Do you know that John Chow who makes $40000 every month from his blog was banned from Google’s search engine index for 3 years. But his traffic, reach and earnings only grew. What stopped John Chow from falling down the sky in a ball of flames? The reason he survived and the only solution to Panda proof your site is building an e-mail list. With the SEO parameters changing every time Google rolls out the next update from its garage there is nothing much you can do to secure your blog’s future than building an e-mail list. What happened to John is now happening with everyone who is running a site. Traffic is dropping for no reasons, the bots seem hard to please and every Tom Dick and Harry out there is firing SEO tricks. Now that I have convinced that you can’t survive without a list I will break it down to you how you should go about it.
George what’s an email list?
An e mail list is simply a list of people who have signed up for receiving e mails from you. They have given their full consent into receiving e mails from you. In order to get people into trusting them your e mail ids, you being a stranger, they need some strong reasons. What most internet marketers fill in as a reason is a freebie like an eBook or a course, to the person who consents to be in your list.
When you give a freebie related to your niche then you get a person who is actually interested in receiving more and we can capitalize on that. What you can do with your list is that you can send useful information like a great post that you have written and get repeat visitors and also relevant offers pertaining to them.
Yes all the people on your list will not respond to all the offers that you send but some of them will and if what you are asking them to buy is not pure shit they will buy more from you. Business is built on repeat customers.
The parable of the house built on rock v/s e mail marketing
If you have read the Bible then you might have read the story where two persons set on building a house. In case you haven’t read I will tell you the story. One person who saw the soft sand and the big sea facing him was overwhelmed with joy and decided to build his house there. It did not take much effort as the sand was soft and he easily made a home. The other person went above the hills and chose a rocky place for himself.
It was pure labour for it required an iron will to pitch his foundations on rock but he did it. For years the two persons lived happily one on sand and the other on rock. One day, the sky changed colours, the sea grew in fury and winds started howling. The wind and the rain lashed on both houses. The house built on sand could bear the good days but it wasn’t prepared for nature’s fury.
It washed away completely.
The rain, winds and other misfortunes landed on the house built on rock as well but it didn’t move an inch.
Building a blog on the foundation of e mail list is like building a house on rocks. It will stand anything. Google Panda, Penguin, dolphin, horse, caterpillar you name it. The reason is that with e mail marketing you are reaching a person’s core, that which is shared by only a select few.
Social media methods do work but the money is in the list. On social media a person is involved in multiple things has ; for Joe who has liked your page, checking which of his status updates has been liked by Mary is more important than the latest earth shattering offer you have.
But when it comes to e mail, since time immemorial people have either sent e mails or read e mails. E mail marketing gives exclusivity to your efforts.
The right way of building and keeping an e mail list
The most efficient manner of building a list is by offering something for free like a 17 page exclusive report on bringing traffic from Pinterest or a free course on how to blog better. It should look interesting that’s it. You can either write it yourself or give away a plr product( these are products which you can give to others for free no copyright issues). Lot of people use Aweber as their auto responder. For the first month they will charge you $1 and next month onwards $19, but its worth every penny. Sign up here
What it does is that it sends e mails to all the people on your list and 99.9% of the time they land on your inbox and not in the spam box. If you are offering a free course then Aweber will take care of the fact that the new members on your list will get the contents of only the course for the initial period and if you wish so some offer mails. The rest of the people will get what you are sending them newsletters, earth shattering offers etc. What I said above is the easiest and foremost step.
Keeping an e mail list is harder than adding a person to the list. You should never sound like a spammer. I will now discuss the lessons that I learnt from the masters of this trade. To know what to do with an e mail list I signed up for as many lists as possible and have been receiving e mails from them for the past 5 months.
This is what john chow, zac johnson and matt lyold did
You might think that these guys sent me the best offers on their cache. Wrong ! For the first few weeks all I got was excellent tips and advices on running a blog, inspirational content etc. I am so addicted to Matt Lyold’s mails that come what may I always read his e mails and a fact is that he makes $150k per month. Most of his e mails will have his story of how he started online and some of them will be about webinars. Basically I can’t figure what the hell he is trying to sell me, all his e mails are so good on the eyes that I can’t avoid any of them.
1.First send the most relevant info that can make the other person’s life, blog, health whatever is your niche better. Communicate to them personally. Its like if you want to have sex with your girl friend you should behave as if sex is the last thing on your mind
2. When you send good things to a person he has an unquenchable thirst to pay you back in the same manner.
3. Once you have built a relationship send valid offers to them
4. PROFITTT!
this is what the spammers did
I don’t know who they are but they have built a permanent spammy image on my head. I will never ever buy anything from them come what may. Even though what I did was an experiment and it required checking on both the spammers and good guys one fellow sent me 8 to 10 e mails on whatever offer came live anywhere on the planet. In deed I was so frustrated that I opted out of his list but only the opt out message would come. I was never really opted out. But boy I went to the settings tab and filtered his e mail id, name everything and put it over the permanent delete section. I won’t show him the courtesy of spam folder even.
The rest of the spammers sent me crap offers, pre built websites, turnkey business models etc. Initially I opened them but then they grazed the spam folder. I was so excited by one such fool proof method which cost $47 that I started counting my pennies for buying that. Luckily I did a Google search on the offers and found it to be a game of investing money on gamblers.
Result opt out!
I will not say the do’s and don’ts as I already told you about it in examples. This is how you keep a list and make the most out of it.
Speaking about list building do not forget to sign up to my list.
If you wish to know the exact step by step process of making money online by finding high traffic low competition niches then enter your email address below. I will send you my free ebook
Akos Fintor
Hey George,
No question,an email list is da business. It can save our asses if something goes wrong in the cyber space.
But as Mike Dillard puts it: The money is not in the list but in the relationship with that list.
cool post
Akos
Holly Jahangiri
Even rocks can wear, erode, and crumble – or be battered by the waves. 😉
It’s a good cautionary tale.
I haven’t found my traffic going down at all. In fact, my traffic’s up, bounce rate’s down (mostly – actually, it started fluctuating a lot when I changed my template), and life is good. My email list often asks, “When are you going to try to SELL us something??”
Well, now, that’s a problem…
George
well does your list really ask that. I should join your list then
Ehsan Ullah
Well, building email list is must for everyone. This is what as you said which will save your blog against the animal updates from Google. If you have good audience and they trust you than no need Google traffic.
Thanks for landing on my blog George 🙂