I'm sure you've all read...even those of you who are newbies...that you need to grow your list, and that you need to keep in touch with it on a regular basis in order to build a rapport with your subscribers that should ultimately lead to sales. What's the rule of thumb? You should eventually earn $1 a month per subscriber IF you do this correctly.
You've also read that autoresponders are a great way to do this. You can create an ecourse or just simply send some followup emails. Anything to make sure it's not just a one-and-done contact. Or not just sales pitch after sales pitch, which will lead to unsubscribes so fast your head will spin.
(Or, if you're like me, you don't even bother unsubscribing...you just block those senders as junk mail, so they never even know you've stopped reading them.)
Frankly, most people are finding they need to read less and take action more, so you have got to be REALLY compelling to keep even some of them.
My Reselling4Profit newsletter only goes out once a month (if I'm lucky) but I get tons of emails from subscribers telling me that they think it's great newsletter and that they look forward to getting it. I get very few unsubscribes and, based on tracking, know that a lot of people actually do read the darn thing.
But I'll be honest. I don't keep up with those folks the way I should. When I *do* send out recommendations for products, I make lots of sales. Indeed, I've had people tell me they've waited for me to promote a product so they could by it from me!
But, because of the nature of the membership, I find I don't recommend all that much by way of "buy this" because I tend to buy much of it myself for the members. Of course, newsletter subscribers who are not yet members tend to get noticeably more emails from me, depending on how they signed up for the newsletter, but I still could do much, much better..
On the other hand, R4P isn't my only online business, although I did create a multipart autoresponder course last year on what to do with resell rights products once you have them that had a ton of signups resulting in a lot of sales. (Hmmm...maybe I ought to update it and let you folks read it! I think you'd enjoy it and many of you would learn something from it.)
Anyway, except for that one course for R4P, those other sites are where I make full use of autoresponders.
For example, if you' ve been a reader for a while, you know that I work a ton with for sale by owner sellers. They tend to be one-time clients...or potential one-time clients. Plus FSBO is a highly competitive field. Yes, even as much as Internet Marketing, if you can imagine! So I have to set myself apart in people's mind as much as possible.
Sure, there are some other FSBO sites doing autoresponder ecourses, but I have a headstart as my 10+ years of FSBO property marketing experience is what sets me apart. Other FSBO sites can send out emails, but they just list properties. They don't actually market them, so don't know what works and what doesn't.
Plus a lot of those sites were started by realtors who aren't really interested in FSBOs being successful. So the advice all these other sites give out tends to be and sounds the same. My various autoresponders are quite different...and they sell my products and services because they are.
And this is an important point. If your autoresponder series or ecourse sounds like everyone else's, it's not going to convert particularly well.
That brings to mind a recent autoresponder email I received talking about 'the 20 questions you need to ask before writing an ebook'. I've gotten it many times before, but the timing was perfect since I now get to reference it here (since I deleted it every other time I received it).
This list of "vital" questions literally started this way:
Good grief!!!
That's not what you need to be reading concerning the decisions you have to make before writing an ebook. I mean..."how many pages will your ebook be?????" (How about counting them when you've finished :-)
Talk about a worthless autoresponder message. Worse...it is a disrespectful message.
I don't care how much of a 'name' someone has...if they send out garbage, it's still garbage. Sure, a 'name' might be able to get away with it but, if you don't have a name, why do you think you'll be able to get away with it?
Rule of Thumb: Respect your readers or they won't respect you...and won't buy from you. Their time is just as valuable as yours.
~~~
Frankly, it does no one any good - least of all yourself - to write about things you don't know, things that you have simply gleaned from other people's information without verifying that they themselves know what they're talking about or that their information is still timely, or merely hiring someone to do it for you.
If you haven't made money online, don't pretend you have. Why do you think there is so much junk out there? So many fluff pieces? So many ebooks lacking in substance? It's because the writers themselves (or those they hire to write for them) don't have a clue as to how to actually make money online. (Or they've run out of old things to say and don't bother trying to find new things.)
This kind of silliness might have worked in 2000. But this is 2007. There are far too many decent resources available now for a half-baked piece of recycled junk to work successfully anymore.
When you write your autoresponder ecourse, write from YOUR knowledge. Does this mean you won't be writing about how to be successful online? If you aren't successful online, then, yes...you shouldn't be writing about it.
Ah, but what if you did something right? Well, of course it's OK to write about that. But don't pad what you've written with make believe.
I can hear some of you saying "but I'm not an expert on anything".
Who asked you to be an expert? Writing from your experience is a perfectly valid option. Heck, how about "The 5 Things That Did NOT Work For Me And Why They Probably Won't Work For You Either?"
Or how about spending time on something you're already interested in?
Too many people think they need to write about stuff simply because they think other people are interested in it. Sure, there needs to be a market, so you probably don't want to be writing about Phoenecian pottery markings for an online market, but that doesn't mean you should be sending out junk to the people on your list because you think they would be interested in it, regardless of whether or not you personally give a hoot.
(I have so many ideas for autoresponder series and ecourses I'll probably never get to them all, and none of them have anything to do with Internet marketing.)
But, seriously, almost all of you have things you're interested in. Instead of looking for high-payout products on Clickbank that mean nothing to you, how about looking for products that hold some interest to you, then creating an autoresponder series based on your experience with the topic?
It will have more substance, will be in your voice (not just a bunch of anonymous-sounding words), and will establish *you* as someone to listen to.
Rule of Thumb: Don't pretend an expertise you don't have
~~~
OK. So you've decided to write an autoresponder series or ecourse.
They're basically the same thing, by the way. You use an autoresponder software program - either one on your computer or on a server somewhere to send out a series of emails. It can be a training course divided into separate emails (an ecourse) or simply a series of emails (autoresponder series). The choice is yours. The thing to remember is that we are talking about multiple emails sent out automatically by a software program to people who have signed up to a mailing list.
The point of sending out a series of emails via autoresponders is to stay in touch with the people who have signed up. For people reading this article, it's 99.999% because you want to eventually make money from doing this.
Obviously you want people to
You're probably only going to get one chance to get it right for each subscriber. This means you have to send them something of quality the first time out and every time afterwards.
I don't know about you, but I hate receiving those emails where the person tries to sell me something the first time out. I don't mean he tries to sell me something as an adjunct to providing me with something related to what I signed up for in the first place, but literally simply tries to sell me something in his first email.
Jeez Louise! Have a little respect. Both for the reader and for yourself.
So make sure you provide quality information. And, no...quality does not mean 'doing them a favor' by trying to sell them something. If you have no relationship with them, they know darn well you aren't trying to do them a favor, but are trying to put your hand in their pocket.
You also don't have to give them something free every email, particularly if you email them several times a week. I provide freebies with the monthly Reselling4Profit newsletter because it *is* only monthly. I certainly wouldn't be including them several times a week because that would diminish the value of my emails. People would stop reading them and just scan for the freebies. (Heck, that's what I do. Don't you?)
How do you get subscribers to your autoresponders? By capturing email addresses every chance you get and actively promoting signups.
Here are just a few ways to do this...
Rule of Thumb: Make sure you actively promote signups and collect email addresses wherever you can
"Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right."
~ Oprah Winfrey ~"A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other."
~ Anonymous ~
Here it was New Year's Eve. I got the newsletter done in time to mail it out in December. The subscribers initially signed up through Your Mailing List Provider got it on time. Those signed up through Norabots...well, "cannot update member database" is NOT what I want my mailing list provider to tell me at 11 PM on New Year's Eve.
So I frantically imported my other subscriber lists into Your Mailing List Provider where I have a premium account just to be able to import large quantities of email addresses.
Did the newsletter get mailed? Nooooooooo. Because it had to be reviewed by an account manager. I assume that was because I imported so many subscribers then promptly sent out a mailing. Unfortunately, it was not only a Sunday but it was New Year's Eve and Monday was a holiday. Heck. at least I tried.
Well, I'd like to say that would teach me to wait till the last minute, but I know that won't happen.
I will tell you this,though. I'm writing this column at 11:38 PM on New Year's Eve (I've postponed the shrimp and champagne for a few minutes :-) So at least the January newsletter has been started!!
[One final note: here it is again, the last day of the month, and I'm pushing my luck getting the newsletter out in the month it was written for...indeed, almost completed at the beginning of the month. Perhaps it's time for me to hire a virtual assistant. You think?]
Interestingly, I'm finally writing about autoresponders and keeping in touch with subscribers...something I'm terrible about with some of my Reselling4Profit.com mailing lists. But I do know from experience that it really *does* make a difference, so will share that experience with you.
I had an unpleasant experience a week or so ago. One of our members (now a former member) decided that it was appropriate to take our members download page and pass it off as his own. Not only did he use it as his own download page, but he used it in all his advertising, giving his site great appeal by taking all our hard work and, again, passing it off as his own.
Needless to say, he received a cease-and-desist order and had his R4P membership cancelled.
ALL web pages are copyrighted by the creator, even if there isn't a copyright notice on the page (which there is on ours). Do not assume you can simply take someone else's page, copy it, and post it as your own. It's illegal.
Not only that, but we do not sell rights to our site or any portion of our site, only access to the products themselves. In addition, it is the responsibility of R4P members to determine the rights of each product before they sell them. As an example, just because *we* have the right to include resell rights doesn't mean that R4P members do. Often members simply have the right to sell a product itself, not to sell resell rights to that product.
From now on we'll be including a link to an offline version of the Reselling4Profit Newsletter for those folks who don't get the newsletter to appear the way we intent them to see it.
Hardly an issue goes by without someone taking the time to let us know that it didn't come through correctly. We're always sorry for the yuckiness, but really appreciate our readers taking the time to let us know.
We test and preview...but still it doesn't always come through correctly. Oh well.
As you can see, the link is above the title, so it's the first text people will see.
http://reselling4profit.com/newsletter.html
I've had people ask when I was going to get back to product reviews. One reason I've been avoiding the darn things is that there has been so little out there that I would buy (that didn't have resell rights that I already bought so you wouldn't have to) that there wasn't much of anything to review.
But, this issue I actually have something I've used very successfully, so I thought I would review it for you. The review is below.
Kendall
As some of you know, I'm ADHD...which goes a long way toward explaining why the newsletter usually gets out on the last of the month, if then.
I find it hard to focus at times, loving to run off in all directions at once, and so use deadlines as a means of getting myself to finish things. Sometimes that works really well. Too often it doesn't.
That doesn't really have much to do with this book, except that it goes a bit toward explaining why I like it so much.
Actually, though, this book is designed for almost all of us. Well, it's designed for all of us who want to grow our income. The rest of you can stop reading now :-)
While I already have three profitable internet businesses, one since 1996, I want more. I have tons of ideas but, thanks to the ADHD, struggle with focus. Plus I know countless people who don't yet have successful businesses but they also struggle with focus, so decided to buy the book. Heck, it was cheap, even though it doesn't have resell rights.
To my surprise and delight, 5 Bucks A Day truly does provide a step-by-step formula for growing your online income on a regular basis. Since I've started using the author's recommendations, I've successfully expanded the things I do to make money and continue to do so on a regular basis. No wonder I want to recommend it!
More important probably for many of you, it isn't one of those stupid books that expects you to know more than you do or have all kinds of resources or requires you to work outside of your 'comfort zone'. (Seriously, how many of you feel comfortable cold-calling to make a JV or get an interview? Or have $997 you dare to spend on the latest giant IM phenomenon?)
Since I've read many other things over the years - a few I still like, some I asked for my money back, and some just sit on my various hard drives and gather dust - it's nice to find something I decided to try that has actually born fruit and that doesn't frustrate me beyond belief.
No, it's not a miracle cure. There ain't no such thing.
Yes, you have to actually apply what you plan. But it breaks this whole online marketing success thing into small, easy-to-digest, easy-to-accomplish steps for regular people.
It talks about how to start small and build steadily. Sure, you can make excuses about 'your' project being too large to start small or come up with one excuse after another as to why you can't stick with it. My advice? Read the book again. I have. It's a darn good motivator and a quick read.
How many times have you read that 'multiple streams of income' is the way to go? That's because it is. Lots of eggs. Lots of baskets. And lots of fun realizing that there truly are a LOT of ways for you to make money online and that you don't have to do just one and you don't have to jump from one unsuccessful attempt after another.
Like anything else, making money online requires commitment. But you may very well find that 5 Bucks a Day makes that commitment easier than anything else you've tried before.
I give 5 Bucks a Day an A-, and those of you who've read my reviews before know I can be pretty harsh.
It's only $17 and you can get it here: http://reselling4profit.com/recommends/5bucks
With freebies like this, we expect you'll be a subscriber to the Reselling4Profit Newsletter for a long, long time.
IWe all have products gathering dust on our hard drives. Many people do this because they keep buying the 'next new thing', but frankly it's also hard to just keep track of what you have.
Wouldn't you like to know how to keep track of things in ways that don't require you to spend a lot of time doing it? That's what I thought :-)
Great success to you and yours!
Kendall Simmons
Reselling4Profit.com - where
YOUR profit is our product
Affiliate program
While banners are still getting designed and all that stuff, the affiliate program *is* back up and running. Thank goodness!
Here's the signup link and, yes, even if you were an affiliate before, you'll have to sign up again. Sorry about that.
< http://reselling4profit.com/amember/signup.php >
We will also eventually be offering affiliate signups through Clickbank and PayDotCom.com.