ForHere’s a list of some tasks you could automate using autoresponders:

- format and schedule mailings days, weeks, even months in advance- send out ‘welcome’ messages to new subscribers
- send out newsletters, updates, alerts, etc.
- circulate viral articles and reports- automate list compilation and databasing activities
- promote front-end and back-end products
- deliver instant product details when the prospect is hot
- deliver product specific emails until the prospect buys
- deliver product user’s guides before or after the sale
- add new buyers to a verified paying customer list
- deliver product download info (links, passwords, etc.) to buyers- promote upgrades and upsells for products already purchased- dramatically reduce manual email answering
- follow up to minimize refunds/returns and chargebacks
- send out surveys, polls, questionaires, etc.
- automatically add new affiliates and increase your sales
- administer affiliate training and motivation
- solicit product testimonials from buyers
- get hot, new, marketable product ideas quickly and easily
- get feedback on your customer service and products
- answer FAQs instantly
- and so on…

This list is just what came off the top of my head. With a little imagination applied to your own business needs, you’ll find plenty more to add. Keep in mind that if you use autoresponders to perform even some of the tasks above, your physical action will no longer required for those tasks to be accomplished. Not only will your workload decrease, you’ll have more time to do the really productive stuff – like promote your business – find or develop new products – set up joint ventures with other marketers – watch Oprah.

Even though autoresponders can relieve you from a lot of repetitive tasks, I want to make it clear at this point that my autoresponders have one overriding and primary purpose. And that is to groom potential customers, maintain their interest, and gently remind them of my products and services until they are ready to make a buying decision. So the first priority is to get new subscribers hooked into my autoresponder loop. Toward that end, I’ve actually reached back to my old mail order days and adapted one of the most powerful promotional methods that has ever been devised.

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time and effort to read this. If you follow through and use any of the techniques I’m going to explain, you will see real results—more signups. The formula is simple: the more techniques you use, the more signups you’ll get! If you use all of them, you will be amazed by the number of new signups you get everyday!

I also want to congratulate you. If you’re reading this, you’ve at least learned the #1 rule in online marketing: The Money is in the List! (You’d be surprised how many people are trying to make money online right now that have no idea they should start with a list. In fact, I used to be one of them—it took me 6 months to learn that!)

So, getting to the point…

You know you’d make money IF you had a huge list, you WANT to build it, but so far you’ve only been trickling in new subscribers or haven’t even figured out where to start. Take a deep breath, because if you’re serious about building a great opt-in list you’ve come to the right place.

The simple truth in list building is that there are really only 2 ways to do it:

1) get your signup page in front of more people
2) signup a higher number of people who see the message

Getting your message out to more prospects is fairly obvious and the focus of most people’s list building efforts. Advertise & promote your site = get signups. This is certainly important, but it also can be costly.

Signing up a higher number of people is often overlooked and it alone can be the difference between success and failure. The way to do it is to test different web pages, signup forms, and tools. And keep testing until you’re sure you can’t do better. Remember that it’s FREE to get more visitors to signup, but it costs money to get more visitors.

Here’s a simple example of these 2 points:

If you get 1,000 visitors to your site and signup 10, you are converting 1%.
Now, you can pay for double traffic to get 2,000 visitors and get 20 signups,
OR you can test and tweak your campaign for FREE to get 20 signups from the same 1,000 visitors. Your cost per signup (VERY important) is ½ of what it was.

To take it 1 step further, assume you are going to sell a product for $35 which is pure profit. If 2 people out of every 100 signups buy it, you make $70 per 100 signups. Now, if you’re converting only 1/100 visitors to signup, you need 100×100 or 10,000 visitors to make 2 sales. If you are converting 2/100 visitors to signup, now you only need 50×100 or 5,000 visitors for the same 2 sales!

Can you see why it’s important to test & squeeze every possible subscriber out of your traffic?

If you were buying traffic at $10 per 1,000 visitors look at the difference:

10,000 visitors = $100 (1,000 x 10);
2 sales = $70, so you lose $30 (70-100)

5,000 visitors = $100 (1,000 x 5);
2 sales = $70, so you make $20 (70-50)

It can literally mean the difference between making and losing money.

Let’s look at 18 ways to get more subscribers (without breaking the bank!):

1) Be Specific – You need to target a specific niche of customers and ONLY market to them. One of the biggest mistakes list builders make is trying to cast a wide net to capture as many signups as possible. This is flawed thinking because you cannot serve every market segment.

Imagine your car is a BMW (if it really is, all the better!) and you need to get a tune up. Which of the following mechanics would you bring your prized auto:

a) A1 Auto Body – “We fix all car problems for all types of cars”
b) AAA Auto Body – “We are European car specialists”
c) Tops Auto Body – “We are BMW experts. We ONLY work on BMWs”

They can all tune up your car, but chances are you’ll go with c. Why? Because you know your kind of car is the ONE thing they do, so you assume they will do at least as good a job as the others, if not better.

The same goes in marketing. Someone is targeting each specific niche. If you are too general, your prospects will signup with the person who specifically focuses on them.

Examples of target markets:

a) Online marketers – BAD! WAY too general

b) Online marketers who suffer from lack of traffic – better, but can still improve

c) Online ebook marketers who use safelists to generate traffic and are not getting enough hits to their web pages – NOW we’re getting somewhere.

When you target like c, you can then use headlines to attract prospects like: “Selling ebooks using safelists but not making money? Free guide shows you how to make safelist subscribers beat down your door to get your ebook”

You will be using your headline like that against others who are using the too general approach with ads like: “Free guide to generating tons of traffic!”

Which would you rather signup for?

2) Stay the course – when you start any online marketing campaign, it’s very important that you stick to the same central idea and work with it until you get results. Another major problem that kills many would-be marketers is trying to advertise or promote in a certain way and when it doesn’t work jumping to something else. For example this pattern happens all the time:

- Excited newbie advertises website or affiliate site

- after 50 hits and no sales switch to another product

- after 50 more hits and no sales switch again

- start to believe “This doesn’t work” or “There’s no money left to be made in Internet marketing.”

- Become frustrated and bitter, quit, give up on dreams of creating wealth

his happens all the time. The problem is, the learning in this business (and most success stories) comes from trial and error. It’s important to research and see what ads are working, what products are selling, and what approaches sellers are using to make money. But in the end, you need to stay focused on your target market, and TEST TEST TEST! Keep trying different headlines, offering different free gifts, trying different signup page layouts—but stick to the same target customer base until you make it work!

It starts very slowly at 1st, but if you have valuable info to offer and you stick to it, your results will continually build on themselves and you will create a huge list.

It took me 6 months to get my 1st subscriber! I started by trying to sell products to prospects and only months later did I realize I needed to capture signups 1st and gradually build trust to make sales. How many people do you think would quit before 6 months of no results? This is a key point that ALL online marketing pros have in common.

3) Maximize your signup page – one of the most important things you can do to build a massive opt-in list quickly is to make sure your signup page is very powerful and effective. Nothing’s worse than driving lots of traffic to your site, only to find that no one is signing up. So here are some tips:

a) Put the signup box high enough on the page so the visitor does not have to scroll down to find it. Users are far more likely to signup if your box is right in front of them.
b) Include the phrase “We respect your privacy and Never rent, sell, or share your info. You will NOT get a bunch of unwanted emails.” People are very careful about sharing their info with anyone they don’t know. Give them reassurance and your signups will go up.
c) Use a photo or image of the ebook or software you are offering. Photos and images without question outperform those without them.
d) Setup an exit popup or fly-in ad to capture extra signups. When visitors leave your page, you can have a popup or fly-in ad try one more time to capture them as a subscriber. Use this ad to offer something extra or different, or use , “Wait! …” and restate the value of joining.
e) Add a “tell-a-friend” box at the top to allow visitors to send your page to several of their friends or colleagues and gain viral signups

4) Monitor your results – this goes hand in hand with staying the course. While consistency is important, you need to confirm that what you’re doing is at least working, and then try ways to make it work better. Always be thinking of ways you can offer more in your product, different headlines you can use, and extra bonuses you can use to increase your results.

Track the results you’re getting with stats tracking software—it’s the ONLY way to know what is working and what’s working best. If you make a simple change in headline, don’t you want to know if it doubles your subscriber rate? Then you can use that headline everywhere, and expect double the signups! If you don’t have testing or stat tracking software, I recommend ProAnalyzer. You can see it here: Pro Analyzer

5) Use Safelists – Safelists are simply ezine subscribers that agree to receive mail from each other, and most people think they are worthless because they don’t know how to use them. What kind of people signup for safelists do you suppose? Mostly online marketers who aren’t getting enough traffic or list signups—if you have ways to help them get more traffic or signups, do you think they’ll be interested? You bet! Here are the secrets to using them:

a) Use lots of them – safelists will give you fewer responses per 1,000 prospects than many other forms of advertising. However, because most are free and you can sign up for as many as you want. You want to reach at least 100,000 safelist subscribers because you’ll only get 1 out of as many as 10,000 to reply. BUT, you can also mail members often—some are daily, some every 2-3 days, and some weekly. NOTE: Use an email address for signing up that is NOT your primary email because you’ll get 1,000s of messages. You also need to clean out the inbox often because if emails sent to you bounce, your account will be suspended.

At even 100,000 you can still get 10-50 new signups per week—not bad for FREE!

b) The #1 key in safelists is the headline. Hands down, because so many emails are sent out to members each day, your headline WILL determine your success with them. Test different headlines and track the results. When you find a winner, you can keep sending it out because safelists add new members every day. This can be a great source of signups for your list.

c) Consider upgrading to Pro memberships for those lists that give you results as a free member, or if they have 15,000 or more members. Many safelists allow Pro members to not receive emails from free members (only from other Pro members). Simply, the Pro members have a track record of spending money (they upgraded to Pro), and those members are more likely to be buyers for you, too!

HOT TIP: The best way to email 100,000+ safelist members is by using at automated emailing tool. You can do them all manually, but you’ll spend hours on it. There are several tools that allow you to input the safelist web address and your login info, and it will automatically send your emails to ALL of them with 1 click!

It takes a few hours to get all of your lists entered into it, but then you can schedule the software to automatically send your emails out everyday and watch signups come in! The tool I use is SMASS, and you can find it here: Get SMASS

Another automated tool I use is My Mad Mailer. You can email 1,500,000 weekly through a web page interface, test different ads, and track URLs all in one. Get it here:
My Mad Mailer

6) Use Traffic Exchanges – traffic exchanges, when used correctly, can also give you a great boost in building your list. Remember that most traffic exchange users are looking for more traffic, so if you target them with ways to increase traffic, do you think they’ll be interested? Of course!

The best way to use these exchanges is to signup for one manual exchange that requires visitors to click a button to see the next ad—they actually need to pay attention to the ads they see to get credits. You also want to be sure that your manual exchange gives you credits for referring their service, even if referrals don’t sign up—this is the key point. I use HitPulse as my primary exchange. You can signup through this terrific free service called Profit Rally that acts like a portal to dozens of site promotion methods. Signup free here: Profit Rally

The next step is to signup for several automatic traffic exchanges (you just pull up the web pages and get credits just for leaving the browser open—you don’t even need to look at the pages. If you setup several of those automatic exchanges and use your REFERRAL URL from Hitpulse as your site with them, you will gain free credits at Hitpulse. Free credits there are useful because you can advertise your list signup page and you’ll get signups! Some popular autohit exchanges are autohits.dk, 126hits.com, freeautosurf.org, autohits.info, and autosurf.org

7) Ip2IP Instant Messenger – this is a breakthrough tool most people don’t know about. It allows you to send popup messages directly through other people’s computers, even if they aren’t looking at your web page!

The best part is, you can blast 1,000s at a time, and it is NOT considered SPAM. This is a revolutionary new technology—you type in your message and a range of IP addresses, and the program goes to work to try each one—popping up a little system message on each user’s computer. No competition, no cost to do as often as you like!

The best way to use this tool is to work with a short & simple ad (text only) that gets viewers to click on your web page link. Have your webpage convince them to signup for your list.

BONUS! This software is currently selling for $29-$99 online depending upon where you see it. I am showing you how to get a Free Trial.
Click here: IP2IP Messenger

Link Machine (SEO Optimization Tool) – this is a REAL Search Engine Optimization tool you can try for free. It doesn’t try to “trick” search engines or give you short term gains in rank. It helps you optimize your site by comparing it with the top sites for any keywords you choose. So even if Google changes their criteria for ranking, you will always be able to optimize your site and get a high rank. It also sets up link exchanges for you with 1,000s of other sites with high page ranks—that is the key in getting a high rank!

The top sites in every search word get 1,000s of “free” hits every week—you can absolutely explode your viral list building “system” with a high ranking site. Many products and services offer “black hat” methods of quickly moving up the ranks in search engines, but black hat methods essentially “trick” the search engines temporarily. That means your site will shoot up in ranking, then plummet back to where it was soon after.

Search Engines are the #1 most popular way Internet users find sites, so getting a higher ranking will bring in more traffic and subscribers. Click here: Link Machine

9) Use Magic Subscriber – this is an amazing, simple tool that really works! It is a unique, “system-looking” popup that allows visitors to subscribe to your mailing list without typing in any info! It automates the process so users just need to click “Subscribe” and it does the rest. I tracked my results, and I have gotten 2x as many signups by using that tool. It takes 5 minutes to setup, and it works perfectly.

I use this tool on my home page and also my ad pages when I advertise them directly. It is much easier for people to sign up with it, so more of them do! With ad pages, once a visitor leaves the site you’ve lost them and wasted the ad money unless you capture their info. Magic Subscriber is the best tool I’ve found so far.
As a Special Bonus, you can download it FREE, here: Magic Subscriber

Here’s one I use:

10) Pay-per-Click – this advertising method can really help to skyrocket your list if you use it right. The basics of pay-per-click are you bid an amount you will pay for each click of your ad. When visitors click your text ad, they go to your web page. The great thing is, you only pay for those who are interested and click on your ad. But if you don’t use it right, you can run up a big bill very quickly, and have nothing to show for it.

I recommend using GoClick.com for a low-cost PPC solution, and Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing if you have a little more to invest. I advise AGAINST using Brainfox.com because although prices are cheap I ran campaigns with them and got 0 responses for the same campaigns that were working great at the others.

You can visit their websites and signup for an account, but you absolutely HAVE to track results with PPC to know what’s working. Again, I use ProAnalyzer but any stats tracking that can rotate multiple web pages, tell you how many clicks, how many signups from those clicks, and how many sales also will do. That way, you can see exactly which ads and headlines pull the best, and tweak for best results.

And the same goes for choosing keywords to bid on. When you bid on keywords, your ad shows up anytime someone searches for those words online. Avoid too general words like “traffic” and get very specific “increase safelist traffic” because often the more specific the word, the less it will cost to get the top bid.

Perfect PPC bidding strategies are beyond the scope of this but that will get you going the right way. You can find advanced resources specifically for PPC if you are interested in becoming an expert.

11) Tell-a-Friend – this is the foundation of all viral tools, and you need to put one on the top of your web page ASAP. Many products are available that allow you to put a link on top of your web pages users can click. It opens a box where they can type in several friends’ and colleagues’ names and email addresses. Each of the people they type in get a personalized email FROM someone they know with a recommendation to look at your site. Free promotion, and word of mouth is the most effective promotion you can get, without question. The trick to tell-a-friend is you have to offer enough value for them to want to send to their friends (What would it take for YOU to do that?)

The tool I recommend and use is Tell-a-Friend-King. This one allows you to customize a button to place on your web pages, and it opens a very user friendly TAF box. It’s very simple and very cheap, and it also tracks all of your results! (We’ll cover 2 more advanced uses for the TAF feature below also…)

12) Funny Videos – did you ever get a funny video clip forwarded to your email from a friend or colleague? These videos spread virally like wildfire! The trick to getting signups out of it is to put your signup page below the video on a web page, and include a “Tell-a-Friend” box so visitors can easily email the funny video (and also your ad) to up to 10 friends. Look at an example here:

Believe me, these work! One person emails 3 or 4 people they know, who also email a few they know… Not everyone will sign up for your list, but enough will and the entire promotion is FREE! You can download free clips that are legal to use (public domain) here: www.funny-videos.co.uk

NOTE: always verify the fact that you have permission to use any materials. As of this writing that is true, but it’s always better to confirm. To embed these videos into your webpages, check with the software you use, but an example is this simple one line:

This works for Macromedia Dreamweaver, and you insert the HTML after thetag but before. Then your video appears at the top of the page.

If you need a tell-a-friend service, I highly recommend Tell-a-Friend King. It’s very easy to use, they handle all of the setup and maintenance, and the cost is very low. Visit them here: Tell-a-Friend-King

13) Use Viports – Viports are viral reports. You can create a free info report with something of value to your prospects, compile it into a Viport, and give it away. In order for recipients to open the file, they need to enter 3 names and emails to unlock the file. It’s a great way to build a viral list, fast! In case you don’t have a Viport creator, download one FREE here: Viport Creator Here’s an example:

14) Create a Blog – Blogs are a great indirect way of really building credibility online. A blog is a Web log, or basically a journal you keep online. As opposed to a traditional website, you create posts to a blog with messages that are dated (much like online forums). The value with these is in creating a targeted blog and providing lots of great content about the subject. If you are able to do that, you will gain a loyal subscriber base that checks in often, posts messages, and refers others. You also gain a lot of credibility in the “anonymous” online marketing world. Check out the new Blog I just started at www.optin-email-list.com

If you don’t feel you know enough about a subject, search online for sites on your topic, and email the site administrators to ask them to contribute an article or do an interview. Also, post any useful tools, software, guides, and reviews of products. They key to blogs is to put lots of good content, and to UPDATE OFTEN (daily if possible). People will only continue to visit as long as fresh content is there. If it gets stale, you’ll lose your visitor base.

This may seem like a lot of work, but I can promise you that you can create a huge list very fast if you put some time into it. Also, it’s one of the few online promotion activities you can actually do almost free.

To get started, visit www.blogger.com to start a FREE blog. Blogger will even host the blog for you, so you don’t need to pay anything!

HINT: If you are serious about starting a blog, check out this resource. It shows you how to directly make money from your blog, without spending any money and without selling anything! This is an awesome resource for blogs with good content that are updated often: Google Adsense Secrets

15) Top Sponsor Ads – Another hidden gem. These are the short text ads you see on the very top lines when you open some emails. It’s the first thing the reader sees when opening email, and the best part is most people don’t know about them AND they are very cheap.

The best part about Top Sponsor Ads is that they are counted by opened emails, NOT sent emails. So, if you get 10,000 impressions that’s 10,000 OPENED emails where your ad is seen. Here’s an example from an email I received:

The best way to use these ads is to tease the reader to create curiosity and get them to click your link. Your ad needs to grab readers and promise something valuable to them. Remember your audience: these email readers are all building lists and trying to make money online. Two sources for Top Sponsor Ads are MBP Advertising and Business World List

16) Write testimonials – a great way to get free traffic and free signups. Any product or service you try that impresses you (even free mini courses or ebooks), email the author with a testimonial and state in the email that you give permission to publish it. ONLY do this for products and services you really believe in, though. Your reputation in online marketing is your most important possession, so don’t risk it just to get free promotion. The way to get these published is to write specifics about what you like and how you benefited from it. A couple lines of general praise will not get you published. Here are a few great examples (scroll down to the bottom of the page to see them): Testimonials

It is a proven fact that testimonials that include the author’s web page and name get clicked on. You gain instant credibility because you are featured on someone else’s site, and you are saying something positive about their product.

17) Start JVs – joint ventures are another way to go to get free promotion, and you can gain access to 1,000s of subscribers. Joint ventures are simply when one marketer promotes another marketer’s product to his or her list. So, if you ask marketers with huge lists to do a JV, you can both benefit with a ton of sales.

Obviously, the more successful the marketer, the more selective he or she is in terms of which products and services to promote. For this to work well, you must have a great product that’s valuable and not a rehash of someone else’s work.

Browse web sites on Clickbank or look at any ad pages you see promoted everywhere and look for the author’s contact info at the bottom. Email (or even call when appropriate) the author, request doing a joint venture and give 4-5 great bullet points about the value of your product. Also, include your product FREE for review—no reputable marketer is going to promote your product without knowing how good it is (nor are they likely to pay for it). The value of the promotion and sales you’ll get in return is far greater, believe me.

Promote it to several JVs and let them know you’ll only be accepting 2 partners and several are reviewing it (create urgency to act). Do this until you land a few JVs, and now you’ve also built successful relationships you can use again and again with your JV partners! Here is a great Joint Venture resource: JV Alert

18) Viral page – I saved the best for last! This is one of the absolute BEST ways to get your list building to explode. It combines multiple elements from previous list builders and rolls them into one power-packed list building supercharger!

First, get your hands on a free gift that you know your prospects want. (The better the gift, the better the response). You may even want to consider buying a product that gives you rights to use it as a gift (most products will state whether you can give them away or not).

Next, you can promote the free gift to your list (if you have one), or using any other advertising or promotion. The goal of your promotion is to bring prospects to your web page.

What your page should include:
1) Free product displayed right at the top, and use an image or picture if you can.
2) Include some persuasive details to build up the value of the product
3) Give step by step details about how to get the product free:

Step 1 – Click the Tell-a-Friend Button
(This is where you insert the button from Tell-a-Friend King)

Step 2 – Details on how to fill out the Tell-a-Friend form

Step 3 – Details on how to personalize the message so it comes from them to their referrals

Step 4 – Rules: you want to make sure they know the people receiving their email, and you want to prevent SPAM

Step 5 – Send message

When prospects complete the form, I instruct them to include 1 email address that I provide, and it is an autoresponder. They will fill out the form with their 3 referral names and my autoresponder, and when they send the email my autoresponder will reply with a copy of “Profit Pulling Niches.”

The tell-a-friend box from Tell-a-Friend King I setup like this:

Subject: This site made me think of you – Check it out!

Message: Hi, it’s me [Put your 1st name here]

I just wanted to tell you that I found this great website for opt-in list building and Internet marketing.

They also give some of the best Internet marketing tips & software I’ve ever seen. I think you’ll love it also and I wanted to share it with you! You can find them at:

www.i-vault.biz

Oh! They also give away an unadvertised bonus of “Profit Pulling Niches” (the #1 guide to making profits with Google Adsense—no products, no selling!) just for signing up.

This is the product they give you free: www.i-vault.biz/ppn.html

Remember, it’s only after you sign up! Just wait for the reply email they send you!

Thanks,
[Put your 1st name here]

Just promote the page through any advertising or lists you already have, and watch your list explode! You are giving something away that normally costs money, so there is automatically value in it. Now, some people will fill out bogus info and try to cheat the system. That’s okay. You will still create a tremendous number of new visitors to your signup page through these referrals, and a much higher number of them will signup also. In turn, they will refer people to get their free gift! Can you see the power in this???

Tracking and analyzing the actions of your customers and prospects is critical to your success. After deploying several campaigns, you will have generated a mountain of response information that reveals invaluable data enabling you to create new and more effective approaches and offers. There are many software tools easily available that track, record and analyze all data pertaining to your email marketing campaign. Many sophisticated analysis tools predict future actions based on past behavior. Such tools are crucial for your campaign as response data is meaningless unless it can be analyzed and turned into valuable customer knowledge.

Once you have the capability to track the vital statistics of your email marketing campaigns, the inevitable question becomes: how well are my mailings doing? Here are some guidelines on what information to gather and how to measure the performance of your campaign from the gathered information.

There are a number of different pieces of information that can be gathered when using any reasonably good email broadcasting service.

The five primary measurements are: the totals each of messages sent, message opens, click-throughs, bounces, and opt-out requests. Total number of items sent must be accurately counted, based on reaching each individual email address only once. Opens measure the number of people who actually view the message using their email program.

I prefer to use “unique” opens, so that if a recipient views a message in their preview window, then opens it into a full size window, that this only counts as a single open instead of two opens. Clickthroughs are recipients that respond to your offer by clicking on a link in the email. Bounces are messages that are undeliverable to the recipient. They could be “soft bounces” due to temporary issues such as a full mailbox or “hard bounces” from an invalid email account, but for our purposes here it means “people on your list who did not receive your message”. And last, opt-out requests are recipients who request to no longer receive email.

There are a wide range of results that can be measured for email campaigns, such as:

• How accurate is the list (how many bounces out of total sent)
• How active is the list (how many opens out of total sent)
• How positive was the reaction to the offer itself (number of click-throughs out of total opens)
• How negative was the reaction to the offer itself (number of opt-outs out of total opens)

The actual number of responses on any particular campaign can vary quite a bit. A newsletter whose primary job is to inform will not achieve the same click-through rate as a promotion, which is intended to get a specific response. The differing levels of permission within your list of recipients will also affect results. Until a list has been ”cleaned” of bad addresses and those who are not interested, you may see far different data. Pruning these from your lists will help you improve your results considerably.

In order to account for these wide variations in factors, I suggest some general “baseline” ratios that should be achieved on any particular mailing. There should be more opens than bounces, or else the list is probably out of date. Also, there should be more click-throughs than opt-outs, otherwise the offer is poorly targeted or the list is of questionable origin.
In order to get the optimum response you will need to send two or three multiples of your email marketing campaign, each time using  a variation of the original offer. If they haven’t responded by 3 attempts, it’s time to change your approach.

The typical response pattern is that mailings 1 and 2 will have a similar response, with number 2 often having slightly fewer clickthroughs than number 1. Number 3 picks up the stragglers and undecided recipients, so the response will be much lower, but usually
significant enough to justify the mailing. Please note that you shouldn’t necessarily just blast out three mailings one after another. For example, you might piggyback your first offer onto a monthly newsletter, send the second offer separately as a special promotional
mailing two weeks later, then finish the series with the final offer in the next month’s newsletter.

It is useful to understand how the size of your lists is changing over time. By viewing how many people sign up for your lists each day, you can attempt to correlate list growth with other marketing activities that you may be conducting. It is also important to consider how many people are signing up for your lists versus how many are opting out of them. If your lists have been cleaned, and the overall list size is still shrinking, you need to reevaluate both your list acquisition strategy and the content relevancy of your mailings.

Testing is critical to optimizing your email marketing campaigns. But in  order to test, you have to measure first. Make sure you have a way to collect detailed information about your mailings, preferably in an automatic way. Careful analysis of the actual metrics will give you the information you need to take your email campaigns to the next level.

Another of the most frequently asked questions, in the online marketing scene, that comes especially from people who haven’t created their own products yet is how do I build my list. Everyone has grasped the concept of building your own media outlet, that you can promote to again and again without having to pay a penny, that usually consists of the most targeted people, and those who are going to buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous work.

And that right there is the key to it all. By the time you have your own list that stretches over the five thousand mark, you should at least have one product, and the majority of people should have come from the promotion of that product. Avoid anything that asks you for cash to put subscribers on your list, because, if you haven’t tried them already, let me assure you that compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer although not necessarily it’s size. As we talked about above however, it’s the quality that matters for both your current promotion and your future promotion.

Size is definitely not everything here. The ways in which we’re building your list don’t involve direct methods. Something that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to. Agreed you might end up with a massive list but they’ll be far from responsive. Concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your sites, make sure that they end up on one of your lists. If we look at things this way, all it takes is for them to either buy something, signup for something, jump into some follow-up, join your affiliate program and so on. Never create anything that allows customers to go through the sales process on your site, or any process at all for that matter, and then lose contact with them. This is not the way to do things. Of course, speed is also an issue for many people out there. I’m sure you don’t want to be hanging around only to find a few years later that your list has only reached two or three thousand subscribers. You want a lot, you want a big list and you want it quickly. I understand how it is and I hate waiting for things to build up over time too. This is exactly why we make sure that everything you do, related to your site, involves collecting names and email addresses for your list at some point or another. Let’s look at some numbers starting off with the simple joint ventures. Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. Now with standard e-zines I can understand how you might not see this as being much, as the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit,
can indeed be lower than you expect. But through joint ventures, with these quality lists, I’ve seen subscription rates top one in three, and it’s not unusual for at least 25% of your visitors to subscribe to something if your sales copy is doing it’s job. That may not seem like a lot right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5k, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem if the quality of your JV’s is nice and high and you get a good number of visits. A 5k list is all great, and you’ll also be making money through sales on those joint ventures. Although when you start to couple in your affiliate commissions that you make sure are real high, in fact, so high that you may not even be making a direct profit, the resources will sail in. This is your profit. Not the money from the sales, but the resources that you’re building. This is why you gave up $50 per sale, and it’s your affiliates coupled with joint ventures that are going to, if you’ll excuse the cliché, set your list building on fire, not just numbers wise, but speed wise. Every single time you release a new product, you’re going to be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you. It’s another snowball effect, which is great because this means that you know the more you put in, the more you’re going to get out, and every single product that you release will increase your resources, your list size included, and will add to your promotion power for future products. Thus you’ll make a whole load more cash than you would have done by other means and methods.

Before we move on I want to make one hundred percent sure that you understand how this works. People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists. This is great, it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, it kind of makes me a little bit angry sometimes, for the simple reason that they’re not giving you the whole story by far. It’s ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, along with building affiliates, customers, long term customers and joint venture prospects, but for it to be successful, you have to integrate it into your other marketing methods, and this is what most fail to tell you. Once you’ve mastered this and understand, again, how each of these resources tie into each other, and cannot be seen as separate entities, you’ll start to see bigger and better results, and they will come more quickly too. Now if you think about what I’ve just told you, and step back, you should be able to see immediately how this isn’t a case of go out and get as bigger list as possible, as quickly as possible, on your own. This is what many guides teach, but as with the success of the whole system it’s tying resources in together through the launch of your own products.

An autoresponder allows you to capture the email addresses of your website visitors so that you can build your own opt-in targeted mailing list and follow up with your subscribers automatically. This is the tool most commonly used for sending an email newsletter.

The autoresponder will automatically extract the prospect’s name and use this information in your follow-up messages. With an autoresponder, you can send personalized follow-up messages addressing each subscriber directly by their own name. If you personalize an email message with a subscriber’s name, this prospect is much more likely to buy from you.

You can sell your products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the help of an autoresponder. An autoresponder is also a handy tool that automatically follows up with a series of email messages at preset time intervals and works for you 24 hours a day. You will be able to develop your follow-up messages and set reliable time intervals. For example, you could write a series of 7 messages that you want delivered to new subscribers and set each of those messages to be delivered to new subscribers every third day. So, when someone initially subscribes at your website, that person will receive one follow-up message instantly and 6 more messages over the next 18 days. All of this is accomplished without any additional effort from you, other than the one-time setup of the messages in your autoresponder.

Following up with your prospects could easily translate to a 100% increase in your sales or more. Your potential customers may simply forget about your initial message or they simply may have a bad day which is why it’s so important follow-up with your prospects at preset time intervals at least five times after sending your initial message.

Autoresponders are great for sales letters. Suppose you posted to a couple of forums and newsgroups — you could offer a free report about your industry. You then post the email address of your autoresponder instead of the website and within seconds the forum user could be reading your free report via your autoresponder followup and your autoresponder messages could direct them to your sales letter for a related product. It’s 100% automatic. With your utoresponder, you can even set up predefined answers to the most likely questions. This can cut up to 80% of your normal customer service requirements.

Given below are some of the other key benefits of autoresponders:

• They introduce your business to the prospective customer
• List out special offers for members
• List out benefits of joining your website
• Compare your product or service with your competitors
• Give testimonials of existing customers
• Welcome letters for new members
• Thank you messages for new orders
• Order confirmation
• Acknowledgement of a query or a receipt of payment from
• your customer
• A reminder when their subscription or free access period is
• about to expire

Sending email too often can be annoying, resulting in recipients asking to be removed. Don’t send often enough and you may be forgotten when the recipient is finally ready to buy. Generally, once every 2-3 weeks is best. A few exceptions are a daily newspaper or a time-dependant offer like a seminar invitation.

Sending three variations of the same offer to the same recipient is a good way to improve response rates. You should never send the exact same offer more than once. Otherwise you risk the recipient thinking that it’s just another copy of the same email and deleting it. If a recipient has not responded by the third attempt, they are not going to respond at all, either because it’s the right offer/wrong time, or the wrong offer altogether.

For a mailing to business recipients, sending midday from 11 AM through 3 PM is generally the best time. Sending a message earlier in the day can result in a higher risk of the message getting lost in the rush to prepare for morning meetings. Send it too late in the day and it may end up quickly deleted before the recipient leaves for their commute home.

On the other hand, when mailing to consumers, 5 PM through 8 PM is the best time. People tend to check their personal email when they get home from work or after dinner. Most consumers are too busy getting ready for work in the morning to read their email.

Like the time of the day, different days of the week can affect your results as well. The best days to contact businesses are weekdays except for Monday and Friday. Monday has proven to have too many meetings to reach decision makers, and on Friday, most people would prefer to leave early before the rush hour than receive your email, no matter how exciting the email and offer may be.

Consumers are more likely to spend more time on the Internet on weekends, and hence have more time to consider your offer. One observation is that since many people tend to check their personal email at various points throughout the day, selecting a specific time to hit your target group while they are online is much more difficult.

Avoid Mailing During Holidays

During the holidays, people tend to be away from their computers and don’t check their email regularly. This means they may get your message when they return together with a ton of other mail that has piled up during the holidays. Chances are all but the most important messages will be deleted in a rush without a second look.

A popular Internet battle cry states that “the money is in your list”. It’s true that you can make a lot of money by building a list of opt-in subscribers, establishing trust with those subscribers and sending those subscribers special offers promoting your products.

But you must do it correctly. Here’s a few tips that will help you get the most bang for your buck out of your list-building activities:

Collect Only Relevant Information

While requesting a visitor to sign up, collect information that is relevant to your business. A recent study lamented that most of the corporate probing was unnecessary, given that most companies never act on the information they extract from their customers. It is crucial that you know exactly what you intend to do with the information you’re going to collect. Moreover, you should also be able to prove to your visitors that information you would be collecting from them is actually vital for your business.

Don’t Make Your Customers Repeat Information Most customers don’t mind telling their banks the ages of their children if they think the bank will use the information to help them sort through the myriad of college savings plans or make them aware of estate planning issues. But nothing irritates customers more than having to repeat the same information to each channel as if it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the information. This is especially true in the case of email lists on websites.

Focus Your List

We’ve discussed the importance of focusing or targeting customers earlier as well. Current customers are the most important email addresses to collect, much more so than prospects. They’ll be more receptive to your communications and likely to respond, since they’re familiar with your company and its products.

Don’t waste your time running campaigns that attract a high number of visitors who have no interest in your products or services.

Special Offers and Discounts

Special offers like coupons and discounts are classic direct marketing techniques that translate extremely well to email. In order for an offer to be effective, it must provide something of real value to the recipient. Minimal discounts are not enough to get the reader’s attention; you have to offer something of substance. Of course, don’t discount lower than your profit on the transaction. Having a time limit on discounted offers is also very important in order for the call to action to work effectively.

Apart from using the Internet, there are also ways you can use your marketing efforts in the real world to help build your email lists.

All right, so you’ve got the addresses. Now what are you going to do with them? Obviously, what you’re going to do is send your users marketing messages via email so that they’ll know all about the great products and services you offer.

There are two ways you can do that: you can send them a newsletter every couple of weeks or so; or you can send them a sales letter. Newsletters are very important for building trust with your subscribers and warming them up to your sales offers. In the next chapter, I’ll discuss newsletters in detail.

In the rest of this chapter, I’m going to explain how to write simple sales material that gets results. I’ll do that by concentrating on the two most important parts of any sales material: the headline and the call to action. Get those two right, and any piece of marketing material you produce — online or off — will get the results you want.

Writing Headlines That Grab Your Customers and Sell Your Goods!

Headlines are absolutely vital for all your marketing efforts. Whether you plan to use them on your website, your emails, your newsletters or anywhere else, they’re the hook that grabs your readers, reels them in and turns them into customers. There are dozens of different kinds of headlines that you can use and some of them are better than others. Below are the type of headlines that I use, and that I’ve found to be the most effective.

The No-Nonsense Headline

The first type of headline you can use is the simplest. No frills, no tricks, no hooks, just a straightforward description of the contents of your message. Your headline could be something like: Tips to Save Money on Your Weekly Shopping The Best Way to Choose Your Next Car Real Estate Agents That Sell Properties Fast Notice that you can still use explanations and powerful adjectives to get your point across, but these headlines do little more than tell the reader what to expect.

The advantages of these headlines is that they’re easy to write and easy to read. You don’t have to try to come up with some hardhitting sales message and customers aren’t put off by a document that looks like a piece of promotional material. On the other hand, they are a bit weak and that makes them hard to turn into cash.

You can use no-nonsense headlines when you don’t need to work hard to make the sale. If you’re sending information that you know your customer will read, either because it’s free or they’ve specifically requested it, these are the kind of headlines to use.

The Question Headline

Question headlines work by asking customers a question that plays on their worries and promises a solution. These are great when you really want to grab a customer and drive your message home.

Want To Save Thousands On Your Home Insurance Bills?
Learn How To Cut Your Costs In Half!
Where Do You Look For Love? Discover The Best Places To
Meet Your Match!
Suffering From Termites? Drive Them Out With The
Extermite-Ator!

To write these headlines, think first of what problem your product is actually going to solve. (If it’s not going to solve a problem, then you’re going to have a problem selling it!) In the first half of the headline, you ask your customers if they’re suffering from the problem. Just by asking, you’re suggesting that they do. In the second half of the headline, you tell them that you have the solution. It’s very easy and extremely effective.

This is a really simple formula to follow: all you have to do is state the question and promise the answer. And it sells too; you’ve put the problem in the reader’s mind, now you’re offering the solution. Of course, these kinds of headlines depend on the reader empathizing with the problem. If they don’t, or if they decide that the headlines look too long to read, they’re not likely to buy.

Question headlines are most effective when your product is going to clearly solve someone’s problem and when you know your customers are going to empathize with that problem. If they don’t say yes to the question, they’re going to say no to the sale.

The How Headline

This is pretty similar to the question headline, but only offers the solution. It makes for a shorter read than question headlines so you get your point across faster, but you lose the empathy.

How To Fix Up Your Home Without Breaking The Bank!
How I Made $3,000,000 With One Phone Call!
How I Lost 33 Pounds On A High Fiber Diet And A
Revolutionary New Exercise Plan!

These kinds of headlines cut straight to the problem-solving aspect of your product. They’re short and to the point and can be easily absorbed with just a glance.

How Headlines are great when the rest of the document is going to reveal information. That information might just be details about your product, but the focus should always be on telling customers how they can solve a problem. These work best when you’re selling information products like books or newsletters.

The Numbered Headline

There’s a good reason that magazines like Cosmopolitan use headlines like “6 Ways To Drive Your Man Wild!” They work. Most people are put off by the sight of a giant slab of text. They want their information in bite-sized chunks. When you put a number in your headline, you let your reader know that the information you’re offering them is going to be easy to read:

7 Ways To Make Your Computer Run Faster
15 Proven Ways To Make Money From Home
23 Sales Tools That Guarantee Success

The advantage of these headlines is that they promise easy reading, increasing the chances that your text will actually be read. It’s also easy to slip a call-to-action sales message into these kind of documents: one of the promised solutions can be: “buy my product”! On the other hand, easy reading isn’t the same as interesting reading. The headline still has to grab your readers to make them want to read it.

Numbered Headlines are most effective when you’re confident your readers will find your message interesting and you don’t have to fight to make them read on. They’re best used when you’re competing against other articles or sales letters. I use them a lot in newsletters, especially when I know it’s going to be published in a joint venture partner’s newsletter.

The Testimonial Headline

These are some of the toughest headlines to write. You take a chunk of text from a letter written by a satisfied customer and use that as the headline for a sales letter:

“Last Year, I Was Working 12 Hours A Day And Making Just $36,000. Last Month, I Made $32,000 And Worked Three Days — All Due To The Amazing Techniques Revealed Below!” “I’d Tried Every Weight Loss Program Ever.

I’d Tried Dieting, Exercise, High-Fiber, Low Fat, High-Carbs… You Name It, I’d Done It And Nothing Worked. Then I Tried The Lose Fat Fast Program. I Lost 33 Pounds In The First Two Months And I’ve Never Felt Better!” “Within A Week Of Sending Out My Resume, I’d Got Three Interviews And A Fantastic Job Offer. I Couldn’t Have Done It Without You!”

These headlines put your reliability right at the top, increasing the customers’ confidence to buy. They explain in detail precisely what you’re offering and what you can do for the reader. They also create
massively long headlines that are difficult to absorb at a glance and can put a reader off.

Testimonial headlines are best used in industries where reliability is a bit of a problem. If you’re selling weight loss products for example, or any other life-changing service, then a headline like this
goes some way towards proving to the buyer that you’re trustworthy.

Those are just five kinds of headlines that I use in my businesses every day. There are dozens more, but these are the ones that I’ve found the most effective. There’s certainly enough here for you to get started. Play around with them, figure out which ones would work best for your business and try them out.

But even the best headline will only grab a reader’s eye and get him reading. They won’t close the sale. After the headline you’ll need to describe all the wonderful benefits of your product in order to get the reader to actually take the action you want.