Archive for the ‘List Building’ Category
September 9th, 2009 | 
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Give-away events, everyone must know what they are by now. You can’t open your inbox without someone promoting one, two or even three of them.
Just in case you have missed seeing these, I will give you a quick rundown on what they are all about. The idea is that everyone gets together and offers a free downloadable gift each. Then you all mail to your lists to get people to sign up and when they download a gift they of course have to supply their name and email so if it is your gift, your list grows, and that’s it in a nutshell.
This worked fine until about a year ago. Up until then there would be one event every month or two, so each one was getting really large numbers of sign ups and you could grow your list by several hundred each time and most of the gifts were fresh and new.
Since then the number of events has started to outgrow the number of people signing up. When you have three or four each month of course, fewer people will be joining each one. Not only that but the same old gifts get recycled event after event and month after month, which also causes fewer to sign up.
How can you tell they are no longer the little goldmine they used to be?
Just look at how they are now run. Keep in mind that the reason you join is that your list is on the small side and this should be the quickest and easiest way to grow it, the guys with the large lists are the ones who run them as they can kick start the event with one mailing.
The big listers grew their list by adding every person who signed up, I don’t have a problem with that, it is their event and they have put the effort in, your list grew by getting people to take your gift. All cool and dandy. Now here is the big BUT, now that numbers are down they feel the need to squeeze the little guy at the bottom but making it a condition of the event that they get sign ups or their gift will be deleted.
The problem with this is that if you have a smallish list not only are you mailing them about the event but so is everyone else so the chances of you getting a sign up are small, therefore you get told to mail harder or get deleted. If you over mail you will lose people of your list because they will see it as spam. Not really what you are after.
There is a way around this and that is to upgrade by paying $17 or $27, good idea if you were getting the numbers out of it but as numbers are low at the moment and not really worth it.
If you want my advice it would be to grab yourself three or four good free products from a recent event, sign up to every one going and rotate the products through them. Then after a month or so grab a couple more new products and repeat. Don’t worry about being deleted, this tends not to happen until a week or two in and the busiest time is normally the first five to eight days. Therefore, you get the best of the event and still have another three or four on the go anyway.
So sign up, enjoy and watch your list grow, slow but grow.
For a list of running and up coming events try HERE
Gregg
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The three myths about list building that tend to get banded around most are for the most part true. Unfortunately only two are really true and the third, well lets just say that most of the mail you have in your inbox would not be there if it also was true.
Myth 1
You need a list to sell online. This one is true. No one really expects to make sales just by putting a site on the web and waiting for people to find it. Yes you could spend a fortune on Adwords etc. to get it to the top of the search lists but if you had that kind of money to spend why bother trying to sell when you could be on a beach somewhere. So yes you do need a list to sell to if only to off set your Adwords costs and get you in the market.
Myth 2
The money is in the list. Also true but it needs to be qualified by saying that size does matter in this case. It is all a game of numbers. The generally accepted number is 1%. That is an average conversion rate of emails sent out. By that I mean you can hopefully expect 1% of the people who read your mails to buy something. So if you send 100 mails you might expect 1 sale. Not really going to get you far. If you have a list of 10,000 well you do the math.
Myth 3
List building is easy. NOT true, again qualified by unless you already have a large list. Have a look at your emails, how many are promising huge numbers of sign ups in 7 days/30 days or whatever? Oh and just as an aside, how do you get to be told all these wondrous secret plans, that’s right you sign up on to their list. So their list get bigger and you get, well more emails really.
There are many ways to grow a list from scratch but they tend to be slow, time consuming and require a lot of work. This is why so many people give up early on. The pay off though is that once you have a fair sized list it does get easier because you can then be taken seriously by other marketers who will be willing to enter into ad-swaps with you etc.
So be prepared to spend the first several months doing not much more that list building, with the odd sale here and there.
The many list building tactics are matters for many more articles and I hope to get down and have them written up soon.
But whatever you do, stick with it and don’t give up.
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