Picture this… You get an email with an invite for a webinar where you are promised to be shown how to make money online. You sign up for the webinar and login right on time.
The presenter shows you a ton of slides about who he was and what has become of his life after he took to internet marketing. He also shows you that he is an absolute non-techie, yet he was able to learn the steps involved in the system to prove how simple the system is and you start to feel that it is not as tough as it sounds.
At the end of the webinar there is a course that the organizer and the presenter sells. It is a premium course which could be anywhere upwards of $497.00. You could be one of those who decides to join the course or, even one of the others who skip buying it.
But at the end of the webinar you are sure to have found a never-before seen energy to work hard and make money from internet marketing.
You spend the next 15-20 days doing a lot of things. You keep checking your affiliate accounts to see if you have earned a commission. But, nothing. The accounts keep showing the ZEROES..
Gradually the enthusiasm dies and you are almost on the verge of giving up, when you get another mail from somebody else for another webinar and the cycle continues…
Does it sound anything like you?
This was how I was for almost 7 years. The only difference here was that I did not quit.
Have you ever wondered as to why you were not able to make money online? How is it that the others are able to make so much money?
Why you are not able to Make Money Online
Let’s take a step back into what we discussed above and go through the steps once again.
It all starts with an email invitation that you receive from somebody. This somebody is the person on whose list, you are one of the many subscribers.
You had signed up at a website of his at some point in time, maybe to get some information-filled ebook, audio course, video course or, maybe a report that you thought addressed one of your problems.
Since then you have been getting emails from this “somebody”. While you delete some of these, you read the others because either the subject line enticed you or, something in the subject caught your attention.
Now let’s get to the second part of it.
You attend the webinar just like hundreds of others, who would also have come to the webinar after they read the invitation email.
At the end of the webinar, there is a course that this “somebody” promotes with his partner, who is the presenter in the webinar. A few of the attendees pays and joins this course during the webinar. A few others join a little later.
Whichever is the case, the presenter make some good money and the “somebody” who sent you the invite, make some money too, by way of commissions.
Now, if I am to ask you – how did the “somebody”, who is an internet marketer, make money?
The answer is – “By way of sending an email to his subscribers”.
And there lies the answer to the question on why you are not able to make money online.
Email Marketing Starts with Building a List
Yes! that’s right, List Building.
And I am sure you are tired of hearing people say, “the money is in the list”. It in fact, is in the list.
If you were ever made to believe that there is another way of making money online, then get it right once and for all today. There is no other way of making money in internet marketing.
The concept is pretty simple. This entire thing about making money involves somebody buying a product or, a service. And this in turn means that there are people involved. There could be two ways to get people to check out your business, product or, service.
The first one is by making your website appear on the first page of Google search results for all of the relevant keywords. This will ensure that people searching for products and service in your niche, are able to find your website. But this is not all that easy.
And even if you are able to do it, what is the possibility of a visitor coming back to your website if in case he/she doesn’t buy anything from you in their first visit?
Near to ZERO!!
And statistics say that it requires at least 3 touches to convert a visitor to a buyer.
This is what the business insider has to say about the number of contacts required to convert a visitor to a buyer,
How many touches are required on average before the sale? In the case of an impulse purchase, only one contact is needed, but this usually happens inside a favorite store where there is already a level of confidence and trust, or the price is so low that it does not matter to the buyer.
Research suggests that three touches are needed; or is it five, or eight, or twelve? The only right answer is “it depends.” But, following a schedule and maximizing the value of each contact will decrease the time, effort and total cost of each sale.
So the question is, how do you ensure that you are repeatedly contacting your visitors?
And the answer is – by capturing their contact emails. This is precisely what we do in list building.
Derek at Social Triggers puts the benefit of capturing email addresses in a very simple way –
If you’re running an online business, brick-and-mortar small business, or ANY kind of business, you NEED a way to stay in touch with your prospects and customers.
And since every single person in the world has an email address, building an email list is one of the cheapest, most cost-effective solution for doing that.
Now you know why you are not able to make money online. But isn’t building a list a very difficult thing to do?
Building Your List is not as difficult as it Sounds
The biggest mistake that I did in internet marketing was not building a list. When my websites were getting thousands of visitors everyday, and when it was easy to get your websites ranked on Google, all I had to do was capture the visitors and build my list.
Since I didn’t do it, I lost all my earnings when things changed in internet marketing. When Google changed rules, my websites lost rankings. And it took me about 4 years to stand back up again.
And all this only because I thought list building was difficult.
But is list building all that difficult?
In fact, it is not. If done the right way, it is very simple and can be very effective.
In the words of Kevan Lee at Buffer, the steps to build a huge list involves just 2 things –
If I could boil down the process of building a massive email list to just the most basic parts, I think it would look like this:
Amazing blog content + crystal clear calls-to-action = massive email list
Assuming you already have good content in place, the only thing you are missing is a call to action. In this case, since we are discussing about building a list, it would refer to a “Call to Subscribe”. In Kevan’s words –
Once you have the amazing content, the next step is to ask for emails. People who adore your content will be primed to receive that content as often as you can create it, delivered straight to their inbox. It’s up to you to make sure they find your call-to-action (or, in this case, a call-to-subscribe). Make it obvious. Make it crystal clear.
The last 2 sentences in the above quote is what could make or, break your list building efforts. But what does it mean?
It simply means that you have to have your optin boxes at the right places; places where they get the most attention and the best response. And you can do it by using a good optin form builder which gives your multiple options to place your optin forms.
A few of the best converting places where you absolutely need to place your optin forms include –
- Your Blog Sidebars – Preferably as the first thing that your visitors can see on your sidebar. Plainly put – above the fold.
- Welcome Mat – This is a welcome screen with an optin box and is found to convert really well.
- Lightbox Popups – I am sure you would have heard about this from a thousand other bloggers. The reason is obvious. Because it works.
An above the fold optin box on your landing page is also a preferred place to put your optin form.
We use and recommend Thrive Leads which is the best solution to build and manage your optin forms. With some nice conversion statistics, it gives you a lot of relevant information on which optin form is working well and which is not, so that you can tweak things accordingly.
Some simple tweaks to these could further improve your conversions. And that could mean better optin rates from the same amount of visitors; that in turn means a bigger list in a shorter period of time.
Brian at backlinko talks about content upgrades in his post on 17 tweaks for a better email optin rate. If you understand how content upgrades work and you are able to place your optin forms strategically in each of your posts, offering an upgrade to the content that you offered your reader by way of the post, then you conversions can be even better.
Offering content upgrades mean placing optin forms within your posts. And Thrive Leads does this nicely using both direct embeds and also shortcodes.
Nurturing Your Email List through Relationship Building
Now that you have built a list, what next?
This is the slightly difficult part. You don’t want to bug your subscribers with irrelevant emails and drive them to unsubscribe from your list. You want them to stay with you and buy your recommended products and services. Because that is the only way you are going to make money.
This is primarily why a lot of people refer to email marketing as relationship marketing as well. Because in email marketing, you build a relationship with your subscribers and this relationship is what you cash in on.
If you want to learn more about relationship marketing, then Andre Chaperon and his Autoresponder Madness course is the best one. You will learn everything from the absolute basics to the advanced strategies in this course.
As you go through the course, you will realize the importance of sending relevant emails to your subscribers and moving them between lists based on their interests.
Aweber is our preferred autoresponder to manage our lists. With the many features like tagging, running multiple campaigns, sending different emails to different subscribers in the same list etc., Aweber reduces the amount of time you will otherwise have to spend on managing your subscriber lists.
Over to You Now
So, have you been building a list? Are you sending emails regularly to your subscribers?
If no, then what is the biggest problem that you are facing? Write to us and let us know by commenting below and we might be able to help you.
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If you are unable to write effective emails and that is why you are not able to make money online, then you might want to check out Michael Cheney’s “The Commission Machine“. It is a very concise and effective course on writing the right kind of emails that can make sales and earn you commissions.