subscribers – it can help you build a relationship with your list, install customer loyalty, and thus making selling a lot easier.

But let’s face it, you are not building a list because you want to make friends, or because you find writing content super fun. You are building a list because you want to make money… period! Don’t try to hide that from your subscribers. You want to include a link to something to buy in every single email. It might just be a short P.S. but you always want to have something there. This way you will train your subscribers to expect the pitch and they won’t feel “exploited” when you try to sell them something – especially not if also give them some valuable content on a regular basis.

How often should I mail my list: Another question I get asked a lot. Again there’s no single right answer (except maybe to mail them when you have something to write about ) But here are a few pointers.

You want to be fairly consistent in your mailing schedule. If you usually mail your list once or twice a month, and then suddenly move to mailing every day, you are going to piss people off (along the same lines as the “pitch” example above). Again you are training your subscribers and letting them know what to expect from you.

Pick a mailing schedule you are comfortable with and try to stick to it. Be careful not to go too long between mails. Once or twice a month is probably not enough to make an impact in the fast flowing IM world, and you risk painting yourself into a corner – I would advice you to mail your list at least once a week (including follow ups).

Consistency Is The Key

As I have just discussed above, consistency is the key when in comes to training your subscribers on what to expect from you, and in getting them to take the actions you want them to.

But it’s also important that your are consistent in your writing style. You want to build a relationship with your subscribers – you want them to know, like and trust you – because that makes selling a whole lot easier.

You need to pick your writing style and stick to it. Don’t try to be something you are not, people will see right through that. You can never please everyone at the same time – stick to your writing style, your topics and the kind of products you want to promote… The people that like it will stay and be your best customers, the ones that don’t like it will go away – if you try to please them all you will end up with a list of indifferent people, and that does not put bread on the table.

Time For The Cynical Comment

Everything I’ve written so far today might come across as very cynical, and a lot of people don’t like this very “in your face” approach… But again, we are in business because we want to make money. Being nice and giving away free stuff does not make you money – but it is a valuable strategy to help close a sale.

Unsubscribes are good: a lot of people get frustrated when people start unsubscribing from their list, but unsubscribes are actually a good thing, here’s why:

1. It means that people are actually opening your emails
2. Unsubscribes are a lot better than spam complaints. Or having people leave your emails in a “dead” inbox that fills up and starts bouncing.
3. You are just getting rid of the people that would not buy from you anyway. And you are left with a cleaner list of people who are actually interested in what you have to say.
4. It makes it a lot easier to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns. People that really don’t want to hear from you will only mess up your stats.

If have often said, that if you aren’t getting unsubscribes, you are not pushing hard enough. Here’s a great article from my friend Robert Puddy that expands a bit on that: Internet marketing is a game so play to win.

Once your list gets big enough, you will probably come to realize… That it does not matter what you send to your list, your unsubscribe rate will be steady. I can almost guarantee you, that the email announcing this blog post will get as many unsubscribes, spam complaints etc. as my last “pitch only” email.

On To Writing The Actual Follow Up Series

People often ask me how many emails they should put in their follow up series. There no right or wrong answer here, but in my opinion, more is definitely merrier. I would say that you should at least have 8 emails lined up – But the more you have, the more hands off your business will run. Generating auto pilot income, as long as you continue to put new subscribers into your system. I know people that have years worth of emails lined up. I prefer 1-2 months though and will then shift to regular broadcasts (when I have something to mail about e.g. this article).

The funnel: in line with my comments about training your subscribers, you want to set your email series up as a classic sales funnel. You start by giving something away for free (your hook, so all subs get that), then you move on to offering free to join sites that has an upgrade option attached to it. Next step is to offer them some low cost products, and then you gradually raise the entry price. Of course far from everyone will funnel all the way down to the higher price points – but you will make far more money doing it this way – rather that slamming a $1000 product in front of them as soon as they have downloaded their free gift.

It’s also important that the entire sales funnel in your follow up series is relevant to what people signed up for in the first place. Your recommendations can stray a bit from the original topic/gift – but then your writing has to reflect how this can be used with, enhance, or help them use the original – or maybe how it can take them to the next level.

Step 1: Your Welcome Email

This one is very important, and you want to accomplish a few things with it:

1. Give them the download link again in case they missed it.
2. You want to make them another offer. You are building a list because you want to make sales, you might as well be upfront about it, so people know what to expect (that way they won’t be offended when you try to sell later on) – Again, people who just signed up are the hottest prospects on your list, and you want to cash in on that.
3. You want to hint at what is coming – make them curious, so they look forward to your next email. And let them know that you ARE going to send them more emails.

Here’s my suggested template for your 1st auto responder email (of course you would need to change it to fit your campaign):

Subject: Thank You {!firstname_fix}, Here’s Your Download Link

Hi {!firstname_fix},

Thank you for requesting the “Automatic Money
Machines” Report. Here’s the download link again,
in case you missed it on the confirmation page.

=> Download Automatic Money
Machines Here!

And if you haven’t already, I *highly* recommend
that you sign up for Affiliate Cash Secrets. It’s
my #1 recommended resource for affiliate marketers.

=> Affiliate Cash Secrets

Thanks again {!firstname_fix}. I’ll be in touch shortly,
with a powerful tip that can easily triple your affiliate
income + an extra free ebook for you.

Have a great day,

Soren Jordansen
www.Soren Jordansen.com

Step 2: Your Extra Bonus – Build A Relationship

In the next email I give away an extra “no strings attached” bonus, this could be an ebook, a video or similar. I’ve already hinted at that in my welcome email, so people will be looking for the bonus email. Gives me the perfect opportunity to enter their inbox again, and set myself of as the generous guy, they want to hear from. Here’s an example email (of course you also need to change this to fit you).

Subject: Here’s Your Bonus Download Link {!firstname_fix}…

Hi {!firstname_fix},

I hope you enjoyed the “Automatic Money Machines”
ebook, I sent you the other day. As promised I have
a bonus ebook, one that can easily triple your affiliate
income.

But first… I wanted to tell you a bit about my self.

I live in Denmark and as most Europeans I’m a bit of
football fanatic. But when I’m no rooting for Liverpool
or my local Danish team Aab, I’m working hard on
building and expanding my full time internet business.
Thankfully that is my other great passion, so it doesn’t
really feel like a job.

Over the coming weeks I will send you a series of emails
that will recommend various tools you need, in order to
be a successful affiliate marketer.

I will also teach you how to use them and more importantly,
why you need to use them – and I’m very much looking
forward to sharing the tips, tricks and secrets that allowed
me to replace my army job with a full time internet marketing
income.

And now for your bonus ebook… It’s a great ebook called
“The 5 Critical Tools for a Successful Affiliate Business”,
you can download it here:

=> Download 5 Critical Tools Here!

Thanks again {!firstname_fix}, enjoy the ebook – I’ll be
in touch shortly with some hot internet marketing tips
for you.

Have a great day,

Soren Jordansen
www.Soren Jordansen.com

P.S. And if you haven’t already, I *highly* recommend
that you sign up for Affiliate Cash Secrets. It’s my
#1 recommended resource for affiliate marketers.

=> Affiliate Cash Secrets

As you can see I’m trying to accomplish a few things with this email:

1. I tell them that the bonus is there, but I don’t give them the link right away – I want them to read the email first.
2. The little blurb about me is meant to put a face on the marketer, and build a relationship with my subscribers. I’m not just the cold hard selling machine, I’m the Dane who loves football and roots for Liverpool.
3. Then I tell them a little bit about what to expect. I let them know that I am going to mail them on a regular basis and that I am going to recommend products to them.
4. But then I let them know that I’m going to teach them the “how and why” – that I’m successful, and that I want to share my knowledge with them
5. Finally I use the P.S. to soft sell something to them – both to “train” them to expect that, but of course also because it’s nice to give them a second stab at the product I recommended in my welcome email.

Hopefully the end result is that they are happy (the got a bonus download)… They feel they know me a bit better (maybe they even like and trust me)… and they are looking forward to seeing what kind of tip I have to share in my next email.

Step 3: Promoting Free To Join Sites

Next you want to add some emails promoting good free to join sites, that pay you commissions when people buy the one time offer. At this stage in your follow up series it’s much easier to get people to join a free program, than it is to get them to buy something. It’s also my experience that you can make as much (if not more) in commissions, if you do it the right way.

You will be seen as the nice guy finding all this great value content and giving it to them for free . If you write some good emails you can cash in on the one timer offer commissions, and use the “free to join section” to expand your relationship with your list, setting yourself up to make future sales. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to write an email that gives away free stuff, here are a few components you should include.

1. Include a small blurb about yourself – It just has to be a few lines that will help people relate to you and feel that they are getting to know you even better. Remember that this is going into an auto responder. Don’t writing something about wrapping x-mas gifts, people might read it in July.
2. Relate the free gift to the original topic/gift of your list. It does not have to be more than one or two lines. But it’s important that you don’t just throw random promotions at them – it has to be something that will help them accomplish part of what they originally signed up to learn (if not you have to tell them why this new thing is also important).
3. Then you actually pitch the product – doesn’t have to be much, as it’s not hard to sell free. The sites will almost always have some good affiliate tools, so you can borrow a few lines to use here.
4. It will most likely boost your conversion rate on the one time offer, if you also mention the upgrade options. Tell them that it’s free to join, but if they want to put their xyz into overdrive, they should pay close attention to the special offer – The extra videos really helped you etc… (you get the idea )

Here is a sample email that includes all the components above:

Subject: My Geeky Day Is Your Gain {!firstname_fix} – Free Step-By-Step Video Tutorials…

Hi {!firstname_fix},

I was just sitting here rummaging in my Cpanel, cleaning
up a few cluttered data bases – Yes I can be a bit geeky,
but it’s internet marketing, so that’s allowed.

But then it dawned on me, that I’m in the minority here.

A lot of affiliate marketers never get their business off
the ground, because they are too busy banging their
head against a wall of tech problems they have no idea
how to solve. Even if they wanted to outsource it they
would have no idea what to ask the programmer to do.

Does that sound familiar {!firstname_fix}, if so you could
probably use these great step-by-step videos.

=> Discover Cpanel

They go through all the different aspects of managing your
own hosting. It’s how I learned it, and I’m sure you can use
it for your websites too.

You get the first videos and some cool bonuses for free,
but you should keep an eye out for the special offer when
you sign up. If you see it, you will get a chance to snap up
the entire package for next to nothing – I did, and it made
a world of difference for me.

=> Discover Cpanel

Unleash the geek within!

Soren Jordansen
www.SorenJordansen.com

P.S. With these step-by-step video tutorials, you’ll be
able to control your own hosting, fast. Get started with
a free video on setting up your email accounts now…

=> Discover Cpanel

I would say that you need at least 5 of these “free to join” emails in your follow up series, but the more you have the better – as long as you can keep them relevant and follow the formula above.

With all the BFM and LFM sites out there, there are thousands of sites to chose from and you’ll be able to find offers for just about any niche.

Here are a few of my favourites, I get a regular paycheck from all of them. To get your own affiliate links, all you have to do is sign up:

Discover Cpanel
Free Website Builder
Email Promos Exposed
Instant Squeeze Page Generator
OTO Goldmine
Mini Site Profits Exposed
Affiliate Funnel

Step 4: Selling Products

Now that you have warmed up your list, built a relationship and showed them that you have some good stuff to share – You can start adding some emails that sells products directly. These emails should follow the same basic formula as the “free to join” emails above. But when you are asking for money upfront, you generally have to write a longer email – to highlight the benefits of the purchase, and to counter their possible objections. If you want to learn more about how to write good emails that sell, I highly recommend that you watch these free videos.

I personally don’t like to add a lot of sales emails to my follow up series, as I prefer to keep my schedule open for JVs and new launches. But you can add as many as you like – I have a few sub-lists that are maxed out with these super cut & paste emails.

You should keep the “sales funnel” in mind if you are adding more than one product to the end of your follow up series – start with low cost first and then work your way up to the more expensive items. If you are adding a lot of products you want to break up the barrage of sales pitches with the occasional free gift or free to join site – or maybe some good content blog posts that links to a few recommended products.

Power Tip 1: When you are promoting a new launch to your list, consider writing an honest review on your blog and send them there first. You can then keep adding short emails to your follow up series, sending people to these reviews. This way you can set yourself up as their “crap filter” – you are giving them content, honest reviews and recommendations (but of course you are selling at the same time). By adding these to your AR you will be making sales long after all the other affiliates have forgotten about the launch and product.

Power Tip 2: I like to add products with recurring commissions to my follow up series. That way I can make the sale once and get paid over and over again. Here are a few that work great for me (+ instruction on how to join the affiliate program).

Affiliate Cash Secrets (Join to become an affiliate).
Wealth Building Portfolio (Join the affiliate program here).
Internet Entrepreneur Club (Join the affiliate program here).

If You Have Your Own Products…

The steps above were written with affiliate promotions in mind, but they also apply if you have your own products. If you are selling your own products and services you want to write as many of them as you can into your follow up series (if they fit the list/niche topic). Follow the same approach, free gift(s) first, then free to join with upsells, and finally selling your products (going from low to high cost).

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

If you have read the first article and implemented the steps, you should have a squeeze page system set up and properly monetized. When you are done implementing the steps in this article, you will also have a profit pulling email series in place – That is basically all you need to become a successful list builder and make some serious money in this business.

Of course now you need to put some people through your system and sales funnel, in other words, drive traffic to your squeeze page. Funny enough that is what I will be covering in my next article “How to drive traffic to your squeeze page and make it convert”. If you can wait to get started you can go read this Traffic Generation article by Mike Paetzold.

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the steps, a comment on the article or maybe a suggestion for the coming ones. Thanks for reading – I hope you found the information useful.

Based on last week’s survey results, I’m now ready to start my article series. Hopefully I can help you kick start your internet marketing career. If you did not see the survey results, you can find them here. I’m going to focus on helping you get started building a profitable list, and today I’m going to talk about “how to set up your squeeze page and monetize the sign up process”.

The purpose of this series is provide you with a step-by-step blueprint to internet marketing success. It will be based on the actual survey results, and thus targeted towards the “newbie”. But every step is critically important to the whole process, so don’t assume you “know it all” and think you can skip things – Unless you are already wildly successful in internet marketing, you want to take action and implement these steps today!

Don’t Dig For Gold – Sell Shovels

This is where most people get it wrong… They jump from program to program, searching for that one push-button system that will make them rich. They are digging for gold in the vast world of hype and scams. What savvy marketers realize is that the real money is in teaching the millions of opportunity seekers how to make money online, and selling them the tools they need to do so. Just look at this article – if you think about it – I’m selling shovels right now, based on what the survey told me the gold diggers need.

Not entirely sure what this shovel selling talk is all about? Ok, here’s your first assignment: Read this sales letter from Russell Brunson and pay special attention to the part about selling shovels, (I’m not asking you to go buy the course – although it is good).

Step 1: The Tools You Need

Before we get started setting up your list building system, we need to make sure you have the 3 essential tools in place. Without these it will be impossible for you to build a profitable internet marketing business. Based on the survey and comments I realize that most people would like to get started for free. Unfortunately there are always start up costs associated with starting a business. Throughout this series I will recommend the tools and services I use, but I will also strive to give you a free alternative (if there is a decent one out there)… Ok, so here is what you need:

Auto responder: this IS the most important part of your business. It is where you will collect your subscribers and email them. Your auto responder will likely account for over 90% of your online income – this is not where you want to cut corners. Here’s what I recommend: AWeber is hands down the best service. It’s what I use and recommend – and it will be the auto responder of reference for the rest of this series. If you really want a free auto responder you can grab one at Email Aces (scroll down to the P.P.S. and click the link) – Be aware that you will be limited as to the size of list, numbers of emails and campaigns you can have, and they will place 3rd party ads in your emails (nothing is ever truly free).

Hosting: you need somewhere to host your pages. I use and recommend Zoot Host from Jon Atwood. Great service and very affordable. The small standard package will be more than enough for most list builders.

Ad Tracking: You need a way to track your ads. There is a gazillion ad tracking programs out there, but it is very important to use one that lets you track your conversion rates. I use and recommend Hitsconnect (you want a partner membership, so you can do conversion tracking). If you want a free service you can grab a Goto-Pro free trial here, however it’s a lot harder to use than Hitsconnect.

Step 2: What Kind Of Shovel Are You Going To Sell?

Next thing you have to do is find your hook, also known as your ethical bribe (usually an ebook, video, audio file etc.). This is what is going to convince people to part with their contact info, and subscribe to your list. Your squeeze page needs to convince then that you have information they need, and that they can only get it if they sign up -  Your hook (or gift) must have enough perceived value to make this happen.

But before you pick your hook, you need to think about why your are building a list. What are you going to write about? What are you going to sell to your list? Your squeeze page and gift needs to attract the people who are interested in your topic – not much point in having a traffic exchange ebook as the lead in, if you are mainly going to write about, and sell blogging stuff. Check out the defining your offer article from Mike Paetzold for more info.

Your list can have a broad internet marketing appeal, we do all use a wide variety of products and services – but you are best off if you focus on one niche (inside internet marketing). Establish yourself as an expert on that, and then build from there.

There are a ton of membership sites where you can find something to give away on your squeeze page. Resale Rocket is one of my favourites. If you use Instant Squeeze Page Generator to build your squeeze page, they already have a selection of gifts in there you can use.

If possibly try to find a gift that you can rebrand with your own affiliate links. Having your links in hundreds of ebooks sitting on people’s desktops can potentially create a lot of sales over time. Just one of those extra little income streams, as people trip your affiliate landmines.

Even better… consider writing your own ebook or creating your own product to give away on your squeeze page. That gives you full control over what you want to promote in there – but more importantly the hook is unique, they haven’t seen it before, and they can’t get it anywhere else. Having a unique gift will usually increase your conversion rates. If you don’t want to write your own ebook, you can go to something like elance.com and get a ghost writer to do it for you.

Step 3: Set Up Your Squeeze Page

Time to set your squeeze page… I recommend that you keep it short so everything is above the fold (means they don’t have to scroll). The squeeze page has only one purpose and that’s to collect subscribers, don’t dilute your efforts by including banners and links to other thing, it will only hurt your conversion rate. Here are the key components of a good squeeze page (don’t leave any of them out):

1. A strong attention grabbing headline – this should force them to stop and read your page but also instantly point to the benefits of signing up.
2. A couple of bullet points with details. Don’t list the features, list the benefits
3. I nice image of the gift they will receive
4. A strong call to action
5. Your opt-in form, remember to change the standard “submit/subscribe” button to something sexy. People don’t like to submit and subscribe – but they sure do like to “Click Here For Free Instant Access!”
6. A little blurp about keeping their details private.

I have just created an example squeeze page to give you an idea. You want to create something very similar to this: See my example squeeze here.

If HTML is a foreign language to you, I recommend that you use this free website builder, it comes with some great tutorials and some good bonuses you can use to build your squeeze page. Alternately you can use something like Instant Squeeze Page Generator, where you can point and click your way to a good squeeze page.

Finally… when you create the opt-in form for your squeeze page, you will (almost always) have the option to redirect them to a thank you page. Don’t leave the standard AWeber page up, use this feature – Here’s what you can do…

Step 4: Monetize Your Thank You Page

Your thank you page is a prime piece of real estate. By signing up, people have just demonstrated that they are interested in what you have to offer – it’s time to test that commitment towards a sale. This is your first chance to monetize the list building process (aside from any links in your gift) – but unfortunately it’s a step that most people miss. With a little bit of testing and tweaking you can often turn a profit on the thank you page alone. Here are some of the thing I prefer my opt-in forms to re-direct to:

1. A one time offer: There’s a free service called OTO Goldmine that will let you create one time offer within minutes. Here’s an example – it took me two minutes to set up and they even host the OTO for me (and deliver the products). Notice how I’m both monetizing my thank you page, and telling them to go check their email for the confirmation link.
2. If there is a good product directly related to my gift, I like to send them straight to the sales page. They have already demonstrated an interest in the topic, and taken action on the offer. They are hot prospects to send to the sales page. I’ve found that this strategy works best of you can find some low cost products e.g. $7 reports or some good free to join sites, with good converting one time offers e.g. Butterfly Marketing sites.
3. Or you can use a co-registration service like Advertising Know How – You will be showing ads for other people’s ezine on your thank you page, and in exchange your ezine will be shown on their thank you pages. While this won’t earn you money directly, it will likely boost your list building by 20-30%, making you more money long term. When I’m sure that my follow up series is making money, I prefer to use co-registration on my thank you page, but…

The bottom line is that you have to use something, don’t leave it blank – pick one of the strategies above and monetize this prime piece of virtual real estate.

Step 5: Get People To Confirm Their Subscription

Now that they have signed up for your list, and you have presented them with an offer of some sort – You want to make sure that they click the email confirmation link so you can continue to send them emails. Here are a few changes you need to make to your AWeber “Verification Message” (found under List Settings => Verified Opt-in).

Change the subject line to something like:

{!firstname_fix}, Confirm To Download Your “Gift Name” Report…

Change the verification message (Intro) to something like:

Hi {!firstname_fix},

Thank you for requesting your free copy of my
“Gift Name” report. Before I can send you the
download link I need to make sure I have your
permission, so…

Please click the link below to go to the download page…

Finally AWeber also has a feature called the “Confirmation Success Page”. Don’t ever leave this blank, this is another piece of real estate you can monetize. I like to use OTO Goldmine here, especially if I’m using the co-registration on the thank you page. Here’s what I do…

1. I log in at OTO Goldmine and create an offer like this one
2. I make the “no thanks” link go to my actual download page
3. And I then put the link for the OTO in AWeber, as my “Confirmation Success Page”

As you can see this serves a few purposes. First of all I will hopefully make a sale, but the page also tells them to go check their inbox for an email from you (a nice habit, we want them to get into) – and finally the “no thanks” link will send them to the download page as promised.

Step 6: Optimize Your Download Page

This is pretty straight forward, but very important. You want to keep people happy, so provide them with clear instructions (step-by-step if necessary) on how to download your gift. Your download page is also another piece of valuable real estate, where you can present them with an offer. It works best if it’s a free to join thing (that pays you if they buy the OTO) – make it look like an extra bonus to their download. Here’s a download page example.

Step 7: The First Email In Your Auto Responder

This one is very important, and you want to accomplish a few things with it:

1. Give them the download link again in case they missed it – especially important since you used the “Confirmation Success Page” to send them to a one time offer.
2. You want to make them another offer. You are building a list because you want to make sales, you might as well be upfront about it, so people know what to expect (that way they won’t be offended when you try to sell later on) – Again, people who just signed up are the hottest prospects on your list, and you want to cash in on that.
3. You want to hint at what is coming – make them curious, so they look forward to your next email. And let them know that you ARE going to send them more emails.

Here’s my suggested template for your 1st auto responder email (of course you would need to change it to fit your campaign):

Subject: Thank You {!firstname_fix}, Here’s Your Download Link

Hi {!firstname_fix},

Thank you for requesting the “Automatic Money
Machines” Report. Here’s the download link again,
in case you missed it on the confirmation page.

=> Download Automatic Money
Machines Here!

And if you haven’t already, I *highly* recommend
that you sign up for Affiliate Cash Secrets. It’s
my #1 recommended resource for affiliate marketers.

=> Affiliate Cash Secrets

Thanks again {!firstname_fix}. I’ll be in touch shortly,
with a powerful tip that can easily triple your affiliate
income + an extra free ebook for you.

Have a great day,

Soren Jordansen
www.Soren Jordansen.com

You Have Got Work To Do!

So that is my basic step by step guide for setting up your squeeze page and monetizing the sign up process. What you need to do now, is go through all the steps and get your whole squeeze page system set up and properly monetized. Even if you already have a live system, you probably need to go back and tweak it a bit in order to optimize and monetize (catchy phrase )

What’s Next?

I’ll get to work on the next article in this series, it will detail “How to write a killer follow up series and how to make money from it”. Should be good, so stay tuned for that… If you are on my list you will receive and email as soon as I post the next article. If you aren’t on my list you can sign up at the top right of this page (and you can also subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed).

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the steps, a comment on the article or maybe a suggestion for the coming ones. Thanks for reading – I hope you found the information useful.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to purchase and test Marl the stock trading robot (doublingstocks dot com). I fully anticipated it to be hogwash, in fact if you do a search on Google you will find plenty of people complaining about these scam artists. But I decided to test it anyway, here are the 3 reasons why (remember I did this so you don’t have to):

1) Marl the stock trading robot is currently the number 1 selling product on Clickbank and I have seen a ton of affiliates promote it on various advertising venues – as an internet marketer this of course got my attention, I wanted to check their sales process to see why they were selling so well, getting people to promote them etc.

2) I routinely reinvest a part of my profits on the stock market and I’m always looking for good information and tools that can help me make the right decisions. The notion of finding cheap penny stocks that are very likely to double is of course something that will give most investors wet dreams

3) The Stock Trading Robot has a very compelling sales page that really sucks you in – Of course it is of the “too good to be true – run away fast” nature, but for testing purposes I decided to let myself be “sucked in” and give it a test.

So what is Marl?

The background story: a young computer geek develops a computer stock trading model, while contracted to Goldman Sachs. He then goes on to develop a piece of home computer software to predict the stocks future direction by analysing a stocks past price movements. The story is plausible, however if you search on Google you will find that a number of people have already shot it to pieces e.g. he was never contracted to Goldman Sachs.

The real problem is in the premise that his new software can predict stock prices based on past price movements. Yes you can use such a model as part of your analysis, but as you can imagine it takes a lot more than that to predict stock movements e.g. overall market trends, news and most importantly reports from the companies in question. Furthermore such a technical analysis of price movement requires and ungodly amount of data an calculations – plus you still have to make your “educated” decision based on the data and the other factors.

What you get (or don’t get) when you buy!

So, my alarm bells where already ringing at this point, but as I said I had decided to go ahead and purchase it anyway.

The main product is a subscription to their newsletter and it has a $47 price tag. Supposedly you will receive a weekly newsletter with a couple of recommended stocks as calculated by Marl. I paid and entered my name and email – I promptly received an autoresponder email from Michael Cohen (the developer). The email thanked me for signing up and told me that I would get my first newsletter on Sunday – well two Sundays later I still haven’t received anything. Again if you search on Google you will find that this is the most common complaint (and I can guarantee you 100% that this was not a junk folder issue on my end).

Bottomline: $47 wasted on getting a thank you email. The so called stock prediction newsletter might have been worth $47 if they actually bothered to send something – Of course if they did I would highly doubt it was based on a technical analysis by a stock trading robot

But it gets worse!

After you subscribe to the newsletter you get presented with an offer to buy your own version of the stock trading robot. It sells for $97 and sounds like a very good deal – you can then “predict” as many stocks as you like instead of getting 1 or 2 in your weekly newsletter… Yeah right LOL, but of course I also had to test this option.

I got my download right away and it was easy to install – a few minutes later I burst out in hysterical laughter…

1) You are supposed to download EOD (End Of Day) files from the various stock exchanges and to analyze movements you, of course, need as much previous data as possible. The stock trading robot offers these EOD files from their website and they are nicely formatted so it’s easy to import into your database. Problem: I have checked on a daily basis and they only have EOD’s available for April 18th 2008 – they do not update this and of course you can’t analyze movement from a one day data set.

2) Big deal, you can get EOD files from hundreds of websites including Yahoo Finance. Problem is that this “state of the art” stock trading robot does not support the conventional formats for the EOD files and it took me forever to get some valid data in there… No worries, afterall I was ready to get rich now.

3) The stock trading robot does not predict a damn thing. It has a range of filters you can use to analyze the stock movements, but nothing you can’t find in your own stock trading platform e.g. etrader. In fact the tools and interface in Marl is the worst I have seen in a long time and the documentation is virtually non-existent.

Conclusion – Run Away Fast!

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a scam. They have a highly optimized sales process, but deliver absolutely nothing of what was promised. The only saving grace was a couple of PDF’s with decent content, but nowhere near the $47 and $97 value. I have seen this a hundred times, their concept is to push enough sales through and then hope that people don’t refund (either because they forget or because they don’t want to admit that they got robbed)… I got my refunds from Clickbank today and if you have purchased this piece of junk I suggest that you go there and ask for yours.

My recommendation

There is nothing wrong with wanting to earn a significant ROI on penny stocks. But here’s what I suggest, take your $47-$97 to Amazon or your local bookstore – there are hundreds of great books on small cap investment strategies. Follow the market news both online and offline and do your own research on the companies you want to invest in. If you don’t want to do all the leg work, put you money in an investment fund that specializes in penny stocks – trust me that is far better than wasting your hard earned $ on a scammy stock trading robot.

Are you promoting Marl?

Are you one of the thousands of affiliates who are promoting Marl? I can understand the lure, it sells like hot cakes and pays some great commissions – to be honest that was one of reason why I decided to test it, had it been any good I would have been all over it. But you may want to take a step back and think… is a few quick bucks worth risking your reputation? I have seen people destroy their internet marketing career in a single email blast! And can you live with selling a known scam? The decision is yours.

Please Help Me Spread The Word

I strongly believe that these scam artists should not be allowed to get away with their shady business. First of all it’s just plain wrong, but at the end of the day it will also hurt the reputation of the rest of us, who are selling quality products and services. Help me spread the word so we can put these guys out of business… Here’s what you can do:

1. Digg this post => Click this link to give me a Digg!
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And finally… Please leave a comment below if you have any questions about this article, any comments or maybe you could share your own experience with Marl – thank you.

I hope this post was helpful – I any event you have been warned

Have a great day,
- Soren Jordansen