All About My First List

Those of you who wish to take control of your business on the Internet with automated tasks need a functional and easy to use automatic email response system. An automatic email response system will take care of any emails you receive, and automatically deliver a response to potential clients 24 hours a day – 7 days a week.

You can set up your autoresponder program on your own computer or server without any problems. Using your own program is the way to go, especially if you want to avoid paying a monthly fee to companies that charge for the same services. There are several companies out there that offer autoresponder services, although they can get expensive over time.

If you decide to use your own email autoresponder program, you can save a lot of money and a lot of time. These programs will streamline your business, freeing up your time to concentrate on other important areas. You can let your email program handle responses and follow up emails, while you work on making other ideas work or just getting out there and spending time with your family.

An email autoresponder can help you generate thousands of leads in little to no time at all. With a lot of leads, comes money. Although you may disagree, a customer list is what leads to money. If you don’t have a customer list or database, chances are that you won’t be doing a lot of sales. Having customers to send emails and products to is a plus – especially when you weigh in the fact that customers make your business. Without customers, you wouldn’t make any money at all.

When you are using an autoresponder with your website, you should always include a subscription box for visitors who wish to sign up. This way, anyone who visits your website and wishes to learn more about your products or offers, can easily sign up. Your autoresponder will instantly send out an email, which will in turn help you build your customer list. To survive in the online world of business, you’ll need to have a customer list. Autoresponders will help you manage your list and help it grow at the same time.

Everyone who owns a business on the Internet is always looking for better ways to carry out business. Email autoresponders make things easier than ever, helping you to minimize your daily routine by handling email support for you. You’ll save money using them as well, simply because you won’t be wasting your time answering emails. In the end, email autoresponders will help you get better profits as well. Even though they will cost you money – the results they give you will far outweigh the cost.

Have you heard of the term “Super Affiliate” else where? Actually, we bet you already know what it is: Super Affiliates are greater affiliates. If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, it’s an interesting job selling other people’s products and earn commissions for yourself.

The Internet has been growing so wide and large in a short period of time, and there have been millions and millions of people trying to jump on the Internet billion-dollar market. People are starting to sort their way of beginning an online business.

Yet, it’s a really tough job to accomplish if you’re just a beginner. There are a lot to digest, but it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed with it. In fact, it is very easy.

Earning big money on the Internet is entirely possible. Here are just a few examples of successful affiliates and affiliate programs:

•Cashring – Top affiliate earns $5,000/month

•FriendFinder – Pays out more than $1,000,000 in commissions to its affiliates every month.

•Matt Haller – NPC newsletter subscriber earns $10,000/month with a hip-hop affiliate site.

•Deborah Casey – Student of the ‘Super Affiliate Handbook’ by Rosalind Gardner who earns $15,000 every month.

•Jim Cockrum – Affiliate selling the ‘Super Affiliate Handbook’ made $1000 in ONE day!

•Rosalind Gardner – She regularly earns $50,000+/month just from her affiliate marketing efforts!

•Ewen Chia – An affiliate marketer who also regularly earns more than $10,000 every month.

Now you will probably think, how can I be like them, and what should I do? The answer: meet the basic requirements for a Super Affiliate: domain name, hosting, website, and sign up for the appropriate affiliate programs.

Basically affiliate marketing is as easy as 1 – 2 – 3:
1. You join the affiliate program and place links on your site or in your newsletter.
2. Your visitor clicks that link and buys a product, service or fills out a form.
3. You earn a commission for sales or leads generated through your links.

And without a website, you can hardly sell them at all, unless you really plan on printing out flyers and distributing them to the neighborhood.

How do Super Affiliates earn a steady income and grow bigger and bigger every month? It mentions one of the most important factor, Opt-In List.

If you are going to learn one thing from this, remember that the fastest way of making money with affiliate marketing is through your own list of subscribers! If you have started building your own opt-in list, great. If not, you need to start now.

To have an opt-in list, you will need to register for an auto-responder account. The better auto-responders are Aweber and GetResponse. You will be provided with the script that can be easily copy-pasted on your web page to have an opt-in form so that people can subscribe to your list. There are so many things you can do once you have an opt-in list, some of them:

Follow-up on your affiliate sales:
You can set your auto-responder to send a newsletter/e-zine every few days to provide your subscribers with useful information, of course, integrate your affiliate link for a certain product whenever you can on the right time.

Offer time-Sensitive bonuses:
When you are selling your affiliate product, you can always include a bonus or free stuffs along, a report, an e-book, anything that suits. People who buy from you in that limited time will get the bonus you offered, a good incentive isn’t it?

Pre-selling/Back-End Selling:
You’ve probably seen this being mentioned everywhere, but really, there are too many lazy affiliates around that don’t practice it! After you sell an affiliate product to your customer, it doesn’t mean that you won’t need to bother about him/her anymore, in fact every single customer is your source of “gold mine”. Not only can they become your repeat customers but also working partners in the future!

Don’t make it sound too hard for you, for most Super Affiliates doing these become their everyday habit, as easy as breathing and they can do it anytime they want, anywhere they are. Once you have a huge opt-in list, the send button on your auto-responder will be your ever-needed money machine. When you need cash, pick a good affiliate product endorse it to your mailing list and that’s all, wake up the next day with all your affiliate earnings!

Other than your own opt-in list, you can definitely leverage on other people’s list, by purchasing solo ads from ezines or joint venturing(partnering). A solo ad is an independent, single email advertisement you can buy in ezines and they normally allow up to 300-600 words for your ad copy.

Joint venturing although doesn’t seem as appropriate because you don’t have your own product to be offered as an affiliate marketer, you can definitely have an ad-swap with other Internet Marketers, which is to endorse each other’s solo ad to your own subscribers. If there is a huge difference between the numbers of opt-ins, you just need to endorse the solo ad of the other Internet Marketer a few more times, until both of you are equal.

When there is time, focus more on creating websites to endorse the other affiliate programs and build your list. It’s just that simple, a concept which is repeated over and over again, and grow more and more each day. Successful affiliates work harder and smarter, while broke affiliates hardly work at all.

The Super Affiliate:
•Have their own domain names, hosting and websites!
•Carefully selects great products to promote.
•Consistently chooses to promote products which pays high commissions, or those which have a higher price.
•Knows the value of building highly targeted and highly responsive opt-in lists.
•Focus on improving and maximizing the activity/efficiency of each affiliate sale/campaign before thinking of moving to the next one.
•Find multiple affiliate programs to build multiple streams of income.
•Consistently work hard for more traffic and sales, while lowering any other costs of advertising.

There are a lot of places for you to find great affiliate products you can sell, here’s a few of them:
http://www.cj.com
http://www.clickbank.com
http://www.affiliateguide.com
http://www.affiliatemathc.com

You can easily exceed the other 98% of affiliates and become the 2% of Super Affiliates that are responsible for more than 80% of the sales for an affiliated product or program, once you have gained your momentum, it really is as easy as breathing.

As I’m sure you know, “a list” is what an internet marketer calls the people who have subscribed in order to get something of value from her.  Typically, the marketer has a sign-up box, or opt-in box, on her blog or website and she gets people to sign up by offering something of value for free.

This can be:

* a report
* an ebook
* a newsletter
* tips and info
* a podcast
* insider secrets
* an ecourse
* a teleseminar

When someone signs up to your list, they get the freebie and you get their email address.  Why is this important? Once you have their email address you can go about building a relationship, earning their trust, and selling products to them.

If studies show it takes a marketer an average of seven contacts with each person before they’ll buy, then a list is a must.  Yes, the marketer can sell products to people who’ve come to her website one time and decided to buy.  But then those people go away.  If she gets them on her list, she can market to them again and again as she creates more products or promotes affiliate products .

Not only can you sell to your list, you can get feedback from them about what products they’d like you to create next.  Set up a survey or poll and find out what they want.  You can also gather up the questions they’ve sent you and make the product based on that.  Just think of how many buyers you’ll have with your product tailored to their issues.

A cold list vs. a warm list

A cold list is the one that comes from giving something away for free in a giveaway event.  You’ve lured these people in for the freebie, but now you have to do some work to keep them.  Give value before you start promoting to them.  Emails showing some of your personality along with some no-strings-attached information will go a long way in building a relationship with your subscribers.  You will eventually start throwing in some promotions too, but there’s no rush.  It’s true that some freebie seekers will opt out of your list as soon as they receive your freebie, but they probably were never going to buy from you anyway.

A warm list may have started out cold, but they’ve been primed and are eager to buy from you.  Many of them already have and because you give great value for the money, they’ll buy from you again.  Don’t get sloppy and stop sending value in your emails.  Sending nothing but promotional emails is abusing your list and even people who were once happy with you will unsubscribe.

Having a list is very important for your internet marketing success.  Having a lot of people on your list is great, but what’s important is remembering they’re people.  A good rule of thumb is to send out the kind of emails you’d like to receive.

Also known as the “name squeeze page” or “lead capture page”, you can build your mailing list by funneling all of your would-be subscribers through the creation of a landing page. Not only do you do the work just once, your traffic driving efforts can be focused onto just one effective method.

The following are tips in creating a successful landing page that converts visitors into subscribers on a very huge percentage.

Success Tip 1: Offer a freebie in exchange for your visitor’s email address. I very much endorse this method of building your mailing list. You can offer a special report or a sample of your paid product to your visitor in exchange for their details such as name and email address.

Success Tip 2: The landing page must be written professionally. When writing your page, treat it as if you are writing a sales letter. While you are not necessarily making a hard sale or try to get someone to buy your product upfront, being able to entice your visitors to give their details to you is just as important as selling.

Success Tip 3: Other than your opt-in form and perhaps important disclaimers and terms, there shouldn’t be any other links on your landing page.

Success Tip 4: Rub in the benefits of the freebie you are offering more than a mere subscription to your newsletter. You should focus most of the attention of the letter on encouraging your prospective visitor to download your free offer. Later, you gently remind your prospect that he or she has nothing to pay but just merely subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie.

As a final reminder and conclusion, in order to build trust, you can include your hand-written signature or a photo of yourself explaining where you are coming from and how you can help your visitor through your free report on offer.

While the rest of the world have developed many barriers and protections to keep their e-mail accounts spam-free, there are also those that subscribe to mails that promotes their products, services and their site. This is mainly because these subscribes wants to know more about what these sites are offering and can be beneficial for them. They expect to get be kept posted on what they are interested in and what are new in the market or field they have chosen.

Businesses would be so lucky to have these kinds of customers; the basic element needed to get these types of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many internet users have gone to great lengths in protecting their email accounts from spam mail. Some free-mail internet providers and internet service providers offer spam protection while there are also some internet based companies that screen your mails for you.

With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketing media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient, to get this permission; you need to be able to get their trust. With the great lack of disregard for privacy in the internet, getting the trust of an internet user you don’t personally know is a big achievement.

To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you, for a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get spelling more profits. Its easy math if you thin about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is?

•    Getting the trust of your clientele shouldn’t be so hard especially if you do have a legitimate business. Getting your customers trust should be based upon your expertise. People rely on other people who know what they are talking about. Garner all the knowledge and information about your business. Ell, frankly if you decide to go into a business most probably you have an interest in it. Like how many basketball payers become coaches, you don’t really venture into something you don’t have any interest in.

•    Show your clients that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to what you are selling. Talk about how to install a roof if your into hardware products or provide articles on insurance settlements if you’re a settlement lawyer. You don’t have to be a big corporation to make use of an opt-in list. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will trust you quickly.

•    Be true to your customers, if you want to hype up your products and services, provide guarantees. The more satisfied customers you get, the bigger probability there is that they will recommend you. Generally, people will trust someone they know, when that someone recommends you then you’re a shoo-in. They will go to your site and check it for themselves and be given a chance to experience what the other shave experienced from you, so make sure to be consistent in the service you provide.

•    Another tip in getting a customer to trust you quickly is to provide them an escape hatch. Show them that you are not there to trap them. Keep a clean list that would enable them to unsubscribe anytime they want. Elaborate your web form by providing information on how to unsubscribe from the list. Guarantee them that they can let go of the service when ever they want to. Many are wary that they may be stuck for life and would have to abandon their email accounts when they get pestered with spam.

Remember that when you get the trust of your clients don’t lose that trust. Because if you do anything with their email addresses like sell them or give them out, you will lose many members of your list as ell as potential members. The true quickest way to gain the trust of your subscribers is when you are recommended by someone they trust.

Every online business provides great service to generate satisfaction among their customers. As each and every customer receives satisfaction over their products or the services they get, there is a great chance that they will become a return customer and buy again. Better yet, they will recommend you to other people that could generate more business for you and your site.

As more traffic is driven to your site, you can entice many of them to subscribe to your mailing list or opt-in list. This is a list where in website visitors agree to be sent promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and such that could keep them updated about your site or the niche of your site. These promotional materials are sent via e-mail to the members of the list in different time intervals.

When using e-mail as the media of your marketing and advertisements, you eliminate the need for high costs. Email is free and if you can manage to make your own promotional advertisements you can also save a bundle there. With an opt-in subscribers list, you are pretty sure that what you are sending out is received, viewed and read by the subscribers and not simply being deleted. They have signed up for service and have consented in receiving it.

This means that there are constant reminders to your subscribers about all your products, new products and services as well as any promotions and special deals you are having. There is also the chance that they can be forwarded to other potential customers as they tell their friends and families about you and your site.

Of course you should be also aware that a subscriber may unsubscribe when they feel that they are not getting what they want or expected. Make sure that they are satisfied with your opt-in marketing strategies and keep them excited in receiving your newsletters and catalogs. Here are some tips that can help you build a list of eager subscribers.

Make your promotional materials interesting and fun. Try to use a little creativity but not too over artsy. Build around what your product or service is about. For example; if you are selling car parts, put some pictures of what is new in the auto parts world, a new wing door possibly that can fit any car and make it look like a Lamborghini.

Try to research what people are looking for, these way, you stay one step ahead of them all the time and you will be their bearer of new tidings. They will be eager to receive what you are sending them because they new you always have fresh and new things to share with them.

Write good articles that can be very informational but light at the same time. If your subscribers enjoy your articles, they will go to your site by clicking the links that you will be putting on your newsletter to read some more. You can provide articles that can connect to many people. Be diverse in your articles. Put something humorous, then put something informational, then put something that has both.

Are you wary about this because you don’t like writing? No problem, there are many professional and experienced article writers that can do the job for you for minimal fees. They know what they are doing and can provide the need that you have for your newsletters, the money that you pay for your articles are going to be met by the many sign-ups and the potential profit from the sales that you will get.

Create and send an E-book to your customers about anything that is related to your business or site. Use your knowledge and expertise in the field you have chosen to help other people who are similarly interested. Offer this e-book for free. You can write about anything informational and helpful to your subscribers. For example; you can do manuals and guides in so many things. This e-book could be used as a reference for many people.

Share this e-book with everyone, even other sites; just make sure that they don’t change the links in the e-book that will lead people to your site. If you want, you can always get some people to write it for you just like your articles. Your investment once again will be covered by the great marketing this will generate.

Add e-coupons in your newsletters that will help them avail to special discounts. Put a control number in your e-coupon so that they can only be used once. When people get discounts that can be found in your newsletters, they will be eager to receive your newsletter in anticipation of what you are promoting next.

If your subscribers can get benefits from your newsletters, they will be very eager to receive them. Just don’t flood your mailing list with mails so that you don’t annoy your subscribers.

The average person has to be exposed to a product seven times before he makes a decision to buy. What does that mean to you as an affiliate marketer? You need to be able to get the product you are offering in front of your visitors repeatedly. One of the best ways to do this is by getting the visitors of your website to sign up for a newsletter.

By capturing their email address and getting them on your newsletter list, you can keep bringing them back to your site. You will also be able to repeat your offer several times in your newsletter, and if you can’t get them to buy the first product, you move on to something else. Sooner or later they will start buying and you will get your commission from the sale.

A newsletter is also a great relationship-building tool. Think about it, who are you more likely to buy from? A complete stranger or someone that has already provided you with great content on the subject you are interested in. You’d probably buy from someone that has given you great information already.

The same goes for your visitors. To turn them into customers, allow them to get to know you, show them that you know what you are doing and provide them with good content in your newsletter. Then offer them your affiliate product.

The biggest mistake I see new affiliate marketers make when it comes to newsletters, is to try to use their personal email client (like Microsoft Outlook) to run a newsletter. It is very time consuming to manually add and remove subscribers from your list. You also run the risk of being shut down by your webhost if you send to many emails at once.

I recommend you use an autoreponder service like aweber right from the start. You will be able to create signup forms for your website. Adding and removing of subscribers is done automatically, and you can schedule messages to go out at a certain date and time.

You can use the actual autoresponder feature to your advantage by creating a series of newsletters that are not time sensitive. Each new subscriber will receive the newsletter editions you have written in sequence starting with message 1. All you have to do is add a new message each week, or month. Of course you can also send time sensitive messages – like a holiday promotion – to your entire list right away.

To encourage visitors to your site to subscribe to the newsletter, add a signup form on each page of your site. It also helps to offer them something free for subscribing. Create a report, or even an ebook related to the topic of your newsletter and use the autoreponder feature to automatically send it to them when they sign up.

Try to stay in touch with your subscriber list at least once per month; preferably twice per month or even weekly. You could see the first sales coming in within a few weeks. I encourage you to give it a try. Newsletters are one of the most powerful affiliate tools and they are easy to implement.