Dear readers,
What I’m about to show you here will be very important in determining your decision in making the next step in building your list.
First of all, let me tell you that it has never been my dream to be able to perform extremely well in promoting other people’s products. The reason is simply because I did not pay attention to building my list. Instead, I was too busy ‘perfecting’ on my own products when in reality, there is no such thing as the ‘perfect product’.
You can read about my Internet Marketing journey here where I wrote about my past marketing mistakes. Since I did not have my own subscriber or newsletter list unlike most of other marketers do, I didn’t think that making a killing from promotional emails is possible for me. Anyway before I proceed, I recommend that you read my previous posts first regarding my case-studies on running fire-sales:
- Case Study: Wedding Honeymoon FireSale
- Case-Study: Private Label Rights Videos FireSale #1
- Case-Study: Private Label Rights Videos FireSale #2
The above case-studies will give you an idea on what fire-sales are all about and how powerful they are. However, there is one huge difference between the above fire-sales and the fire-sale which I’m about to tell you in this post:
The above firesales were run my me, whereas what I’m about to tell you in this post is about how I performed on promoting two previous firesales that were run by a good online friend of mine, Edmund Loh, using just a small customer list.
Just as a side note, Edmund Loh is well-known for churning out new, quality products with Private Label Rights (PLR), particularly ebooks, at a very fast rate. He had run many successful fire-sales (a.k.a blowout sales) selling PLR products successfully.. and I really mean SUCCESSFULLY…
His last few fire-sales were different though. He offered video tutorials with PLR instead of the normal ebooks, and that niche was perfect for my videos niche in which I was involved in prior to selling off my video business.
Therefore, since all that I had was a customer list to my videos membership site, Hot Marketing Videos Membership, I wanted to give it a shot to see how I will fare in this promotion. I was absolutely confident that I can either get a small number of sales or not at all. Here’s why:
- The number of customers were barely 1,000
- I rarely emailed them except for membership updates
- I could not even recall if I have sent them any useful email content
- Everytime when I sent an update email, I rarely get any reply. So I was thinking that the list is as good as dead
So I just gave it a shot while not expecting any sales in return.
The Result?
I came out to be among the top ten affiliates, beating many other marketers with much bigger lists! 🙂
It was a hell of a surprise for me. Truly amazing! I managed to get into the 10th position among the top affiliates, beating other top marketers who have bigger lists that me.
What Can We Deduce From Here?
It is as clear as daylight that having a customer list is far more better than a subscriber or newsletter list. I’m not saying that you should dump the latter, my point is as much as you put a lot of effort in building your subscriber list, you should even put more time and effort in building a customer list.
One way to accomplish this is to create a low-cost product as your front-end funnel and promote it as much as you promote your subscriber list. A customer list responds much better because they have bought something from you. Thus, they already know you and have built a level of trust between them and yourself. Therefore, it is much easier to sell to your customers than to your subscriber list.
The Question Now Is: How Do I Create A Low-Cost Product?
The formula is simple, but of course it does take some time to create this. Just don’t oversimplify something that is already simple and proven to work:
Step 1: If you cannot create your own product, find a product within your niche that comes with Private Label Rights. There are a lot of places you can get and some of them are dirt cheap. One of the good sources is The PLR Store. You can also do a search on Google: “Private Label Rights” or “PLR”. Alternatively, you can find some good ones at the Warrior Forum under Warrior Special Offers (WSO)
Step 2: Depending on the PLR package that you bought, most likely it will come with a ready-made sales letter with graphics. If you want your product to stand out, hire a designer to re-design the site. Edit the sales letter to insert your name, your order link, etc. Make sure you have a payment processor to process the payment. The most popular ones are Paypal & Clickbank.
Step 3: Since your focus is on building a customer list, you must price it at a low price, say $7 or $9.90. But your sales letter must be able to show a high-perceived value to the product. It simply means the quality of the product that you are offering costs way much higher than the price that you’re asking for. If you do this right, your conversion will soar.
Step 3: Get yourself an autoresponder to collect the email addresses of the customers buying your product. Aweber is highly recommended. Sometimes, the PLR package comes with a squeeze page. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, with squeeze pages, you can pre-sell your prospects first before they purchase your product. Through follow-ups, some of your prospects will purchase your product. If not, you can always promote them other people’s products in the future.
Step 4: Get a hosting account. This goes without saying. 🙂 I highly recommend HostGator. You can read my review on HosGator here.
Step 5: Drive traffic to your site to promote the product!
Step 6: Provide good customer service to your prospects and customers! This is by far the most important aspect in my opinion. If you do not, your customers will not trust you and therefore, you will have a hard time convincing them to purchase any other products in the future.
In my opinion, this is the main factor on why I was able to convince them to purchase the firesale packages even though I rarely emailed them anything except for updates on my membership site. I provide good customer service to my customers, which is why it is easy for them to trust me. (See my testimonials on this page)
These are the most basic and simple steps towards building your customer list. Of course, if you’re a newbie, it will take longer for you to learn the concepts and understand the technical aspects of building a website and promoting it. The most important thing here is to take action! Start building your customer list right now…!
It is funny that so many internet marketers have tried to persuade me to do email marketing, but I never thought it would work, but it totally does now that I use it. Who ever is reading this should totally follow this blog because it is seriously teaching you how the top earners are making money online.
Thanks Margie for the insights!
I’m glad you that you now adopt email marketing as part if your marketing plan. 🙂
Yes the money is in the list, but there is also one great thing to focus on is a really good auto responder. Your auto responder is the key to drive in your traffic to build a list
Hey Katie,
I agree that your autoresponder is also one of the main keys in driving traffic to your sites. Particularly, one must be absolutely concerned with the deliverability rates. For most internet marketers right now, it is beyond doubt that the current top two autoresponders are Aweber & Getresponse.
However, a good autoresponder is only part of the whole success recipe. One must be able to build strong relationships with their readers in order to build highly responsive list.
Looking back I had some good mentors in affiliate marketing whom I never met in person, but they were very willing to help. Many of them would always tell me to build a list and they’d tell me that the money was in the list. But then I wouldn’t listen to them thinking that it would take too long to build a list and because I was content making sales from organic traffic to my website. When my website got penalized by google the money dried up and I was dead in the water. In the same situation that wouldn’t have happened to me if I had a list, the hit would have been much less severe. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m now learning how to build email list step by step.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I did the same mistake by not building my list from the very beginning. What keeps me turned off from doing so was due to the fact that I didn’t know what to send to my list on a regular basis. However, unlike your situation in concentrating on organic traffic and content, I was too focused on developing & ‘perfecting’ my products. In the end, the goal was just for short-term basis. Had I built my list sooner, I would be far more better off right now. I’m glad that I’ve finally woken up to realise this now.
Better late than never. 🙂
I’m in the process of building a PLR video package, but it’s taking a lot longer than I had anticipated. At first I thought I’ll be able to finish this project within a week or two, but as it turns out it takes time to produce a quality product. I could have put together a quick package and just test the water, but I changed my mind because I wanted to start things off the right way. When I’m done with the product, I’m going to get me an autoresponder and hosting account just as laid out here. I know I won’t be as successful as the writer of this article in the beginning, but hopefully I’ll have some success with it so I can look forward to producing my second PLR package.
Hi Maggie,
you’ve done the right thing by wanting to start things off the right way. Most of the time, hastiness will only produce a negative output. Don’t look down too much on yourself, you could pull off way much successful feat than me.
All the best in your online endeavours!
I was about to invest in premium features of a list building service (mailing service). Now I think I won’t do that … I will build a customer list too .. thanks for the advice
I tried many times to build a list and keep subscribers but always seem to fail miserably
Hi Tori,
Never give up.. you should continuosly learn and improve.. hope you succeed in the future..
your post isn’t informative .. it is inspiration ..
I read a post the other day saying .. I choose choose niche of affliate sales properly .. is that true?? which niche is good???
Hi George,
you can search for keywords like “how to find niches” to get more info.
Thanks for your comments! 🙂
I will definitely be referring to this as I am learning about list building techniques now. Thanks for the useful info. I am still in the clueless category when it comes to this stuff.
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