List Building

This is going to be List Building . First of all, let’s start off with the most important thing. The size of your list is not the critical piece. It is your relationship with the list. If you have a good relationship with your list, then you will have what I call a hyper-list.
I’ve seen people with a list of 1,000 people outperform people with lists of 20,000 or 30,000 people. You can take those numbers and scale them any way you want. A good list of 10,000 can outperform a list of 100,000 or 200,000; a good list of 100 people can outperform a list of 1,000 people. It is all about your relationship with your list.
Let’s take that one step further. If you have that relationship with your list and you get that hyper-list, then all of a sudden you start to see that the hyper-list can actually grow itself. As you build a relationship with it, they’ll start to tell other people about it and all of a sudden you will start to grow through word of mouth.
Also, a hyper-list will help you with cash on demand. That’s obvious because you can publish any time you want. You can send out a broadcast and literally make money any time you want. That’s the cash on demand aspect.
It will also produce partners and affiliates. It will actually help you create content. Your hyper-list will give you product ideas. As you run ideas by them they will give you feedback on those ideas. You’ll
actually find employees and volunteers to work for you within your list.
List Building Rule #1 is always focusing on list building no matter what. You should always be focused on your list building. Your list building metrics, in other words, your measures of what a subscriber is worth, what your opt-in rate is, how many people are subscribing, what your un-sub rate is, and what your list growth is, those are the most important metrics or measures in your business.
It is almost like that is your dashboard. You are always watching your opt-in rate. You look at how many people visit your site. Of the number of people that visit your site, what percent join your list? That is your opt-in rate. These measures are the most important measures within your business.
You are probably going to end up having lots of lists. People end up with lots and lots of lists, especially if you have a service like AWeber where you can literally create another list in five minutes. It doesn’t cost you any more money.
The way I break down my lists is there are prospects and there are clients. Your client list is worth ten to fifteen times what your prospect list is worth. Those are people who have already bought from you.
Groundwork #1 – Testing I’ve done more testing around opt-in rates than any other metric in my business. It is easy to test your opt-ins and to make changes to see what that does to your opt-in rate. Do you get more people opting in or fewer people? Testing can be pretty easy if you have a lot of data to test your opt in rates. In fact, the most important thing is that you have a lot of data. If you only have a small amount of data, it takes you forever to run a test.
Almost always, you are going to have fewer buyers. If you are going to test something like your sales letter, maybe you are going to test the headline in your sales letter and then you are going to have fewer buyers, fewer actions. When someone hits your site, they are either going to leave your site, or they are going to do what you want them to do, or respond to what you are testing for.
When they respond to what you are testing for, that is an action.  In other words, if you are testing your sales process, if they buy from you, that’s an action. Testing is based on the number of actions you have. Unless you have a decent number of actions, it will take you forever to do a test.
It is a lot easier to get an opt-in generally, than it is to get someone to buy from you, so you have a lot more actions. That means it is a lot easier to test your opt-in rates and your whole opt-in process than it is to test your actual sales data.
The opt in process  is not only easier to test but it is faster, than any other process.. It directly applies to the most important thing in your business which is building your list.
Groundwork #2 – List Hosting. I’m going to make no bones about this. I’ve already talked about this in the past. The single best place for list hosting that I would recommend is Aweber. I’ve been through all kinds of different list hosts over the years. I have tested many, many, many different list hosts and many different styles of list hosts. I’ve even tried hosting on my own machine.
They are the ones who will be running your lists. They are doing everything for you. The only difference between ProFollow and aWeber is twofold. One, like I said, it is my private label version so I’ve spent a lot of money to get this set up. I’ll make a few dollars in commission if you go there.
The other thing you will get are some bonus training videos. I haven’t completed them yet, but I will soon and then you’ll get those bonus training videos that show how to do some of the advanced ninja stuff that I figured out how to do there.
This is my super-duper complicated list building formula: traffic plus conversion equals a list. Traffic is visitors coming to your site. Conversion is where you are convincing them to opt in to your list. If you do that, then you have a list.
Basically, list building is working on different ways to get traffic to your site and different ways to increase your conversion. Then you are building your list.
One other thing I want to say about that is when I first started building a list; I was getting one person every few days joining my list. Eventually I got up to one person a day, then three or four people a day, and then eventually I was able to grow that number up to around 24 per day. Then I grew it to 27 opt ins per day. Then I hit the 30s, around 34 people per day. I was pretty happy with that. I never did much better than that 27 to 34 range, where it would fluctuate depending on traffic.
I never could get it much bigger than that. Nevertheless, I grew that list from zero to 80,000 people by doing that. If you put 33 people on your list per day, that is 1,000 people per month, and that’s 12,000 people per year. I ran that list for seven or eight years. Bingo! All of a sudden you have 80,000 people.
It was approximately 80,000. You are never sure with a list that big. You are never really sure how many actual people because you have duplicate addresses and you have some addresses that become undeliverable and stuff like that, but it was a big list and that was in a high dollar niche. That was in the investing niche which is a lucrative high dollar niche.
Next is conversion. I’m going to go over some ways to convert people with squeeze pages, with pop-ups, and with subscription boxes.
Squeeze pages are where you have a web page that you send traffic to. You give people an option. They can either give you their name and e-mail address, or they can leave your site. You absolutely focus this entire page on getting the opt-in. You don’t give people any choice to go and look at other links and find out other stuff about you. They only have a choice to subscribe or not.
I’ll tell you what; you’ll get a lot fewer subscriptions if you use this versus a squeeze page or a pop-up. If you have one of these portal type sites where you are getting tons of people visiting, and all kinds of content on your site, and you don’t want to take the chance of using a squeeze page, then this is not as effective, but you’ll still get people signing up.
In terms of obtrusiveness, immoveable pop-ups are the most obtrusive because they can't do anything unless they subscribe. This is the next most obtrusive. You are going to pop up this box on them. They can either fill out their name and email, or they can click here to close. This is the least obtrusive, but you are not going to get the kind of sign-ups you do with the other ones.
Now let’s talk about traffic. There are many, many ways to get traffic, but I’m just going to cover three of them here that I use with list building.
As you can see I have natural traffic. Those are people coming from the search engines that find you by doing a search on the search engines, or they are people that follow other links to you. There is pay per click which is where you advertise and pay on a per visitor basis. Then there are joint ventures which is the mother of all list building methods and the quickest way to build a big list.
One way to build traffic is by using natural traffic.  Natural search traffic which is from the search engines. You write articles and put them on other sites. You have links and forums and other methods for building natural traffic. Let’s just look at a quick diagram here.
Here we have four areas. They all fall in the general area of natural traffic. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but this is a starter list
for you. There are various links here. You have natural search, which is again, people finding you on the search engines. You also have forums.
You can see that I use natural search. They are going to come into your site usually, not into a squeeze page. The natural search is usually going to drop people onto some other page on your site. Remember, in conversion we talked about three different things. We talked about pop-ups, we talked about sign-up forms on your site and we talked about squeeze pages.
Generally natural search traffic is going to come into pages that are not squeeze pages. They are usually regular pages that either have sign-up forms or pop-ups. Generally you are going to get links from people. They are not going to want to link into a squeeze page either. They are going to send people to regular pages on your sites, so you are dependent on pop-ups and sign-up forms.
Actually, if they are affiliate links or joint venture links, you can send them to a squeeze page. Forums, like in your signature, you can drop people on to a squeeze page, depending on the forum, and depending on your presence on the forum. Depending on the way things go on that forum you can drop people on a squeeze page, or it might be a softer squeeze page where it doesn’t look like one. It is much like that squeeze page I have, but it drops them someplace that says, “To get a free report, sign up here.”
If you are posting in forums, if you are going to post a link, you are just generally going to want to send a link to a regular web page. Then you use pop-ups and sign-up forms.
That is natural traffic. Now let’s move on. What do you do for natural traffic? One way you get people to opt in is by offering either a report or a video or a mini-course. A mini-course is beautiful, like a five part mini-course on how to play a video game, or a five part mini-course on how to grow tomatoes, or a five part mini-course on how to carve wooden dolls. That is the promise to get their e-mail address.
it probably is not included. Then you can buy pop ups at www.FocusGenerator.com. You can actually buy this software. I don’t know how much it costs. I think it is under $100 for the software. There is other software available. If you have ProFollow or AWeber, it is built right in.
Then there are links in forums, you can always go out and try to find people that put up links to your site. In my opinion, that is more of a 1990s thing in terms of driving traffic. It is always good to have links and pursue links and get links from other sites that help your search engine rankings, but for most sites it doesn’t tend to drive a ton of traffic. If you can get a key link on a key site, maybe you put up an article on their site and it gets a lot of traffic, it can send you a lot of traffic that way.
On forums, you can create a presence on various forums; I’ve already shown you how to do that in some of your homework. You go out and create a presence on the forums and you can occasionally put links back to your site in your messages if it is relevant to your message. If you are teaching people about something, if you are telling people about something on a forum, and there is greater material on your site, then you can refer them back there.
You can also use signatures on most forums. Always check the rules and play within the rules in the forums, because nothing will backfire faster than going out and spamming the forums and just marketing your stuff. You don’t want to do that. That is very counterproductive.
Using pay per click, you generally want to send traffic to a squeeze page. This is very much a numbers game. You have to take a look at what a subscriber is worth, and then look at how much it is costing you not just to get the click, but to get the subscriber. If you are using double opt-in which I would recommend for most sites, what does it cost you not just to get someone to your site and to get them to subscribe, but to get someone to double opt in?
If you are getting 70% of your people to double opt-in, then that raises the cost it is going to take. Then there is this thing called the Google slap. That is where Google doesn’t really like you sending people to a squeeze page. Generally the way I found to get around that is by having a site that has good content.
The Google slap is that they judge your site, but they judge the quality of your site, not the quality of your page. This changes all the time but at the time of this recording this is my current experience, So if you have a good quality site with good content, then in general, they are not going to slap you. One way to do that is to have a blog and publish regularly to that blog,
Another way you can do this is at the bottom of the page you could put a link to your blog or to some other content. They like that. Worse come to worst, you could put some content down below the fold so there is some content on the page, or you could create a squeeze page with a video. They seem to like that. So those are ways you can get around the Google slap.
Briefly, for people who aren’t aware, the Google slap is that Google really doesn’t like you sending the traffic just to a pure squeeze page off of your AdWords ad. What they’ll do is raise the price that they are charging you. Effectively, they will make you pay more money for the traffic.
This is the way to get around the Google slap. You need to have a good site with good quality content somewhere on the site. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on that page. Again, they judge the quality of your site, not just of your page. These things are always changing, but as of right now, that is the way things are working.
The most powerful method for building your list is by using joint ventures. This is the single fastest way to build your business and to build your list. Basically, you are tapping into the people who have lists and you are getting them to promote for you. This is something I learned first from John Reese. If you are looking for traffic, just go find where the traffic is right now.
Traffic is stored in the lists of other people in your market in your niche. If you contact them and you create an incentive for them to send traffic to your site, it is like turning on a faucet. They have their
list and they can just flip the switch and send you a ton of traffic. This is the fastest way to grow your list and grow your business.
JV Strategy #1 Here are some good joint venture models. You can have your JV partners e-mail to a squeeze page. The squeeze page adds people to your list. Then you send your list to your sales letter and from your sales process into your launch. You end up paying your partners based on those leads.
If your partners send John Smith to your squeeze page and John Smith opts in on your squeeze page, then you track him. You set a cookie in his browser. Hopefully he joins your list. Then when he ends up buying, the partner that sent him gets a report of who bought your product from the traffic he sent to you. That partner gets paid on a percentage basis.
JV Strategy #2 Here is a very, very similar model, but if you take a look, they are basically identical. The only difference is instead of giving him a part of the sale as a commission, you give them 100% of the commission. This is a radical, aggressive way to build your business. Basically, with most partners, the more money you pay them, the greater percentage that you pay them, the more enthusiastically they are going to promote you.
You can do this if you know in the long run you are going to sell something else to your prospects, the people buying from you. If you have a backend product that you know is going to convert, then you can afford to pay 100% commission. I’m not saying that you have to do this or you need to do this, but I’m just pointing out that the more you pay in commission, the more active and enthusiastic your partners are going to be.
JV Strategy #3 Let’s take that to another extreme. What if instead of paying 100% commission, you paid 150% commission. Before you do something crazy like this, you are going to have to know your metrics. What is a new person on your prospect list worth and what is a new person on your buyers list, your client list worth? Once you know those numbers, then you can figure out what kind of commission you can afford to pay.
One thing I want to point out in this model is that the JV partner sends people to your squeeze page. Let’s say this person sends 1,000 people to your squeeze page, or let’s just say they send 2,000 people to your squeeze page and half of them opt in. Now there are 1,000 people on your list. You have 1,000 people on your list. Then you send them to your sales page, your offer and let’s say of those thousand, 20 of them end up buying. If 20 of them buy, and let’s say it is a $100 product, now you’ve got $2,000 in sales. At 150% commission then that means you are going to pay $3,000 to your partner.
To keep our example simple, if it is a digital product, you’ve done $2,000 in sales. It hasn’t cost you anything really to deliver that. It would cost you some in your merchant fees, but let’s keep it simple and forget about merchant fees for right now. You make $2,000 in sales. You give $3,000 to your partner. That means you are out $1,000. But what have you done?
You’ve added 1,000 people to your list and you’ve added 20 clients to your client list. In most markets, 1,000 people on your prospect list and 20 people on your client list, especially 20 people who bought at the $100 price point, is well worth the extra thousand dollars you are going to pay your partner. So you are out $1,000. You did $2,000 in sales and you paid your partner $3,000 so you are out $1,000, but you’ve essentially spent $1,000 to put a thousand people on your list and put 20 clients on your client list.
That is how that math can work. Then if you are selling them something else down the road, you can see how this could work very, very quickly. This is an advanced strategy – not a beginner’s strategy.
JV Strategy #4 Here is another joint venture model.  This is a great model to use if you don’t have a product. Let’s say you have some expertise in this domain. You know what you are talking about. You know what’s going on and you can convince your partners that you know what’s going on. This is where you have your partners send to a squeeze page and then the squeeze page basically tells them that they can get on a teleseminar if they opt in.
This is really great if you are starting from scratch. Basically you just have to find one or more partners that you can convince that you know what is going on. In fact, you could even have the partner interview you. If you wanted to do this on a list by list basis, you can go to the partner and say, “I’ve got this great area of knowledge. Do you want to interview me?”
This takes a little finagling, but you can talk to them and tell them you are going to do an interview with them, and  have them send them send their traffic to your squeeze page. You have them opt in to the teleseminar and then the teleseminar is you asking them stuff. I know this sounds crazy, but that actually works. I’ve seen it over and over, even in the most competitive of markets.
Basically the pitch would be, “Hey, are you interested in creating some content pretty painlessly? I’ll interview you. You just e-mail your list to this squeeze page and I’ll take care of everything else. I’ll get the bridge line. I’ll get it all set up. I’ll interview you and then you can have that interview. You can use it for content. You can use it for a bonus, a product, whatever. I’m a great interviewer and you are going to end up with a great product.”
If you did that to five, six, or ten to twelve people, pretty quickly, you would have a sizable list. You might even be able to work it so that you both get access to the content. Let’s say you set it up with 12 different JV partners.
You say, “I’m going to interview you. You just send them to the squeeze page. I’ll take care of everything. We’ll put them on my list. I’ll do all the follow-up. I’ll make sure they get on the call. You’ll get the content and the recording, or while we’re on the call, we could
make a pitch. We could sell your material on the backend. So you are going to get sales, plus you are going to get this recording.”
If you went to ten or twelve different people, you’d have ten or twelve different recordings. You want to make it part of the agreement that you get access to the recordings as well. All of a sudden you have a big lengthy home study course and you’ve built a list. You’ve used the partners to help you build a list and create the product. In return you’ve given them a copy of the recordings and possibly you’ve sold some of their product for them.
It sounds crazy but you can actually go into a brand new market and create a presence, create a list and create a product all at the same time by doing this. I have seen this done in the most competitive of markets. It really does work.
JV Strategy #5 The next JV strategy is basically very, very similar to #3, without the 150% commission, but where you’ve put together some type of a PDF report, some type of a video, or something special. The partners might say they want this free content. Partners like to mail for people with free content, especially, if you track the traffic they sent you and then pay them down the road.
That’s the golden combination. You give your partners something good to mail to their prospects. If they can mail their list good videos, or good PDFs, or good audios, or good teleseminars, then down the road they are going to end up making some commissions. That is a very, very effective model.
Here you can either squeeze your prospects before they get the report or you can give them the report for free, but, buried within the report are kickback offers. In other words, they are reading and it says, “Okay, this is the cool PDF report, but if you want to get the super-duper cool PDF report, then go to this link.” Then that link is basically a squeeze page that puts them on your list.
You’ll get much fewer people doing it that second way, but those people will be more highly qualified because they actually did read your report. They are going to be much more highly qualified. A lot of times, partners will be more open to actually mailing someone straight to a report, rather than sending them to a squeeze page for a report.
Finding joint venture partners is going to be a review for you since we already covered some of this. You simply go to Google and type in whatever your keyword phrase is. If it is ‘growing tomatoes’ you type in ‘growing tomatoes’ and here are your potential partners. It is that easy. Your results pages from Google are all potential partners.
The natural search listings are on the left side of your Google results and the pay per click listings are on the right side of the page. Just click through all of these. Now you know the sites that are in your niche. Now it is just a matter of developing a relationship with them.
Here is another way to do it. You go to www.Amazon.com. Every one of these authors wants to sell more books. Authors in particular are very, very happy to get into this model that I told you about. They just wrote a book. They don’t know anything about information marketing. You can teach them how you can actually go from just being an author of a book to being the author of a multimedia course. I’m going to interview you and then you can have the audio.
A lot of them have web sites and some of them have lists. Authors work really, really well with that model. I’ll tell you what, these guys, you might think because they are an author they are probably a famous person. No they‘re probably not. They are sitting there at home trying to figure out how to sell more books. You can click through and look at their books. Often there is a web site and often there is a link to the author. You can follow through with them and they will respond because they are hungry to sell more books.
I already talked about this in some of the other homework. Do a search on your key phrase and the word ‘forum’. If you do that, then you are going to find the forums. Look on the forums for the people that are active. Follow their links to their web sites. They can be great partners.
Finally, if you do a search on Google of ‘growing tomatoes’ or whatever your key phrase is plus the word affiliate, you can find the people that have affiliate programs. If they have affiliate programs, they probably are affiliates for other programs. Go through and join their affiliate programs. See what they’re promoting, how they’re promoting, start selling their stuff. That is a great way to build a relationship if you can actually sell their stuff for them.
The next couple of subjects are going to be review because we already covered a lot of this in Module Two. Approaching potential partners is first of all a numbers game. You want to be persistent. You don’t want to be a pest. Being a pest is never good, but be persistent. If you don’t hear back, then just follow up.
Expect to land five percent of the people you are going after. That’s why I say it is a numbers game. If you approach 50 people, you might get ten people, ten partners. Even if you approach 20 people, what would that give you? That would give you one partner.
I mean, you want more than one, so just work on getting two or three partners. The thing is that success breeds success. As soon as you have one partner or affiliate and they start to have success, then you can take that story of their success and share it with other potential partners. When you bring them in, work with them, do your best to get them some sales, to help them succeed, because success breeds success.
Those people are all probably talking to each other, so if someone does really well with promoting your stuff, he will probably talk to other people and tell other people about that success.
I’ve already covered this. This is the general order from least preferable to most preferable ways of developing relationship. E-mail is the worst. Phone is better. Direct mail is better. Lumpy mail is just the idea of sticking something in your mail. If the envelope isn't flat, people are curious and they always want to know what’s in that mail, so they’ll end up opening it up to see what’s in there. You could stick a toy in there or some coins or all kinds of different things just to make it lumpy. That is an entire other course that I could do on lumpy mail. FedEx is better than regular mail.
Live events are the king of creating relationships. If you are at a live event, getting an introduction to someone is better than walking up to someone cold.
Then use Ali Money Online Courses. Use scarcity, social proof, reciprocity, being event based, and use sequences. You are learning about all this stuff. When you can actually use this on your potential partners to get them involved, on partners that are already set up, you can use it on them to get them activated.
Finally, remember to optimize your opt-in conversion. This is some of the most important work you’ll do on your site. Remember that you need to have a good relationship with your list. You should always work on that. Start building natural traffic through search engines, through articles, and through forums using links in your signature. Start using pay per click, like AdWords, but know what your numbers are, know your metrics and what a subscriber is worth, and go out there and find your joint venture partners.
This is all list building, 101, and this is an overview. I’m moving really quickly, but this is how you build a list. This is how I’ve built lists. My biggest list to date is that 80,000 people. But if you added up all my lists, it amounts to hundreds of thousands of people. This is how I built these lists, using these five bullets.
Finally, remember that it is all about list relationship, your list relationship, and you are always striving to grow a hyper-list. That’s it for List Building 101. Go out there and go get them. There is nothing more valuable than having a list.
You won't need to save for your kids’ college education if you have a list, so go start building. It all starts with one person. No one starts with a huge list. Everyone starts with one person and builds from there. 😏