In this article about how to build a buyers list, I want to show you how to build a buyers list by using other people’s product promotions.
Why should we want to build a buyers list rather than a list created by offering a free offer?
The simple answer is that a buyers list will generate more sales than a list consisting of freebie seekers.
Of course, the initial conversion rate will be lower if you are asking your visitors to buy something (i.e. more visitors to a freebie squeeze page will optin) but you will be building a higher quality list.
Of course, a buyers list is usually created by selling your own products but it is possible to create a buyers list from other people’s products.
Here are two possible strategies:
Strategy 1
In this strategy, you first find a product to promote – preferably one you already know about and like.
Usually, the promoter will be offering a discount so you need to take note of the key elements of the offer including the discount.
Next create related bonuses that you can offer to incentivise someone to buy the affiliate product through your affiliate link.
Using these elements, create an affiliate promo page and preferably post it somewhere that already has targeted traffic such as the classified ads on a niche specific forum site.
When the potential buyer clicks on the buy button on the promo offer page it takes the visitor through to a pre-checkout page which reaffirms the key points of the offer and tells the buyer to return to this page to input their email address and payment ID to claim their bonus.
The buy button on this page has your affiliate link through to the affiliate offer.
In short, this is the system:
Find a product to promote
Create or find your offer-related bonuses
Find a place to post the affiliate promo page
Create the affiliate promo page
Create the pre-checkout page
Set-up the web optin form and deliver the bonus with your first email or send to a download page with further affiliate offers on it.
Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.
There is a purpose built wordpress theme for creating your affiliate promo page with a 3 step process for your buyers to follow – I own this theme and it is excellent for this strategy but you will still have to find a way of sending traffic to your promo page to make it work:
Strategy 2
Find new upcoming product launches using a site like Muncheye and contact the product vendor and offer his/her buyers a relavent free bonus within the download page or membership site.
The product vendor has more value to offer to buyers and you get their buyers on your list when they claim your free bonus. This is a win/win!
The system in short is:
Identify upcoming product launches
Create or find high-value related bonuses.
Approach the product vendor and say that you are willing to promote their product launch as an affiliate and could you also offer their buyers your free product-related bonus within their download area.
If the vendor agrees, send him the free offer copy and image to put his download area with a link to your optin page where his buyers can claim their bonus and then deliver the bonus after optin
Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.
Conclusion
Both these strategies are simple, proven systems for creating buyers lists using other people’s product offers as the primary offer source.
Finding relevant bonuses to offer is not difficult if you either look around your hard disc or purchase a high-quality PLR product for a few dollars. Bonuses can be re-used with other promotions so the costs can be spread.
Hopefully, these two strategies show you how to build a buyers list through using simple strategies.
In this article I will discuss how to build your list of subscribers quickly and why this must be your absolute #1 priority as a business.
The business of internet marketing is about putting people onto lists, sending them emails and them clicking on the links in our emails, purchasing products and services that we recommend, in return for which we receive money/commissions.
The important thing is to focus on list building as your goal – the size and quality of your list is key to the size of your income and success.
Building a list is simply a question of maths.
It requires traffic/visitors to a your website or landing page to click on an offer (free or paid) to join your list and for you to then follow-up with them to develop a relationship and make offers.
The number and quality of subscribers you get onto your list depends upon a number of variables:
the volume and QUALITY of traffic i.e. how targeted it is for your offer
the conversion % of your landing page(s) (which can be increased by testing variables)
the quality of relationship that you develop in the follow-up process.
These are the key metrics that Ryan Deiss works on:
$1 per subscriber per month i.e. 1,000 subscribers = $1,000 per month
20% email open rate = 200 opens 30% Click Through Rate from his emails = 60 clicks
@$1EPC = $60 x 4 emails per week = $240 per week
There are 4 weeks in a month = $960 per month from a list of 1,000 subscribers
These metrics give you a guideline to work to. In practice, the numbers will vary from niche to niche and marketer to marketer so they are merely a useful ‘rule of thumb’
So how do we get, say, 1,000 subscribers?
We first need to offer ‘something’ to a subscriber in return for their email address – either free or paid. The offer needs to be relevant to the reason they visited your web page.
(Having a free offer is not an essential pre-requisite for list building – you might simply have a squeeze page with a headline that piques the visitors curiosity and then redirects them straight to the sales page of an affiliate offer e.g. ‘This guy generated 1,000 subscribers in 2 hours at zero cost – register to find out how’ – as soon as the visitor opts in they are redirected to a sales page with that headline to their main offer.)
If we make a good squeeze page, we could convert perhaps 30%/40%/50% or more of our targeted traffic to subscribers (compared to perhaps only 5-10% if the offer is a good paid one to warm targeted traffic.)
Most marketers choose to make a free offer and then immediately follow this up with one or more paid offers in a sales funnel, supported by a follow-up email marketing campaign to maximise conversions.
Another popular tactic in the internet marketing niche is to make free and paid offers via the Warrior Special Offers Forum, which naturally has a lot of people looking for information in that niche. This can be supported by affiliate traffic i.e. affiliates drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission.
If you are driving traffic to your blog, the number of subscribers may depend upon:
the quality of your content
whether you are asking for their email address frequently throughout your blog – sidebar, in page, footer, header, in content links, exit etc
what you are offering in return for their email address
the quality of the traffic to your website i.e. how targeted it is
Conversion %
Conversion percentages are driven by a number of factors:
how targeted your traffic is
the relationship and emotions, you can create with that traffic
the quality of the offer
how much information you ask for at optin – you will get better conversions asking just for an email address than asking for more complete details like name, address and telephone number (although leads that do give this information may be more qualified and therefore more likely to convert to a sale.)
the clarity of your offer i.e. no confusion.
the quality of your copywriting – why it’s important (the hook), what it does for them (benefits), how they can do it and where they can get it NOW!
the optin mechanics and how frequently you ask for the optin – pop-overs, two-step optins, exit popups, page load speed etc
the size and quality of your sales funnel – you can increase conversions by making a variety of different offers in your sales funnel. (I include your follow-up email marketing as being a part of your sales funnel strategy.)
testing and tweaking your offer pages with A/B or multivariate testing.
Defining Your Target
Throughout this post I mention the need for ‘targeted’ traffic. This means that you must have some understanding of:
who you are targeting – demographics, newbies/intermediate advanced etc
where you can get these people from e.g. Facebook advertising, solo ads, Warrior Forum, etc If you cannot identify where to get targeted traffic from then you have a problem and may need to reassess your entire list building strategy.
why your offer is attractive to them – does it entertain, educate or solve a problem for them?
The more focused and defined your market is, and the more you understand it, the more likely it is that you can make an offer to appeal to that particular market. It is difficult to get good conversions by trying to appeal to everyone.
Earnings Per Click
This is an important metric for all internet marketers. Affiliates may not mail your offer to their lists if they cannot earn $1 or $1.50 per click minimum on average from your offer.
If you are offering only 50% commission, the affiliate only gets $0.50 per click which may not be sufficient for them to mail their list. You can rectify that by offering 100% commission on the basis that you may be able to earn commissions either from the offers made in the immediate sales funnel or from email marketing.
Earnings per click = sales revenue, divided by the number clicks or unique visitors to the sales page i.e. if sales revenue is $2,000 from 2,000 unique visitors that is $1 per click.
If you want to make a profit, the cost per click (CPC) needs to be lower than the earnings per click (EPC).
When you know your EPC, you also know how much you can afford to pay for traffic. Traffic does not become a problem when you can achieve higher EPC’s than your competitors because it means you can afford to pay more for your traffic.
If you are offering your products through a sales platform like JVZoo or Warrior Plus then your metrics (other than CPC) are calculated for you and it is easy to monitor your conversions and EPC. Alternatively you can use Google Analytics or paid services like MyClickBoss, Hypertracker, Adtrackz Gold, Quality Click Control etc.
The Purpose of Creating Your Own Products
When you create your own products, as opposed to just being an affiliate marketer, it puts you in the position of:
earning 100% from sales that you generate from your own traffic sources as well as building your list
you have potential for affiliate marketers to drive traffic to your product offer to generate profits and build your list
you control the terms of the offer – price, period of the offer, quantity offered etc
you have an asset you can leverage to grow your business further e.g. offer your product as an affiliate bonus to get more people on your list
If you do not have a product, then you need to master traffic generation so that you can earn a commission from other peoples products.
Ultimately, the best traffic strategy is to build your own list and then send them emails that direct them to whatever offer you wish. With your own list you have an asset that you can readily turn into cash.
Sources of Traffic
There are many sources of potential traffic but here are some of the most popular:
affiliate traffic i.e. other marketers drive traffic to your offer in return for a commission
forum traffic e.g. WSO or signature link in forum comments
list traffic – if you have an existing list you can email them to send them to your new offer
solo ads – drive solo ad traffic to a free offer then offer your paid product as an upsell
Facebook Ads – highly targeted – or other PPC traffic
banner advertising on niche websites
media buys – you can buy traffic from many media sites
ad swaps – I’ll mail for your offer if you mail for mine
adding your product as a bonus to another marketers download page or membership area – the buyer has to opt in to your list to get the bonus
video marketing – a lot of marketers do ‘launch jacking’ by ranking their videos for new product launches.
blog traffic
social media traffic
and so on…
If your product has a good EPC, you will find that traffic is relatively easy to attract or acquire.
You are Running A Business
In internet marketing it is easy to forget that you are running a business and that your ability to generate sales and profit is what will ultimately keep you in business.
This being the case, you need to run your business as a business i.e. monitor, tweak, tune and know your numbers – traffic volume by source, CPC, conversion %’s, EPC’s, # on your list, email open rates and click through rates, sales revenue, costs and profit.
Once you know your numbers, then you need to work on strategies for improving your numbers. If you can master the mindset of running your business by the numbers, then you will be well positioned to build your list of subscribers fast.
I am about to start list building with Optin Hurricane.
I have been exploring if there are better and faster methods for building a list. In the past I have relied upon SEO to drive traffic to my website and then had various optin or buying options on my website.
I have also built lists by launching info products on JVZoo and Warrior Plus where traffic has largely been driven by affiliates.
However, I wanted to find a way of creating a list faster through paid traffic but realised that, if I was going to pay for traffic, I needed a number of things in place:
a good sales funnel
analytics to measure conversions and ROI
split-testing to improve conversions
the means to recover traffic ‘leaks’ using exit popups
I bought a product called ‘Optin Hurricane‘ – The Secret Files’ that sets out a basic funnel for solo-ad traffic as follows:
To facilitate the building of this funnel I am using a plugin called Optin Hurricane which I have purchased and installed on my blog.
It is my intention that the front of my website will be this funnel and access to the content on my site will only be granted once someone has gone through my squeeze page.
The plugin knows when someone has already opted in or visited before and previous visitors can therefore be redirected to my blog.
There are a number of other features that make this plugin highly attractive:
Multiple Squeeze Page Styles
Multiple Backgrounds – images, videos or colours
Vertical & Horizontal Squeeze Page Formats
Built in Call To Action Buttons (but you can customise as well)
Diverse Engagement Effects – animated options
One Click Countdown Timers
Exit Pop Up Technology
Universal Auto-responder Integration
Mobile Optimized Squeeze Pages
FB Comment Functionality
Import/Export feature for pages
Add Footers, Menus & Disclaimers
GEO Targeting & Visitor Segmentation to allow only specific countries to visit pages to segment your list
Generate Free Traffic through viral features
Accurate Tracking – find out your squeeze page conversions, premium stats redirects, past visits and build multiple campaigns (- link tracking is built into the software too!)
Redirect Past Sign Ups
Redirect Past Visitors
These extensive features mean that I do not need to add other plugins and software to achieve my goals. It even has an inbuilt meta refresh page that is illustrated in the above diagram as ‘Confirm & Redirect’. This page is also integral to the conversion tracking system.
Now that I have the sales funnel plan and the software to implement the plan, product offers now need to be added, the pages created and then traffic applied to the front of the funnel to test conversions and ROI.
‘Squeeze page 1’ will have an offer that covers a basic plan for how to make money online whilst ‘Squeeze page 2’ will probably cover how to generate traffic which is a major problem to internet marketers. After that, visitors will be sent to my e-book offer wall that is already on my blog – http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .
I then need to write the email follow-up sequence which is the semi-automated part of the system.
This means that when my list building system is set-up anyone coming to my site at http://mark-salmon.com they will visit my primary squeeze page and either optin or try to leave which will trigger a second squeeze page where they will either optin or try to leave which will trigger a redirect to my ebook offer wall http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .
If anyone who has already opted in comes back to http://mark-salmon.com then they will be redirected to my blog at http://mark-salmon.com/news .
When on my blog or if someone comes into my site via a post then there is a pop-over offer to join The Sky Inside (my product) for free and there are other offers bothin the sidebar and on posts and pages throughout my website.
All this is in a effort to maximise the my traffic to my blog by ensuring that visitors have multiple opportunities to join my list which is my primary goal.
Once on my list, my prospect will be redirected to an initial paid offer and will also receive 7 days of follow-up emails with further information and offers. Thereafter, they will join my master list and will receive broadcast emails.
Purchasing Optin Hurricane will make your task of building a relatively sophisticated list building sales funnel relatively easy and I therefore recommend it.
Training can prevent us from taking action. This is one of my weaknesses – I love learning new things!
But it’s all completely useless unless you take action and pass on the value to others. Money does not flow until you do that.
It’s great to feed your intellect and be comfortable in the fact that you have skills but the real learning comes when you take action. You then find out how the theory translates into reality and you start improving your performance based on actual results.
Over the past week, I have indulged in too much training which prevented me from taking ACTION!
Webcamp with Armand Morin
I spent 2 days last weekend listening to Armand Morin at his Webcamp in Las Vegas – the topic was ‘residual income’.
I was completely gobsmacked when he revealed that, as an affiliate of Powerpay, he is receiving between $40,000 and $80,000 every month in affiliate commission for doing NOTHING. He has plans to boost that to $200,000 per month. He actually opened up his affiliate account and he has been receiving huge sums of money each and every month for many years.
That’s where I want to be!
He revealed a number of cool ways for making residual income, including newsletters, Facebook Groups, Google Plus Groups, Membership sites and recurring income affiliate programmes. I am eagerly awaiting the recordings of the event to to recap some of the material.
I paid $27 to attend the live broadcast and, whilst he pitched a lot of his products, there was incredible value given from time-to-time throughout the weekend. I admired the way that he actually demonstrated what he was teaching via a laptop on the stage – very authentic.
He is holding monthly or bi-monthly Webcamps and I will certainly be attending more.
KISS Event at Gatwick Airport on Product Creation
Next weekend I am going to the KISS Event at Gatwick Airport near London on 19th/20th October 2013. The theme is about product creation – I don’t feel that I need a lot more tuition in this area but I think the networking opportunity will be valuable. There are 6 speakers and I know 3 of them. I want to get myself known in the right circles for affiliate recruitment purposes!
The cost of this event is £127 (about $200) plus accommodation – I felt rather better about this when my sister sent me an email from Malaysia (stopping off on the way back from a speaking event in the US) saying she needed to raise £15,000 to get more training on how to improve her already good speaking skills. Apparently she was chosen to progress by the event organiser – lucky her!!!
The ‘Solo Ads Assassin’ Project Progresses
I have been helping Daniel Madeira to set up his membership site throughout the week – he is starting to create the content and we have sorted out the graphics , so that project is progressing nicely.
Coincidentally I bought my first WSO for a while called ‘31,525 in 59 days’ – this is about how a warrior built a list of 31,525 in 59 days – on the sales page he recorded it as it was happening on a video. I had to find out how he was doing it – it turns out that he was throwing solo ad traffic at the squeeze page! Matt Bacek was behind the product and he revealed that in his business (which was not the business in which this list was built) he spends $250,000 per month on solo ads!
Business Storyboards Progresses
I have also created more content for my strategy membership site called ‘Business Storyboards’ – I created 10 or 11 videos in a spurt of creativity last Monday morning and then ran out of energy! I have also managed to reorganise my thinking about this product on a mind map and I am reorganising the membership site as a result.
Photoshop Actions
I also discovered an incredible free resource of Photoshop Actions for marketers – I am now able to create all sorts of highly professional marketing graphics as a result.
Today I re-wrote a PLR eBook on Focus as a front-end free product leading into The Sky Inside membership product. The book is actually fairly high quality for a PLR product and I have formatted it nicely so it is now a very valuable product indeed. I am in the process of building a squeeze page here – http://mark-salmon.com/focus-offer/ .
Tony Robbins said this about ‘Focus’:
Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.
Here is the eBook cover I created with Photoshop Actions:
As you can see, I am now very conscious of my branding and all my eCovers will reflect my brand from now on. I will be producing more front-end offers in order to start building my list faster and in order to create sales funnels into my paid products.
I also badly need to start promoting myself on weekly or even daily webinars. I see people with less talent making more money than me and I am getting annoyed with myself so I have to keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and not a sprint – I am building for the long-term, rather than the short-term, according to a strategic plan!!
YouTube Marketing
Finally, I bought a small product on YouTube marketing by a guy called Nick Breen – this too is an incredible traffic method. He shows you how to create short videos and get them ranked quickly using PPC to give the videos an initial push. Definitely a good traffic system.
So much to do and so little time to do it in! I just need to make sure that all this training does not prevent me from taking action i.e. to implement what I am learning. Ironic that my eBook above is about ‘focus’ – this is exactly what I need to do!
I am locked within sales funnel frustration having not yet found anyone who can explain how to test a JVZoo funnel. I’ve therefore sent a stiff support ticket to JVZoo telling them that their training is not good and asking for help. If I cannot resolve this soon, then I will set my sales funnel up elsewhere.
I have had a consultation with Marc Milburn and this has helped me to resolve a few issues in my mind. With regards to driving some traffic to my sales funnel (once testing is complete), then I am going to buy some solo ads and I have a couple of good sources for this.
List Building with List Liberation
With regards to list building I am going to test the system that Chris Ramsey has created called List Liberation. This involves building a fan page following using Facebook Ads and then running surveys with the offer of a free gift at the end as a reward for completing the survey – of course, the respondent needs to provide their email address in order to get the free gift. The free gift will be one of the free gifts I created for my funnel.
Chris Ramsey is a very clever marketer – I came across him first when I was doing offline marketing and he was really crushing it. In fact he has recently moved to a small Caribbean island to live the internet lifestyle there. Just shows what can be achieved when you get it right.
Excuses, Excuses
Progress has been exceeding slow since my last blog post for a couple of reasons:
I am gridlocked by not knowing how to test my funnel in JVZoo
I had to take a couple of days out to help my daughter
I attended the first day of the Ashes at Trent Bridge in Nottingham (cricket – England v Australia) last Wednesday – a great day out with my son James.
I cannot catch up this weekend because the whole family are descending on us for the weekend to celebrate my grandsons first birthday
Daniel, my grandson
My Son, James
Incidentally, we have set up James’ first blog at http://james-salmon.com – we literally set this up in 10 minutes so it requires a bit more work but I am pleased that James is interested in creating his own website. He is going to help me to recruit affiliates during the couple of weeks he has off after leaving IBM (his work experience job) and before he goes back to Nottingham Trent University. One of James’ strengths is that he is a people person i.e. most people like him and he will be ideal in a sales role.
My son & his girlfriend
James is living the millionaire lifestyle having just returned from 4 days in Nice with his girlfriend and shortly about to spend 4 weeks in the US travelling from California to Las Vegas by car and then a weeks Caribbean cruise with his girlfriend and her parents – I don’t know how he does it but I hope that he enjoys himself before he gets into his final year at university.
Tweaking The Funnel
Three other issues that arose from my consultation with Marc were:
to change the headline on my squeeze page
to amend the sales letters on my upsells within my sales funnels to position the offer in relation to the front-end products in the funnel
setting up a split test for my squeeze page
I am almost there with my sales funnel and once I am confident about what I am doing then I am going to create a video of how I set the funnel up.
I’ve also been consulting with Manie Amari on his FB CashFuse product and this is almost good to go – I have learnt a lot from Manie about monetising a membership site – his site is full of potential income-earning opportunities.
Future Plans
One of my former offline customers has referred me to a charity who need their website refreshing – I have quoted £500 to £1500 depending on what they want done. I am hoping they will go for the latter figure which will enable me to spend some time on building them a great site using a premium theme. I already have some great marketing messages worked out. Their existing website is horrible to behold so I am confident that I can make them very happy if they trust in me.
I have also negotiated a special deal with Andrew Hunter of Membersonic for both his membership plugin and his theme. It is my intention to use this deal to set up a free webinar to demo the Membersonic plugin with an offer to help the attendees to build their own membership site in a 4 to 6 week workshop programme to include the discounted purchase of these tools. This business model was outlined by Marc in module 6 of Email Cash Siphon and I really like it. I bought Russ Rufinos ‘Knockout Profit System’ some time ago which outlined the same business model but at the time the webinar technology was very expensive. Google Hangouts on Air have changed all that for ever and I now think I will pursue this business model.
Google Hangouts & Other Products
Manie and myself I are using Google Hangouts to carry out our meetings so that we get more used to using the technology. In our last session we used a free tool called Hangout Magix to create customised overlays for the Hangout. 10 days ago we demonstrated Google Hangouts on Air to our coaching group and had some fun doing so.
The only other progress I can report is that I am receiving monthly affiliate commission cheques from affiliate marketing activities and I have imposed a rule that I will not spend more than I earn on new internet marketing products. Buying products is a bit of a sickness as far as I am concerned. I am planning to buy Optimize Press 2.0 when it launches at the end of the month. They have just demonstrated a built in button creator which you can see on their blog. This plugin is going to be awesome!
I am also benefiting from the fact that I get all Marc Milburn’s products – he is currently rolling out several products including Online Wealth Blueprint, Profit Flare and the remaining bonus modules of Digital Millionaires Bootcamp. In addition, I am studying his Email Cash Siphon training about email marketing. So much to do and so little time to do it! It is great having access to all of Marc’s products as I am constantly learning how to do internet marketing the right way.
Concluding Remarks
Whilst progress is slow, on reflection, I am still moving forward inexorably towards my goals – next week will hopefully be a cracker jack week when I can clear up some of the outstanding issues with my sales funnel frustration and I can finish my affiliate page and start driving traffic.
