yourdoku /Foter

This week I heard a terrific tip for getting more people to register for your free teleclass.

Wherever you advertise your class, whether on your website or in an email, don’t put the time of the class – just the date. You’ll find that many more people will register for the class to find out when it is. What a great way to build your list!

If you provide another opportunity to listen to your call, either live or recorded, even those registrants who can’t attend at the original time will still be able to hear your call.

Give it a try and let me know how this works for you.

We all know that having a large, responsive list is the best asset you can have to make money online. Did you know you can get someone else to build your list for you?

If you know – or can find – someone who serves the same audience as you, but is not a direct competitor and has a good-sized list, you can propose a deal that benefits both of you.

You will offer to be interviewed and give away as much of your expertise as you can to this partner’s audience. In exchange, your partner will promote the call to her list.

How Does This Build Your List?

1. The very least your partner is likely to agree to is to mention your web site to the audience a few times. Some of these people will visit your site and hopefully, subscribe to your list.
2. The most common and popular way to build your list from being interviewed is to offer the audience a free gift. The host shares a URL where the gift can be found. When the listeners go to that URL, they are asked to opt-in in order to receive the gift. This is a direct and powerful way to build your list.
3. One more way to benefit from being interviewed is if the host will allow you to promote a product or program. This is tricky because neither you nor the host want the call to sound like just a sales pitch, but if handled properly, it can work. There must be lots of good content and a little promoting. This would not only build your list, but possibly also make you money! And your host can be an affiliate so he makes money, too. Some hosts will not want to do this for fear of alienating their list. Instead of providing value, they may be seen as just trying to sell to the list and lose credibility.

If the call is recorded, you and your partner can negotiate who has the right to use it, and whether it will be sold or given away for free.

This technique for attracting new people to your list works well since the audience is in your target market, you’re displaying your expertise with information that’s useful to them, and due to the implied referral to you from the host. Since this audience is in your target market, they’re likely to be responsive to your marketing if they do opt-in.

Meanwhile, the host’s value to her audience is enhanced by providing this valuable information you’ve shared.

Of course, it goes without saying that you must be compelling and share content valuable to the listeners to receive any benefit or build a good relationship with your partner. If you don’t, no one listening will go to your site, opt-in, or buy from you. And your partner’s credibility with his list will be diminished.

You can solicit standalone opportunities to be interviewed. You may also seek out the chance to become part of a telesummit with a theme you can speak to. With a telesummit, you have to opportunity to get in front of all the participants’ lists, so it can really leverage your visibility.

There’s also a way to be the host interviewing others and build your list. We’ll discuss that in a future post.

Have any of you grown your list with this technique? How did it work out for you?

If you’ve been around online marketing for any time at all, you’ve heard about joint ventures and how valuable they can be for building your business. What you may not know are the variety of ways you can structure joint ventures.

(In this article, I will refer to a product, but this may also be a service or program.)

1. Endorsement Marketing

This is probably the best known and most often used style of joint venture. One person promotes the product of another person.

For this to work well for both parties, the promoter must have a fairly good sized list to promote to and must believe in the product’s value and benefit to her audience. The product creator must be willing to offer the promoter something – usually a commission – for each customer that comes from the promoter’s list.

Sometimes the product creator also grows his list of prospects even beyond those who become customers. This can happen, for example, when there’s a free call or webinar the promoter’s list is invited to. People who choose to attend opt-in to the product creator’s list and some then also become customers. The product creator can now develop his own relationship with these people.

The benefits to the promoter include the commissions, being seen as a helpful resource to her list, and a relationship with the product creator that may provide additional benefits in the future.

2. Co-Authored and Co-Promoted Product

This is a traditional partnership where both parties help to create the product and both promote it to their lists and elsewhere. They may even enlist other joint venture partners to promote to their lists via endorsement marketing.

An arrangement like this works best when the partners have complementary expertise. The resulting product is more valuable than one either partner could create on her own.

The partners’ audiences should both value the product being created. It’s also simplest if the two partners have lists of roughly the same size.

If either the list size or the level of expertise is skewed too much in one direction, the financial agreement may offer one partner more than 50% of the profits.

Another style of partnership might have one partner creating the product content while the other handles the marketing and e-commerce mechanics. I’ve seen this work quite successfully.

Either way, the benefits to both partners include creating a superior product, getting visibility to the other partner’s list, and having a built-in accountability partner so the project moves ahead.

3. Thank You Page Marketing from Subscribers and Buyers

This technique is a simple, passive endorsement. It’s so easy I’m surprised it’s not used more.

The idea is that when someone opts in to a list or buys a product, he lands on a thank you page. On this page, he sees an offer to opt-in to another’s list or buy another’s product. The link for the offer will be the site owner’s affiliate link so she will get a commission if he ends up buying something from the other person.

While there’s an implicit endorsement of the product, the site owner doesn’t need to do anything other than put the offer on the thank you page. And the product creator only needs to provide the offer copy and an affiliate link.

While simple, this technique can be very effective. The subscriber or buyer has just taken made a commitment to the site owner and is still in that frame of mind when arriving at the thank you page. He may well be willing to make a similar commitment to the other business owner in this moment.

4. Collaboration Product

This can take one of two forms. First, a relative newcomer to the market can gather a group of veterans to participate in creating and marketing the product. For instance, each person could write a chapter in a book around a particular theme.

If each veteran has a decent list and they all market to their lists, the product could sell well. The profits could be divided between the newbie, who’s getting paid for organizing and physically (or digitally) creating the product, and each of the veterans.

Even if there aren’t huge profits, each veteran benefits from having a published book (or whatever the product is) and from being associated with all the other veterans. The veterans’ expertise spills over on the newcomer, and he develops valuable relationships with the veterans. Depending on how the deal is structured, he probably grows his list as well.

The other form of collaboration consists totally of peers. One person recruits colleagues to contribute to a product and they all market it and share the profits. The organizer may benefit a bit more to compensate for her additional effort. This might be in her share of profits or that customers land on her list.

5. Telesummit or Websummit

A telesummit (held on the phone) or websummit (online webinars) is quite similar to a collaboration product except instead of a product, there’s an event.

The organizer – either newcomer or veteran – recruits people to interview around a specific topic and these calls or webinars are scheduled for people to listen to. These interviews may all be scheduled in one week, several times a week over the course of 2-6 weeks, or once a week for months.

Typically, telesummits are free to listen to when scheduled. but may have a fee to access after the fact. Often, the person being interviewed will have a free gift for listeners that requires they opt-in.

The benefits to the interviewees include getting exposure to the other interviewees’ lists, growing their own lists by giving away their free gifts, and showing their expertise.

The benefits to the organizer include growing her list since listeners must subscribe to attend, revenues from selling the recordings afterward, and sometimes affiliate fees from sending listeners to get their free gifts through an affiliate link. The organizer also gains visibility as an expert from interviewing the experts and develops relationships with these experts that can be valuable in the future.

Telesummits can be complex and time consuming to organize, but the benefits can be huge.

Now that you have several ideas on how to use joint ventures to build your business, go forth and partner!

And if you had a great success with one of these methods, or if there are any other ways you’ve benefited from partnering with others, leave a comment and share it with us.

Hopefully, you’ve developed the habit of regularly publishing blog posts to your own site. Have you considered branching out and becoming a guest blogger on others’ sites?

Posting articles on other blogs will expose you to a broader audience and boost your reputation as an expert in your field.

The posts you create will include an author box at the end with your name and web site address. If readers of your post appreciate your article, you may get new visitors to your site and even new subscribers to your list when they click through the link in your author box.

Also, if the publisher of the blog is willing to put an author tag on the post for you (and you’ve set up a Google profile), your photo will show up next to the post in Google search engine results, giving you even more visibility.

So there are clear benefits of becoming a guest blogger, but how do you go about becoming one?

First, find some blogs with good sized audiences in your target market, but where the site owners are not direct competitors of yours. You want to find the blog of someone who provides something different than you, but to the same people.

Write a blog post suitable for his or her audience and send it, along with an offer to provide more posts on a regular schedule. It could be one or month or more, depending on what you and the site owner agree to.

Can you use one of your own blog posts as a guest blogger?

You can, but there are drawbacks:

• Blog publishers may not wish to use a “recycled” post.
• If your target market reads your blog and one or more of the blogs you’re a guest for, they’ll see the same article in multiple blogs.
• Search engines will only list one of the duplicate blog posts, and it may not be the one at your site, so you may be damaging your own site’s search engine position by reusing blog posts.

Of course, to implement this strategy, you’ll REALLY need to be disciplined with your writing schedule. You don’t want to slack off on your own blog posts, or fail to meet your commitment to the blog owners with whom you have arrangements. But if you can pull it off, becoming a guest blogger can be a terrific way to become more visible and valuable to your market.

A client calls me, anxious about a subscriber who’s not getting her emails. “What’s wrong?” my client wants to know. “Is my email service not working? How do we fix it?” And she wants me to tell her why the email isn’t being received by her client and how to make sure it does.

So here’s the bad news: I probably can’t tell you why it’s happening. There’s a whole list of possibilities and it’s usually not worth the effort to track down and check each one – or in some cases, even possible.

Some of the possible reasons are:

- The subscriber never confirmed her subscription.

- The subscriber’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking the messages, thinking they’re spam.

- The subscriber’s ISP is blocking all messages from my client’s email service due to a spam issue having nothing to do with my client.

- If the subscriber has his own web host that his email goes through, its spam filter might be blocking messages.

- The subscriber may have a spam filter on her own email client – Outlook, Thunderbird – that’s dumping the emails into a junk folder.

- The subscriber may have a filter set within their email client that’s moving the messages to another folder automatically.

- The subscriber is accidently deleting the messages, not realizing who they’re from.

- The email messages are getting lost somewhere in the web. If multiple messages from you are getting lost, this is probably not the case.

With all these ways emails can go astray, is email marketing really worth it?

My answer is a resounding YES!

Even though it’s not perfect, email is one of the few ways you can ‘push’ your content and marketing to people who have given you permission to do so. And it works – all the most profitable online businesses point to email marketing as a crucial element of their success.

If email is so important to growing your business and being profitable, how should you handle a subscriber reporting not receiving your emails?

First, look at your list management system to make sure the subscriber is a confirmed contact. If not, re-send the confirmation email message if your system lets you. Otherwise, have your would-be subscriber re-submit the opt-in request from your website.

If the subscriber is confirmed, have her check her Junk or Spam folder to see if the messages are landing there. If they are, your subscriber needs to add the from email address for your messages into her address book (or whatever other method will let her email client know these messages are not spam).

If the messages are not found in the Junk folder, make sure your subscriber doesn’t have a filter set up within his email client that’s unintentionally redirecting your messages to another folder.

If the mystery isn’t solved at this point, I’d suggest having the him try to subscribe again using another email address, such as a Gmail address. This is because the remaining options for trying to figure out what’s happening are more time consuming and not any more likely to resolve the problem. So if an easy work around like using another email address fixes the problem, it’s probably the way to go.

If you or your subscriber still want to pursue the issue, she can contact her ISP and/or her web host to see if they’re automatically blocking any messages.

The next step would be for you to contact your list management service to see if they are aware of any of their messages being blocked by the ISPs.

If the missing emails are still unexplained at this point, it’s unlikely you’ll ever know what’s happening, and the only solution is to have your subscriber re-subscribe.

There’s also a matter of perspective I often bring up with clients. We need to remember that marketing is a numbers game. Some small percentage of emails will not go through properly for whatever reason. An even bigger percentage don’t get opened and read.

While we all want to make sure everyone who wants our messages is able to receive them, it’s not usually worth an extensive investigation every time this issue comes up. Make sure the subscriber is confirmed in your system and make sure your emails are not in his Junk folder. After that, just have him re-subscribe.

Put more of your effort into figuring out how to make your subject lines and content attractive enough so that subscribers that DO get your messages actually open and read them! That’s the way to be successful with email marketing.

We all know how important building an opt-in list is to your success online. The majority of visitors to your site don’t purchase or contact you on their first visit, so you are losing them forever.

Popups to the rescue! A popup is a smaller window that appears on a page where you convince a visitor to opt-in to your list so you can contact them later.

Action PopUp is a very cool script that can appear when a visitor
is about to leave your site or when they enter your site. The popup is unblockable since it uses HTML layers instead of actual pop-up windows.

A lightbox effect dims the screen behind the popup to prevent visitors from being distracted by what you have underneath. They fill in that info, the popup disappears, and Action Action PopUp submits that info to your autoresponder in the background while your prospect continues to read the sales message.

You can use any autoresponder you want with Action PopUp.

Action PopUp has a built-in sales letter personalizer. After they fill in their first name in the Action PopUp, the sales letter will change to match that first name. If the visitor typed “Steven” as their first name in the opt-in box, then hit submit, the opt-in form would invisibly submit the information to your newsletter, close the popup, and suddenly the sales page would say “Steven” wherever you’ve put the special code on your page.

Action PopUp can work as a WordPress plugin so you can add popups to your blogs with just a few clicks.

Best of all, this tool comes bundled with two other complementary tools!

Action Opt-In allows you to use your existing opt-in form on your site and makes it disappear after people subscribe.

Under normal circumstances, placing an opt-in form on a sales page is a definite no-no in Internet Marketing. When a visitor is about to buy, and they decide to sign up to your list instead, they are taken to a “thank you for signing up” page where they can’t order. You just lost a sale!

With Action Opt-In, once your prospect has filled out the subscription form, it vanishes and they can keep reading the current page.

Action Opt-In remembers if your visitors have already subscribed to your list and will hide the subscription box on repeat visits so they won’t be bothered again and again.

Action Opt-in can also work as a WordPress plugin.

The second bundled tool is Action Comments, a WordPress plugin. When someone fills in the comment form on your blog, they type in their first name and e-mail address. So why not ask these already-interested people if they’d like to subscribe to your mailing list?

You can pitch your newsletter to commenters using either a checkbox or a popup dialog box.

You can see all three of these tools working here at my site, and it’s true – my opt-ins have increased since I started using these scripts!

All three tools are very easy to install and the developer provides PDF installation guides for each. They’re particularly easy to install as WordPress plugins. But if you’re interested in using one or more of them and would like help installing and configuring them, I’d be happy to help you with them.

Learn more about Action PopUp, Action Opt-in, and Action Comments here.

In my last post, I shared with you that I’ve designed five streams of income for my business, and that the plan needs more detail before it would be really useful. All true.

But there’s one major area that needs to be included in my plan – and in your plan – before we do that: list building. By list building, I mean adding people to your email list so they get an email notification each time you post an entry to your blog, as well as occasional announcements and promotions. That’s how I communicate with my list. You might send an e-zine to your list instead.

While list building is not a stream of income itself, it is a project that deserves the same level of attention as any stream of income. As more interested people join your list, it becomes much easier for you to fill your events with participants and make more money selling products.

For example, if 3% of your list typically responds to an offer and your list has 100 people on it, you’ll get 3 customers for a particular offer. However, if your list has 1,000 people on it and you have the same response rate, you’ll get 30 customers. And if your list has 10,000 people on it, well…

Now we’re talking!

All your streams of income will have a much better chance of getting larger as your list grows larger. Remember, these are people who have chosen to receive information from you, so they’re likely to be good prospects for the services and products you offer.

The large internet marketers understand this concept all too well and are constantly working on growing their lists. For those of us who aren’t so flush (yet!), it’s tempting to focus solely on what will bring in money now. I know I’ve frequently fallen into this short term thinking.

It’s a big mistake.

Of course, we need to make enough to pay our current bills, but if we don’t put some energy into building our lists, we’ll be stuck on the rung we’re on now forever! The way to leverage our time and make more money with every service and product we offer is to get more customers for each offer. And, as we’ve seen above, this becomes easier as our list gets bigger.

For those of you who’ve been doing business online for a while, you’re familiar with the mantra, “Build your list.” You hear it everywhere online. What’s not always so clear is exactly how to do that. We’ll get to that, but for now, let’s just agree that building our lists is going to get equal footing with each of our other income streams. That means when we drill down to create more detailed plans, list building will be a major area we want to focus on every single week.

How much attention do you give to growing your list? What’s the best way you’ve found to add people to your list? Leave a comment and share what works for you.