Reply To: How do you build a list now?
I did one thing primarily at first to build my first list, maybe 100,000 subscribers generated this way, and that’s I wrote articles for ezinearticles and really pushed their system, figured out what it took to get to the top of their recommended lists, get to the top of their top authors list, and really pushed to get views . . .and it all paid off to the tune of close to about 100,000 subscribers . . . .
Then I shifted to using the Warrior Forum to generate leads . . .and generated maybe 50,000 buyer leads there . . . .same concept, I studied the format, determined what it took to get them to send me the most traffic, and did it.
Then when warrior forum and warrior plus split, since I had already built relationships and the bulk of the leads were coming in from the warrior plus side, I simply continued to use warrior plus to drive those new leads.
Bruce, to answer your question about where most of my leads come from now, there are 2 answers:
Where do the total volume come from?
Or where do the profitable ones come from?
And I’m scared to answer this because I am talking about things I used to do, and I find when I do that, people try to copy what I used to do, and it doesn’t work for them, and somehow they think it should . . . I don’t do the things I used to do because they don’t work as well now, so I do different things now.
But I’ll answer cause you asked.
Probably most of my profitable leads are warriorplus . . I get a lot of leads from buyer download pages, etc – but they haven’t been productive so far.
Also get leads from my old articles, dipping into quora lately.
I get leads from referrals and interviews.
Regarding what I tried before ezinearticles . . .mostly fake stuff (but I didn’t know it at the time) – I bought a lot of guarantee traffic, safe list traffic, safe emails, etc – just junk, junk, junk traffic.
And about 80 more article directories until I did the tests that ruled them all out and I went all-in with ezinearticles.com.
I did an $8000 google PPC test one time and about broke even in the long term – like months and months
and learned that cold traffic doesn’t convert as well as warm traffic (and since the average article marketing lead has read about 7 articles before opting in to my list, they are quite warm -and then after a few days on my list they are either hot or quit!~!!!
Bought tons of solo ads in the past, the only way that ever worked for me was sending that traffic directly to a wso, make it break even there, and get a buyer out of it instead of a subscribers.
Solo ad subscribers tend to be hard on an email server, because of 2 things:
1) because of their nature and why they got on my list . . . they are also on 100 other lists – so – they get used to unsubbing
2) and they are also on 100 lists so their open rate is really low
but once the solo ad market got more advanced, it’s hard to get anyone to mail a wso offer anymore, so I stopped doing that.
And way before that, Matt Garrett and I developed the ad swap model that evolved into the big solo ad market in the im niche . . and we did fairly well with that . . .
but every before that – and this I think is how I met Matt – I would write people with similar lists to mine and say, Hey, I think we have similar prospects on our lists, will you mail your list for me if I mail my list for you?
and many said yes, huge starter list for me.
But that is much, much harder these days since there has been so much commercialization of solo ads and adswaps since then (this is one case of starting something but once it took off, it was no good to me anymore)
Sorry this isn’t chronological, but I think you can surmise the order . . .
and there may be a few more sources I’m forgetting.
But a fair warning to anyone reading this: just because something works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you.
And just because something doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it won’t work for you.
YOU have to do the hard work and find out where YOUR demographic and YOUR bleeding neck prospects are hanging out, and intercept them, just like I’ve done.
Sean
Do you want to learn how to start a coaching program that stabilizes your income and changes lives? If so, visit http://www.AnyoneCanCoach.com
Sean
