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How To Make Money Using Only Your Opt-in List

06 2008 Monday

By Yunis Khan in Featured

An opt-in mailing list is usually THE essential component when it comes to recording and converting prospects who have expressed an interest in your products. Without an opt-in list any internet business will struggle to fully convert all the prospects that may buy its products.

Therefore the first part in creating a successful internet business is to create your opt-in list - we will not be dealing with that subject in this article. This subject is dealt with in my article “How To Build Your Business with An Opt-In List That Works” - if you would like me to send you this article then please email me.

This article deals with how you can use your opt-in list to make money and up sell higher ticket items to your prospects and customers.

An opt-in list is crucial to 99% of internet businesses, even for small or new sites the opt-in list can make a highly significant difference to the sites income. Use the opt-in properly and it will pay you handsomely.

The opt-in list allows you to establish and maintain communication with your prospects or customers. One point to make here is that a prospect is someone who has enquired about your products without actually purchasing them. Once the prospect has purchased a product from you then they become a customer.

You can use your opt-in list to send information about your products, special offers, newsletters, whatever you think your prospects or customers want and need. Remember your objective here is to get emotional buy in for your products or services. By providing them information, for example via newsletters, you are building up your companies trust and the more your prospect trusts you the more likely they are to purchase from you.

The whole point of an opt-in list is that your prospect has given you permission to send them information on your company and products. This effectively means you have been invited by the prospect to tell them about your products as they have already expressed an interest in what you have to offer. Therefore you cannot be accused of spam mail.

Newsletters are a great way to keep contact with your list and provide useful and informative information to your prospects. They also encourage your list to visit your site regularly and check for new content. As we all know content is king, if your prospects like your content then you are already more then half way to converting them to customers. Newsletters are also a great way to build your list.

The most effective and easiest way to contact your list via email is through the use of an autoresponder. There are many on the market today, most internet businesses use Aweber as do I and I recommend it.

You can set up your autoresponder to send messages to your prospects that have enquired about your products, its very simple to do. Your objective here is to appeal to your prospects emotions as we all know that when making a decision to purchase it is usually driven by emotion first and then justified by logic later.

I would recommend if you are new to internet businesses and to email follow-up messages then you get an experienced sales copy professional to help you compose these messages. It is well known that a prospect needs to be contacted at least 7 times before they will buy - so follow-up is key and the easiest way is through using your autoresponder.

Typically, most internet businesses try and get their prospects to buy something that is relatively cheap, lets say under $40. For most prospects this should not be a problem. Once the prospect has bought from you they become your customer and are now very valuable to you.

They have proved they are willing to get their credit card out and purchase from you. This differentiates them from prospects in a real way - You can now try and up sell your customers higher ticket items. This is where most internet companies make most of their money so you can see how important it is to know who your customers are and what they are interested in purchasing.

Once your list has grown you can make extra money not only by selling your own products and services but by using the following methods, obviously the larger your list the more money you can make:

a) Create and maintain affiliations with other companies that are involved in the same industry or sector as yourself. These other companies provide links on their products and services that you can add onto your site or newsletter. Every click made on the affiliates link will mean money for you.

b) Again by establishing affiliate deals you can ask for a percentage of sales made by your list purchasing products from your affiliates. Once a member on your list clicks through to the affiliates website and purchases goods, this is recorded and you get a percentage of the value of the purchase.

c) Sell advertising space. Many companies will be prepared to pay for banners and other similar adverts on your newsletters or even your website. The amount you can charge will vary on the size of the advert and how many unique users visit your website or how big your opt-in list is. I would strongly advise against selling or renting out your list - it will damage your reputation with your customers and lead to a long term loss in sales and will result in a shorter list.

d) You can sell information products in the form of e-books or even articles that you have written. There is great demand for information products on the internet, many people are willing to pay to gain knowledge. With the trust you created with your list, they will be much more likely to buy from you than someone they have not dealt with.

e) Use your list to its full potential - get your list to recommend you to their friends, family and business associates. You could use recommend-a-friend and offer some sort of free gift for doing so. An increase in your opt-in list will pay handsome dividends now and in the future.

Remember your list is the life blood of your business - look after it, take care of it, nurture it, make it grow and it will reward you handsomely.

Yunis Khan - I have been involved in Internet Businesses for the past 5 years and have gained some valuable experience, sometimes bitter, sometimes with fantastic results. I hope my experiences can help others become successful Internet Business owners.

SEO Contests Are Gaining Industry Respect

06 2008 Monday

By Bill Platt in Featured

Search Engine Optimization companies have been around as long as there have been search engines. In the early days, I ignored SEO contests as a tasteless attempt to spam up the search engines, especially when I saw target search terms such as: “nigritude ultramarine”, “seraphim proudleduck”, and “v7ndotcom elursrebmem”. But, my initial attitudes towards SEO contests have changed.

The first SEO contest was the “nigritude ultramarine” competition, and it offered an iPod as the grand prize for the contest. That contest was actually offered by the Search Guild. This contest ran for 60 days. At the end of the competition, whichever websites held the top two listings in the Google search results, for the target keyword phrase, would win the top two prizes.

The conceptual purpose of the SEO contest is to bring the sharpest minds in search optimization to the table and give them a chance to prove themselves on a level playing field against their top competitors. At the end of the contest, most contest sponsors ask the winners to share some of their secrets for success. By design, it will produce two outcomes: those who really know their stuff get to shine in a public spotlight, and it may help industry practitioners improve their technique.

All was happy in the SEO community, until they saw the “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” contest, which was offering cash prizes. Many people felt that the sponsor of that campaign acted in poor taste when he admitted that he was putting up the money for the contest, on the premise of actually driving link popularity to his own website. Read more about that controversy here.

These days, it does not seem to be such a bad thing for people to sponsor SEO contests that help pass link popularity back to their own websites. In fact, the practice seems to be pretty commonplace. Personally, I don’t see it as a bad thing really, since the person putting up the money for the contest is seldom a person with the simplest of altruistic motives.

While the Search Guild was no slouch, I did not actually pay attention to SEO contests, until which time I had seen that Search Engine Journal was playing the game. All of a sudden, I started paying attention.

In early June of 2008, I was browsing the Digital Point forums and I saw a mention of a new SEO contest. So, I popped in for a quick look.

I searched the target keyword phrase in Google and realized that the contest was so new that only fifty web pages were competing at that time. One of the top ranking posts was one made by the Search Engine Journal, so I read their post. I had been expecting them to be slamming the practice, but I realized that they were playing the game along with everyone else.

Of course, I have an axe of my own to grind. I have told people for years that if they used article marketing smartly, then they could successfully utilize article marketing to influence Google, Yahoo and MSN’s search listing for specific keywords. For a time, I had even operated a SEO link building service at http://www.linksandtraffic.com for the purpose of selling folks a service that enabled them to get the same kind of ranking value I was getting for my own websites.

Links and Traffic was a successful enterprise until which time Google’s Matt Cutts started to question “paid links” and to inform the Internet marketing community that “paid links” were a big no-no in Google’s search algorithms. But, customers never really understood that Google views links derived from article marketing differently, than links purchased on high PageRank pages, solely for the purpose of buying PageRank value.

I left Links and Traffic in place, but I took my own link building services off the table, until which time the marketplace began to understand that links derived from article marketing were different from links that were outright purchased. If I were to tell you how many inbound links I have successfully derived from article marketing for my websites (as evidenced in my Google Webmaster Tools console), you would fall over. If you understood how many keywords I rank for in the top search engines, you would probably scream.

So, I had my own axe to grind. I saw the Blackhat Fish contest to be a perfect opportunity to showcase how I actually practice what I preach, and deliver what I promise by moving my websites up in the search results for my target keywords, utilizing article marketing as a primary tool in my SEO arsenal and SEO philosophy.

We are still a couple of weeks from the conclusion of this particular contest, and my full rollout is still in progress, but I am bouncing between page one and page two of Google’s search results, against what is at this time 233,000 results for this keyword phrase in Google.

Some SEO gurus have told me for years that they think I am full of crap, but the proof is in the pudding. If I am so full of crap, as some of these so-called experts would have you believe, then how is it that my blog post titled, “Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish For Links or Die Trying“, is holding its own against some of the most influential SEO companies on the Internet? Check the Google link above to see how I am doing against the professionals… The proof is in the pudding.

If you fancy yourself to be good at search engine optimization, or if you are like me and you want to test your own skills against the big boys, then bookmark the http://www.seocontests.info website and visit often enough to keep up on what is going on in the SEO contest world. Of course, not all SEO contests get posted on this website, so keep an eye to the various forums as well, to catch the news of upcoming and current SEO contests.

Wouldn’t it be so cool if we the people could outrank the professionals in a few of these SEO contests? I don’t actually think I will win this competition, but it would be more than awesome if at the end of this contest, I was sitting on page one of the search results, while all of the pro’s are sitting scratching their heads as to how they were outperformed by a person they have so many times referred to as an amateur.

At the end of the day, it really does not matter to me if I win this competition or if I gain the respect of my peers. What matters to me is that I know how I can help “my” websites win in the search ranking game, for the keywords that matter to my business and my bottom line. In the long run, I will make much more money selling my products and services, than I ever will make winning a single SEO contest. So, I am just going to keep doing what it is that I do to strengthen my own search rankings, and if I win a contest or two along the way, sweet.

About The Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article marketing to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article writing success that can be found at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html