With more marketers who’ve traditionally relied on Pay Per Click, Social MEdia and Search Engine Optmization jumping on the listbuilding bandwagon, trying to start up a newsletter and get readers and visitors to opt-in to a mailing list, it’s a positive, yet at the same time negative trend for the industry.
The benefits of a list are easy to see, zero acquisition cost and the ability to build an ongoing relationship with your list members.
Treat them right and a healthy list will generate a comfortable income for you.
Conservative estimates put the value of a list at $1 per list member per month.
In simple terms, each member is worth $1 per month or $12 a year. Multiply that by the number of members in your list, with some list owners having lists of upwards of 100,000 members and you get the idea of the potential and lucrative possibility of having a great list.
The relationship building element is where a number of marketers can experience pitfalls however.
I recently joined a self-improvement giveaway with a few hundred products to be given away free.
So I opted in to a mailing list and was sent to the download page.
This is when the problems began…
To receive each product, I needed to opt-in to that particular author’s mailing list.
With the giveaway touting itself to give away more than a hundred “gifts”, this potentially meant having to opt in to more than 100 mailing lists, just to get a free MP3 recording or PDF report.
After the 2nd opt-in, I gave up. So much for that “giveaway”.
Here is why I think the opt-in failed:
Failure to follow the “Pay It Forward” concept: Have you eaten at a restaurant where you are asked to pay before the food arrives? It happens in fast food restaurants, but I think you will be taken aback at a 5 star restaurant which asks for your credit card before you’re even shown to your seat. Likewise, if you ask for an email even before you’ve shown your product, it’s the online equivalent of the restaurant example.
Overestimating Your Brand power: Depending on your preferences, you will likely follow a leader or role model in your market, it might be someone like Warren Buffett for stock investing, Donald Trump for real estate, or Gene Simmons if you’re looking to start a music business. If one of my role models had an offer, I’d probably give up my name and email address to get the report. If Joe Blow “guru” asked for it, the trust and credibility is nowhere near what I’d expect.
Misconception that Quantity Trumps Quality: Again, the unsophisticated will have the idea that “more is better”. Does getting more food at a buffet mean that you will have better quality food? Not really. Handmade Swiss watches are limited in quantity because there’s no way a human craftsman can compete with a machine punching out 100 watches per hour. Likewise, getting 200 reports will likely not be as beneficial as getting one quality product. If there’s 1 takeaway from list building, it’s always to deliver quality, quality and quality.
So what’s the solution, having deconstructed, destroyed and annhilated the giveaway campaign, what’s a good mechanism to build a list?
I’d suggest having a simple download page to give away your product. If you feel so include, you can include an opt-in box to provide updates and revisions to website visitors who’re interested.
Further, and this is the important step, include at the end of your report, an option to opt-in to your list. Chances are that someone who has made it to the end of your report and takes the effort to opt-in to your list, will be more qualified and more positive than someone who had been forced to opt-in to your list in order to get your report of unknown quality.
For more emailing and list building tips, take a look at “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin.
For a quality autoresponder service, check out Aweber.
Also check out Friday Podcast with Aweber’s Education Marketing Manager Justin Premick “Email Marketing Tips“.
I had a great time presenting a session on social marketing and web 2.0 technologies for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project today and it fired off a couple of thoughts on how Internet marketers can leverage their brand to enhance their business.
Especially if you’ve been traditionally focusing on PPC or Search Engine Optimization to generate leads and sales, these strategies can give you a couple more tools for your arsenal.
Social marketing is all about open communication and visibility. (transparency and honesty are key too).
If you don’t already have an online presence, look at how you want to position yourself.
At the heart of it, a Dell computer, an Apple iPod or an Asus Eee PC is just a bunch of circuit boards and electronic chips soldered together and encased in an aluminum or polycarbonate case. It’s marketing magic that imbues these objects with the emotional associations of style, ease-of-use, prestige, etc.
In his book, “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth Godin mentions how consumers are actually the ones lying to themselves. They imbue products and services with these larger-than-life characteristics and spending their income on “driving machines” and believe that a computer can help them “think different”.
If you’re an online marketer and you aren’t already picking up these tips to up your game, you could be missing out on the massive leverage these strategies provide.
Pickup artists like Neil Strauss AKA Style, Erik Von Markovik AKA Mystery talk about creating personas or social avatars. I don’t see this as very different from a brand that a company creates.
One question might be asked “So, how do I create my identity if I’m new to this?”
Answer: Create your identity based on what you want to be (your outcome) and strive towards it. An avatar is your desired outcome, you build it as a goal you want to achieve.
Having it consistent with your personal thoughts, values and attitudes will help you market via social media and web 2.0 with authenticity and brutal effectiveness. Projecting a picture of yourself as something you’re not is going to be a fruitless exercise down the road.
The pickup artists have put a practical application to Robert Cialdini’s concept of social proof – the idea of DHV’s or Demonstration of Higher Value. In Internet marketer speak, that’s becoming an authority site in your niche. (ok, I’m extending the concept further from its original position).
More importantly, social marketing still represents a pool of huge untapped potential – something like the Excalibur buried in a block of stone. The secret here is that anyone can be the “King Arthur” that pulls it out and unleashes its potential – it’s a matter of stepping up and taking action.
This clip with one of Mystery’s lieutenants, JDog, address the issue of creating avatars. Read between the lines and the same principles of focus, rather than “peacocking” will equally apply in your business too.
During the recent Affiliate Summit West, I met Justin Premick who’s Education Marketing Manager at email marketing solutions company Aweber.
I think I’m doing more than 90% of the affiliates out there when it comes to incorporating email marketing as part of my SEO-based marketing campaigns, but some of the tips that Justin shared with me during the few minutes we talked before the Blue Man Group performance at the Affiliate Bash at Tao gave me a couple of ideas to test out in my campaign.
So I was looking forward to chatting with Justin when he agreed to come on as a guest on this week’s Friday Podcast. Some of the ideas and behind-the-scene stuff that goes on at your autoresponder operator will surprise you, and I uncovered some killer tips to use autoresponders to enhance conversions in your affiliate AND CPA marketing campaigns.
It was definitely worth waking up at 3am this morning (3pm EST Tuesday) to chat with Justin and the interview will be posted this Friday.
If you aren’t already using email marketing in conjunction with a PPC or SEO marketing campaign, you could be leaving quite a bit of cash on the table…
Here’re some tips which will help you get started:
Content is and should be packaged differently across multiple platforms
Seems obvious, but you need to tailor your content to suit the medium you’re publishing the content on.
On a website you have the benefit of space and the ability to use multimedia generously (audio, video, graphics), while in the context of email marketing, people are used to seeing bite-sized chunks of info.
So unless it’s very compelling, it’s generally not a good idea to send out a 5-page email. Even if it does get read, you can expect to see a dropoff if you consistently send out long emails.
Permission-based marketing
This was one of the major points during our discussion – email marketing is very much “relationship marketing” which plays by a different set of rules when compared to pricing/bidding strategies of PPC or the search engine algorithmn trustrank/pagerank strategies of SEO.
“Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin is a great primer. To check out 4 free chapters, visit Seth’s blog.
Having a foot each in the info marketing and PPC (Pay Per Click) space has been eye-opening and there’re a number of possibilities for hybrid marketing, especially given the pros and cons of each side of the divide as I’ll go into details here…
Information Marketing (or Info Marketing) is where I started out, marketing ebooks and digital products and gradually developing my own products.
Traffic generation and list building are the bread-and-butter for info marketers. The mantra “The money is in the list” applies.
As an info marketer, you should be keenly aware of the lifetime value of each customer. That’s the value of commissions or product sales you’d expect from each of your customers over the lifetime that they do business with you.
[If this is new to you, you need to work this out immediately, as it had direct implications on your business]
If you have compelling and sticky content and treat them well, you can expect to grow very loyal customers.
What’s a loyal customer?
Take me for example, when it comes to digital cameras and camcorders, I’d look at what Sony and Canon offer. If they don’t have what I’m looking for, I’ll consider other options (only with great reluctance).
The old time marketers would call this “brand loyalty”, the Internet Marketers would call this (more…)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.
With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]
The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)
But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?
It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.
Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?
Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.
 Master Marketer Seth Godin
If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:
“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.
Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.
You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.
As Seth skillfully illustrates:
Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.
So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need (more…)
If you’ve been online for any amount of time, chances are you’ve heard of Squidoo in passing or even been to their site.
Although it’s easy to pass off Squidoo as just another platform for traffic generation and revenue generation. (which I did for the longest time).
Upon closer look, the brainchild of marketer Seth Godin aims to achieve social good by focus the community’s efforts towards raising funds for charity.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Squidoo:
Squidoo splits its revenue with its “co-op” of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 45 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo. (more…)
