Month: August 2009

Aug

2009

List Building – Building A List From Scratch

This is an update to my previous post where I gained 125 new subscribers in 12 hours and made $80 profit while doing so.

The new sign up activity has been gently slowing down and now seems to have stopped at 171 subscribers as the WSO has now moved to the bottom of page 3. Other than the welcome email I’ve not yet sent any broadcasts out to this new list, so we’ll see what the unsubcribe activity is like when I do so.

Still, at 171 new highly targetted subscribers for a $20 outlay, that’s pretty good. However, as I said I’ve also made at least $80, and I’ve not yet analysed the sales to find out if I’ve made more than that.

I’ll “bump” the WSO to the top again in a few hours time for another $20 and it will generate some more sign ups. I’ll repeat this until the return becomes poor and then close the WSO altogether. I may also re-write the WSO from a different angle to attract more interest.

Next, I’ll send some useful information to them in the form of two emails, and maybe also a simple survey, and finally try out a low cost offer. If that goes down well, then I have a third party product I want to test out a promotion of, and by that time anyone who was going to unsubscribe will have done so by then.

That means the list I will have built (hopefully at least 500 subscribers) will be a strong one who are interested in what I have to offer. ie, we’ll be a good match for each other, which is really what we’re all striving for isn’t it?

It’s all very well to have a huge list, but if 95% of them aren’t engaged by what you have to say, then it’s pointless them being there.

I’d rather have a good list of 500 than a poor one of 5,000 any day.

Now as I said in my previous post, depending on who you believe, a single subscriber in the internet marketing niche can be worth anything from 10 cents to $1 in income per month. I believe that discrepancy is all down to copywriting and understanding what your list wants.

Of course it varies from individual to individual, but in this niche it will always come down to making money, and it’s a good assumption that most people on such a list will be warm to any related topic.

So for this list it will be my job as a copywriter to always emphasise the make money angle for any product I promote.

That’s a big tip, please take it on board when writing your own copy.

Of course I’ll also write about other non-money-related products too, such as useful tools I find and use myself, and I’ll try to steer some of that new list to come sign up to this blog too, as it holds more of the same.

I’d be pleased to make a couple of hundred dollars a month from that list, but I know the potential is there to earn a lot more than that if I do things correctly. And of course some products naturally sell better than others do.

For instance I find I get a far higher response to my own products than I do to third party products.

After I’ve bumped the WSO a couple of times, then I have something else I’ve been working on that I intend as a giveaway product to you and everyone else that’s on any of my mailing lists. For a short time at least. Eventually that product will become a $10 list builder at 100% commission rather than a free one.

So what I’ll do is set up another list building free WSO and a brand new mailing list for just that product. By segmenting all my lists in this way, I always know where people came from originally, and I also know which product it is that got them interested and so I’ll have an idea of what kind of product to target them with.

Okay, that’s what I’ve done, and that’s my plan forward for this list building method.

Now it’s your turn to go away and have a think about how you can run a similar exercise to build yourself a brand new list using the same methods. I hope that if you go and do this and benefit from it, that one day you’ll thank me by promoting one of my 100% commission products. 😉

By the way, I think it’s worth mentioning the new autoresponder service I’m using to build these new lists.

The service is called ImnicaMail and in my opinion is going to be THE number 1 autoresponder service – this is the company that the big boys are now betting on, purely down to the benefits of using it, not just the price. Speaking of which, it’s actually less expensive than the current #1.

If you’re as fed up as I’ve been with the “know-it-all” dictatorial service I’ve been using then you’ll really appreciate what ImnicaMail has to offer.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

List Building – Adding 125 New Subscribers In 12 Hours

I know people have a lot of trouble list building, but it’s probably the most valuable thing you can do to build your business, so it’s well worth getting to grips with.

Here’s something I’ve just done to add 125 new subscribers in 12 hours and has also earned me $80 while doing so.

This is something else I’ve never tried before and you know how I like to report back on what I’ve tested out. My intention was to at least break even on the list building exercise, but as it turns out I’ve so far made $80 on the deal.

Here’s what I did – to set the whole thing up took me about 8 hours.

I wrote a short 16 page report on how to make a quick couple of thousand dollars and ran a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) for it which went live on the 23rd August. In case you’ve never run one, a WSO costs $20 and you have to have at least 30 posts on the Warrior Forum before you can kick one off.

The WSO was run in two parts. The first part was the report, and after reading it, right at the very end is a link to the second part which consists of the PHP script to enable people to use the method described in the first part.

I split the WSO because I wanted to know who would sign up for the first part, and then of those people who were drawn in, I wanted to know who would take action and sign up again to a second mailing list to get the second part. I figured there’d be a few dropouts along the way and my curiousity made me want to find out how many.

I’ve been very surprised that in the last 12 hours only 46 (37%) of the people who took the report went on to get the script. The script itself in my opinion is incredibly valuable and has been responsible for adding at least $10,000 to my income when I’ve used it. So for people to miss out on that crucial bit is gob smacking.

But it goes a way to confirming what I’ve known for a long time as to why so many people don’t make it online.

Simply, they don’t follow through – they don’t take enough action.

Think about that for a moment.

I’ve seen it time and time again and I’ve even done it myself on occasion. Something is started but not completed because there’s another distraction that drags the attention away.

Here’s the killer though. Whenever I’ve followed something through, it’s always worked out for me.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out quite as well as I expected it to, and sometimes it works much better than I ever thought it would. Over the last couple of years I’ve had people say to me they can’t understand how I do it, but the fact is I try things out and the outcome of that is I always get positive results.

If you’ve been struggling a little, then PLEASE take this on board. I’m no different to you and you can do this too.

Okay, back to the WSO.

As part of the initial sign up, I made an immediate offer for another product at a killer price of just $20, with another upsell of $20. So right after sign up, the new subscribers get directed to an offer page. Even at the price I knew this would be a difficult sell to hardened Warriors and expected a 1% or less take up rate.

To my pleasant surprise I’ve had 4 people take the offer and 1 of those has taken the upsell too, bringing in $100. The WSO costs $20 to run so I’ve made a profit of $80.

So I’ve earned $80 and added 125 new subscribers for 8 hours work. I guess I’ll get more subscribers over the next day or so and a couple more sales. I’ll close the WSO on Wednesday, or I might even just close part 2 of it, I don’t know yet. I may even pay another $20 to “bump” it to the top of the forum again before closing it – after all I have a budget of $80 to play with now.

😉

I’ll definitely be doing this again, but next time I’ll try it out differently. (When you take action you learn stuff.)

What I may do next time is write a short report and a longer ebook, both related, and both about making money online. The short report will have some great content in it and will effectively be a sales piece for the ebook. The ebook will be low cost, about $5, so it’s an easy upsell.

I’ll then offer all new subscribers of the report a brandable version and an affiliate link for the ebook that will pay them 100% commission of $10 or $17 instantly using SmartDD.

So imagine this were you and you’d signed up for my free report. You’d get offered an upsell of the full ebook, and you’d also be given the ability to put a brandable version of the report on your blog or web site in return for a sign up. If people then grabbed the upsell ebook, you’d earn the commission for it.

What I’d get is the opportunity to also add a new subscriber to my list that’s actually purchased something to do so. That’s a win-win for both you and me which is what I love to happen, don’t you?

In fact, thinking about it, I could write the short report on exactly how I ran the WSO, with the ebook all about different methods of list building.

That would go down well wouldn’t it?

Last thing then, what would 125 new subscribers mean to you?

I’ll tell you. More subscribers means more income.

Depending on who you believe, it’s been said that it can be up to a dollar a month in additional income. But even if you use a figure of only one tenth of that, that’s an extra $12.50 each and every month for just one concerted effort to set it all up.

There aren’t many industries where you can say 8 hours work once will earn you an extra $150 every year.

Food for thought?

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Automated List Building

How would you like to INCREASE the size of your current mailing list, or even just start building one if you’re new to all this?

For FREE (my favourite word).

Read on.

If you consider yourself a newbie, then you might be finding it difficult to get it all started and I understand that, I’ve been there too. If that’s the case I can tell you right now, the MOST worthwhile thing you can do for your business on a daily basis is to build a mailing list.

Even a few hundred subscribers can generate enough monthly income to enable you to buy a new car for instance, by enabling you to pay the monthly loan amount. Or maybe take a nice holiday somewhere, or get an extension on your house. The same principles apply, it doesn’t matter how you spend the money. 😉

You’d generate this income either by selling products you’ve created yourself, or by acting as an affiliate and promoting other people’s products and earning a commission from it. Many affiliate schemes in the internet marketing niche pay 50% or more, and some of them 100% paid instantly.

If this is really new to you, then you might wonder why anyone would offer 100% commissions on a product. That’s simple – they’re list building! You get the full payment for the product and they get a new subscriber courtesy of you.

I do that too, my latest product at WPAffiliatePages.com pays 100% and is one of my list builders. You email your own list or write a nice review, publish it on your blog and you get 100% commissions. I get new subscribers and we all win.

Don’t EVER worry about losing subscribers. Some people are a good “fit” for you and what you do, and some aren’t. If you’re telling them about truly useful products and also giving them good content too, then they likely won’t ever leave. Some will, but it’s never anything to get hung up about.

That aside, I know you’ll want to sign up to a new free service I’ve just found that will build a list for you on autopilot. I’m using it here on this blog now, and you may have already closed the box to read this. Refresh the page if you want to see it again – it will only show itself 5 times to you as long as you have cookies enabled in your browser.

But before I tell you about that, ask yourself if you have a useful product that you can offer to people to get them to sign up to your mailing list. You need a good bribe. 😉

You might also want to follow up with some useful content before you start promoting to your new subscribers. So think long and hard about that and jot down a plan right after you’ve signed up to this new service I’m telling you about – it’s what’s known as a co-registration service.

This kind of co-reg set up is used by many HUGE publishing companies so you’re in good company by doing this.

The way it works in this case is to present a javascript box on your web site that not only presents your own subscription offer, but also related and similar other mailing lists with a couple of them already ticked. All that your visitors have to do is enter their name and email address and not only do they sign up to your mailing list, they also sign up to any others they’ve selected too.

The GREAT thing about this is your own mailing list ads are showing up on other web sites too, so you’ll soon begin to pick up subscribers from other sites.

IF you’ve made a good enough offer.

Once you’ve set it up on your own site then your ads immediately become active on other peoples sites too.

I’ve just installed it on my own blog, and here’s a great tip and is the way I’ve implemented it myself. There’s a WordPress plugin called (strangely) “What Would Seth Godin Do?” and you can get it from here:-

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

What it’s supposed to do is to show a small RSS subscription box at the top of all your posts for a limited number of times per visitor (it’s fully configurable). So by default it shows the RSS message for 5 times when you activate it, and then disappears permanently for your regular visitors so it no longer annoys them by showing every time. Clever.

You can bend it to do other things too…

So rather than show a message, you can just paste the little bit of javascript into it which shows the co-reg box.

Aha!

So after 5 (or whatever) visits by your regulars, they will no longer see the co-reg box as by that time they’re either signed up or they’re never going to do it. Even if you decide not to sign up to the co-reg service, I’m sure this WordPress plugin will come in very handy for other things you might want to do on your blog.

The final bit of the puzzle is which autoresponder service to use with this free list building service, and that’s an easy one.

Even though there’s another autoresponder service surfaced recently, the smart money is on:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/imail/

There are some great benefits to using this autoresponder, and I’ve spoken to the owner (someone I’ve known for a while now) and he’s got even more great stuff coming – new development seems to be happening every day. I’m 100% confident that this service will replace Aweber and GetResponse for many people, me included.

The big deals for me with this new service are the built in API, and the choices available as to how you configure it – you’re not locked into doing things the way Aweber forces you to for instance. Importantly, I’ll be building support for this service into all my products as we bring out new versions, so if you’re in the market for a new (or your first) autoresponder, this is without doubt the one to go for. It’s so flexible I plan to do some videos showing how to get the best out of it, so watch out for those.

So, what have we got?

#1 – WordPress Plugin
http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

#2 – New (and extremely cool) Autoresponder Service
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/imail/

…and finally…

#3 – Co-reg List Building Service

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/lc/

That’s a 1-2-3 knockout. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Offline Gold And WordPress Affiliate Pages

Just recently I’ve found myself going a little crazy. I’m trying to settle down to do TWO particular tasks.

#1 – Create another highly targetted automated list builder.
#2 – Sort out the free learning site.

In both cases, I know exactly what it is I need to do, and while #1 should only take me about 4 hours or less, and #2 several days to get up and running, I find myself unable to do either one.

And it’s driving me mad.

The last 3 days I’ve sat down in the morning fully intending to to do #1. But each day I’ve just had a “play” with another little project that’s taken my fancy. And each day it’s ended up turning into an all day session.

What is it that’s got me so distracted?

Simple. “Offline Gold.”

In case you don’t know what that is, it’s turning your marketing skills (you have some right?) away from the internet and instead targetting local niche businesses such as dentists and plumbers etc.

The more I’ve looked at this, the more I’ve realised there’s very little competition, far less than there is online. And the number of small businesses that don’t even have a website is ridiculous. It’s like they’re living in a time warp – at least that’s what I thought initially.

I’m now beginning to realise that most of them would probably like to be online, but don’t have a good reason to invest possibly thousands doing so.

From what I can tell, that seems to be the perception of the costs involved. Thousands.

Now I know that’s amazing to you and me, as it’s dead easy to create a WordPress blog and then choose one of the many free themes that are knocking about. Add some text and a few photos and you’re done. Hey presto! A niche website.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

There are any number of sites that are selling “web designs” to small businesses, but sod all that are selling marketing to them.

The fact is, pretty designs don’t make a sale, it’s the words that do it. It’s the words that pull in search traffic and it’s the words that turn a prospect into a customer. Yes a nice looking site certainly helps, but I’d guess less than 5% from my experience online.

What does that mean to you?

Well. If you can take the time out to educate businesses local to you about the power of a website to convert visitors to prospects to customers, they’ll look up to you and you’ll become the local marketing authority.

Ray LaFoy said to me a couple of years ago “our internet marketing skills would make us gods offline” I took that comment for granted at the time, but looking at the HUGE potential around us, and the fact that it’s crunch time for many businesses given the economic climate, isn’t this the perfect time to be investigating selling a few simple services to businesses local to you?

For instance, it should be relatively easy to ask small local businesses such as dental practices for $50 month in return for registering a domain and building a web site with a sign up box, all centred around WordPress. The $50 would be for “maintenance and backups” and is zilch in terms of costs to a dental practice charging $500 for 30 minutes work.

But it’s funny how thoughts can differ on subjects like this.

Discussing this with Paul (the developer of SmartDD), he said “isn’t that a bit much?”

Discussing it with my wife, she said “that’s nowhere near enough!”

Paul takes his enviable technical skills for granted and so doesn’t see any great value in his abilities. We ALL do that. We ALL underestimate how valuable our particular skill is to other people that wouldn’t have a clue how to get started. You have to put yourself in the right mind set and imagine yourself as not knowing anything about the subject in question.

My wife thought that $50 wasn’t enough for acting as a marketing consultant to small business, but that wasn’t my intention at this price point, and a quick and heated discussion sorted that out.

I think $50 per month is just right for a “foot in the door” product.

For $50 recurring each month you could afford to put aside 8 hours to put together a WordPress blog fully loaded with the plugins required and the content supplied by your client.

I won’t break down my thoughts behind those costs in this post, but 8 hours or less seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time to do the necessary work once the client has supplied all the content.

If you rate your time at a paltry $20 hour, then you’re losing money on the deal for the first 3 months. From month 4 and beyond you’re in the black.

But the REAL benefit is that you have a client who trusts you and sees you provide excellent value for money. From their perspective they’re paying you a pittance in return for a good looking website that they can go and add content to themselves.

If they want YOU to add the content, then as part of the deal you’ve already told them up front that you normally bill at $50 hour, including phone calls and other hand-holding tasks. My guess is that at least half of them will do it that way, but I could be grossly underestimating that and it might well be all of them.

That then becomes easy money for the skills involved.

Anything is easy if you know how to do it. For instance, if you’re a dentist and you know how to fill teeth or fit crowns, it’s not hard to do, but it IS worth a lot of money.

What I’m saying is, don’t underestimate your individual skills worth to other people.

Once you get past that additional money earner, then the next bit is to educate your clients about marketing and SEO. THIS is where the real money comes in.

When you have their interest you can start to give them quotes for additional “on page” optimising of their web sites. Then you can offer them backlink packages, for example you could offer an “ongoing SEO campaign” and add 10 incoming links per month (easy), and just add it to their existing payments.

Most small businesses will start to see results almost straight away from even the smallest link campaign as it’s very targetted – think “[your town] dentists” and you won’t go far wrong.

And as you educate them more and more about marketing, you can offer more and more such as setting up an autoresponder sequence. Once you’ve emphasised the money angle to them and the fact that a good sequence builds trust, it’s as good as sold.

And I have a few ideas about how you can do that to prove what you’re telling them is true.

Next, sell them on the concept of a sales page on their blog (completely unheard of by small businesses and will blow their minds) and add in my WordPress Affiliate Pages method and you have a winner on your hands.

The upshot of all this is I’ve clearly had my inquisitiveness “gland” tickled and I’ve been doing homework on the whole offline gold thing.

So what do think? Is this something you’d like to see me pursue and put together a product for?

It’s certainly something I’m up for, and I’m trying this out locally whether you say yay or nay. The difference is, should I put a bundle together for you to try out for yourself?

I’m very confident I know exactly where to go with this, and what kind of bundle would be useful to you as I’m running into my own issues already.

Yes. I’ve started building a site to launch this new venture from.

I couldn’t help it. I can spot a good money spinner a mile away, and I know this is one of them.

Multiple Income Streams.

That’s VERY important, just remember that phrase.

Comments please.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2009

Zero Blog Comment Spam With Clickcha

I thought I’d tell you about a plugin I installed a week or so ago that has completely removed all automated comment spam from this blog.

It’s called Clickcha and what it does is present a small random clickable image with instructions on where to click such as “click the smallest number” or “click the biggest square”.

The beauty of this is only a human would know where to click. So all those spammers using tools that automatically leave spam comments on blogs are out of luck.

Interestingly, it seems that ALL comment spam has stopped. In fact, even those comments I used to get that were what I would call borderline spam have stopped too. I used to deal with those by looking at the URL, and if it was anything to do with herbal remedies or gambling etc, I’d mark it as spam and let Akismet deal with it for other blog owners.

So just stopping to think about that one for a moment, it seems to be true that there’s a lot more automated blog comment spam must be going on than you’d think.

In fact Akismet hasn’t had to deal with one item of spam since I installed Clickcha.

That’s pretty cool and is definitely a plugin worth getting.

Update: I’ve had a couple of problems getting Clickcha to work properly on another site and I had to edit the comments.php in order for it to work. I’ve also had a subscriber (hi Larry) tell me that he clicked the smallest number and it deleted his comment from this blog. I’ve also just found a load of comment spam in Akismet, so Clickcha doesn’t quite seem to be doing what it’s supposed to at the moment and I’ve now deactivated it. The concept is good though, so lets keep our eye on that one.

-Frank Haywood