I once worked very briefly for an Internet millionaire that
had about 80 websites. Man, he was
selling everything you could imagine under the sun from e-books, courses,
dietary supplements, to multilevel marketing sponsorships. I was hired on to help him manage and update his
sites because some of them had been around for a very long time.
I will tell you that he had quite a following. He had rented a big office building that was abandoned
(I think it had been a two story commercial site that sold light fixtures
originally.) and sometimes I would beat him to his office to start working on
his sites. The phones would ring off the
hook day and night.
I remember that his primary product was an info product on
how to build a multilevel marketing business.
He would travel to a bunch of Internet conferences and give a
demonstration or speech about how to grow a networking company and then
afterwards he would sell his course on how to do it.
He was constantly on the road and was an excellent salesman,
and I believe that his ability to sell to a live audience increased his bottom
line and it created a great sales funnel.
If I can remember
clearly, this is what his sales funnel looked like:
The process of doing business, whether it was getting people
to opt-in, buy a product, or upselling was accelerated by the fact that he was
at speaking engagements all of the time.
They would see him speak and at the very least most of his audience would
go to one of his websites and opt in.
This Is Pure Gold
One day while he was at the office I had an opportunity to
talk. I mentioned to him how I was
inspired by marketers like Dan Kennedy, John Carlton and Corey Rudl (Of course
this is before his tragic death). He
told me that he had actually spoke at seminars with these folks on occasion and
that even though he was a chronic info-marketer and pretty successful himself, he was always trying to extract any
nuggets of wisdom that he could from them.
The one thing he told me that he learned from the likes of
these big time entrepreneurs was that a list of potential prospects is pure
gold and that mining it, using it and reusing it was how he built his business.
As a matter of fact, his exact words were “The list is pure
gold.”
Don’t Misunderstand The Message Here…
He never said the list was EVERYTHING, he just said it was
pure gold. Now, if you were in his
office and could see the way he generated, used, and reused his massive list
you’d know he was telling the truth. As
a matter of fact, the one aspect of his business that he was very careful to
take care of was his list.
Website passwords, he’d forget.
Dates and times of things, he’d lose them.
Even products and merchandise he didn’t have that good of a
grip on, BUT THE LIST HE BUILT WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO HIS BUSINESS.
What Can You Take Away from This Story?
Well, list building is extremely important! As a matter of fact, the more information you
have on a prospect, the better off you are.
If you only have an email address, you can still stay in the loop with
them, but it is much better to have a physical mailing address and potentially,
a phone number even.
As a rule of thumb, try to gather as much personal info that
you can gather on your clients and prospects as you can.
However, if you JUST have an email address, you are limited
to sending just one type of message – email.
Email is very easy to ignore and dispose of. Not only that, but email accounts get dumped
all of the time, so the more contact info you can get, the better off you’ll
be.
How Do I Start Building a List?
You can start by using an auto responder like GetResponse, Awebber,
or even a cheap free one like SendFree.
Of course, anything that is free will just the bare minimum and they
will want you to upgrade to a better account ASAP.
In my opinion, if you are brand new list builder the best
way to start is by going as cheap as possible.
The reason I say that is because it will definitely take time to build a
viable list. If you are building your
list online and that is the only way you are marketing your business, then building
a list will be a rather slow process, no matter what marketing gurus will tell
you.
If you don’t want to use an email responder at all, here is
a video that will show you exactly how to gather email addresses without one:
Once you have several email addresses to send to, you can
always use the following e-mail trick to send your email out to an entire herd
of people. Use this technique to send
multiple emails out without recipients being able to see a list of email
addresses: Email Trick
The downside to this lesson is that it takes diligence, hard
work and a certain amount of patience to cultivate, build and use a list
properly. However, once you have it, you
will see that it is pure gold!
If you want to learn more about how to write and use ad copy
in your business, please click the link below and I’ll send you a free report
on how to write more effective copy for your business.
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