When someone signs up to your list, you’re not guaranteed to have them as a loyal subscriber forever. You have to work to keep them – and that means proving your value.
Another thing you want to do is make your subscribers so enthusiastic about being on your list that they tell others to get on, too. Word of mouth is a powerful force with online marketing.
When someone you trust as a friend tells you about a viable resource, it holds more weight with you than if you stumble upon an advertisement, right? The same holds true for the friends of your subscribers, so give them something to talk about!
Layout
This is a very basic step, but it’s the foundation you need to know about in order to allow your subscribers to have the best experience possible and want to tell others about you.
You can choose between a highly professional HTML coded autoresponder series – similar to an offline, printed newsletter – or go with a plain text email autoresponder.
If your niche is one where images help your audience, such as crafts or cooking, then you might want to consider using something where you can include images in your newsletter.
But if it’s not pertinent to your audience’s discussion of topics, it’s not necessary and plain text will be just fine.
What’s more important in terms of layout is to have a consistent feel for how your autoresponders are navigated. For example, yours might always look something like this:
* Introduction paragraph (personal, friendly greeting)
* Recommendation of product as an affiliate
* Blog post link and commentary
* Question or survey for your readers
It can be anything you want – the items listed above are just one example. You may want to do the same thing every time. Or, you might want to focus on just one thing each time you email out, and your email will read like a letter to a friend.
What you want to do is to be consistent so that when they open the email, they instantly know it’s from you because they’ve learned your style. Make it as enjoyable and easy to read as possible, not cluttered and difficult to find information in.
Frequency
There is absolutely no cookie cutter frequency that any expert can give you about how often you should be emailing your list. Every single marketer has a different style.
There is also an audience for every type of email frequency. You might be thinking, “Well I know for a fact you can’t email offers every day and expect to keep your list happy,” but that’s simply not true.
There’s an audience who does want to see those daily offers. There’s also an audience at the opposite end of the spectrum who will be appalled whenever you even hint at a recommendation.
The one thing you want to keep in mind is that there’s no way on Earth for you to please everyone. You need to find a pattern and frequency that works best for your business and then weed out your non audience.
As long as you’re providing value to your subscribers, you can be a little more bold and daring with your frequency. It’s when you lack value and subscribers regard you as an interruption that you begin to have a problem.
If you plan to email your list daily, as some people do, then you might also want to offer a less frequent “digest” version. This can be a weekly digest that sends out all of the past week’s emails in one autoresponder on a particular day.
Another thing you want to keep in mind in terms of frequency and emailing to a list is making sure you keep your name in front of them. If you stop emailing for 2-3 weeks or longer and let your list go stale, they’ll balk whenever you start emailing again, thinking you’re sending unwanted emails.
Be consistent with your mailings and don’t just email once in awhile most of the time and then slam them with offers for 14 days straight during a promotion. Get them used to your style.
Do it right and you’ll have word of mouth that says, “John Doe is great! He emails me wonderful tips every day to motivate me and then every Friday I get a fantastic recommendation for the weekend.”
Quality
The quality of your emails is what’s most important, and you’ve read here about value over and over again. So let’s talk about that – how do you show value to your customers?
The first thing is to share helpful tips that stem from your interaction with your audience. If someone emails you asking a question, turn that email into a blog post (names removed, of course) and help the others on your list who are struggling in the same manner.
This is a great way to show your list that you’re available to them and open o doing a bit of hand holding, even if you don’t offer one-on-one coaching packages.
Share other people’s content. Not every link you share should be a link to something of your own. You can link to other people’s stellar blog posts. Don’t be stingy with your audience – show them you’re a thought leader who cultivates good will and shares resources other than your own
Share reviews of products. People have a lot of marketers bombarding products at them. If they’ve grown to trust you, you’ll find that they often email you to see what your thoughts are on someone else’s products.
One of the things your list will deeply appreciate is your product reviews. But a product review and a promotion are two totally different things. Most marketers don’t know how to review – they simply promote.
What’s worse is, they use swipe emails to promote to their list. So what happens when you grab a swipe email from an affiliate or joint venture page, email that to your list, and they open 5-10 other emails saying the exact same thing?
They lose trust in you.
It’s okay to use swipe emails as a springboard piece of content so that you know what important points to hit on, but don’t quote it verbatim or you’ll be one of many your subscribers mass unsubscribe from that day.
Instead, do a proper implementation review on your blog and link from your email to your blog post where they can read all of your thoughts on everything from the promises of the sales letter to your results of implementation (and everything in between, too).
Share paid resources as well as free ones. There are free and paid tools you’ll want to recommend to your list. Do a little of each, for everyone on your income spectrum.
Availability
Previously, we talked about generating good will with your list by answering their questions and turning them into anonymous blog posts that the entire list can share in for learning purposes.
One thing you want to do to help spread the word that your list is one no one should miss is to just be there for your subscribers. Get to know them on a deeper level.
Ask them what their challenges are and then be prepared when the emails come in to answer each one individually, one-by-one. Obviously, the more your list grows, the harder this becomes, but you can also stay on top of emails and only focus on going to great lengths to answer questions for which you don’t have products yet.
Believe it or not, many subscribers will either be too shy or not want to intrude on your personal space – so they won’t email you any questions. They’ll simply suffer in silence.
When you become a marketer who has enough heart to help lift others up another level, word gets around and you’ll have more people joining your list, buying your products and recommending you to their friends.
Transparency
One thing your subscribers will love and tell others about is if you’re transparent with them. They love seeing your struggles in addition to your successes. Whether it’s with dieting, earning money, or dating – they want to feel a connection to you and that means letting yourself be seen as human.
So don’t think that just because you’re leading a niche, you can’t make mistakes and share those trials and tribulations, because you can! In fact, it will endear you to your list even more and you’ll become known as one of the most genuine marketer that your niche follows.
Do You Have a Marketer’s Mindset?
Before you get started in this industry, you have to analyze your own mindset to see if you have what it takes to be an online entrepreneur from conception to fully-functional success operation. It’s not enough to say you want to make money or be your own boss.
Everyone wants those things, but not everyone can achieve those goals. It takes a special person. You don’t have to be a workaholic or be willing to engage in questionable marketing tactics. You just need to have a few characteristics that are common to most successful Internet marketers.
This industry requires deep commitment. If you’re the type to change jobs with your moods, then stick to a 9-5 gig. You’re building a business and it takes time, effort, and tweaking to make it work.
Perseverance and a positive attitude can make or break an entrepreneur. You’re going to have down times. Every marketer does. Something will go wrong – whether it’s a freelancer who didn’t deliver on time and threw off your launch date or a JV partnership that fell through. If you panic and shut down, you’ll tarnish your reputation as a true professional.
The great Internet marketers don’t fly by the seat of their pants. They believe in being meticulous planners. They make schedules and plans for their day, week, month, year, and even further down the road.
They plan every step of a launch before the product development even begins. They plan every single detail they can think of. The more meticulous you are with your plans, the fewer things there are that might go wrong.
To become an authority in your niche, you need to exude confidence. Even if you’re worried, anxious, or unsure of yourself, what you project must be that you have it all together – you can’t be paralyzed by fear.
Are you willing to be a student for life? No successful marketer gets to the top and stops learning this industry. That only means you’ll eventually become the prey of another hungry marketer who’s stayed on the ball with up-to-the-minute solutions and practices in your niche so that they can become king of the mountain when you let your guard down.
You have to know how to get from point A to point B on your journey to achieving financial independence. Do you know what you’ll say when your in-laws or spouse questions your “career?” If you’re a fearless marketer, the inquisition won’t bother you a bit.
If you aren’t sure how to develop a blueprint for your success, don’t know how to set and achieve goals, or have a mindset that’s not in sync with that of victory, then work on those things before you quit your day job and set off on this voyage. You want to be mentally prepared for the ups and downs along the way
Host a Giveaway Event With Other Marketers
A giveaway event startles some newcomers to online marketing. First, they don’t like the idea of giving away anything and not being compensated for it. That’s just a part of developing loyalty and good branding so you have to think of it like you’re walking through Sam’s Club for groceries and someone hands you a bite-sized taste.
You appreciate that, right?
The second that worries them is the thought of sharing their up and coming list with others. If you join a giveaway event with 5 other marketers, it’s not just you sending your list to them – it’s them sending their list to you, so you have the potential to increase your list five-fold!
You have to eliminate your stingy mindset and think in terms of providing your list with a value opportunity. You’re going to share your audience. You probably already do that anyway if you’re an affiliate marketer (or plan to be). It’s no different.
Research Other Thought Leaders in Your Night
So once you decide you want to host a giveaway event with other marketers, yo have to find who you want to line up with. If you don’t already have a group of people in mind, you have to start finding them.
Spy on other marketers who are on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Look for the people your followers follow and see if you see any candidates. See who is talking about the same topics and who are the leaders who have people sharing their content.
Look on Amazon to see which Kindle self published authors are on there using Kindle to attract a new audience. Look inside their book to see if you like what and how they teach and look for ways to contact them.
SEO (search engine optimization) rank is another way to find thought leaders in your niche. If you are a leader, chances are you have stability in the search engines, and people are sharing your links and helping fortify your position, so reach out to those people who have earned that ranking.
You want to see what the size of their following is. Ideally, you’ll be hooking up with other marketers at or above your level of list strength so that you pull in more people to your own list.
Sign up to list to see what they offer and how they operate. You want people similar to what you do. You definitely don’t want to align yourself with any scammers or unethical individuals.
Reach out for JV giveaway partners on threads in marketing forums. The Warrior Forum, for example, has a JV section where you could post your opportunity, but make sure you filter the people instead of allowing it to be a free for all.
If your audience exists, and you already have a list going to some extent, then ask them who they align you with. You’ll usually have people responding to tell you that they know of 1-2 other people similar to you who they respect.
Contact each person you vet for viability and then ask if they’d be interested in forming a joint giveaway with you. Gauge general interest at first or, go ahead to the next step and create your guidelines and email your prospects the guidelines along with your initial request.
Create Guidelines for the Giveaway
After you contact the others (or even before), create a list of guidelines for the participants. There are several things you can include, or leave out what doesn’t matter.
Size (like number of pages) might be a consideration for you. For instance, it might be a 50+ page eBook or 5 page short report. Maybe it’s an article pack or even five hours of video or audio tutorials.
Maybe you’ll want to put a dollar limit on it and make it value based. For example, “Must be something you normally sell for at least $27.” You’ll want to put the value on the offers to show the visitors everything they’re getting free.
Topics might be a consideration, too. You’ll already be honing in on people who are in the same niche, but you might want to go one step further. For example, let’s say you are in the diet niche.
Your giveaway event might be built around one topic, like nutrition. So everyone has to submit a product for the event about nutrition. They can’t focus on diet drugs or exercise.
Themes are similar to this concept, and you might want to create a theme for your giveaway event. Using the diet niche as an example again, you might use something like this:
* 7 Ways to Kickstart Your Diet
* Eliminating the Quitter Mindset
* 14-Days to a Trimmer Waist
So everyone who submits for a certain theme must produce something that helps back up that concept.
You also want to detail the time until the event for your prospective participants. They need time to create something unique for the giveaway. The less time you give them to prepare, the fewer people who will join in and the worse the quality will be.
So plan well in advance of your event.
Figure out how people will get each offer. Will they go to a squeeze page and opt in to the person’s list to receive their download? Or will you not make opt ins a requirement, but instead add promotions to the download area or zip files?
You might also want to set guidelines on whether the submission has to be something 100% brand new or if it can be older products that they already have on the market.
Set Up the Page for the Giveaway Event
Like sales copy, the giveaway event should have copy that promotes the offer. You want to inform, educate and excite your audience about what they’re about to receive.
You’ll want to include some simple instructions for what they need to do to get their free downloads. The more complex you make it, the worse off your event will be.
Terms and rights will need to be included in some instances. For example, if you’re hosting a private label rights giveaway event. Each marketer might have different terms, so those should be listed with each offer.
Start with a catchy headline and maybe a subheadline before launching into a bit of storyline for the sale. Beside each offer name, include a picture of the marketer, tell what their offer is, give the specifications or details of their offer, and provide the link to where they grab it.
The promotion should have some sort of time scarcity. You don’t want to leave it wide open forever. If you have plenty of advanced notice and build a lot of buzz, then you should be fine doing a 24 hour to 7 day giveaway event, max.
Create graphics for the sale just as if you were launching an info product. That means a minisite feel, ecovers for the offers if applicable, and even promo banners for the event.
You might want to create a set of swipe files for the event too. This makes it easy for the participants to either use it as is or as springboard content that they can tweak and blast out to their list.
Promote the Event
You can’t just make the event go live and expect people to find it via the search engines. Your page would need time to get indexed and ranked for domination. So you need to manually promote it.
Building a buzz should take place shortly before the event and every day thereafter by every member who is onboard for the special giveaway event, not just by one person.
Come up with a daily promo idea such as asking people (your list, your social networking followers), “Who’s your favorite?” Discuss the various participants and get their feedback on which offer blew them away.
Share that feedback with your audience online and bill that favorite as a “can’t miss” free download to drive more traffic to the giveaway.
Discuss specific offers in more depth like a review – or offer a tutorial for them. So for instance, if you were in a PLR giveaway event, and there was one pack for a 35-page eBook, you might do a lesson on how to repurpose that person’s giveaway freebie.
You’re showing your people (your blog readers, etc.) how to get more mileage out of this event, and that will hook the people who heard about the offer but passed over it because they were unsure how to put it to good use.
Social networking sites will need to have a buzz about your event. Whip up posts for Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook (as well as Pinterest). Make sure you provide a call to action that says they should visit the event and share the post with others!
Host a webinar with the participants of the giveaway. Invite everyone’s list to the event and then have each person do a short presentation. If you want to up the ante a bit, do a Q&A afterwards.
Have everyone in the event blog about it. Each person should email their list a link to their blog to read about the event and get more details, in addition to linking directly to the event itself.
Choosing a Cross Promo Instead of a Giveaway Event
Picking one marketer to cross promo with is another option. You don’t have to have a big group of individuals initially. Sometimes it’s hard when you’re relatively unknown with a small list (or no list at all) to get people to agree to be part of your event.
So if this happens, just try getting one person to agree to an event.
If you have a list yourself, and are trying to grow it, choose someone with a list approximately the same size as yours. If you have no list, then choose someone with a bigger list and make an unbelievable free offer just for their list.
Why would anyone want to come onboard for this type of exchange? Because your offer is going to be so awesome, they’ll be providing something great for their list.
What you’ll have to do is explain this to the potential joint venture partner and go above and beyond in what you create for their list. In fact, try to tailor it to their subscribers’ needs.
The JV partner will probably also want to know what kind of marketer you are. If they’re established, then they probably get requests all the time for promotions and other deals.
They’re looking for someone ethical. Why is this important? Because they’re about to put their own reputation on the line and recommend that their subscribers sign up with you.
If they send them to the jaws of a scammer, they’ll be the one blamed. So somehow, prove to the prospective JV partner that you’re on the up and up and that it’s safe to engage in a cross promotion with you.
You can do a free event, or if the prospective partner won’t go for that, see if he or she will possibly entertain the thought of letting you give their list a different kind of perk – a discount on a paid product.
Coupons are also special and show a list that you’re working on their behalf to get them good deals. Make it a special offer so that it’s not just the same discount everyone else online gets.
Giveaway and cross-promo events can be a great list building activity. It forces you to give it your all and showcase the best that you have to offer to the paying public and they’ll be more loyal from that point on.