As you will have noticed I have dedicated a number of posts and videos recently to the subject of Email Marketing and Building Your List.

I had someone email me and thank me for the videos but at the same time, question why I had placed so much emphasis on recent posts on increasing opt-ins and building a list and apparently less on the Affiliate marketing side of things.

Well, to be honest, I had not appreciated I was appearing to focus less on the Affiliate side of things and if that is how it appears, then it was not intentional.

You see Affiliate Marketing and List Building go hand in hand and the bigger the list you have the greater the affiliate commissions.
It has been said before and really I don’t need to repeat it – but I will:

The Money Is in the List

Building a decent, solid list is in my opinion the best way to build a reliable long term residual income.

For me, affiliate marketing is not just about linking to products on my website. At most in a well organized Affiliate Marketing strategy that will only represent 50% of your income and the balance should come from promotions you do to your list.

And again, as I have said before, the best way to get subscribers to your list is to:

Deliver valuable content that adds value to the life or business of your visitor

Frankly if you are not delivering value — especially in today’s competitive world you may as well give up. Today’s website visitor is more sophisticated than ever, more reluctant than ever to give up their email address and demanding more value than ever.

No use being a ‘copycat’ (not even a copycat of me) – and rehashing something someone else is putting out there. You have to have your own unique angle / approach and above all giving your website visitor a reason to follow you and opt-in to your list.

In today’s video I actually disclose the Email Marketing System I will be employing on my new website for the first time.

A term often used these days is that something or another is a ‘game changer’. My personal view is that the game is changing all the time – sometimes a little bit – sometimes a lot and if we don’t change with it, then we get left behind.

My new website will hopefully be a Game Changer – but I always recognize the need to evolve and improve on every element of business all the time. I came across this quote by William Knudsen this week which very accurately sums up my views on the matter:

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you

Please don’t get swallowed in business.

Enjoy the video – again I have included an enhanced transcription with many additional resources. (Thank you for the great feedback on the Enhanced Transcription – especially from those of you to for who English is not your first language) This transcription includes more than ever explanations and links not included in the video – so really it is a Must Read.

Your comments and feedback is as always very welcome

To Our Success

Michael

PS: Check out the IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel for all my latest videos – in advance of them being published on this blog. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

Video Transcription – Enhanced

Today I’m going to talk to you about my complete email marketing system that I put together in the last couple weeks for my new site. There is a much more to this than most people realize.

To start with your visitors have to find your opt-in (or have their attention drawn to it by your OFFER)

Today I want to highlight 4 different strategies and some issues related to Opt-ins.

I am experimenting with some new approaches on IncomeDiary now I have redesigned the site. Note the word’ experimenting‘ — in business and marketing you need to always be striving to beat ‘control’ (i.e. beat your current best strategy) and it is not only just about number of Opt-in’s it is also about number of un-subscribes, number of people who don’t confirm and actual conversion on any offers you promote to your list. After all a list of 1000 people that converts at 10% is exactly the same in monetary terms as a list of 10000 that converts at just 1%. (I will talk about some of my own stats a little later on)

No1: strategy is driving people to the “Michael Dunlop” Squeeze Page. I do that in a number of ways – for example I will include a link to this page in my email signature, or if I give an interview I will include this link and explain the benefits of my 7 Day eCourse. However for this example I am just going to highlight how I promote the Blogging eCourse on my website.

See image below:

Getting The Attention Of Your Visitors With Good Graphics

I sort of wish I could say it didn’t matter — but really I have found, the better the graphics, the better the conversion.

No 2: Strategy for me is an offer (Opt-in Opportunity) placed in the side bar of the blog. Again a STRONG OFFER is essential. See Example Below:

Sidebar Opt-in Offer

Special Note: The “I take your privacy seriously’ notice is essential. An opt-in without it in my experience converts much lower.

No 3: A light-box Subscribe / Opt-in Form. This is a BOX that appears (hovers) over your content.

AWeber have produced an excellent LightBox Video that explains how to install a Lightbox Opt-in using the AWeber system. Highly recommended and you will see just how easy it is to do.

It is the much maligned pop-up by another name I suppose. I am in two minds about the Lightbox – it will I’m sure convert very well but I’d be reluctant to ‘hit’ a visitor with it the second they land on my web-page. However if it appeared after they had read a number of articles or just on some specific pages I think the quality of conversion would be better.

I mean, there is no point in ‘forcing’ people to opt-in if they then unsubscribe after a few days – or worse still you lose the goodwill of your visitor. So I am going to start of tentatively with it and indeed many of you will not even see it to start with. As I said earlier there is little point in growing your list if the quality of the list reduces significantly and their responsiveness to offers (conversions) is very low. I know not all marketers would agree with me on this and there is a tendency to just throw as much as you against the wall and see what sticks – but that is not my style.

I would welcome the views of my visitors on this topic so if you have anything to say on it please comment below or feel free to Contact Me

Offers?

Having decent graphics as I mentioned above helps a lot – but more importantly in my opinion is the right OFFER. No longer is it good enough to just say something like signup for my free newsletter. It needs to be more substantial like my Blogging eCourse or another cool giveaway – for example some free audios or videos or an ‘underground report’ about your niche.

No4: Test and Then Test Again

After all of the above you should test and find out what works for your site and what doesn’t. You could do loads of different things, like different colors, different text, different offers. For example, I test different offers, such as my videos, my e?course and eBook, reports, you name it. This is sometimes referred to as A/B testing or bucket testing. As I mentioned above — all the time, you are trying to beat ‘control, beat your previous best.

More on A/B testing can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

Something New On This Site

Something I have discovered, especially with my eCourse is that people don’t always act on each day immediately and then end up for example loosing day 5 and 6 emails for example. When this happens they “Opt-in’ again. The AWeber system will point this out to the visitor but I am working on a new system which points this out to the subscriber and actually gives them a PDF download of the eCourse – see screenshot below.

Message For Already Subscribed Visitor

Other Offers

It is not something I do much with myself – but something a number of my friends do is on the Subscription Thank You page include a special offer for one of their products. For example a $1 Trial on their membership website or indeed any sort of sales offer.

As I said, not something I am doing myself, but something that might work for some of my readers. I personally have found it better to Emphasis just how important it is that they CONFIRM their email address in order to receive my offer / free gift. I also give them an ‘unadvertised bonus’ such a Free subscription to my weekly blogging updates – always building the value so to speak.

Talking of confirming email addresses – ask any marketer and you will find this is one of their biggest issues with building a list. Getting people to opt-in is only half the story – to complete it you must encourage them to CONFIRM email address. I have recently created a new Thank You Page which will hopefully encourage more people to complete the Email Confirmation. Check out the new Thank You Page here

I have quite a number of email lists now – across a number of sites. Last year my target had been to get an average of 50 new subscriptions per day across my websites – which may not seem a lot but that is 350 a week or 18200 in a year. I have been beating that now for a while and my new target is 100 new opt-ins per day but as you will see in the screenshot from one of my lists on AWeber below getting people to CONFIRM their email makes a big difference to how fast you grow that list. As can see in this example if I wanted 50 confirmed opt-ins per day on this list alone I need a lot more than 50 new opt-ins to reach that target.

Confirmed Opt-ins is what counts in List Building

In the above example you will see that 12th May I got 41 new opt-ins but with Unverified (did not confirm email address) and 5 unsubscribes I actually netted just 22 new subscribers on this list. Compare that with the 19th May when it ‘only’ took 28 Opt-ins to leave me with a net number of 21 new subscribers. This is why I focus on the SUBSCRIBED (confirmed) number daily rather than the number of opt-ins that day. It is also why I am putting even more effort into encouraging people to CONFIRM email address. (And also why I am being selective about Lightbox Opt-ins – and anything that ‘forces’ visitors to subscribe — because as you can see it is all a waste if they don’t confirm.

Just in case you are wondering why I used the word “LEADS” in this post title it is because in my opinion an OPT-IN is not a LEAD or a SUBSCRIBER until they confirm their email. So you could say:

More Opt-ins = More Subscribers (Leads) = More Sales = More Income

When Might You Have a Single Opt-in?

As you will have noted, I primarily go for that double opt-in and get people to always confirm their email address. But there may be the odd occasion when you only wish to use a single opt-in.

One time you might wish to use a single opt-in is for say a webinar or tele-seminar (a one time event). You can send the subscriber details of the event (call in numbers etc) along with reminders of when the event is just about to start. (e.g. Webinar Starts in 1 Hour)

Auto-responders Make Your Life Easy

If you have not already done so please check out my Making Money with Email Marketing and an Autoresponder Series post.

I use an Autoresponder to deliver my 7 Day eCourse but in between I will email important updates (Helpful blog posts etc) plus I also will do promotions such as $1 Trials and Product Launches by other people in my niche that I respect / endorse. I really don’t over-do these promotions – sometimes there is one every week or so then other times a month or more will pass. Basically I don’t promote unless I think what is on offer is something I would be happy to buy myself.

In Conclusion

As you can tell I am a huge fan of List Building. It is also very important to not spam or email anyone who really doesn’t want to hear from you. (Always include an un-subscribe link)

AWeber offer what to me is an amazing service. Indeed I have to say there are lots of AWeber features that I have not even applied yet.

One however that I plan to do soon is to send email ONLY to people that had not OPENED a previous email I sent. Open rates are rarely better than 50% and 10% – 20% is considered good, so as you can see there are a lot of people (busy people) who never see that well crafted email you sent out. But what if you could email the ‘un-opens’ only again with out offending those who had already opened their email?

Well that is now a feature that is available through AWeber and by all accounts it is very powerful.

I have heard of this strategy doubling the overall open rate – especially if you change a few words in the subject line but resend the same email.

Not only that, but it allows us to learn more about our list and their emotional hot buttons and what they respond to – which ultimately makes us all better business people.

But that is another subject and a big one at that which I will leave for another day. For now I hope you have enjoyed today’s video installment and this transcription, I hope it helps.

Let me have your comments below and as always you are very welcome to email me your suggestions and questions you would like to see answered in future posts by contacting me here

Note:

Check out the IncomeDiary.com YouTube Channel for all my latest videos – in advance of them being published on this blog. You can also Friend me and Subscribe to my channel there.

Today I want to share with you how you can create your own email list and teach you how to earn money from it. The great thing about having a list is you can always be making money, all you need to do is find a offer that you can sell to your mailing list and then send it to them. For example, last month when I was in Cyprus I emailed my list a promotion and was able to pay for my whole entire trip two week trip, all it took me was 5 minutes. The thing with blogging is that your traffic can drop and advertisers can come and go but if you look after your ‘list’ it is yours forever. If you were to lose your blog today you would have nothing to show for it, your advertisers won’t carry on paying and readers will quickly realise you no longer exist, however if you had an email list you would carry on making money. Personally 80% of my income comes from sales generate from my email marketing and eCourse and is by far the best approach to making money blogging  I have come across.

Right now I am using pretty much any means possible to grow my list because I understand how important it is, I created myself an eCover, I use a lightbox optin, I have a squeeze page, I use the best software possible for my newsletter and so much more.

Below is my step by step guide to email marketing:

The only choice you need to make is, how much money do you really want!

Creating a “hook” so people sign up for your list

When I created WebDesignDev back in 2006 I got my programmer to create some custom newsletters software which worked to the extent I thought that newsletter software should work (send emails and that’s it). There was many things wrong with this, the biggest problem was I didn’t get my sign ups to double optin which meant I wasn’t legally allowed to email them. When I started my next site in late 2006, I made sure to get this right and get some email software that I could rely on and worked. After researching I found most big Internet marketers where using a service called Aweber and so I invested $19/month and bought it. Frankly working with Aweber is probably one of my best business investments ever.

When I first started I simply said, “Sign up For Retireat21’s Newsletter”, I think I got around 4 or 5 sign ups weekly doing this, not very good. A couple months later I decided to offer a FREE eBook about making money online and optins went up straight away to around 4 or 5 per day and it grew from there. I realised that to get more people on my list I had to almost “bribe” them to sign up, a few examples of good incentives would be, FREE reports, eBooks, eCourses, Design Templates, Software, basically anything you can give over the Internet that holds value. A lot of people aren’t keen to give away something to good but you got to remember, the better it is, the more sign ups you will get and so the more money you will make.

A few things to remember when offering a hook:

• Make it stand out with a good title, copy is one of the most important things because if people can’t see the benefits of signing up, then they simply won’t!
• Add a eBook design, this helped a lot to make it stand out and make it look like there was value to the FREE eBook. For those looking to get a eBook design, I recommend you check out eCover Creator 3D as it allows you to quickly make a very professional eCover at around half the price it would cost to get it done by someone else. Another benefit of using this software is that you don’t have to just make one, you can make 1000s!
• Social Proof, if you have several hundred or a lot more, then show it off with a Aweber List Counter, if your readers see you have a lot of sign ups, they will think they should to because everyone has.

Setting up your email list and adding an auto-responder series

Once you have decided what type of list you want to have, you have to create it. Like I mentioned above, you should use the service called Aweber, by far the best and has some great features to work with. Once you have ordered Aweber, login and we can start.

If you have done that, here’s what to do next: In the top left corner, below the logo you will see a link to Create and Manage List, click this and then click Create a New List. Fill out the form and click Save List Settings. Now we need to create a opt-in form so people can sign up for your mailing list on your website, in the header, click Web Forms followed by Create Web Form. Fill out the form and click Next, an example of one of my forms is below:

Creating a Opt-in Box For Your Blog.

You will notice that I have added a custom thank you page URL, I recommend you all do this. A easy way to set one up is to go into your WordPress Admin and click Pages, followed by Add New, now add a page to thank your new subscribers. Now you will see a preview of what your opt-in box will look like, click on the text to change it and style it. Once you have done all the edits, click Save. Now click the link saying Get HTML, you either have the choice to get Javascript Snippet code or Raw HTML Version. I personally use the RAW HTML so my designer can custom it to fit in with my website, if you won’t be customizing it then just take the Javascript version. Now go to your blog and login to your WordPress Admin, on the left side click Appearance and then Widgets. Drag the widget called Text to the right side next to your other active widgets and where it says Title, put the text you want to be seen above your opt-in box, for example “eCourse Sign Up”. Now in the other box paste in the code Aweber gave you and click Save, it will now of been added to you blog. You can see an example of this in action by looking at the top of my sidebar where I offer the opportunity to subscribe via email.

Add Your Newsletter Opt-in Box To Your Blog.

Autoresponder Series

The next you want to do straight away is set up your first autoresponse email for when people sign up. To set up your first autoresponse, go back to Aweber and put your cursor over Broadcast and a drop down box will appear, click Follow Up. Now click Add New Follow Up Message, you will now be able to set up your first autoresponse email, it’s all quite self explanatory, you can choose to customize it in a few ways such as use code like {!name_fix} to input the name of the person on your list who will be receiving it. A good thing to do on your first email if it’s not a eCourse is to just simply introduce yourself and mention all your important pages on your website.

Michael Setting Up Day 1 Of The Make Money Online eCourse.

There is a big difference between offering a FREE report or eBook and giving away a eCourse. You see with a eCourse, the reader knows that you will email them regularly and so they won’t get annoyed when you email them daily. So often once someone signs up for your mailing list they will unsubscribe because they have got what they want and don’t want to be spammed. Even if you don’t intend to create an autoresponder series, you MUST set up at least one autoresponse email to welcome them when they sign up, this is the time when they are most interested and have showed that they want something from you. A good idea is to create a email to say who you are, where they can connect with you and your favourite posts from your website.

Autoresponders can be used in lots of different ways, myself I use it to provide my FREE eCourse to teach everyone how to create a blog. Some people set up a year worth of emails to be sent out, some daily, some weekly but each time it refers them back to their website to have another chance at making them money. I have one friend who uses his list quite often to promote affiliate promotions, every time he gets a good response from a email, he will add it to his autoresponder as he knows it performs and will likely make more sales when new people sign up for his email list.

Making Money From Your Email List

You see I make it a slight mission to get people to sign up for my eCourse because this way I know they really want to be on it. Before I even get them to sign up I make them know they need to spend money on Domains, Hosting and a Web Design. Typically a lot of people buy before they sign up because I make it feel like the course is conditional on them buying the products. Once they buy they sign up, even if they do or don’t buy the product they will then go to a thank you page. This is where a lot of people go wrong, your thank you page is probably the most important page because they have already taken action and are interested right now! This is where I make sure they know to confirm there email address but also I let them know again to buy a domain and hosting. On this page I always cut out the navigation which is on the main site so they have to scroll through the page first to see what I have to say before there is a link to go back to the main site.

Sending Out Affiliate Promotions

Here is where you can make more in a single day (actually 2 minutes it takes to send) then your blog makes in a month. I recently sent out a couple promotions for related products to my site, both had up sells and both had recurring revenue built in, two things you want to look for when choosing something to promote as that can bump up your earnings a lot. I made around $2000 from the two emails and both had recurring payments so since then I have earned several thousand dollars. It’s super easy and your list doesn’t have to be big, mine was a 4 month old list I built from a new blog. Another great thing about participating in product launches are the affiliate contests where you can win prizes if you perform well as an affiliate.

One Email I Sent Out Made Me $1,500!

Rules to Follow When Finding and Send Out Affiliate Promotions

• Always look for the best offer, for example you can sell a eBook were you will get a commission, but you would be best to find a offer that has a recurring revenue program built in so you don’t just earn today, you earn for months and years to come. For example the promotion I talked about that I did in Cyprus just over a month ago, I have since earned around $1000 in follow up payments from the recurring revenue program. Another great thing to look out for is up sells, on some promotions I make more money from just the up sells then the course itself.
• Don’t send to many promotions out, typically you can get away with around 3 a week and no one gets to cross but I try to limit to once if it’s a direct promotion but most of the time I don’t send out ones at all because I know my eCourse performs well.
• Make sure you send promotions for target products, if you can’t send many emails because you are worried people will drop out then you want to get the best results possible. Wait for a promotion that fits 100% with your business.
• Send out emails before the launching offering the affiliates FREE reports, this is huge! Basically they give you an affiliate link which you can promote to your list and when they sign up for it and get a FREE report or eBook they are now signed up through your affiliate link so when they email the there list about the launch of the product and anyone you send for the FREE eBook buys, then you make a commission, this way you don’t look like your pushing the sale yourself.
• Be the first to promote, so often dozens of affiliate will email a new promotion on the same day, the first person is more likely to get the most sales. This is because a lot of lists have the same people on them so you want to be the first one to let your mailing list know.

No Leakage Means More Money

This is something I picked up from James Schramko who was one our my first interviewees on this blog. We sat down on the last day at Yanik Silvers underground seminar and we compared blogs, I had double the amount of traffic as him so naturally thought I would be making more money then him, surprisingly he told me he made around 20x more than me! After I went through his website I didn’t quite understand how, he had no text links, no paid reviews and no advertisers, he later shared with me that it’s all in the list. He explained if your list is so much more profitable than selling adverts on your blog, then why bother selling adverts? You see he worked out that instead of sending people to other peoples websites through adverts and reviews and instead getting people on his list, he would make more money. This is where “No Leakage” comes in, if there is a way for your reader to leave your website, then there is less chance they will sign up for your mailing list. A great example of this is IncomeDiary, the only way you will leave is if you go through an affiliate link or if you get bored and press the X in the top corner, so my chances of getting you on my list are greater then say someone like John Chow who has 100′s of different websites you can leave his website too. Now if John concentrated on his list and getting people on his list instead of having all those banners and links up, he could earn more money in my opinion. (But to be fair, I know John does make a lot of money with his site — but hopefully you can see the point I am trying to make) Another great benefit of using the no leakage rule is you don’t devalue your content, readers typically hate adverts and do get turned off so your blog will stand out as being a nice one.

Email Marketing Rules

You now have all the information you need to set up and start earning from your mailing list. I thought I would finish by offering a few rules I run my list by to make sure I make the most out of  my list and get the best results.

Rule 1: DON’T SPAM!

Rule 2: Try not to share your list, often for new product launches they will get you to send pre launch emails to get them to opt-in for a FREE report, this is a bad idea because then they basically get a copy of your list although it’s a great way to convert more sales. OK, not everyone will agree with that one and there are times when I will share the list, but the above point is well worth remembering — at least some of the time

Rule 3: Be personal, your a human being (I hope) so come across like one and not a spam bot.

Rule 4: Be consistent in what you offer your readers, if you are offering great blogging tips then don’t just “wack” up a post about blogging just because you have to, make sure everything to provide has true value.

Rule 5: Be consistent in how often you email your readers – I get some readers who actually email me saying “Hey Mike, I haven’t heard from you in a while, when is your next update?”. I try to update them Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Rule 6: It’s not all about the money, don’t promote something just because you want to make money but because your readers actually need it – and you would personally buy it!

I hope today’s post has helped you all out a lot and if you are new to making money online and haven’t yet set up your blog to drive sign ups to your mailing list, then I recommend you take my FREE 7 Day eCourse on How To Make Money Blogging.

To Our Success,

Michael Dunlop

PS. If you are just setting up your mailing list today, comment below so I can check it out and see how you are doing!