Exposing Profits on the Web

Enhancing Your List Building

I hope you’ve had some time to look over my viral list building idea using Advertising Know How and List Inferno. There are a ton of list building ideas and techniques out there, but rarely do I see people outlining exactly how to put several techniques and systems together to create your own, customized system for your needs. Hopefully you can use my suggestions to get a system going for yourself.

In order for list building to be effective, you have to have three things. Actually, for almost any web business, you need those three things.

1. Something of value.
2. A method of delivering that value to customers.
3. A way to attract interested parties and turn them into customers.

This trinity of value, delivery, and attraction are the key building blocks to a web business. Each one could be one or more books by themselves, but I’ll try to address them a bit here. As this applies to list building, here are the descriptions of the above 3 items…

1. Something of value - you must have something of value to offer your customer who joins your list. Why would you build a list or have a website, or any business, for that matter, if you did not have something of value to offer?

Now, you do not have to create this value yourself. You can offer someone else’s product or service. This is the core idea behind affiliate marketing.

You can offer information. This can be information you create, or information that someone else creates. What kind of information? Well, if you’re selling someone else’s product, that question is answered for you. Or, you can start with something you know a lot about and build a website, email ecourse, or ebook around the subject. This is often how niche marketers get started.

2. A method of delivering that value to customers - this delivery can be via email, the web, or real goods shipped to the customer. You can package up your thing of value however you like, and even use a combination of delivery methods.

For example, let’s say you focus your list building efforts on a course on “10 Ways to Overcome Procrastination.” You’d use list building techniques to build an email list and send them the ecourse or ebook.

Now, as you build your list, you can take this in a number of directions. You could:

1. Offer an advanced version of the course for a price, and you could ship them a hard copy workbook that they could use for the course.
2. Sell someone else’s course on self-improvement.
3. Expand your offerings to include seminars, audios and videos.
4. Sell leads to another company that offers similar products. Be sure not to sell any leads unless your subscribers agree to it.

As an example of number 4, offer an advanced course for free for signing up for some other offer. The other offer is provided by the company buying the leads from you. Now you’ve got a real business going!

I’ll give you one last example of how to offer value. Perhaps you’re using affiliate marketing to sell someone else’s product on Internet Marketing. Write up a report or ecourse with information on how to better use that Internet Marketing product. Then, offer your list the report or ecourse either as a pre-selling tool, or as a bonus for buying the product.

3. A way to attract interested parties and turn them into customers - something that is almost always overlooked is how exactly to generate website visitors or subscribers. There’s all this great information out there on how to create an Internet Marketing business, or a niche marketing website, but how do you actually promote it?

I’ll have to leave the details for a more in depth discussion, but you might want to try article marketing. It’s a great place to start!

Here’s a free viral list building formula that works well if you have a website. You can do this without a website as well, but you’d have to modify it a bit and you’d lose much of the viral aspect of it. It can work for any niche, but I’m focusing here on the Internet Marketing crowd.

1. Join Robert Puddy’s Advertising Know How (AKH)

2. Join each program in the downline builder for AKH

3. Set up an autoresponder (Aweber is excellent and you can test drive it here, or you can join freeautobot)

4. Create an autoresponder series for your ezine/free report and enter it into your autoresponder, leaving the thank you page and confirmation pages at the default for now. (I’m assuming we’re using double opt-in here to avoid spam complaints as much as possible)

5. Set up your ezine/free report sign up details in the list builder for AKH. This uses your thank you page to generate more subscribers, and yes, it does work. Copy the url for this page into a text file for later use.

6. Create your confirmation page on your website. Your confirmation page should state that your visitor will be receiving a confirmation email, and that they must confirm by clicking the link in that email if they are to receive any gifts you offered for subscribing, as well as your ezine/free report. If you offer more than 1 free gift for subscribing, you can put 1 free gift download link on this page. The rest, either put in the emails, or on another page.

7. Log in to your autoresponder and change your confirmation page to the one you just created. Change your thank you page to the url you copied and saved from AKH in step 5 above.

Now, whenever you get a new subscriber, your thank you page will show them more ezines they can subscribe to. In return, your ezine details will be shown on someone else’s thank you page. In fact, if you’re a paid member of AKH, it will actually be shown on 6 other thank you pages (3 if you’re a free member of AKH). I have found the sign up ratio to be relatively high.

Note* If you don’t use double opt-in, you lose the ability to use both a confirmation page and a thank you page, and thereby reduce your list building efforts (you’ll see why in a minute). Also, while you may lose some subscribers who do not double opt-in, the ones you do get will be more responsive.

8. Join List Inferno and enter your ezine details. Grab the list inferno code and modify your confirmation page that you created above to include the List Inferno code at the bottom of the page.

Now, each time someone requests to subscribe to your ezine, they will be shown the confirmation page with the List Inferno code. So, even if they don’t double opt-in, you will rack up a credit with List Inferno so that your ezine details are shown elsewhere on the web. Then, if they do double opt-in, your thank you page will also rack up up to 6 credits and your ezine details will be shown on 6 other thank you pages.

You could go with single opt-in, and yes, you’d get your thank you page viewed every time, and yes, the ratio there is much better (6 to 1 or 3 to 1 instead of 1 to 1). But, my opinion is that first, you probably should be using double opt-in anyway, since spam complaints are a huge issue. If you’re using double opt-in, then your confirmation page is empty real estate, and here we’re just putting to work something that would have gone to waste.

Second, it is better to have two systems working for you than just one. Also, if you word your confirmation page correctly, you can get over 70% to confirm the double opt-in. Third, if you wanted to get creative here, you could actually rotate your confirmation page code and use several other list builders in order to test what works best. In the end, it’s up to you.

While it might seem counterintuitive, I believe the reason the sign up ratio is high for the viral list builders (especially the AKH thank you page) is the same reason that add on sales, upsells, downsells, and one time offers work so well. That is, you’re catching people in the “buying mode.” In this case, buying refers to signing up for an ezine, rather than an actual purchase.

9. Sprinkle the List Inferno code throughout your website. You don’t have to put it on every page if you don’t think it fits, but on some of your high traffic pages would be a good idea. The sign up ratio for LI will be quite a bit lower than for the AKH system, but it’s probably on-par with regular traffic. That is, organic search traffic that has found your page with an opt-in form on it somewhere, not targeted traffic being sent to an opt-in squeeze page.

Now, when people visit those pages that have the code, it will get the ball rolling by giving you LI credits, and things will grow from there.

Notice we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can do here with this. What can we do to kick start it? Well, I’m glad you asked, but this post is already way too long. I’ll show you how to supercharge things in another post.

Want to see this system in action?  Subscribe to my Proven List Building Secrets.

Want to use my thank you page to help build your list? Join Advertising Know How