Hi,

First, there are a lot of people unemployed today, in desperate need of ways to make money from home.  And most people are very good at something – usually one or two things (at least), that they’re passionate about.  Blogging is a great way to get started making some money online, by serving up your knowledge and expertise and sharing that passion with others.

Second, there are even more of us with existing businesses who realize that the bigger our email lists and online audiences become, the more money we make.  One common figure that’s thrown around a lot for small businesses and online entrepreneurs is that each subscriber on your email list is worth $1 per month (per subscriber).  For large corporations, it’s undoubtedly orders of magnitude more.

Whatever the exact value per subscriber, it’s clearly important to build your email list and attract a quality audience by providing quality content.

But how do you go about building a list these days?  Unless you’ve been hiding somewhere underneath a rock or lost in the woods for several years, you probably realize how WordPress is taking over the world as one of the leading blogging platforms.

And today, WordPress is also being used extremely effectively to build all kinds of websites, including Launch Micro Sites, portals and small business websites of every kind.  Why?  Because it’s free, it’s easy and there’s all kinds of “plug-in” extensions available.  There are millions of WordPress blog and websites in use today.

Of course, this blog you’re now reading has been WordPress-based from the beginning in 2008.  Since then, WordPress has grown into a rich content publishing and content management system (CMS).  WordPress has also evolved into a great platform for building a subscriber base, building your email list bigger and faster and making money.  In fact, there are many professional bloggers who make their living from publishing great content on their blogs.

So, how does one go about making money quickly and building a bigger email list using WordPress?  It’s taken me several years to figure all this out. Today, I decided to share it with you here.  I organized this into three main steps.

1. Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme
2. Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building
3. Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Let’s take each one of these steps and go a bit deeper, shall we?

1. Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme

You need a flexible, quality WordPress theme to get started.  There are many different free themes available, and some of them may be perfect for you; however, if you’re developing a site or blog for building your list and making money, you’ll want more flexibility to customize your site.  That’s where “premium themes” come in…

I have used a lot of different themes over the years, for my own sites and blogs and with clients, including Thesis and Socrates, which are both excellent themes.  However, in my opinion, the new kid on the block has them all beat hands down, in terms of flexibility, quality and value.

It’s called the Headway Theme.

In fact, I believe in this theme so strongly that I’m using it on client projects almost exclusively.  At the time of this writing, this project is still underway, but get this.  It only took me a couple of days to create this entire site from scratch over a weekend, including the graphics design and most of the content work.  If you’ve ever developed your own websites, you realize how impressive (and cost-effective) this approach to website development is.

So, I highly-recommend starting with a premium theme.

2. Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress as a platform is its extreme flexibility and adaptability to changing needs.  A lot of its adaptability comes from the modular “plug-in” architecture, which enables a WordPress administrator to quickly and easily add new capabilities by simply installing and activating a WordPress plug-in.

To build your list effectively, you need the right plug-ins.  Today, I use several dozen plug-ins to operate this blog; however, there are a couple of them which are crucial to building our email list and my blog’s subscriber base.

The main list-building plug-in is:

• Subscribers Magnet – this is a premium plug-in that inserts opt-in forms on your blog, and integrates sign-ups with your favorite auto-responder software (e.g., AWeber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, etc.).

Subscribers Magnet makes it easy to automatically insert opt-in forms in various strategic places within your blog, including:

• Before or after certain posts or all posts
• In the blog sidebar (the area to the right of this article, for example) as a WordPress “widget”
• As a “checkbox” option to automatically subscribe a user who posts a Comment (very cool!)
• As an overlay window at the bottom of the page (when user first arrives at the site)
• Anywhere within a post or page

In addition to Subscriber’s Magnet, I also used regular Text widgets to insert HTML code directly into sidebar widgets (like the Launch Report you see at upper right currently).

A couple of other important plug-ins I use are:

• Register Plus – this plug-in provides the ultimate in flexibility for registering your new users, allowing you to capture just about any kind of information you want, and use your own logo (instead of WordPress’ logo)
• Subscribe2 - this plug-in emails your blog subscribers whenever you publish a new post.  This is a great way to build your list locally within the blog itself (without using an auto-responder); incidentally, there are also now numerous auto-responder plug-ins that turn your WordPress site into an auto-responder! (I haven’t tried them yet)

So, as you can see, it’s fairly straightforward to build your email list and blog audience using the right plug-in tools.

Of course, you need traffic and visitors to your blog.  Hey – write some useful content!!  (that’s what attracts people to your blog, along with some well-chosen SEO-friendly keywords in your blog title and blog permalink URLs).

When I get more time, I’ll try to post some more detailed reviews of these plug-ins.

3. Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Last, but certainly not least, is you need a way to “monetize” your WordPress site’s traffic and your email lists.  Obviously, you need to give away lots of useful information, by posting it on your blog and emailing your list regularly, but what else can you do?

Advertise!

That’s right.  Find some high-quality products that meet your audience’s needs (your own and other people’s products you can promote as an affiliate) – and then advertise them in a calm, clear, professional manner.  Notice I use those qualifiers – calm, clear and professional – because if you go overboard with your advertising, you will turn people off and drive them away from your site!!  (not a good thing )

So, how can we advertise things calmly, clearly and professionally on our WordPress site?  It starts by thinking about advertising this way… if you were visiting your own site, how would you want to be advertised to?  What would you consider to be useful, acceptable practices for finding and buying high-quality products?  In other words, use the Golden Rule – treat others as you would like to be treated – it (almost) always works!

You might have guessed by now how we can make these advertisements visible on our WordPress site…

By picking the right plug-ins, of course!

Here’s the plug-ins I use and recommend for advertising on your blog:

• Ninja Affiliate - this is one of the coolest plug-ins I’ve seen and used in a long time… it allows you to define what the author dubs “ninja links” – which are basically alias URLs on your site – that when clicked on, redirect to the user to a specific offer page.  What’s most cool, though, is that you can define a list of keywords that will be automatically converted into hyper-links to your advertised offers.  And if these are affiliate links, they can be “cloaked” easily.  (you may notice certain keywords in this and other posts are now links – that’s the ninja at work)
• DataFeedr Random Ads – this plug-in enables you to define groups of related ads that rotate on a random basis, so that multiple ads can be shown in a single sidebar location.  So for example, the banner and text ads you see on this blog are served by this plug-in.  You simply define an ad group, then define each ad (by giving it a name and inserting the HTML code you want served), then you place an ad widget in your sidebar – then your ads automatically rotate and show up.

There are many other plug-ins and mechanisms available for advertising on your WordPress site or blog, but these are a couple of my favorites.

Summarizing

So, if you want to build an email list bigger and faster, and generate a revenue stream from blogging and/or a WordPress-based website, now you know how to get started.  Just install WordPress, install a quality theme, then start posting some great content.

Along the way, add the aforementioned plug-ins into the mix and start promoting some quality products that help your audience get their jobs done better, faster and easier.  You’ll find plenty of great products to promote on ClickBank, Share-a-Sale, CommissionJunction and dozens of other CPA networks out there just teaming with products to promote. Of course, you might have your own products and services to sell, too, which is great.

As long as you’re serving up real value, you can’t really go wrong.

I hope this helps you build your lists and grow your online business profits.

Happy list building and monetizing!

P.S.  Need help getting started or developing a WordPress-based website for your business?  Contact me and let’s discuss how I can help.

Related posts

• Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability (4)
• Your most important needs for 2011 – addressed (2)
• Some list building and sales conversion help for you (2)
• Powerful Money Magnets (7)
• 3 WordPress Security Steps to Block Would-Be WordPress Hackers (1)
• No list, no partners, no budget – no launch (1)
• List Building Secrets E-book (11)
• Desperate Buyers Only (2)
• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)

I am underway with a live launch right now for one of my niche businesses – in this case, Texas Hold’em poker training with a membership site that was originally launched in Feb. 2008.  We are “launching” a new poker pro who has joined our “Poker Underground” site – we’re dubbing it “Poker Underground 2.0″.

I just realized this would provide a nice example of the final stages of the pre-launch sequence and launch sequence that’s coming up. Launch day is this Friday, October 15th at 10 a.m. Eastern time.  You can check out our Launch Landing page here.  If you register, you’ll receive the balance of pre-launch and launch emails, so you can watch the launch as it rolls out.

One of the interesting things we did with this particular launch is to align our money magnets and bonuses. Let me explain.  We are giving away 300 of our Advanced Tournaments DVD’s as bonus items for those who subscribe during the launch.  So, we decided to do a “mini-giveaway” of a Poker Underground 1-year membership and three DVD’s ahead of the launch as part of a “contest” (it’s called a “freeroll” in poker parlance).

This is pretty darned ingenious (an affiliate partner suggested it), so pay close attention to this…

By giving away a very small quantity of the bonus items in conjunction with a separate, distinct event (in our case, a freeroll contest – it could be a drawing, a raffle, whatever else makes sense), it allows us to extol the benefits of these items while we are clearly not selling anything (and before we’ve even announced the launch itself).

This is a great way to create awareness, interest and desire for these bonuses ahead of launch day, so when you do open the doors on launch day, there’s increased demand for these bonus items – which in turn, makes them much more valuable to both you and the buyer on launch day!

I told you this was ingenious, didn’t I?

So, here’s the magic formula for using this in your own launch:

1. Decide what bonuses you will offer as extra incentives to buyers on launch day

2. Make a small quantity (1 to 3) available the week or more prior to the launch, in conjunction with some kind of contest, then explain the value and benefit of these items BEFORE you announce your launch.

3. Announce the winners, then remind everyone what was won and what it was worth to the winners.

4. Include these same bonuses in your launch.

5. Make more sales!

Happy launching.  I will provide another update as this launch progresses.

Related posts

• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• Twitter Research Formula (16)
• Top 5 Product Launch Success Factors (and Pitfalls to avoid) (10)
• The Truth About How To Use Twitter in a Product Launch (11)
• The importance of the campaign revenue goal (5)
• The all-important Launch Blog – Some tips for your success (7)
• The 3C’s of Product Launch (1)
• Step-by-step Launch Plan for Web Sites (1)
• Startup Launch Marketing Process (4)

In Internet marketing, the now common term “moving the free line” refers to taking what you used to charge money for and making it free.   By moving the free line, we enable demand creation to occur naturally on the Internet.  It’s not enough to build and sell great products.  Today, you also must build and deliver great free products that attract buyers to you in the first place.

For example, if you used to charge $27 for a particular e-book, today you make it free in order to cast a wider net across the Internet.  And when you cast a big enough net, you catch a lot more subscribers and customers.  For example, an e-book I developed called the New Rules of Launch could easily have been a $27 to $49 e-book, but instead, it’s actually free.  Why is that?

Because I recognized a huge underserved market – an opportunity to help thousands, potentially millions, of businesses become aware of the enormous opportunity to launch new products properly via the Internet.  If I had charged for this information, it would’ve severely limited the number of people who could benefit from it – and my opportunity to gain exposure and add value in the marketplace as a result.

The term “money magnet” is now often used to describe a special kind of free item – one that attracts the right kind of people into the top of your sales funnel.  Money magnets are any kind of free (or inexpensive) items of value that attract customers to your business.  And money magnets definitely do not have to be free to be effective.  In fact, sometimes charging between $7 and $19.95 is an excellent way to attract people with money into your sales funnel.

Check out this blog post entitled Powerful Money Magnets for additional money magnet insights, along with an actual case study of how a $19.95 money magnet is used to sell a custom-built item for over $5,000.

The more complex or expensive the item is that you are launching or selling, the more critical your money magnet strategy becomes.  In the offline world, when we have a complex or expensive item, we use “pre-sales” people to spend time assisting prospective customers. These folks help both the sales person and the customer by analyzing the customer’s particular needs and situation.

The main role of the pre-sales engineer is to educate future customers on the products and technologies, so the sales person doesn’t have to (and most good sales people wouldn’t know how).  Today, travel budgets have been severely crimped or eliminated.  And the availability of every kind of information imaginable on the Web has trained people to do their own research and homework before making a purchase.

So it’s now critically important to perform as much of this pre-sales function online as possible.  This translates to lots of free content – not fluffy white papers full of double-speak, techno-jargon and corporate speak – that’s the fast path to nowhere fast with customers.  Instead, the information that used to require a human pre-sales engineer to show up can be captured and delivered in a variety of ways, including video, e-books, technical papers, blog postings, recorded webinars and live online meetings.

Before launching your existing or new products, services or anything else, carefully analyze your offline sales cycle to identify the key information that a prospect typically needs, and come up with a viable pre-sales content strategy.  Then develop the best possible content and make it available.  This information is especially critical to leverage in the launch of new products, where some education and learning by customers is required.

Lastly, if you have a consulting arm of your company, you could be in for a rough ride.  Since the consulting group earns its bread and butter selling custom consulting, they will sometimes be the best source of information that now needs to be made available for free.  You may need to include your consulting folks in your launch and ensure they understand the importance of moving the free line and contribute appropriately.

In reality, most of the services that customers really should pay to have done are truly custom and still require some consulting services, so there’s usually no need to be threatened by moving the free line.  Done properly, moving the free line will actually bring this group even more value-add services, if that’s something that customers expect to pay for in your particular business.

A well-designed money magnet strategy can often be best designed by taking the outcome you seek to achieve (e.g., make your first sale to a new customer) and working backwards to “reverse-engineer” your money magnet sequence.  A money-magnet sequence is a set of content designed to attract, educate and endear your prospect – before they buy from you.

Here’s an illustration of how money magnets can front-end your pre-sales sequence:

We begin with the outcome, and then identify the likely gaps that must be filled in order to achieve the desired outcome.  For example, let’s assume our goal is to sell solar-powered flashlight products.  We have identified the following potential gaps in our sales cycle that need filling:

1. Bait – Our first money magnet is something our target audience will find so irresistible when they see it, they will immediately want it. This item is free.  For this example, let’s say we’re targeting the campers and hikers, who we ultimately want to buy and use our solar-powered flashlights instead of carrying the traditional battery-powered flashlights.  Our bait will be something of broad interest to these folks; e.g.,  “10 Surefire Ways to Ensure Your Safety in the Wilderness’.  This brief report provides 10 important tips that every hiker and camper should know about before heading out – one of those tips is about ensuring you will have ample emergency light available on an extended basis.
2. Stories – after attracting a prospect using the Bait item, we decide that sharing a real-life story about a family who went hiking and camping suddenly find themselves stranded due to bad weather, which washed out the road and stranded them.  This story provides the backdrop for learning what can happen when the batteries run out after several days.  We then provide several additional interesting, useful stories that address some of the most common safety issues for hikers and campers.These stories educate the reader and begin to “endear” them; i.e., they begin to appreciate how we are helping them stay safe, something they worried about when going camping and hiking in the past.  Finally, we share a story involving the use of a solar powered flashlight which comes in handy.
3. Video – we make an interesting, funny video available demonstrating how bright solar-powered flashlights actually are. In this video, two people go out at night to find their dog.  One person takes the solar-powered flashlight; the other one has a regular flashlight.  The story quickly exemplifies the benefits of having a flashlight that’s always fully-charged and ready to go, whenever it matters most.

This relatively simple money magnet sequence attracts hikers and campers, providing them with interesting, useful content.  This content educates and provides real value – information that could potentially save their life (not the typical boring, jargon-filled marketing gobbledygook you find in the typical report) .  Then we share a funny video that shows how our product helps to find the dog.  Now the solar-powered flashlight is a hero of sorts.

This is just one example of a money magnet sequence.  By understanding your buyers, the jobs they’re trying to get done in their life (e.g., going camping and hiking – safely), we can then design a money magnet sequence that’s both appealing enough to attract the right kinds of buyers, and interesting enough to educate them while building awareness and interest in our product or service offering.

It may be tempting to take shortcuts with your money-magnet sequence.  Be very careful not to fall into that trap.  Your money magnet strategy is an important part of your launch (and ongoing sales) process.

Don’t be afraid to move the free line.  The typical company has all kinds of free tools that its consulting group and pre-sales folks use on a regular basis.  Ask around internally.  Be willing to just give these things away to attract and endear more buyers to your company.  You’ll be amazed at how well it works.

Related posts

• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The importance of the campaign revenue goal (5)
• Product launch automation software on the horizon (1)
• Powerful Money Magnets (7)
• Live Launch Process Underway Right Now (1)
• Groundhog Day Website Marketing (7)
• Fast Way to Make Money with WordPress (13)
• Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability (4)

I recently posted the Product Launch Readiness checklist, a quick quiz that gives you an idea of how prepared you really are for your launch or campaign.  There are some interesting patterns emerging in everyone’s responses.  One of the common problem areas has to do with setting a revenue goal for the campaign- and this one’s a BIGGIE.

My dad once told me “if you want to get from A to B, you first have to know you want to go to point B, then you can figure out how to get there”.  It seems simple enough.  Set a goal, then chart the course.  As it turns out, figuring out where you want to go in very specific terms is more challenging than one might think…

When it comes to their revenue goals, it’s very common, especially for entrepreneurs and online marketers, to say “I want to make as much as I can!”   Of course you do – we all do.  But as John Reese once said, “you can’t build a plan to do that.”

So how do we figure out what our revenue goal should be for a given campaign?  Well, for me, it’s an iterative process. Let’s walk through it together with an example.

Let’s say you want your launch campaign (or other marketing campaign) to generate $1,000,000 – one million dollars (to keep the math easy in this example).  First, let’s assume your average selling price (ASP) is $1,000 per sale (again, to keep the example simple).

We need to take this revenue goal and turn it into a “Unit Volume” number – how many sales we need to make to achieve our revenue goal.  It’s simple math:

Unit Volume = Revenue Goal  /  Average Selling Price

For our example, Unit Volume is $1,000,000 divided by $1,000:  1,000 unit sales (use your own numbers in your case).

Next, we examine that Unit Volume number very carefully to determine just how realistic it is to actually achieve that level of sales.  Let’s say we have in-house customer and prospect list assets totalling 50,000.  And we have existing partners with lists and social network audiences amounting to another 50,000.

So we expect our market “canvassing” efforts can directly reach at least 100,000 people during the campaign period (see the Product Launch 3.0 Sales Process if you want to know more about canvassing).

So far this is what we know:

1. We want to generate $1,000,000 from this launch campaign
2. We need to sell 1,000 units to reach our revenue goal
3. We can identify 100,000 potential prospects that we can directly reach through existing means

Next, we need to identify any “gaps” we may have in our ability to execute to reach our goal.  So, now we have to make some additional estimates about traffic and conversion rates.

Since we are following a proper launch process, we are building a Launch List – sometimes known as a “sub-list”.  This is a an auto-responder list which is specific to our campaign (whether it’s a mini-launch over 4 days or a full-blown launch, this list is a must).  Everyone who registers and gets on our Launch List has expressed a specific interest in what’s coming and have asked to be kept informed and learn more, and will be exposed to our entire campaign conditioning and pre-sales process.

Next, let’s assume that from our 100,000 available prospect universe, ten percent of them will choose to join our Launch List, due to the great money magnets and other content we’re providing them as an incentive to pay attention and learn more.

So, we have 10,000 interested prospects on our Launch List, who will be with us on the journey toward launch day.

Next, we must determine what percentage of these folks we believe we can convert into buying customers.  Keep in mind that for a real launch, we’ll be using a variety of techniques that dramatically increase our conversion rates – way beyond what you would normally see.   It is not uncommon to see 1/3 or even more of your Launch List convert to sales, when everything goes exactly as planned (and you execute your pre-launch flawlessly, get your launch offer and U.S.P. right, etc.)

Let’s say that we believe we will convert just 10% of the Launch List.  As it turns out, that’s 1,000 sales!!

OK. That was too easy.  Let’s back up.  Instead of 10% of our 100,000 audience joining our Launch List, let’s say only 5% joined, so we now have a Launch List of 5,000.  If 10% of those folks buy, then that’s 500 sales.

This means we’re about halfway to our goal with our existing list, partner and social networking assets.  Now what?

Well, we have a model to work with here, so it’s time to “reverse engineer” the numbers to see what we need to close this gap.  We need 500 additional sales, which means we need 5,000 more prospects to join our Launch List.

So, we must build a plan that will bring us at least 5,000 additional prospects who subscribe to our Launch List at least one week before launch day.  How might we do that?

Well, if our earlier conversion rate numbers hold true and 5% of those who are exposed to our canvassing efforts end up subscribing to our Launch List, then we need to reach 20 times 5,000 which equals an additional audience of 100,000 more.

Great.  How can we reach 100,000 additional unqualified prospects?

1. Engage one additional JV partner with a list of 100,000 or bigger

2. Engage ten additional JV partners with lists of 10,000 or more each

3. Engage five bloggers with relevant audiences of 20,000 or more each

And so on.  Continue with all potential routes to reaching your qualified buyer audiences, including Twitter, Facebook, PR, advertising, radio, TV, etc. (more traditional routes).

Now I realize the above example is probably oversimplified in some ways, but if I can write it down in this blog post, I have to believe it’s possible for more people to set and achieve realistic revenue goals for their campaigns.

The keys to doing this successfully are:

1. Choosing a realistic revenue goal

2. Making realistic assumptions about your conversion rates

3. Having a well-known process in place (or creating one by using someone with the right experience to help you)

4. Building a PLAN that you KNOW you can EXECUTE on to make your numbers

5. Tracking your progress against those numbers each step along the way (conversion rates, audience reach/open rates, click-through rates, Launch List size vs. your target, etc.)

6. Adjusting course as needed to fill any “gaps” that appear in the numbers (e.g., adding more JV partners, optimizing your Launch Landing page, creating additional, more compelling money magnet offers that pull better, etc.

7. Recalculating your model as the numbers come in to ensure you will make your goal.

Sales is a “numbers game”. Always has been, always will be.  Every successful sales team and sales person takes their overall revenue goal and then builds a sales plan by reverse-engineering the numbers into a plan that they know for certain they are capable of executing.

This tells sales management how many sales people are needed in each territory, for example.  Each sales person is given a “quota”, then they must build their own plan for achieving their part of the overall plan.

It’s always the same, whether you’re selling potato chips or semiconductor chips…whether you’re selling online or offline.  You set a revenue target, then build a realistic sales plan for achieving the numbers.

The numbers don’t lie.  It takes some work, thought and realism in your planning.  It also takes careful tracking of your progress along the way.  The good news is, when you approach your selling, in launches or any campaign, this way, you will become better at reproducing revenue results each time you do it.

I hope you found this useful – and more of you get that first question on the readiness exam right next time

Incidentally, if the above process seems a bit too daunting to do manually, I agree!  That’s one of the reasons I developed a software tool that does this for you.

Happy selling!

P.S.  I realize that a million dollar example is almost certainly not the right example for everyone.  For some, it’s too high. For others, it’s too low.  And a $1,000 average sale is also not ideal.  Use your own numbers.  If your product sells for $50 and you want to make $100,000, you probably aren’t being realistic (unless you have a huge route to market available) -or- it means you have a price/value problem and need to increase the value you’re delivering!

If you only have a small list, then you must either: a) sell something at a higher price point that delivers more value, or b) find partners willing to help you reach a much larger audience for a piece of the action; e.g., affiliates, resellers, OEMs, etc.

Again, the numbers don’t lie, so pay attention to what they’re telling you and adjust things until you can build a viable plan that’s capable of generating the numbers you need.

Related posts

• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• The all-important Launch Blog – Some tips for your success (7)
• The 3C’s of Product Launch (1)
• Step-by-step Launch Plan for Web Sites (1)
• Startup Launch Marketing Process (4)
• Product Launch Manager Interview with Jeffrey Pezzella (2)
• Product Launch 3.0 Sales Process (2)
• Powerful Money Magnets (7)
• New Product Launch Template (2)

The Relationship Development System

In prior posts, I have talked a lot about how important relationships are to making money online and how our sales process needs to include a Relationship Development System.  When a website visitor arrives at our website, blog or reads our article the first time, we are effectively strangers at the onset.  When things are structured properly, this visitor undergoes a series of relationship development stages, as shown below.

Let’s look at a visitor’s online pre-sales relationship and how it develops over time until that first sale is consummated.

Our journey begins with the Awareness phase, where the visitor becomes aware of their need and your product or site as a possible solution or information source. This could involve one or more exposures to our product—through word-of-mouth, social media, search engine ads or results,  radio, TV and the like. This is where your marketing reaches prospects and they go from unaware to an aware state.

For example, we become aware that analog TV signals are no longer available, which causes us to decide it is time to get a new high-definition TV set. We become aware of a need and something triggers us into bringing this TV need into the “foreground” in our life.

High-definition TVs have been around for many years, but for whatever reason they remained in the “background” for many of us—until recently. So, we begin noticing ads for HD TVs. We actively look around at them online and at stores, and we begin discussing them with our friends and family. This is awareness.  These ads and devices have been around for many years, but suddenly we begin to actually take notice of them.

In the next phase, our marketing creates Interest in what we have to offer. Interest results when your marketing grabs the prospects’ attention and often is the direct result of an initial offer (e.g., a money magnet offer) that captures their attention. We must create interest, or we will never get the prospects to progress any further toward buying.

It is very tempting to try and “short-circuit” the process and jump straight to the close… FAIL!  How many times our impatience comes back to bite us.  Good things cannot be rushed – and a sale is a very good thing!

Continuing our HDTV example, our presentation of benefits and features, cool-looking pictures and demo videos trigger increased interest, because we realize we can now watch sports in high-definition, and then the seller really grabs our attention with a great price for a nice HD TV unit. You need to create the same level of incremental interest with your online marketing processes.

Interested prospects become open to learning more about what you have to say and offer. If your messages and product offerings resonate with the prospects, Desire begins to build in their mind. They are now evaluating various aspects of what you have to offer and they now have decided that they “want it” but aren’t yet ready to buy—they still have questions and concerns that you must address.

At this stage, they will likely be involved in various “self-talk” about where they’d put that new HDTV, how they are going to justify spending the money on it, and where that money will actually come from.  It is very important not to disrupt this thought process.

In the next stage, we begin a Bonding process with the prospect. We begin to create strong associations in their minds that bond them to the product. For example, GoDaddy.com uses NASCAR racing and high-profile racers like Danica Patrick as one way of bonding with their target audience. Racing has absolutely nothing to do with domain names, but it has everything to do with bonding and credibility (and sex sells like nothing else through association).

You can bond with your prospects in a variety of ways: by entertaining or amusing them, by giving them free stuff they enjoy and get immediate value from, and by sharing stories they identify with, among other ways.

What you are really doing during the bonding phase is anchoring positive, motivating associations between you, your site and/or product within the prospect’s mind. This is incredibly powerful when done correctly, as it begins to create a “preference” for you and your product vs. the prospect’s alternatives.

Remember that metaphorical “Bridge of Trust” across the “Chasm of Doubt” we talked about earlier? In the next phase, your prospect will reach a critical state of Trust for you—at least enough to consider buying from you. Everything you have done up until now has either created trust, eroded trust, or had no impact on trust development at all.

Avoid any marketing that causes suspicion or detracts from your prospects’ trust in you. For example, have you ever received an email from a marketer where the email subject line says something designed to grab your attention and get you to open that email? So, you open it. Inside the email, the content has absolutely nothing to do with the subject line and there’s some vain attempt to bridge from that subject line to the actual email content.

How do you suppose this makes your prospects feel?  When it happens to me, I feel tricked. Tricking your prospects is not a way to build a trusting relationship!  In fact, it says you care more about getting your way (making that sale) more than you do about your prospective customer.  This is not lost on most people.

Instead, our actions need to build trust and reinforce that we are trustworthy. Many aspects of our marketing can act together so that prospects begin to trust us.

Creating trust is a complex topic. Fortunately, there are many proven ways to develop trust and help your prospects across the Chasm of Doubt.

At some point, it is time to pitch the prospect. Now that they desire our product, have bonded with us and prefer our product, and trust us enough to do business with us – then we can close the sale.

So, you enable your prospect to engage with your online sales process as a buyer. We call this the Activation phase, because the prospects are now actively entering a buying mode. They decide to invest some of their time and actively pursue a solution.

Various triggers can activate your prospects. Before going deeper into activation, let me ask you something. What do suppose would happen if your prospects hadn’t bonded with you and didn’t yet trust you and you tried to force activation too soon?

Once they are activated into a buying motion, you’d just be yet another option for the prospect to choose from.

Moreover, if they trust someone else more than they trust you, they will probably make their purchase elsewhere.

They might actually look at and consider you as an alternative, but their fears and concerns about doing business with a stranger or someone less trustworthy could easily cause them to steer away once they are engaged in an active buying motion.

Have you ever bought something from Amazon.com without looking for a better price elsewhere?  There’s usually a better price if you just look.  But we don’t usually look, do we?  It’s because we have bonded with Amazon.com as a brand and prefer to deal with a known quantity vs. going through the entire RDS process as a buyer with someone new. And Amazon.com does a great job making it better to stick with them, with customer reviews and even access to those cheaper 3rd party deals through Amazon!

We can trigger activation of prospects by making them an offer they simply cannot refuse. This offer is compelling enough to overcome “procrastination inertia.” Procrastination occurs when people avoid taking action on something they know they want to do or even should do, but continue to delay for various reasons.

They might say (in their minds or to their spouse): “I’m just not sure.” “It’s a lot of money.” “Maybe I’ll find a better one if I keep looking.” “I’m too busy right now” or “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

When you activate your prospects, you essentially light a fire under them to take action now. You give them multiple reasons to act now; e.g., discount pricing, time-limited extras/bonuses, special financing terms, limited quantities, and such.

This is a critical moment.  At this point, the prospect is serious about buying from you, but very likely still has questions and possibly some objections.  It is important they be able to find answers to the remaining, burning questions and get them answered completely.

Activation can create buying momentum that is sometimes sufficient to overcome our prospect’s procrastination inertia – and possibly even enough to get them to dismiss their remaining questions and tell themselves something like – “it comes with a money-back guarantee – what do I have to lose?”.

Activation causes them to begin actively going through your sales process. During activation, your prospects become “buyers”. They begin looking at their options and are about to make a purchase – from you.

The online selling process answers their questions, overcomes their objections, and motivates them to buy from us and to buy right now, before they change their mind, or the phone rings, or the dinner bell rings…

The prospects then decides to buy, and they press that magical button.

That single click represents their buying decision (Buy Now button, Add to Cart button, Join Now button).

Once the buyer completes the checkout process, the Sale is consummated and you now have a new customer.

The Relationship Development System (RDS) is a proven process that increases online sales conversion rates.

Why do you suppose long form sales pages are structured the way they are?  Because they are designed to take the reader on a rapid RDS “journey” through the entire process.  However, in reality it often takes several visits to a typical website and sales page before a buying decision is made – unless the RDS process has taken place beforehand (via email, a blog, a video or some combination of RDS actions).

Without a functioning RDS in place, the best you can probably expect in direct-selling of visitors to your site is perhaps 1% to 2%. With a high-performance RDS in place, your aggregate conversion rates could well reach 5% to 10% (or more when prospects are “referred” by someone they already trust).  This is why an auto-responder follow-up system is so critical to every online business’ profitability.

Of course, developing and nurturing relationships takes time. Fortunately, this can all be automated so it is taking place 24/7. For the most part, it is a hands-free set of activities managed by the auto-responder, except for adding new offers and occasionally freshening (and testing and optimization).

Whatever combination of technologies you choose to use, follow the RDS steps more deliberately and you will make more sales.  I might suggest an “RDS Audit” of your existing selling process – to identity and fill any holes or sticking points that may be present.  Of course, you should always A/B split-test any change you make and measure the actual effects over time.

You will know when your RDS is working because the sales ticker will speed up and that “cha-ching” sound will happen more often – and your bank balance will go up more often than down (if you control your spending).

In 2008, I documented this entire process in The Online Leadership Guide.  There is also a free 5-part mini-course available where you can learn more.

I hope you have an effective RDS in place for each of your products and sites.  If not, what are you waiting for?

Related posts

• It’s good to be King (3)
• When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories (9)
• Psychology of Social Product Launches – Part 2, Proof (1)
• Crossing the Chasm of Doubt (1)
• Groundhog Day Website Marketing (7)
• Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability (4)
• B2B Lead Generation (0)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The importance of the campaign revenue goal (5)
• Product Launch Manager Interview with Jeffrey Pezzella (2)

Today is groundhog’s day, 2010.  And one of my favorite movies was on TV this afternoon – Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

As it turns out, I have been doing some website sales process audits and optimization for several clients over the past few days… or is it the same day, just repeating over and over and over again?

In the movie, Bill Murry figures out that he’s trapped doing the same things over and over again, with no apparent ramifications for his actions.  So he goes on a destructive binge, hognapping Punxsutawney Phil and driving off of a cliff.  Unfortunately, this scene reminded me of the website sales processes I seem to see day after day…

Cluttered home pages with so many choices to make that it’s easier to just make no choice at all – and hit the Back button to keep looking.

No compelling offer – to cause a visitor to register and become a lead that the website owner can follow up with, build a relationship with and, someday, make that first sale to when the time is right.

Direct links to product catalogs, with no sales process in place to explain what the product is, its benefits and key capabilities or answer common questions and objections prior to asking for the sale. The “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons do not close sales, in case you were wondering.

Like Bill Murray, I suddenly realize this as an opportunity – to improve the quality of life of the owners of websites (and their visitors). Instead of feeling trapped living this same dreadful day over and over again, perhaps it would be better to help everyone I can and do my best to improve myself where possible, under the cirsumstances – so here we go…

What I described above are what are commonly called “brochure sites” – websites whose design originally aimed to dispense information instead of generate leads and make sales.  Unfortunately, many of these website owners believe their sites are more than brochure sites, because they have added a product catalog and some cute graphics.

One thing they know for certain – their sites are not making them many (if any) sales at all – and most have no idea why.  These site owners have all kinds of reasons why their sites don’t sell, but in reality, when I speak to them I find they seem surprised by the realities of what’s actually going wrong.

The formula that works to escape this Groundhog Day of Website Marketing isn’t all that complicated, but it involves applying skill sets that still seem to escape many (most?) web developers today; otherwise, wouldn’t these sites be fixed and structured properly by now?

Here’s the formula for escaping Groundhog Day Website Marketing and making money:

1. Focus the home page on the most important three things you want people to do on your site – not two, not five – three.  Three is the magic number of choices that works best anytime you can keep things that simple.

2. Make at least one of those three options a compelling offer – something your ideal customer (someone who buys your product) could not possibly leave your site without. The purpose of this “money magnet” offer is to generate the gravitational forces of desire so strong that it sucks your visitors into clicking on it to learn more and take advantage of this intriguing offer.  Clicking on this offer link takes the visitor to the offer landing page.

3. Use an offer landing page as a lead-generation tool that provides more details on the compelling offer, closing the next step, which is the user providing their Name and Email address details – becoming a lead.  The leads are added to your email auto-responder, then your visitor is redirected to either: a) a page that provides what they just registered to receive (free report, video, etc.) or b) a solutions page that explains more about the various solutions the site offers to solve the prospect’s pain, needs or desires.

4. The email auto-responder consists of a follow-up sequence that delivers what was originally promised for registration, then email #2 reminds the user a few days later to “consume” what they registered for (so they actually get the value you’re delivering). Emails 3 through 5 delivers additional value, in the form of tips, strategies and useful information that moves your prospect closer to achieving the goal they seek; e.g., losing weight, landing a date that will lead to a relationship, learning how to win at poker, train the dog, train the husband, or whatever the primary job to be done is for your client.  This sequence demonstrates your expertise, builds authority and shows you are trustworthy.

5. The sixth email in the sequence makes your prospect an offer to buy – a special offer they can’t refuse if they are a qualified prospect.  This email makes a brief summary of the offer, then “sells the click” to the sales page.

6. The sales page is a long-form sales letter that closes the sale. The purpose of this sales letter is as old as direct response marketing and selling itself – to make a sale.  It hooks the reader on the primary benefit and differentiation of your product (i.e., your Unique Selling Proposition), establishes rapport with the reader and then promises to deliver a primary benefit, along with a number of secondary benefits.

The sales page then provides proof that what you say is true, in the form of testimonials and other forms of “evidence” that cannot easily be ignored and which exudes truthfulness and transparency.  Then the sales page addresses each and every major question and objection that a reasonable prospect is likely to ask and require an answer to in order to make a buying decision.  Since there is no other way to get answers to these questions (there’s not a live salesperson there), the sales page must completely answer every question and objection a buyer has – or no sale will be made.

Finally, a summary of everything you’re going to get, what it costs, the guarantee and reasons to buy today are all made in order to close the sale.

And then it snows outside and we wake up to a new day – with a website that makes sales from that day forward – a website that only needs additional sources of traffic to generate even more profits each day than the day before it.

That’s the dream I awake from after each successful client project – a new day dawning where what was once a brochure site is now actually a real e-commerce site, making the site owner the money they have expected all along, but didn’t get from their original web developers, who were long ago fired and never heard from again.

So the next time you hire a web developer who shows you a great-looking design that blows you away, before approving the project for completion, ask them who’s going to actually finish your site by providing what’s outlined in steps 1 through 6 above.

Meanwhile, I have some “errands” to go run with my existing clients, because it’s still Groundhog’s Day somewhere.

P.S. I am not complaining about Groundhog’s Day Website Marketing, because we are in business to help our clients put those steps 1 through 6 in place. It’s easy to write the outline and even understand why each step is necessary, but it’s quite another to actually put a proper sales process in place.  As online marketers, this is what we do – work with website owners and web developers to turn good-looking websites into moneymakers.  Learn more about how we can help here.

Related posts

• It’s good to be King (3)
• How Successful Email Marketing Is Done (2)
• Crossing the Chasm of Doubt (1)
• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability (4)
• B2B Lead Generation (0)
• Your most important needs for 2011 – addressed (2)
• When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories (9)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The importance of the campaign revenue goal (5)

The New Rules of Launch

How to launch a product, company or
anything else via the Internet in 2010

FREE E-BOOK DOWNLOAD

The Internet and Web have changed the rules for how we launch anything new, including products, websites, and companies – even political campaigns – using social media like Twitter and Facebook to create purpose-built launch communities and make more sales.

The Web and the ubiquitous global communications it enables now interconnect over 1 billion people for the first time in human history. Practitioners who learned based on the old rules have been slow to change and adopt new methods, such as social media.

I hope this e-book will enable everyone who wants to leverage social media and the Web for launch of – a company, product, service, website, political campaign, or anything else –  to grasp how to leverage the immense power of the Internet and social media networking to do so.

While I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, the path and way major launches will reach the masses is clear – through social media and online networks. I think this e-book provides some food for thought that will be helpful and worthwhile.

Download and Read the New Rules of Launch

But be prepared to alter the way you think about launches…

Download the New Rules of Launch here.

Merry Christmas 2009!!  And here’s to a Happy New Year and lots of great launches in 2010!

Rick

P.S. Please feel free to post copies of this free e-book document on your blog, website or email it to anyone you believe would benefit from it. This e-book is licensed under the Creative Commons License, as indicated below.

P.P.S. Please come back here and share your comments on the e-book whenever you can so I can improve it…

Inside the New Rules of Launch

How to launch a product, company or
anything else via the Internet

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The New Rules of Launch.  4

How to launch a product, company or anything else via the Internet  4

The old rules of launch.  5

The New Rules of Launch.  6

Why You Need to Learn the New Rules.  7

Today, savvy marketers use online networking to reach and influence buyers directly.  7

Psychology of Social Product Launches.  7

Reaching Mainstream Buyers and Markets Faster.  11

Targeted Buyer Language vs. Generic Product Language.  14

The 3C’s of Launch.  16

It’s the Network, Stupid!  17

Obama Presidency Launch Campaign.   18

The Power of Grassroots Movements in Launch Campaigns.   19

Network Influence is the Launch.   21

Nobody Cares About Your Product   24

Tuning In to What Customers Want   26

Big Idea = Big Launch.   28

New Rules of Attention.   35

The Magnetic Force of Free.   38

Buzz = Word of Mouth Storytelling Gone Wild.   41

The Launch Community.   43

Launch Partnering in Powers of 10.   44

Introducing Launch 3.0.   46

Launch 3.0 Process.   49

Canvassing – Building the Launch List and Community.  53

The Launch 3.0 Sales Process.   58

New Rules of Launch by Rick Braddy / ConXentric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.winningware.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.winningware.com/contact.php

Related posts

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• The 3C’s of Product Launch (1)
• New Product Launch Email Campaigns Now Available (1)
• Twitter Research Formula (16)
• Network Influence IS the Launch (2)
• How to Launch a Product using Social Networks (3)
• Top 5 Product Launch Success Factors (and Pitfalls to avoid) (10)
• The all-important Launch Blog – Some tips for your success (7)
• Step-by-step Launch Plan for Web Sites (1)
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Money magnets do exactly what the name suggests – they attract people with money to your business and website.  It’s easy to attract “freebie seekers” who will waste your time and never  buy anything, but quite a different thing to attract the right kinds of people who will actually buy what you offer.

Everyone is very busy these days, and there are so many free videos, reports and other downloads available, who has the time to try them all?  Certainly many of the people making the most money don’t – they’re too busy making more money!  Of course, people with a job they need to get done will often spend the time to watch a brief video, read a quality report or go through a free trial.

So a good money magnet both attracts the right kinds of prospective buyers and qualifies them – at the same time.  Let’s examine this further by way of a true story.

Several years ago, I was approached by a customer in one of my online businesses that had nothing to do with online marketing.  He said he needed help with his business and saw what I was doing with my online business and thought I could probably help him out.  At the time, I wasn’t providing any kind of online marketing or related consulting whatsoever (I was too busy with my day job and my own small business during off hours).

His name is Kevin, and on the Internet he’s known now as “Tiki Kev”.  We finally spoke on the phone and Kevin told me about his plight and that he was virtually broke, was having to shut his shop down and sell all of his best tools, and didn’t know what to do…  I could tell he was rather desperate and that if I didn’t reach out and help him, things were going to go from bad to really bad.

Kevin is a master builder, and had decided he wanted to specialize in Tiki Bars and Tiki Huts, something he’s very passionate about.  Kevin builds the highest-quality Tiki bar and hut products.  Click the link and have a look for yourself, if you’re curious.

Anyway, he told me these custom-built products sell from around $5,000 and up and that he wanted to sell them via his website.  He showed me his website, which looked really nice (his wife is an excellent graphic artist).  Right away, I realized there were several big show-stoppers standing between Kevin and success.

I told him, “Kevin, I hate to say this, but people just aren’t going to come visit your website and buy a $5,000 anything from you – no matter how good they look…”   The old saying “Houston, we have a problem” came to mind.  I told him I’d think about it and get back with him.

A few days later I called him back and told him I had an idea.  I told him we needed to start smaller and build our way up to selling them the custom Tiki bars and Tiki huts.  I told  him we needed to write an e-book on how to build a Tiki bar.  After I explained everything that would be involved, he agreed.  I then offered to help him with some important website changes that would be required to make all this work.

Kevin’s a very hard worker and he knew exactly what to do.  He went to his shop and started building one of his signature custom Tiki bars, and they took pictures of the entire process – start to finish.  Kevin then wrote the first edition of “How To Build Your Own Tiki Bar”.  I went to work on writing a sales page for the product.

A few weeks later, the whole project came together.  We had the sales page in place, and posted his e-book for sale on ClickBank.  It took several more weeks of driving Google AdWords pay-per-click traffic to the site and split-testing price points to find the magic price: $19.95.

Kevin was not happy at all about the final price.  We both wanted the e-book to sell originally for $49.95, but it just didn’t sell at that price.  At $19.95, it began selling great and we saw the volume rise to over a hundred e-books per month right away.

Meanwhile, I told Kevin that while his website looked good, it was too graphics-heavy and needed a lot more text, because the search engines only cared about text.  A few more weeks of SEO work and we were good to go.

A few more weeks passed (it’s now been several months) and I noticed I wasn’t getting any emails from Kevin, so I decided to call him.  I finally reached him over a weekend, and he sounded really tired.  He said, “man, I’m working like 18 hours a day building bars for people, it looks like I’m going to have to hire some help – I can’t keep up with all the business that’s coming in”.

A few months later, I get a call from Kevin.  He’s really excited and tells me “I’m gonna be on TV!.  Extreme Home Makeover is having me and my crew on their show!  Can you believe it?”   Well, needless to say, I was very proud of what we had accomplished.  They found Kevin’s site due to the SEO optimizations.  In fact, go search on Google for keywords “tiki hut” or “tiki bar” – he’s still on page one today.

If you visit his site today, you can see for yourself what’s happened since then.  More TV appearances and more e-books and sustained success for Kevin’s business.

In Kevin’s case, the $20 e-books turned into “money magnets” for his $5,000 custom-built bars and huts.  Let’s examine this case study a little closer, because something very important happened here.

People who wanted a Tiki bar and wondered what it would take to build one themselves bought his $20 e-book and found out just how involved it actually is to do this and do it right.  Some of these e-book customers went on to build their own very nice Tiki bars, using Kevin’s master plans.

Another percentage of them realized just how much work and effort goes into building a Tiki bar right, and suddenly had a great appreciation of the VALUE of having it done for them.  And who do you suppose they wanted to build their Tiki bar?  The guy in those pictures who showed them exactly how it’s done.

This is how you develop a money-magnet to sell something worth thousands of dollars over the Internet.  You find something of interest to the prospects, you qualify them with a small purchase (of $7 to $19.95 – no higher), and then you give them all the information you can for how to do it themselves.  Once they recognize the time, energy and effort involved, there’s a much greater appreciation for just buying the finished product.

Some percentage of the prospects will have the money to just buy the product instead of spending the time and effort to do it themselves.

Another quick example of a money magnet comes from one of my online businesses, which is in the Texas Hold’em poker training market, where we provide a monthly membership to poker players to watch training videos and learn to play winning poker.

In this case, I created an “upstream” site known as PokerTester.com.  This site provides a free poker skills test, consisting of 25 questions in 8 different skills categories.  To take the free skills test, users must register and join our mailing list.

After taking the test, the site provides the user with a “report card” on their skills, along with specific tips for improving their game.  This process provides players with real, tangible value and an objective view of where they are falling short, along with instructions for what they need to do about it.

Then, we send a series of skills improvement tips via the email autoresponder, including some sample videos from our membership site.  This site provides a steady stream of fresh leads that feeds the membership site, along with selling a number of other 3rd party affiliate products.

These are just two examples of money magnets that work like a charm.  There are many other types of money magnets, including free trials, free software tools, results calculators, free reports and e-books, free videos, webinars, teleconferences and more.

The key is to figure out what you can use as “bait” to attract the kind of prospects who will turn into buyers, when the time is right, you’ve earned their trust and they’r ready to buy.  It all starts with the right money magnets and getting the prospects on your list, so you have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, earn their trust and show them how you can help them get what they want.

Related posts

• Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability (4)
• Fast Way to Make Money with WordPress (13)
• Desperate Buyers Only (2)
• Your Relationship Development System – Profiting or Costing You? (3)
• Your most important needs for 2011 – addressed (2)
• Why don’t businesses invest more in online lead-generation? (0)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The importance of the campaign revenue goal (5)
• Some list building and sales conversion help for you (2)
• More Traffic or Increased Conversions? (4)

In the traditional sales world, sales people used to use a Rolodex (remember those?), business cards and a call log – and of course, their telephone.  Many still do today.  Of course, modern CRM systems have automated this process nicely.  The Rolodex was the “list” back then… today, CRM software has largely displaced the Rolodex.

In my last several blog posts, I stressed the importance of building a relationship with your list of subscribers.  Don’t have a list of subscribers?

Oops!  You probably aren’t turning a profit online if you aren’t building and nurturing your list – are you?

Today I had a nice discussion with a work at home mom about her attempts to make money online.  She had invested around $5,000 in affiliate marketing and advertising based on some “make money” course she saw on TV… well, I’m always saddened to hear these kinds of stories, when good people are taken advantage of by scams or incomplete sales processes…

I explained to her that the only way to turn a consistent profit in an online business is with a list of customers, subscribers and prospects.  The reasons for this is actually quite simple.  It’s simple economics.

It costs too much to advertise and bring a visitor to your website.  On the first visit to a website, 99% are probably not yet ready to buy whatever you’re selling.  Well, it’s impossible to turn a profit when only 1% or fewer people buy from you, given the cost of bringing visitors to your site.

Instead, it’s a proven fact that in order to run an advertising-driven, profitable online business, you must build a list of subscribers – who you then can develop a relationship with over time and market to them on an ongoing basis.

It seems simple enough, yet I’m still amazed at how many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t do this properly.  There’s tons of great information freely available on how to develop landing pages that get visitors to register and there’s certainly no shortage of email auto-responders to choose from (arguably there’s too many of them to choose from today).

So what’s the issue?  Why are so many companies and people starting out still missing this critical piece of the online profit puzzle?

Perhaps it’s because they lack the content – the so-called “money magnet” needed to attract the right kinds of people to register and subscribe in the first place.  Money magnet is a term that’s been used in a variety of ways, but I first heard the term applied to online marketing by Frank Kern, a very experienced and successful Internet marketer.

A money-magnet is anything you can give away for free or nearly free that attracts the right kinds of prospective customers to register and become a subscriber.  Now I realize this is online marketing 101 stuff, but like I said, there’s so many people who are skipping right past the basics to put a gorgeous looking website up and then wonder why it’s not making money, that apparently it needs to be stressed more.

I outlined the entire process for building a profitable online business in a post earlier this year called “A PROVEN ONLINE SUCCESS FORMULA“, where I go into quite a lot of detail on proper goal setting and putting the necessary online selling machinery in place.

Incidentally, all of this is spelled out in even greater detail in the Online Leadership Guide, which comes with some very cool free tools and a mini-course you should check out (it’s very affordable, at only $19.95).  Incidentally, this is a decent example of a money magnet and landing page.

So if you’ve tried Google AdWords or other online advertising and are disappointed with the lack of sales results, if you weren’t using a proper landing page with an enticing money-magnet free offer for your visitors to register and learn more, go back and fix your front-end “lead generation” process and start building your list.

Several earlier posts discuss the importance of developing a relationship with your subscribers, giving them even more value for free, then eventually *some* of them will be ready to buy – and when they are ready, some will buy from you.

Done properly, your subscriber and customer list become your more valuable online business asset – much like that Rolodex was to a salesperson in the offline world.  Invest in building your list and the relationship with those on your list, and I promise you’ll be amazed at how much it will help you.

If you’ve been in business for a while as a small business, chances are you already have a “list” of sorts – a mailing list in the making inside your Gmail contact manager, Outlook or other mail client.  This is, in effect, your mailing list – all your contacts.  If you’re like me, you have hundreds of business cards squirreled away in a desk drawer somewhere.

Getting these entered or scanned into your contact manager will begin to round out your business contacts.  Keep in mind that these folks would probably accept a personal email from you, but would consider advertising or other forms of direct promotion as spam, so be careful how you use these resources.

If you are a more established medium to large corporation, then you most likely have a corporate CRM system, which is a primary list source for you.  You also probably have lists scattered all over the place and you may need to do some list consolidation, de-duping and cleansing.  It’s well worth the effort, as these lists are pure gold when used properly with a focused email marketing strategy.

Finally, keep in mind that one of your best sources for lists is leveraging lists of your partners through cooperative marketing campaigns, whereby your partners promote your offer to their lists, bringing lots of qualified traffic to your landing page and building your targeted list.

Ultimately, you’ll need to break out from your core contacts and build focused lists of prospects in each of your target markets.  It does take time, but done properly, it is well worth the effort and investment.

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