(Now would also be a good time to sign up for the RSS feed)

Anyways, I recently ran a promo where I gave my Traffic Tips Report for free as a list building promotion.

It’s been over for a couple of weeks, but I’ve still been getting a lot of questions about it. So I’ve decided to write this post, not only to show you how it went, but to show you how you or anyone else could run a similar promo with similar success.

I’ve written a lot of other blog entries, articles and emails on the importance of building your list over the last couple of years, but never really set out on a monumental effort to build my own.

I’d done the normal ad swaps, opt-in pages, article marketing, free giveaways and so on, but nothing big like this. So here’s what I did:

To save time, I took a report which I had previously written and sold for $7 and decided to give it away for free.

Instead of lining up a ton of partners to help me promote it, or spending a lot of time and money on marketing, I decided to try and make it go viral.

Viral marketing can be hit and miss, so I needed a sure fire way to make sure it was successful, so I decided to pay people $1 for everyone they referred who signed up.

I’d seen several big name marketers like Mike Filsaime or Russell Brunson who had done similar things in the past and it seemed to have worked well for them and sounded like a good way to go.

The goal was get a dozen or so marketing friends and business partners to help me by promoting it to their lists, then have it continue under its own power.

So, everyone that signed up to download the report also had the opportunity to sign up as an affiliate and promote the report to earn $1 per referral. Then everyone they signed up under them could do the same thing and so on, thus making the marketing / report viral.

The benefits for affiliates to promote the report was twofold- they could promote a useful resource to their lists or website visitors that was free and earn a commission for doing so. Their subscribers would be happy with the valuable traffic generation information and they’d earn cash for their efforts making it a win / win situation and a no-brainer for most people to promote.

Affiliates also like the fact that they can make money by giving away something and not selling anything which was a huge plus.

The reason I wanted to have affiliates promote something instead of doing it myself was pretty simple. An army of affiliates can cover a lot more ground than I can and they can each use their expertises in their specific marketing techniques to promote the report.

I had affiliates doing everything from emailing their lists, to posting to their websites and blogs, to submitting articles and press releases to posting ads on forums, Craiglist, eBay and so on. There were even a few people that setup PPC campaigns or ads on traffic networks.

In fact, so many people promoted it, that near the end of the two week campaign, there were over 17,000 hits on Google for the report:

After people signed up, they were presented with three one time offers. Some people gave me a little grief over this, but they were there for a couple of reasons.

1. Not everyone could afford the more expensive offers, so I had a cheaper alternative available to them.
2. When I tested everything, having three one time offers generated the highest profits by a long shot.

I had debated having one time offers at all, but got to thinking if things went insanely well and 25k or more people signed up, it would be kind of foolish to be out $25k in affiliate commissions and have not earned anything on the back end, so one time offers it was. They were just your standard OTO’s, nothing really special about them except that they were a killer deal.

Anyways, after signing up, going though the one time offers and confirming their email address, people were brought to a download page that also encouraged them the promote the report. A little over 1 in 5 people who downloaded the report signed up as an affiliate.

Autoresponder / Affiliate Software

To do this yourself you’ll want a complete shopping cart system and a good affiliate program that will track leads (signups) as well as make it easy for people to signup as an affiliate and access the promo material such as 1StartCart.com.

As far as promo material, I provided banners, articles, reviews, text links and emails that people could use to promote the report. That way there was something for everyone and it made it really quick and easy for anyone to post an article or review (with their affiliate link) on their blog or setup a broadcast email for their list etc.

How Well Did It Go – Some Stats

I’m not going to bore you with all the details, so I’ll just give it to you straight up:

In the 2 weeks the promo ran, I had just over 10,000 people signup for the free report – about 2,000 of those signed up to be an affiliate and about 450 of the affiliates referred more than 5 unique people.

The average conversion rate ended up being 51%. It started out at about 57%, then slowly dropped as the promo went on, likely because the quality of traffic was dropping.

The highest affiliate had a conversion rate of 88% and the lowest active affiliate had a conversion rate of 1% – so the quality of traffic definitely had a large impact on the signups generated.

Testing

Before I sign off, one thing I should mention is the importance of testing. Before running something like this, you need to test your opt-in page like crazy. Test the headlines, the graphics, the opt-in form, the bullets, the testimonials, the colors- test everything you can in the time you have.

It’s pretty easy to double or triple your conversion rate by testing a few key things and that cam mean the difference between 2,000 signups or 10,000 signups.

By the way, if you want to see the final tested opt-in page I used, it’s at www.LemonadeHere.com.

I tested everything with PPC, mostly because it was easy to do, cost effective and offered a good random sample of visitors.

I also did a little testing with one of those traffic generation pay per click sites which had such a low conversion rate, it was really just a waste of time and money.

Besides getting a lot of opt-ins, I wanted to try and earn back the $1 commission I was paying to affiliates from the one time offers, so I tested them with PPC as well until they were providing a good ROI.

I also did some live testing of the OTO’s simply because you need a certain number of sales to get decently accurate results and that can take a lot of time and money and go on forever with PPC.

In the end, everything worked out pretty well, I added an extra 10k people to my list, met a lot of new people and as luck would have it, earned back $1 and change per signup.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them as a comment and I’ll get back to you.

But is the money really in the list? Everyone’s going to have their own opinions on opt-in email lists, but check this out:

An average internet marketer with an averagely responsive list should be able to earn somewhere around $1 per opt-in subscriber

People like John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Russell Brunson, Armand Morin, Derek Gehl and anyone else pulling in multiples of 7 figures a year online owe a big portion of it to an email list.

It might not always be their own email list that’s earning them money, but you can be sure that a good (meaning high) percentage of their income arrives from sales to their list or another’s.

Look at all the major product launches that are always fluttering about.

The sales pages aren’t getting the kind of traffic that takes servers offline from seo, article marketing, blog posting, PPC, banner ads or any other kind of traffic generation technique.

The bulk, sometimes all of the visitors to these sites get there through an email they received because they’re on an email list somewhere.

Sure, you can work on seo, viral marketing and other traffic generation methods, but why bother when you can spend 10 minutes, write an email and generate thousands, 10’s of thousands or 100’s of thousands of visitors in the next 24 hours.

The point is, if you’re trying to, planning to, wanting to, or are involved in internet marketing, or making money in any form on the internet, you absolutely need to have an email list.

If you’re just starting out, before you purchase an ebook, put up a website, invest in PPC, create a product or put effort into anything, put it into a list.

Not working on growing a list the day before I started in IM was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made online. I went almost a whole year before I really put in any kind of serious effort into growing an email list – BIG MISTAKE.

If I had just signed up an extra 10 people per day in that time, I would be making an extra $3,650 per month and a staggering $43,800 a year, without much more than a smidge of extra effort. It doesn’t take any more time to write an email to 1,000 vs. 100 people, or 100,000 vs. 1,000 people, so why not do it?

If you haven’t started putting in double effort into building, growing, nurturing and spreading love to your very opt-in email list, think seriously about it.

Next time you sit down at your computer to surf the WWW, look for good deals on eBay or shoot the shit in a forum or through an instant messenger, take that time and put it into something that will actually help you secure your financial future.

PS: While we’re talking about lists, why not opt-in to my new newsletter on the right sidebar and get

PPS: With the summer having been in full swing, it’s been more than a while since I’ve posted anything to this blog. Anyone who leaves a comment for this post will be entered into a draw to win a signed copy of my book, Street Smart Internet Marketing, absolutely free – just let me know where to send it.

If there are 10, comments, you’ll have a 1 in 10 chance of winning. Random drawing will be held on Oct. 26 and the winner will be announced here.

Under no circumstances should you ever purchase a CD of millions of email addresses. These emails have been harvested from the internet and if you contact anyone on these lists, you will be spamming them. Also avoid opt-out lists where recipients are placed on a list involuntarily and then invited to unsubscribe if they want to.

It’s important to note that the lists are always rented, never bought. The list owner is the only person who ever sees the actual list. You rent the one-time use of the list, send your promotion to the list owner, who in turn sends it out to the list.

Since you only get the one-time use of the list, instead of trying to directly sell the recipients a product or service, pull out all the stops to try and collect their email address. Since most people are unlikely to buy from the first contact, this allows you to contact them again and again until you eventually sell your product or service to them. Offer a free gift or ethical bribe, get their email, then sell to them later. This way, not only can you try and sell one product to them later, but over the span of their lifetime with you, you can sell to them again and again,

The average list rental will usually cost between $0.01 and $0.50 per name with an average of about $0.20 per name. Additional specifications, including postal/zip codes, ages, gender and job types carry an additional cost of about $0.05 per name. A typical response rate from a rented list hovers around the 0.5% mark; of course it depends on the list, the copy and the offer, but 0.5% is average.

List Brokers

It’s not always a simple and easy task to find the right opt-in email list to rent for your business. In fact, most of the time it’s a very difficult task and takes lots of research, patience and time. That’s where a list broker can help. Their job is to help you chose and acquire the properly targeted list at the right price. They will even sometimes negotiate for you with the list owner. And the great news is that it won’t cost you a thing. The broker earns an industry standard commission of around 15-20% from the actual owner of the list. Most brokers have a minimum order value of $1,000 (or 5,000 names at $0.20 a name) to make it profitable for them.

Since list sales reps usually work on commissions, they may sometimes try to sell you more names than you want or need, instead of the best names for your campaign. However, you should remember that it is list quality, not quantity that counts.

Here are some tips on choosing a list broker:

• Make sure you have a specific definition of your target audience for them to work with.
• Having a budget in mind will help as well.
• Find out if the list is single or double opt-in. How did they opt-in?
• Ask the list broker if they will review your offer / copy.

Although they will most likely not be a copy editor, they should have a good idea if it will be successful based on previous offerings.

It would also be worth it to insist that there be a warranty built into the contract that will protect your business should the rented list fall foul to spam or data protection legislation.

Perhaps the most important thing about purchasing email lists is to test them first. That means sending a test email to 5-10% of the list before purchasing it to test your response. Be wary of list owners that won’t allow you to test their list. Most will charge you for it (or include the initial rental charge if you do decide to rent the list) so don’t expect it for free. It’s also not a bad idea to send a couple of test emails testing different elements of your email before you blast it to the entire list.

If you’re just starting out, or looking to grow quickly, purchasing a list can be a very viable option. Always remember to research list owners to make sure they are reputable. If they have testimonials, or email/phone numbers of past clients you can call, all the better. Just remember, you’ll get what you pay for.