This article is guest posted by John Rhodes.
Two of the most popular internet marketing questions of all time are ‘how do I build a list’ and ‘how do I generate traffic’. These are the same questions I asked when I first started and I would pay with an arm and leg to anyone who would show me how to do it.
Well there’s no need to send me your arms and legs. In this article, I’m going to teach you how to build a list with thousands of subscribers, generate consistent traffic to grow this list and make money from it.
Hold on tight…this is going to make your head spin.
Before you start thinking about attracting subscribers, you need to make sure that you have a list building machine in place.
This means an online system that consists of:
- You send visitors to a squeeze page
- Visitors will sign up to your list
- You develop a close relationship with your subscribers
- Promote to your subscribers and move them on to your customer list
- Educate your customers to visit and comment on your blog, and buy from you.
Once you’ve setup this list building machine that will generate income for you on auto-pilot, only then should you start thinking about driving traffic.
Here’s how you can create your list building machine.
1. Create a squeeze page
Offer an excellent, relevant bonus to your subscribers for signing up to your list. Create a superb headline, list out the benefits in bullet points and have arrows pointing to the sign up form.
Make a video with you talking or show a presentation to make the squeeze page more attractive.
2. Improving your squeeze page
Use the Google tool Website Optimizer (www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) to continuously split-test two versions of your squeeze page. Choose the best converting web page and try to beat it with another revised version.
This is essential as you don’t want to waste the traffic that is sent to your squeeze page.
3. How to treat your subscribers
As soon as your subscribers sign up for your list, divert them to a webpage to deliver the free bonus which you promised on the squeeze page.
On this page, mention one of your current products or services and ask them to check it out. Don’t push hard for the sale though and scare the folks away. Just treat them like a friend and let them know more about your business.
Your main objective with your subscribers is to:
- deliver valuable content to them
- educate them and show that you’re an expert
- entertain them
- remind them who you are and your services
- recommend your products or other people’s products that can help them solve problems
Look at this list every now and then and remind yourself how you should treat your list.
Writing your autoresponder messages
Your next step is to write around 14 email messages to be delivered to your subscribers from your autoresponder.
Deliver each email 2 days apart from each other so that you’ll have a month of follow-up messages. With your emails, always ask your subscriber to take one action.
This could be to view and comment on your blog post, watch a video, check out a product you recommend etc…
If you’ve done your job properly, your subscribers should love and trust you after a month.
After you’ve completed these steps, you’ll have a list building machine that’s fine-tuned to build your list and help your profit. All you have to do is send traffic to the squeeze pages and your online system will do the rest.
Don’t forget to regularly email your list. If you neglect them they’ll forget about you in no time.
Now here comes the interesting part >>> Generating Traffic.
To start building your list, you need to throw traffic at it.
There are lots of methods on how you can generate traffic but a lot of people still struggle with it.
Do you know the reason why?
It’s because they don’t spend the time to learn and MASTER a traffic method. They’ll make a half-assed effort and then move on to some other technique.
To generate an avalanche of traffic consistently, you need to be an expert with one method, outsource it and then move on to the next strategy. This is how experts do it.
With that said, let’s talk about the traffic generating methods which have worked well for me personally.
Traffic Generator #1 – Solo Ads
These are ads you pay for a list owner to send an email to their list. There are no other advertisements in the email…just your content.
When paying for a solo-ad, make sure that:
- The list related to your market.
- You know the average number of clicks on a link if possible. Many people buy solo-ads based on the number of subscribers, which is wrong.
- You can find some reviews or comments from past customers on how effective the solo-ads were. Better safe than sorry.
The aim of the solo-ad is to make the reader click on the link and land on your squeeze page. From there they will enter your online system which you’ve set up.
Spend time in creating a kick-ass subject headline for your solo-ad and then focus on making the content short and entertaining. The reader needs to see what the benefit is of clicking on the link in your ad. They need to be curious of the amazing offer you’re presenting.
The more solo-ads you send out, the more you’ll know what subject titles work best and how well your squeeze pages are converting.
Traffic Generator #2 – JV Mailings
This technique is one of the most effective ways to build your list at lightning speed. It’s called Joint Venture (JV) mailings.
Here’s what you do:
- Create your own product by writing an ebook and/or creating videos. You can even re-write several PLR ebooks on the same subject and call it your own. If you’re not very good at this type of work then get it outsourced.
- For the sales letter, have a pop-up for an opt-in form or show a squeeze page before they can see the sales letter. Make sure that every visitor has a chance of signing up to your list.
- Offer to sell this awesome product of yours for around $40. Have an affiliate program for it but offer 100% commissions. You can use the software Rapid Action Profits to do this.
- PM as many people as you can on forums about your affiliate program, tell your list and submit your affiliate program in directories.
That’s it. You’ll have a herd of affiliates promoting for you since it’s like selling their own product. You’ll be seen as an expert in your niche and you’ll have a huge list of subscribers and customers in no time.
The real money is when you sell your 2nd product to this list J
Traffic Generator #3 – Article Marketing
Writing good articles can get you targeted traffic and do wonders for ranking your website high on the search engines.
The key to writing articles is to make the resource box relevant to your content. Make it as though the resource box is the second part of the article.
Now in the resource box, promote your squeeze page. Explain what the reader can get for free by clicking on the link. If you write a lot of articles regularly, your list will grow exponentially.
The best thing about article marketing is, you can outsource it and have it work for you on auto-pilot. Just hire someone to write one or two articles for you daily and have him submit them to article directories.
Final Thoughts
By creating and continuously improving your list building machine and by using the methods above to generate traffic, can you honestly tell me you that cannot build a good sized list and make money online?
I can guarantee that by sticking to this blueprint, you don’t need to study anything more and get distracted in the process. Take action with this blueprint and do it well. You’ll get paid handsomely for doing so.
John S. Rhodes will help you build an email list and enjoys writing about email marketing, list building and other internet marketing topics.
