How many times have you heard “The money is in the list”? You don’t have to be a
veteran of countless affiliate marketing forums to run across this saying. Chances are if you are doing any kind of online promotions or affiliate marketing, you have seen this phrase before.
In fact, if you are active online, you probably have seen it many times. It’s too easy to think that you only need to get a list going, and you’ll make bank. This is what many list marketers like you end up doing… and they fail!
Fact: Simply putting up a list is not going to make you an overnight millionaire or a master marketer. Forget about it.
If you keep reading and thinking that the money is in the list, you’re doing it the wrong way. Chances are you’re either in the process of failing or you’ve already failed and you just don’t know about it.
I don’t mean to suggest that list marketing will not work for you. Don’t get me wrong. What I’m getting at is if you go about it the wrong way, you are going to run into the eight common problems that I am going to discuss below.
You need to be aware of these common problems and prepare for them properly. If not, I’m sorry to say it’s only a matter of time until you fail. You put in all this time, effort and money only to end up with very little to show for you. Learn to spot these problems early on, prepare them and actively work around them if you want to succeed.
You’re all excited about this niche that you came up with. You think that this niche is completely new or you think that everybody and their dog would love this niche. Whatever the case may be, you put up a mailing list targeting that niche, and nothing happens.
You put up a nice squeeze page. You’ve set up amazing updates. You’ve even pumped tons of traffic. You’ve even paid for lots of traffic to that list. For the life of you, nothing happens.
Let me clue you in on one central fact: Just because a list niche is hot doesn’t mean it is. The old idea of “build it and they will come” is a surefire way for a list to fail. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles you pack into your list business, you’re not going to make it.
I’m sure you’ve come across squeeze pages with all sorts of technology packed into it. I am of course talking about the scrolling videos, the text that seems to read your mind. I’m also referring to squeeze pages promoted by ads that seem to follow you on Facebook. Have you ever had the experience of visiting a website not buying anything and then going on Facebook to see ads for that site?
This is all amazing technology. There’s definitely a lot of sales potential here. You pack all of this into your squeeze page, your sales funnel and your content. Unfortunately, after a tremendous of time, effort, energy and money, very few people sign up.
You can’t, for the life of you, figure out what went wrong. Everything looks right. The squeeze page looks extremely professional. All the technology is working. What happened?
Fact: Squeeze page flash does not necessarily mean it will vacuum up subscribers.
Just because it looks good to you and it has the right technology doesn’t automatically mean people would sign up. People still need to be sold. They still need to be persuaded. You still have to answer that classic question every single one of us constantly asks: “What’s in it for me?”
This is a very common problem. A lot of marketers think that they just need to tap into the right traffic base, pump that traffic to their squeeze page and they will laugh all the way to the bank. As you can well imagine this hardly happens.
One of the biggest problems is the definition of “the right traffic”. I’m willing to bet that if you ask the average, run-off-the-mill online marketer what “the right traffic” really is, they would tell you that it’s all about cheap paid traffic. This is a serious problem. Just because you can access cheap Facebook traffic doesn’t necessarily that traffic will convert. There are several steps missing in this logic.
Unfortunately, too many would-be list marketing millionaires put up squeeze page after squeeze page, and blast these with traffic only to end up with a financial catastrophe. I’m not going to mince words here. If you’ve just put up a squeeze page that is untried, untested and unproven and pour expensive paid traffic on it, you are wasting your time. Seriously.
What does “expensive” mean? Anything that you paid money for. Seriously. Even if you can get traffic at one cent a click, that is still one-cent-a-click too expensive. You’re doing it wrong. You need to take a few steps back.
A lot of list marketers get really excited the moment they check their e-mail service
statistics page. They get pumped up that a huge number of people are signing up to their list.
What if I told you even a list of one million people is not guaranteed to put extra dollars in your bank account? I know that sounds crazy but this happens all the time. This is not an outlier. This is not a one-off thing.
This happens all the time to list marketers from all four corners of the globe. They all share the same problem. They focus on volume. I’m telling you if you say the wildest claims to a wide range of people, you are probably going to get a lot of those people to click on your link or enter their e-mail address into your mailing list form. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they would actually be interested in the e-mails you are sending.
Sadly, too many list marketers have completely missed the memo on this central fact. They focus so much on volume that they end up compiling a massive list of people who really have no clue on what the mailing list’s updates are all about. Put simply, they attracted the wrong people to their list.
Depending on your list marketing software, this can actually put you in the poor house.
Mailing lists normally attract members by offering some sort of incentive. Maybe it’s a book, booklet or a cheat sheet. It could even be a video. Whatever the case may be a large number of people are not going to automatically sign up for your list just because you say they should. You have to give them something to make it worth their while.
Again, people are always asking “What’s in it for me?” You’re probably asking this question yourself. Naturally, marketers offer all sorts of incentives for people to sign up to their list. In exchange for the prospect’s e-mail, they get some sort of report, booklet, digital content or even software.
It may well turn out that the incentive that you gave out is the best value. If you ask a thousand people regarding the quality of the stuff that you’re giving out and they agree, this doesn’t make your problem go away. Your problem is you need these people to not only sign up but to buy stuff from the updates you send to your list. In their minds, these are two totally different things and that is part of the answer to your problem.
There are too many lists that are essentially sale zombies. Seriously. They don’t really generate any sales. They have a lot of people. They talk about the right things. They seem to be active but people are not doing the number one thing that would put dollars in your bank account: clicking on sales links.
What went wrong? You have a massive list. You have a lot of people who signed up for your freebie. A lot of them are actually interested in your updates but, for some reason, they’re not buying anything. This is a very serious problem because list marketers who encounter this are almost there. They almost realize the full financial potential of list marketing but, for some reason, people are not buying.
Fact: Traffic and Volume Ultimately Don’t Matter, Sales Do
Don’t get caught up on how many people click on your links from Facebook. Don’t get too excited when people sign up to your list. Don’t get too pumped up when you wake up one day when you see a list with a hundred thousand members. Those numbers do not mean anything if they don’t translate to the only number that counts: sales conversions.
Traffic doesn’t put food on your table, sales do. Reputation doesn’t pay your bills, sales do. You might have an amazing squeeze page that does a truly fascinating job of pumping up your freebies for people to sign up but unless sales happen, you’re just wasting your time.
I’ve seen this problem firsthand. In fact, this has happened to me early in my list-marketing career. I would send out all sorts of content, get people pumped on all sorts of online messaging platforms to get people to sign to my list. All those promotions worked. People beat a path to my squeeze page. There were days where I was signing up thousands of people to my list.
However, none of that mattered because at the end of the month, I was still struggling to pay the rent. At the end of the month, I was scrounging around where to get the money to pay for my electricity and Internet bills. What went wrong?
It turns out that the vast majority, and I’m talking about over 95% of the people who got on my list and stayed on it, did not open my e-mails. This really hit me like a ton of bricks. I was doing everything the right way.
If you’re reading this and you think you have everything figured out with list marketing, chances are quite high that you are suffering from this same problem. Be aware that this is an issue. Just because people do not unsubscribe doesn’t automatically mean that they are interested enough in what your list has to say.
Pay attention to open rate. If people stay on your list but they’re not opening any e-mails, there is a serious problem. This is a major red flag. In fact, if you remain blind to this or deliberately ignore it, this can drain you of cash sooner rather than later.
I remember the first time I put up a mailing list. I had this amazing idea of what a squeeze page looked like. I also got really excited about the giveaway that I’m going to offer to my potential list members. This was all based on what I thought they would like.
I’m very big on the color yellow. I’m also a big fan of certain characters from the 1980s. I used all these design notes and hired an expert graphic designer from a freelance platform to create a squeeze page that I thought was the best thing since sliced bread. In my mind this was the online marketing equivalent of the Mona Lisa or the Great Pyramids of Egypt. It was monumental.
I definitely spent quite a bit of time, effort and emotional energy getting everything together. In fact, I remember bouncing back graphics, layouts and everything else to the people I outsourced the design to. I wanted everything to be perfect.
Sure enough, when I started promoting it, people clicked on my links. People visited my squeeze page. I was able to connect to their needs. I was able to say the right thing to the right people to produce the right action, which is a visit to my squeeze page.
Unfortunately, once they got to my squeeze page, for the life of me, it wouldn’t do its job. I would be lucky if ten people signed up to my list after I pumped my page with 2000 visitors.
It turns out that my squeeze page was being visited by people who are actually interested in what I have to offer. That’s not the issue. They saw eye to eye with me in terms of the problem they’re trying to solve.
The big challenge was my squeeze was sticking out like a sore thumb. It looked so different from my competitors’ squeeze pages. It talked about the common problem my competitors were addressing in such a weird and unusual way that my visitors simply did not know what to make of my squeeze page. I suppose they wanted to join, but they couldn’t quite connect the dots.
Sticking out like a sore thumb in your niche might be a serious issue. There’s a reason why your competitors’ pages seem to look alike. Here’s a hint: It’s not laziness.
This is probably the most frustrating problem any list marketer would ever have. It doesn’t matter how many years you have under your belt. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are. If you get this problem, you would be justified for wanting to pull your hair out.
It’s as if you got a horse through a desert valley, up a mountain through treacherous jungles to the river that you wanted to drink from. By the time you move heaven and hell to get there, the horse suddenly stops. It wouldn’t drink a drop. Talk about frustrating.
You solve all the problems listed above only to end up here. What’s really frustrating about all this is that you were able to attract people who are truly interested in your list. They are active. They are opening your stuff. They are reading your e-mails.
What’s going on? What went wrong? You even get a large percentage of them to click on your sales links. Your e-mail is working perfectly except for one thing. They’re not buying anything.
I learned the solution to this problem the hard way. I had to wrap my mind around some key facts though. Excellent sales copy can only take you so far. An awesome squeeze page can only take you so far. Great updates packed with content can do a lot of things except one thing.
It turns out I was neglecting one extremely important factor. What makes this problem so tricky is that it hides in plain sight. Unless you know what to look for, it’s very hard to solve. In fact, it’s very easy to assume that this problem would take care of itself. It doesn’t.
