Internet marketing, whether marketing your own products or someone else’s as an affiliate, is all about developing momentum. In order to create the required momentum you must first put in place the necessary building blocks which are fundamental to building such momentum.
Some experts want you to believe that successful Internet marketing is all in the list. Your ability to create a list of interested individuals ready to whip out their credit card in response to your latest offer will propel you into riches beyond you wildest dreams. Not everyone on your list is going to be interested in your latest offer and for this reason the larger your list the more people you can convert into sales using the same conversion ratio. Following me so far?
Please don’t think for one second that having a list is no important because it is without a doubt one of the most important factors in whether you become a successful Internet marketer or not. However, the actual process of building a list requires some serious thought. You probably know how it works by now and yet still so many Internet marketers are getting it wrong in more than one way, which is a real shame. For starters, if you use the free offer to capture name and email address then it is important that the free offer is relative to the type of visitor you are capturing. It should also offer a reasonable amount of value in terms of information etc. to the reader. What happens all too often is the free report is a complete load of rubbish, either poorly written or contains very little of value that could have been sourced easily from a simply search using your favourite search engine. I cannot emphasise enough how often this happens. If you send me rubbish this time then it is highly likely that is exactly what you are going to send me the next time. Look at it like a job interview – First impressions count. Set a good first impression and the individuals on your list will be more responsive to your offers.
The next problem is relying on your list too often. If you are sending offers to your opt-in subscribers too often you run the risk of them unsubscribing. Those individuals whom don’t bother to unsubscribe will often delete your email offer without taking the time to read it first. It is possible to monitor when this happens by watching your conversion rates for each offer (if you are an affiliate you can track the number of Hops). You need to use caution because by the time you realise that you have got the frequency of your auto-responder offers wrong you may have already lost a percentage of your subscribers. It also borders on being spam in the eyes of the subscriber.
Before you begin sending offers to your subscriber list (opt-in list) you need to build your list from scratch. This involves setting up what is known as a squeeze page. Your options are to buy a number of carefully thought out domain names and have each domain name hosted for you or with even greater thought select a suitable domain name which will cover a multitude of squeeze pages from the same domain. For example, it would be no good using a domain name such as freedogreports.com if you intend to offer a free report on cats also (even if this is at a later date). By using a domain name such as freepetreports.com you are covering your bases. This would allow you to host many different squeeze pages from the same domain name. The alternative would be to purchase several domain names e.g. freecatreports.com, freedogreports.com and freerabbitreports.com
Next there is the issue of generating enough traffic to each of your squeeze pages to enable you to build your list in smart time. Now we are back to the good old techniques of building traffic to our websites, including article marketing, pay-per-click, banner advertising/exchange, writing blogs and utilising Web 2.0 sites. Assuming you already have a website with a sales page and are struggling to generate enough traffic to convert into sales so you can retire, then unfortunately the whole process is about to be repeated with your squeeze pages. Further adding to your lack of sales but you will have to pay out on additional domain names and hosting, pay-per-click advertising and additional time taken up writing many more articles. As I started out writing this article, it is all about building momentum. Once you have the pieces in place it should all start to work for you. This is essentially what the expert Internet marketers do when they first start out.
Accept the fact that you are going to have to work hard for a while before you will see any return and knuckle down and get on with it.