S E L F

“The Money is in the List”

 

How many times have you heard that expression?

 

My guess is that if you’ve been around internet marketing for more than a month, you’ll have heard that phrase at least once.

 

I can tell you, it’s absolutely true, but what the heck does it mean?

It means this: - if you want to make any sort of regular and ongoing income in internet marketing, no matter what your niche or area of speciality, one of your main focuses should be on developing a subscriber list of like-minded people who are interested in that subject.

So if you want to develop a site about Dog Training, you should be focused on building a list of subscribers interested in training dogs.

 

Want to develop a site around learning how to massage? Then develop a list of people who are interested in learning how to massage.

 

Hopefully you get the idea.

 

WHY DO THIS?

 

The Bottom line is that as long as you do it properly, the bigger your subscriber list, the more money you’ll make, and the more secure your future will be.

The most successful internet marketers are the ones who have the biggest lists. Guys like Mike Filsaime, Armand Morin, Yanik Silver, Tom Hua (to name a few) will have tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and on multiple lists in multiple niche markets.

When your list gets to that size, and you send out a promotional e-mail to your subscribers, you don’t have to have a very high conversion percentage to make a lot of money in one go.
For example, say you have a list of 50,000 subscribers interested in making money online. You send out an email promoting a $47 high quality package, and only 1% of your subscribers decide to go for it (which is below average).

That’s 500 sales you make at $47 each = $23,500 from one promotion!

 

The following week / month you send another e-mail promoting a different high quality package, and a different 1% take you up on it.

 

Can you see the power of having a substantial targeted subscriber list?

 

OK, so how do you go from zero subscribers and start building your subscriber list to this size so you can earn this kind of income . . . ?

 

. . . And do it on a tight budget . . . ?

ANSWER - JV (Joint Venture) Giveaways, or Giveaway Events.
This is one of the easiest (and free!) ways of adding subscribers to your list, especially when you are just starting out.

WHAT ARE THEY?

A JV Giveaway is where a group of online marketers in a particular niche come together and offer the Giveaway members the opportunity to download one of their products or packages for free. These could be in the form of e-books, training materials, videos, audio products, software or scripts (and this is not an exhaustive list!).

I should also mention here that you do not necessarily have to create the product yourself - I’ll be covering later how you can do this using a product created by someone else.

In order to download the gift of a particular marketer, members must provide their name and e-mail address, and subscribe to the marketer’s list. The member will then have access to download the gift free of charge, with no strings attached. They may even unsubscribe from that marketer’s list at any time after downloading their gift, but hopefully the marketer provides enough value to them as a subscriber that they will want to stick with them and remain a subscriber.

So why do these marketers do this?

Well, it’s a kind of win-win situation. The Giveaway member gets to join the giveaway (for free) and download the gifts (for free). Many of these giveaways have literally hundreds of gifts to choose from, and members can have as many as they choose.

On the other hand the marketer has the opportunity to add new subscribers to their list.

If you haven’t experienced one of these yet, just join one as a member, and go in and download some gifts so you can get a feel for how the whole process works. Remember, there are no catches and it won’t cost you a thing (unless you decide to go for one of the paid offers you see in there, but that’s entirely your choice)

You will end up with some excellent resources - read them / review them - they can all help your learning.

 

Click on the link below for a list of some of the current giveaways you can do this with

 

Current Giveaway Events

 

Think it all sounds too good to be true?

The cynic in me thought so too when I started, but I’ve participated in quite a few of these events now, both as member and contributor. I’ve found that most of the marketers who participate in these are legitimate and value you as one of their subscribers, and in almost every case I have found something of value

If they don’t, just unsubscribe. It really is as easy as that. At the bottom of every e-mail they send there will be a link to unsubscribe - don’t be afraid to use it! I’ve only ever had one marketer where I did this - I had a recent experience where I downloaded a gift from a particular marketer at a giveaway (I won’t mention names). For every single day after I signed up for his list, I received between 3 and 5 emails, promoting products / packages that I ABSOLUTELY had to to have! After about 5 days my inbox was getting clogged up with sales emails from him, it just became annoying, and he wasn’t sending me anything of value.

What did I do? Exactly - I unsubscribed, and I haven’t heard from him since

 

Problem solved - I still have his gift, and it still cost me nothing.

 

Remember, NO STRINGS.
Action Plan

Sign up for a few giveaways as a member & download some free gifts, just to familiarise yourself with how it all operates. Meanwhile, finish this e-book and the rest of the steps so that you can be ready to participate in one as a contributor and start building your very own list.

Next Chapter - How YOU can use Giveaways to build YOUR list.
GETTING STARTED IN JV GIVEAWAYS

OK, I’m going to assume that you took my advice in the last chapter and have now experienced a giveaway as a member, and you have now downloaded some free gifts, and you are familiar with how the process operates.

So let’s get on now to how YOU can use these to build your list . . .

 

There are a few basic things you’ll need to have in place before you start.

1. A gift to give away
2. An e-mail autoresponder facility
3. A simple website or blog

I’m going to let you know what they are, and where you can get them right now to get started very quickly:

1. A GIFT TO GIVE AWAY
The best way to do this is to create something yourself - an information product, video, audio, ebook, software, or script. Then it’s yours, it’s unique.

But let’s face it, who starting out in this business knows how to go about creating such a product, developing the packaging, etc? Not me anyway whenever I started.

Remember I said earlier that you can use a product created by someone else? Well, for a good few giveaways after I started, I gave away someone else’s product - the same one every time. It wasn’t ideal, but it got me going.

What you have to do is look for a product which has Master Resell / Giveaway rights attached to it. This e-book you’re reading now has this, so you could start by giving this away! Alternatively you could try these resources (click on any of the links to take you straight there)
The Giveaway Events themselves: Often the gifts you download will come with Master Resell / Giveaway Rights. Use one of these, but just make sure it is stated in the rights that you can do so.

PLR Wholesaler : Gabor Olah has gathered here an absolutely huge collection of products, all of which come with resell rights. You can join for free, which gives you a fairly good choice, or you can upgrade, where you’ll have access to thousands more information products in a vast array of different niches - you’re spoilt for choice. If you’re only finding your feet, join for free and find a product which suits you. Then when you’re more comfortable with, go for the upgrade at a later date.

DAILY NICHE IDEA : Nice lady called Cindy Battye offers an absolutely excellent facility where she identifies particular hot niches and sends you a full website, with articles, ebook, and all the info and help you need to get started. You can join and try it out for free, and that part I mentioned earlier where you need a simple website - this site will help you build it. Loads of tools here to help you get going. Highly recommended.

2. AN AUTORESPONDER:
A what?! An autoresponder is simply a service which looks after your opt-ins (subscribers signing up to your list), and allows you to plan and schedule regular or one-off e-mails. Quite simply, it’s an absolute must if you want to build any sort of online business.

There are several options open to you here:

 

(1) FREE AUTORESPONDERS: You can get these for free, but I do not recommend these at all. There are quite a few reasons for this:

(a) When you build up a list of subscribers on a free service, you will eventually want to transfer them to a paid service to better handle your business, and this can cause major difficulties. One colleague of mine built up a subscriber list of several thousand on one of the free services, and was unable to transfer these to his new paid service which he took on to handle his growing business. He had to scrap the list and start again, so all that work on building it went for nothing, when if he had done it right at the start, he wouldn’t have had the problem. Tough lesson.

(b) Reliability & support - it goes without saying. On such an important service as this (the facility which handles your entire customer relationship building), you need reliability, continuity, and good support. You won’t get this with a free service.

(c) Spam & delivery rates - You want your subscribers to actually get your emails, and be able to open them. The paid services are much better at getting your emails to your people, and free services can sometimes land you in trouble with spam and have your e-mail address blacklisted.

I could go on, but for only a few dollars a month, this is one of the things you should invest in right at the start.

There are many things in this business which you can get for free or for just a few dollars. This is one of a few areas which forms the foundation of your business, and you definitely should not compromise, even at the start. When I started I was given this advice by one of my mentors and I heeded it and signed up with Aweber and started learning from their tutorials. Now that my business and my list are growing, I am so glad I took that advice.

A few Autoresponder services:

(1) Aweber: As I said above this is the one I use at present, and I highly recommend it. Bottom line, you’ll find it to be more expensive than its competitors, but in terms of reliabililty, ease of use, deliverability, etc, it’s one of the best on the market. You can also try it for the first 30 days and if you’re not happy - get a full refund (2) GetResponse: Another very good service, and slightly cheaper than Aweber. I can’t comment directly as I haven’t used it, but many of the top marketers around use this. The choice is yours.

Each of these services have comprehensive instructions as to how to use them, so I won’t go into that here - follow the tutorials on the site and you’ll be up and going in no time.
(3) Free Services: I could have put links in here for you to some free autoresponder services, but I’m just trying to emphasise the point - if you’re serious about developing an online business, don’t even go there!

3. A SIMPLE WEB PAGE
OK, for this you’re going to need to get yourself a few things: (a) A domain
(b) Web hosting
(c) Squeeze page

(a) A DOMAIN
You need to register a domain name for your business. i.e. the www.yourdomainname.com, whatever you choose that to be. There’s a whole other e-book I could write on choosing a proper name, identifying keywords, etc, but let’s not overcomplicate things here. Choose a name which describes your business (e.g. www.dogtraining.com, www.learntomassage.com, www.growjuicytomatoes.com - get the idea?).

Whichever site you choose to register your domain with (see below) will allow you to easily search for the one you want and if it’s not available, suggest alternatives. It’s a very simple process.

You need to register the domain, which only costs a few dollars. Below are a few registrars to give you a choice, but feel free to Google and find your own (just make sure they are legitimate):

(1) GoDaddy Probably the largest registrar in the world. This is the one I personally use, and I find them to be excellent. Any problems which do arise are resolved fairly quickly, and support questions answered within a reasonable time. Therefore I have no problem recommending them

(2) NameCheap A good alternative to GoDaddy - I haven’t used them myself but some people prefer them over other services. Entirely your choice.
TIP: Whichever one you go for, do a Google search for “Coupon Code” for that provider (e.g. “GoDaddy coupon code” or “Namecheap coupon code”). You’ll often get coupons available to save money on your registration (it just depends what’s available at the time, but it’s worth a look)

(2) WEB HOSTING:
This is the “home” for your domain, and you cannot publish a website without hosting. TIP: You can have your website hosted with whoever your domain registrar is (e.g. GoDaddy / NameCheap, or whoever you decided upon). It will be slightly cheaper but I wouldn’t recommend this. You should always host your site with someone other than your domain registrar.

For hosting, I would recommend HostGator. I use them myself and so far find them to be excellent with regard to support and range of features you have with each hosting account.

When you’re just starting out, I’d recommend either the “Baby” plan ($7.95 / month for unlimited domains), or if the budget is tight, the “Hatchling” plan at $4.95 / month will allow you to get 1 domain up and going.

TIP : Again, Google search for “HostGator coupon codes” and you should be able to get discount. It will depend what’s available at the time, but at the time of writing you can get a coupon which gets you your first month of hosting for $0.01.

(3) SQUEEZE PAGE
This is the page where you tell potential subscribers a bit about your gift, and offer them the option to enter their name and email address so that they can be added to your subscriber list and download their gift.

My best advice is to keep it simple. You’re sending visitors from a giveaway page where you’ve already described and “pre-sold” the gift anyway, so I never felt the need to go into too much detail. All I’ve included in any of mine is maybe a picture of the gift I’m offering and the boxes to sign up. Click here for an example of what I’m talking about. Your Autoresponder will allow you to provide the code for the sign up part, which is very easy to insert into your page. The only thing you then need worry about is the graphics. Keep it simple.

HOW DO I CREATE A SQUEEZE PAGE?

You have several options:
(1) Use the facility on Daily Niche Idea to create your page. Start simple. (2) If you’re comfortable with simple graphics packages, you can use a specialist web design program. When I started I designed all my sites with Serif Web Plus, and found it to be excellent (it cost me around $40 as far as I remember). Others are available for very reasonable prices - just an option for you if you are happy with simple graphics layout.
(3) Robert Purdy offers an excellent facility at InstantSqueezePageGenerator, where you can design a squeeze page (and you can join for free). Just sign up and there are templates, etc to help you with your design.
(4) Get someone else to do it for you. Another option is to use either a local web designer, or you can hire on one of the online facilities such as Elance or Rentacoder for a very reasonable charge. You should be able to get one professionally done here for less than $30.

OK - now you’re all set to be a Contributor . . .
Joining a JV Giveaway as a Contributor.

By now you should have completed the following:
(1) You’ve got yourself a gift to give away for free to build your list (remember, if you didn’t create the product and you’re using someone else’s, you need to ensure you have giveaway rights for it - this should be stated either within the product itself, or within the licence which came along with it)
(2) You’ve got your autoresponder set up to collect your new subscriber names (3) You’ve registered your domain name, chosen and set up your hosting account, and you’ve got your squeeze page online.
TIP - when doing this - you need to use your autoresponder to generate the code to gather your new subscriber details. Don’t worry - whichever autoresponder you choose should make this easy - it really is just a matter of copying and pasting this to your squeeze page.

Congratulations . . .you’re now ready to sign up as a contributor and start building your list!

First, you need to sign up to one of the current giveaways as a contributor. You’ll find a list of all current events here: Current Giveaway Events - choose one (or choose as many as you like!), and click on the link for Contributors.

The steps involved in joining and uploading your gift will differ slightly between giveaways, but the principles are essentially the same:

(1) There should be a “double opt-in” email list - what this means is that you will be sent an email after you join which will have a link you will have to click to confirm that you want to join. This is standard practice for reducing spam, and in actual fact your own autoresponder will provide the same facility.
(2) The first time you log in to your new account you will probably (but not always) be offered the opportunity to upgrade your account status for a special lower than normal price (it’s called an OTO, or One Time Offer. If you pass on it this first time, it will be a higher price if you decide to go for it at a later date)

SO SHOULD YOU UPGRADE?
The sales copy goes that when you upgrade, your gift goes higher up the giveaway rankings, you’ll get more subscribers due to the increased exposure.

So is it true? I’ll let you know my experience . . .

I joined my first 2 giveaways as a member and downloaded a lot of stuff - I had a field day! Most of the stuff was pretty good too, and I learned something from almost all of it. Some of the gifts I downloaded came with giveaway rights, so I decided to do exactly what I’m teaching here, and join as a contributor to start building my list.

So I did all of the stuff I’ve just gone through in the previous pages, and started getting some signups. By not upgrading, I added on average about 5-10 new subscribers per day to my list.

I was pretty pleased with myself! There I was, building a list, but let’s face it, how long would it have taken me to build a substantial list at that rate!!

 

So I decided to try upgrading in a giveaway, and boy did I get a shock!

In sat watching my list stats when the giveaway launched to see if what they said in the sales text was true . . . Remember previously I received 5 - 10 new sign-ups per day. As I sat there watching, I received 72 new subscribers IN THE FIRST HOUR!! To say I was excited was an understatement!

That single giveaway resulted in my list being catapulted in the early days to 4 times the size it was when it started within the space of 10 days.

 

So do I upgrade now? Absolutely.

 

There are giveaway events going on all the time - I always make sure that at any one time I am an upgraded contributor in at least one.

Do I recommend it for you? Absolutely. Pick one event & upgrade - You won’t believe the difference it will make to your list. Do it when you’re ready, but get ready quick!

(3) You will have to promote the giveaway.
All JV Giveaway contributors are required to promote the giveaway. This is one of the reasons that these events tend to be so successful at generating huge amounts of traffic. Anyone who joins as a contributor is required to bring other members and contributors to the event, and this is tracked using each contributor’s unique affiliate ID. A major benefit for you in doing this is that the more contributors / members who join using your affiliate link, the higher up the giveaway rankings your gift(s) will appear, the more visitors will see it, so the more signups you will get.

Now, if you have a list, this is no problem - you can copy and paste an e-mail from the giveaway promotional section (this will already have your affiliate link in it - literally a 5 minute job)

However, what if you don’t have a list?

Here’s what I did . . . I copied, pasted, and sent that email to the people I knew on my personal e-mail list who may be interested in getting these gifts (let’s face it, it’s not exactly a hard sell! A lot of them thanked me for it). I also posted my affiliate link on my Facebook page. That’s it.

This resulted in a few people signing up to the giveaway with my affiliate link, and I was up and running!

Now I have a list so I can send those promo e-mails out to, and I now also promote on Twitter, which is a phenomenal tool for Internet Marketing if used properly. Click here to download my Free Twitter Guide.

So now you know how to build your list and add subscribers to it on an ongoing basis using the power of JV Giveaways.

Thanks for reading this ebook - I hope you’ve taken something of value away from it. If you’d like to receive more resources like this, join up to my subscriber list at PlanetSelf - Click on the any (or all) of the free resources so you can download them. It’d be great to have you on board.

Now go build your list and secure your and your family’s future . . .

 

To your success . . . .

 

Aidan Breslin

 

PlanetSelf.net

 

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