Internet Marketing Q&A - Issue 5
It’s time to answer another set of questions from my readers. You’re in that group, so you get the benefit of the great questions your peers ask me.
A lot of people wonder why I do this. There are really three big reasons…
First, I care about whether you succeed or not. Internet marketing really isn’t rocket science…once you know what you’re doing. Before you “get it”, though, it helps a ton to have somebody actually answer real questions that real people ask along the way.
Second, even after you’re an “expert”, it’s great to get new ideas from other people. You never know when an answer to a question will press just right button in your brain…and boost your profits.
Third, I get literally thousands of emails every week, and it’s impossible to answer them all. So I set up this system to help me manage email better, while still giving you the information you need.
So read on, and I hope you enjoy the learning.
If there’s one thing I get asked about more than any other, it’s about the size and responsiveness of my email list. What most people don’t know is that the size of the list is far less important than whether it’s full of buyers. So here are some questions related to that issue, and some responses I hope will help you.
1) Getting buyers would be great, but what if I don’t have a product? I always seem to get stuck there. (asked by Lonnie Gersten)
You and lots of other people! You’re definitely not alone.
What most people don’t understand is that it’s actually pretty easy to create a product quickly if you keep it small and focused on a particular information need in the niche you’re trying to target.
Even better, it’s smart NOT to start from scratch. That’s simple to do when you use private label rights (PLR) material. That material lets you put your name on it and claim you’re the author, and you can use bits and pieces of it however you want.
So let’s say you’re targeting the list building niche, and you have some PLR material related to building a long-term relationship with a list. It’s a lot of material, but you extract some to create a report 10-15 pages long.
There’s you product! It doesn’t have to get any more complicated than that.
Or, if you don’t have PLR material to use, you can do essentially the same thing by look at article sites like EzineArticles.com. Find 15-20 articles on your topic, summarize the key points in your OWN words (very important) and then write your own articles to create an ebook.
There’s another product! That approach takes a little more time, but not much.
Even better, once you have your product, you can use the same techniques again to come up with an offer that people will see only once when they buy your main product (an OTO).
The way most people do it today, you’ll show this offer to somebody before he gets to download your main product. This lets you use a great strategy–offering a FREE product on the front end with an OTO behind it.
So let’s say you assemble that ebook about building a relationship with a list. Then you put together a quick, easy set of email templates as your OTO. You can sell it for anywhere from $7 to $17 and have people think that’s quite inexpensive.
When somebody signs up for your free report, show him your email templates offer and…probably add a buyer to your buyer list!
That’s a simple strategy I’ve used myself many times, and it still works great. I’ve added literally tens of thousands of buyers to my lists that way, even with simple products that took almost no time to create.
2) I have a product, but it’s not selling from my site. How can I get buyers if nobody’s buying? (asked by Kelly Goodlett)
This is a real challenge for a lot of people, especially when they’re first starting.
The key is to understand one critical point: “buyer” doesn’t necessarily mean somebody who has bought directly from you. It could be ANY buyer. Here’s what I mean…
A buyer is somebody who’s shown he’ll take out his wallet and make a purchase. Now, does it matter WHO he bought from?
Yes and no. It would help if he bought from you, because then you know for sure he’s willing to give YOU money. But if he bought from somebody else, that’s still good, because he’s shown he’s willing to buy from somebody.
So all you really have to do is figure out how to get somebody else’s buyers to join your list.
An easy way to do this is to find somebody who’s willing to put your product in his upsell or OTO. This is easier than it sounds.
You have a product already, Kelly. So look online in forums, at ClickBank or anyplace else you can think of and find marketers who offer complementary products (not direct competitors of yours). Look at their sales pages and find a few who offer an upsell when you click the order button. Find their email addresses and send them a personal message.
In your email, tell them what you like about their site or product. Then let them know you have a product you’d like to make a partnership proposal about.
Your proposal is simple:
* You contribute your existing product to their upsell, which increases the perceived value of what they’re offering
* You won’t ask them to share any profits with you
* All you ask is that the point buyers to your sign-up page before they download your product
There you go. You’ll be adding somebody else’s buyers to your list, and that other person is doing all of the sales work!
This is a great question. Your action plan begins with one word…
START!
The key to building a list is to create something people want bad enough to sign up for. Then you can transform them into buyers.
When I started years ago, I didn’t have a big list. As little as a few years ago, I didn’t have a list anywhere close to what it is now. I started small and grew, just like everybody has to.
The key, though, is to focus on getting BUYERS from the start. Subscribers are great, but if they don’t buy, you won’t make money from them.
The easy way to jumpstart the process is to add buyers from other people’s lists. A cross-promotion is a good way to start.
A cross-promotion is where you and a partner agree to promote each other’s products to grow your lists. It’s easy to set up, and usually easy to pitch to potential partners.
The critical element in most cases is to give your partner 100% commissions. In other words, don’t worry about making money up front. Focus on building your list.
It’s a no-brainer for a partner, because he’s getting commissions, and he’s getting a great product to promote. It’s great for you, too, because it can help you build your list fast.
You can find partners exactly like I described in my answer to the previous question–look for marketers with complementary products and send them an email. Nothing fancy, just a friendly email with a straightforward proposal.
Remember, what matters in the list game is growing a list, not having a huge list right away. A big list is great, no doubt, but it’s more important to have a list of any size and grow it from there.
4) If you could only use one technique to get buyers, other than selling your own product from your own site, what would it be? (asked by Matthew Lesh)
This is an easy one.
If I could use only one technique to attract buyers to my list, I would use thank you page promos.
You might know of my product at http://www.EmailPromosExposed.com. When that first launched, I used thank you page promos a lot, and that helped me get to the 100,000+ downloads I’ve seen for that product.
That’s over 100,000 names on my email list, and a large percentage were buyers. Why? Because I offered an OTO behind my free product, and that got a large number of people to buy from me right away.
Thank you page promos are easy and powerful. All you need is something to offer and the willingness to recruit partners. You can end up with an autopilot income stream, which is what most people want.
In my case, I offered a free video course up front. But you could offer a video course, screen capture videos, a short report, templates of some kind…anything that might appeal to somebody as a free offer.
Then you put an OTO behind it at some price, typically a low one if you’re just starting to build your list. You want to get lots of impulse buyers fast.
The great thing about thank you page promos, though, is how easy it is to pitch to partners.
Give them something like 75% commission, offer to create their thank you page ad for them, and pay them on time. This is EASY money for them, especially if they’re not currently using their thank you page real estate for anything.
Even better, when you grow your own list and start selling more of your own products, you can offer to swap thank you page ads with other marketers. That makes your thank you page proposal even more profitable for a potential partner.
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All right, that wraps it up for this time.
If you like getting answers to questions like this, ask your own question! You can submit your question by filling out the simple form at:
http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/questions/
Every couple weeks or so, I’ll go through the questions and pick out 5-6 to answer in an email to people on my lists.
Your questions are what will make this email helpful, so please keep them coming. I can’t guarantee I’ll answer your question, but if the same question gets asked several times, I’ll try to answer that one. So don’t think, “Somebody’s probably asked that already.” Maybe so, but it’s worth asking anyway.
All the best,
Michael Rasmussen
CEO, BulletProof Marketing, Inc.
P.S. If you know any Internet marketers who would enjoy this article, just send them an email with this link:
http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/internet-marketing-qa-issue-5
About the Author
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU! Go to http://www.MichaelRasmussen.com
Welcome to the Bulletproof Marketing Blog. In here, you'll find the kind of high quality content that most marketers would greedily charge hundreds of dollars for. These tips, tricks, and tactics are some of my best material, and I'm more than happy to give it to you for free.
