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2 Table of Contents List Building Mistakes to Avoid... 4 Mistake 1: Not Using a Good Autoresponder Service or System... 6 Mistake 2: Poor Squeeze Pages Mistake 3: Failing to Split Test Mistake 4: Failing to Build Brand Awareness Mistake 5: Irrelevant Products Mistake 6: Failing to Deliver High Quality Content Mistake 7: Letting Your Lists Run Cold Mistake 8: Failing to Segment Mistake 9: Copy and Paste Fanatics Mistake 10: Failing to Monetize You Are Not Alone

3 Copyright Notice: 2014 IM Success Center. All Rights Reserved. This publication is copyright protected. This is only for personal use. No part of this publication may be, including but not limited to, reproduced, in any form or medium, stored in a data retrieval system or transmitted by or through any means, without prior written permission from the publisher. Legal action will be pursued if this is breached. Disclaimer Notice: Please note the information contained within this document is for educational purposes only. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaging in rendering legal, financial or professional advice. The publisher disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information. The publisher assumes no liability for errors, omissions, or inadequacies in the information contained herein or from the interpretations thereof. The publisher specifically disclaims any liability from the use or application of the information contained herein or from the interpretations thereof

4 List Building Mistakes to Avoid When it comes to making money online, developing a targeted subscriber base of active and repeat customers is an essential ingredient in the recipe to success. We have all heard the phrase The money is in the list. Well, that is partially right. Let me modify that phrase to The money is in a responsive list that actually opens your s and wants to hear from you Ok, not as catchy, but you get the idea. There is a huge difference between a responsive list and a non-responsive list. Having a responsive list in your arsenal will instantly maximize your outreach, while making it easier to make money with less work involved. For example, with a good mailing list you can simply create broadcasts that go out to your entire subscriber base that feature a blend of high quality information and content with promotional based offers. You can then include affiliate promotions for products and services that you are interested in advertising, as well as gaining valuable feedback from your subscribers on the different types of products that they are interested in. This information will help you develop your own product line of high quality, in demand products with a ready-made customer base waiting to purchase your releases. It s an exceptionally easy thing to build a list, even if you are a complete newcomer to the world of online marketing and business. The trouble comes when people approach list building in such as a way as to hinder their chances of actually being able to fully monetize their mailing list

5 So, I decided to tackle the most common mistakes made by 95% of all marketers and I will show you how to fix them as well. By the time you have finished this brief report you will find that you can take immediate action and see an instant difference in the profits you generate from your lists. To your future success, - 5 -

6 Mistake 1: Not Using a Good Autoresponder Service or System One of the most important steps you ll ever make as an marketer is choosing to power your mailing lists by using a reliable autoresponder tool or service. There are pros and cons to using a remotely hosted autoresponder service. However, a big issue for most marketers is the price and amount of control. The bigger your list the more it costs to host and send s to your list. When you have a huge list it can cost $100s or even $1000s a month. Not only that, but your list and a lot of your business is controlled and managed by a third party service that can turn off your ability to send s at a whim. Imagine getting a notice like this, which I got last year from MailChimp with one of my niche lists of about 13,200 people. Now, before I share this notice, I should state that this was a very high-quality list. All people on this list were very responsive, were double opted in and my average open rate was 20% and CTR was about 10% on every

7 Good afternoon, As a bulk delivery service, a huge part of our job is providing great deliverability for all our customers. ISPs and spam filters are becoming more sensitive to certain types of keywords and content. Keeping this in mind, MailChimp is not able to serve as your provider, because the content associated with your industry conflicts with our acceptable use policy. For direct questions regarding our acceptable use policy and the types of content that aren't supported, please visit our Acceptable Use policy under Prohibited Content: Nothing personal against your content or industry; there are just some very strict spam filters and ISP rules that we have to comply with to maintain the best possible sending environment. These filters are becoming increasingly sensitive to certain keywords because some industries tend to generate greater than average complaint rates (legit or not) with their s. A risk that we unfortunately cannot take. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. The account is open so that you may log in anytime to back up data. If you have any questions related to billing, please contact billing@mailchimp.com. Regards, (NAME REOVED FOR PRIVACY) MailChimp.com / System Compliance It s not just limited to one service. They all hold your business in their hands. Take a look at this example from one of my students. As you can guess, I was not happy and neither was my student and we were in very different industries

8 If I moved that list to another service I would have to import it and in most cases they would then re- them again to make sure they wanted to be on the new service and I would have lost most of those leads in that transfer process. With many of these services, you are not in control and no matter how good your reputation is, if you are making a lot of money from your list, that income can be destroyed at any time. That being said, remote services can be very convenient and provide very good tools and stats. We use quite a few different services, as we like to test different setups to see what works best. However, we developed our own systems that run on our own hosts where we control our lists, can manage imports, get the stats and have all the benefits of a remote service without out all the negatives

9 With our own autoresponder system, IMSC Rapid Mailer, under our control we now save $1000s every month and use remote delivery services that we can swap and change at any time without worrying about the whims of a 3 rd party company. 1) Increased Deliverability There is no sense in spending time crafting a high quality broadcast or if no one is able to receive it. By setting up your mailing list with a good autoresponder system like IMSC Rapid Mailer or service, you can rest assured that your s will make it to their destination. The plugin we developed, called Rapid Mailer, integrates with top services like Amazon s incredible Simple Service (or SES for short) and other services such as SendGrid, etc. For example, with Amazon SES you can send 10,000 s for just $1 and pay as you go. It s their job to maximize deliverability rates and help you connect to your subscriber base quickly and easily

10 Deliverability is a critical factor and the more delivered, the more opens, the more clicks and obviously the more profits you get in return. That being said, even your own host can send just fine with the right set up that and most hosts already have everything you need. 2) Safeguarding Your Mailing Lists All good autoresponder systems like IMSC Rapid Mailer offer frequent backups of your database, in the event it becomes corrupted or inaccessible. This is extremely important, because the last thing you would want to do is spend the time and energy developing a massive list of subscribers, only to lose it all. Further, a good autoresponder system will also handle all requests to unsubscribe, which helps you comply with Can Spam regulations and provides you with the ability to write as many newsletter messages as you wish, and set up the dates and times when you want them to be published. This means that you can write all of your messages at once and have them trickle out to your subscribers on specific dates. Of course, we do all of that with IMSC Rapid Mailer as well as being compliant and having full control over your mailing list for the long-term helps you protect your long-term profits

11 3) Important Features If you are interested in maximizing your open rate and overall response rates, you need to utilize the different features available within your autoresponder account including your average open rate, opt-out rate, response rate and whether any complaints have been sent in regarding your recent mailing. Keeping a pulse on your subscriber base and how well they respond to your broadcasts will help you improve your mailings and tailor your campaigns so that they will directly communicate with those who have subscribed

12 You can review detailed statistics for your entire newsletter by logging into your autoresponder administration panel. Monitoring statistics like open rates, click through rates and other statistics helps you understand how your list reacts to different s and what triggers them to act. One mistake many marketers make is not paying attention to those statistics and can lead to losing a ton of money

13 Mistake 2: Poor Squeeze Pages One of the most important elements of a successful marketing campaign begins with a well-constructed squeeze page. Your squeeze page is the doorway into your marketing system and if it fails to convert visitors into subscribers you will struggle to build your lists. Your squeeze page needs to be very clean and simple. You want people who visit your website to be given ONE option only; to subscribe to your newsletter. This means that you need to minimize any external links, and really emphasize your opt-in form. You also want to limit the graphics that you use on your squeeze page so that it loads quickly and doesn t distract your visitor from your objective: getting them on your mailing list. In order to create an effective squeeze page that encourages visitors to subscribe to your list, consider the different types of incentives that you can offer. When listing the benefits you need to be clear and concise. Make sure they understand what is in it for them, and what you are offering that will assist them. Remember: solve a problem, address an issue, offer a way to save time, money, relationships, etc. When creating the body content for your squeeze page, consider underlining, highlighting or colorizing important information so that you can draw attention to the areas of your squeeze page that you want your website visitors to pay special attention to. Savvy marketers feature a bribe on their squeeze pages that provides a special offer in exchange for a visitor subscribing to their lists

14 You could offer: Free Report or ebooks Free Designs or Templates Free Graphic Packages Free Video Guides or Tutorials Free Sample Chapter (from a paid product) Free e-courses, Newsletter, Magazine This a very effective method of building your list. However, you need to make sure that whatever you decide to offer is directly targeted towards your niche market. Make sure that your squeeze page looks professional with a clean template and simple layout. If you aren t familiar with HTML and editing code, you will find it easier to purchase a pre-designed squeeze page template that you can easily edit and customize to suit your needs. For example, if you are using WordPress there are many different plugins and themes that allow incredible squeeze page creation and lead generation calls to action. We actually have some available with the launch of IMSC Rapid Mailer as an add-on. One very easy way to construct a great offer is to obtain some PLR (Private Label Rights) products in your niche that you can rebrand or have a report created for you for your niche. Once you have that, get a great cover created for it. You could outsource that on Fiverr, Elance, Odesk, etc. if you are not great at graphics and use that as your free offer. You could even find some PLR and then create some videos from it by creating a presentation based on that information. We have done that many times in different niches and the response has been fantastic

15 Mistake 3: Failing to Split Test Split testing squeeze pages is an important element of a successful marketing campaign. Regardless of how well you design your site, or how thoroughly you analyze each section of your squeeze page, there is no way that you will be able to accurately predict how well your visitors will respond to your offer without comparatively testing alternative layouts. One easy method of testing your pages and evaluating conversion rates is by using Google s Content Experiments or a good link tracker system. Google s Content Experiments is a free tool that will help you run simple split tests of any websites you own. You can sign up for a free account at: When split testing, start with only one element at a time. For example, if you change the headline on your squeeze page, leave everything else in its original state until you determine whether tweaking your headline helps with conversion rates. Since you are split testing different layouts and overall structure, you don t have to get it right the first time, as long as you consistently work to tweak your copy until you are able to significantly maximize conversion rates. Once you have determined what headline works best, change another element of your squeeze page, such as the color scheme, opt-in box frame, or summary of your offer

16 Always test the original against the variation and give it enough time to accurately determine whether your changes have increased your subscription rate before making any permanent changes. Google s Content Experiments tool will provide you with enough information to be able to quickly analyze and evaluate your progress

17 Mistake 4: Failing to Build Brand Awareness It s important to build brand awareness and develop a relationship with your subscriber base, because the more that your list members trust you and the product recommendations that you make, the easier it will be to convert those subscribers into repeat customers. Every message and broadcast that you send to your subscriber base should directly represent you. You should also register your own domain names and set up professional hosting accounts that can house your squeeze pages and websites. It s important that you establish an online presence and give people clear direction as to how they can reach you or find out more about you. There are many different providers available online that offer both domain names and hosting accounts including You can set up an account to host your site for as little as ten dollars a month. Ultimately, you want your list loving you, respecting you and trusting the information you send them. That way, they engage with you and take the direction you give them and act

18 Mistake 5: Irrelevant Products Every you send to your list should directly work towards strengthening your brand s recognition for value. This means that you must be extremely careful with the kinds of products you promote as well as the quality of the products you endorse. Whether you are the developer or not, if you give it your stamp of approval, your subscriber base will hold you accountable, should the product or service fail to deliver. You should therefore always review each product or offer you are planning to promote so that you can not only stand behind it, but also can directly answer any questions that your subscribers may have about the offer. You also need to make sure that the products and services you are advertising are relevant to your newsletter s overall theme or topic. If your subscriber originally signed up for your newsletter in order to receive information on dog training. they aren t likely going to be responsive (or impressed) if you begin to send out content relating to online marketing. Keep your s focused and relevant. If you end up venturing into a new niche or are interested in exploring other markets, you should work towards creating individual segmented lists for each niche. Another factor to consider is making sure you know the reputation of the creator of the product or service you may promote. I fall foul of this one many years ago when I was first building my core list. I was promoting a huge product that I thought was a perfect match to my list. I had terrible backlash because there was a massive public scandal around the creator of the product I was promoting that I had not heard of. The bottom line, do your homework before you mail

19 Mistake 6: Failing to Deliver High Quality Content This is perhaps one of the biggest (and most fatal) mistakes that both new and seasoned marketers make when running their list campaigns. While the objective of building lists is to effectively monetize them, you need to earn the right to send out promotional based s. This starts with first building a relationship with your list by offering high quality content, free tools, resources and materials that are helpful and well received

20 Once you have worked towards connecting with your subscriber base, you need to maintain that relationship by focusing on a good balance of solid, high quality content with any promotional s you send out. One thing you may notice we do is promoting a lot of our high-quality blog content. We post about 3-5 powerful blog posts per week and we send out notices out to our full mailing list with those posts. This has dramatically boosted our customer and subscriber engagement. People love our content and they are ready to open every we send. In fact, one way of maximizing open rates and response from your subscriber base is to over-deliver on quality content even during times when you don t have a scheduled launch or affiliate program that you are planning to promote. People tend to notice habits, and if they discover that the only time you seem interested in contacting them is when you have something to sell or promote, you will quickly lose any trust and credibility that you may have earned from your previous communication. Everyone has that annoying family member who turns up only when he wants money. Sending out quality content and resources stops you being that person. Keep this in mind whenever you create a new campaign or broadcast. Consider whether your truly offers value and is written so that it genuinely benefits your subscriber base. If you build a solid relationship and brand with your subscribers, you ll subsequently build a very responsive and loyal customer base

21 Mistake 7: Letting Your Lists Run Cold You absolutely need to focus on staying in constant communication with your subscriber base. This doesn t mean that you necessarily have to them every day, but what you want to do is consider creating a posting schedule so that you can get into the habit of connecting with your subscribers regularly, while demonstrating consistency. Your subscribers will then begin to expect your s on certain days and by doing this; you will begin to see a dramatic increase in your open rates. The more consistent you are with your broadcasts, the easier it will be to condition your subscribers to accept promotional based s and advertisements in between mailings containing free content and resources. If your list does run cold, you can warm them back up again by creating a series of high-quality content and freebies to re-engage them and rebuild that trust. Any list can be reinvigorated and warmed up if you put the effort in. Don t hit that list with a promotion until you feel that they are back to being warm and ready. One case study we are doing for the launch of IMSC Rapid Mailer is a case study in how to warm up a cold list. We are doing this with a very cold list (You may have even been on this list!) that was kicked off of MailChimp the list we mentioned earlier. In this case study (Video 2) we will show you just how we warmed that list up again and made it very responsive indeed

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23 Mistake 8: Failing to Segment Segmenting your lists does more than maximize your chances of having your s delivered successfully. List segmenting will also help you effectively communicate and target specific subscribers, increasing response rate and helping you create successful broadcasts. For example, if you developed a mailing list catering to the Internet Marketing crowd, it s likely that your subscribers come from different backgrounds, are currently at different levels of their marketing training or are interested in various areas of the Internet Marketing industry. By segmenting your lists, you can create content based on each group s interests and skill levels as well as develop products and services around each subscriber category. For example, we have many students at many different levels and interested in different sectors of the industry. Some are more focused on SEO and tools that automate SEO and others are more interested in Social Media Marketing. So, my SEO list will respond better to SEO offers and my social media group will react much better to Facebook tools and training. You can create different lists within the same niche to segment people so that they are all self-contained and ready to mail to with the most relevant offers that maximize your profits. Another example is segmenting by purchasers and freebie seekers. If you send an offer to people who have purchased a product before, they are much more likely to buy from you again

24 However, a list full of freebie seekers may need a lot more convincing to purchase from you. So, build a better relationship and separate the buyers from the freebie seekers as soon as you can. You can also separate by spending level. For example, someone who bought a $7 product is not as likely to purchase a $1,997 product as someone who has purchased a $997 product before. Separating your high-dollar customers from your lower-dollar subscribers can dramatically increase your overall conversions. At the end of the day, open rates and click-throughs are a rough guide for performance. Your real metric for success is your ROI and profits. The bottom line is the bottom line

25 Mistake 9: Copy and Paste Fanatics When it comes to promoting affiliate products to your list, you need to avoid the common lazy marketer tactic of utilizing existing affiliate resources to promote products and services to your list. Instead, create customized s that truly connect with your target audience and speak directly to your subscriber base. Since the majority of affiliate marketers will be busy using the pre-made content offered by the merchant, you will be able to stand apart from the crowd by simply developing your own unique promotional based content. Besides, you know your subscriber base and what they are likely going to respond to, and by crafting s that really touch on the things that are most important to them, you will be able to maximize the results of every broadcast. People are used to the way you phrase things and your writing style. So, they react very well to custom written s, headlines, calls to action, etc

26 Mistake 10: Failing to Monetize While it s very important to provide your list with fresh, useful and free content, resources and information, you are in the business of marketing so that you can build a profitable business and you need to get into the habit of monetizing your list right from the start. Here are a few ways to quickly monetize your lists: 1) Paid Mailing Lists This is something you can only do with IMSC Rapid Mailer. Imagine being able to charge a small fee to be on your mailing list? That is INSTANT monetization. All you have to do is deliver great content on a consistent basis (easily done, just outsource it) and you can rake in recurring income month after month. No other autoresponder service or system offers that feature, but we thought it was a no-brainer, so we added it

27 2) Affiliate Products You can promote third party products to your list, where you will earn a commission each time one of your subscribers purchases the product using your referral link. To begin you can use Clickbank.com, JVZoo (possible instant commissions), PayDotCom or other similar affiliate networks. With these resources alone, you will have an unlimited number of products available to promote, covering dozens of niche markets. 3) Sell Advertising Space There are many benefits of offering ad space within your newsletter, including the fact that you can set your own price structure based on the number of subscribers you currently have. As the exposure to your list grows, you will be able to offer potential advertisers and sponsors access to your list at higher prices! Eventually, you can also consider selling solo mailings, (where you sell the right to send one dedicated to an advertiser s product, broadcasted to your list) at a very high price, once your list has grown enough to make it worth their while. When offering ad space within your newsletter, you are in full control of the types of advertisements that you accept. If you currently have your own product line, you could avoid promoting competing products. In order to set up a successful advertising program, you will need to provide detailed statistics and demographics regarding your subscriber base. I recommend building your list to at least 1,000 subscribers prior to offering advertising space so that you are able to offer greater value to potential advertisers who want to maximize exposure for their products and services

28 3) Sell Private Label Content Private label material is pre-created content that is available for resale, either with transferable rights (where you are allowed to transfer the right to sell the product to your customers) or with personal rights where only you are allowed to sell or distribute it. What you want to do is purchase high quality reports, articles, ebooks and other material that are relevant to your list. Then, spend some time re-packaging the content so that it s an improved version of the original, and customize it, so that it showcases your personal style and brand. You should also focus on purchasing private label content developed by writers who are offering only a limited number of licenses, which will dramatically increase the value of the material and minimize the amount of competition that are offering the same content. Regardless of where you purchase private label material, you should always spend time going over the material, tweaking and improving it and increasing the quality of the information whenever possible. This doesn t have to be a time consuming process, and if you have purchased quality content you can easily re-package it just by editing the title, adding in a foreword, revising chapter titles, and adding in an introduction and conclusion page

29 4) Create Your Own Products With direct access to potential customers, you already know the types of products or services they are interested in, so the next logical step is to create your very own product or service, catering to your existing subscriber base. Consider surveying your subscribers to determine what types of products or services they would be interested in and create a secondary squeeze page so that subscribers can choose to join your new newsletter to receive information on when your product is ready to launch. This will help you determine the overall demand for specific products prior to creating them. This way you'll know your products will be a hit with your list and you'll make lots of sales!

30 You Are Not Alone We have covered a lot of different mistakes that all marketers make and 95% of marketers are still making one or more of these mistakes. So, if you recognize that you are making one of these mistakes, don t worry, you are not alone. A lot of these I personally learned the hard way but once I applied these fixes in our business we literally tripled our income. Now, as you have determined, we have an awesome product that we are launching on April 8 th that addresses a lot of the problems here. We built it to do just that. Let me tell you a little bit more about it in this video