email marketing

Are You Wasting Your Time and Money Buying Leads?

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I’ve seen a rather disturbing trend in the training that some people are passing down to their referrals. Not just in NPN but all over the place.. No wonder people are getting frustrated. It’s difficult to keep up the enthusiasm when your sponsor is giving you mis-information on the best ways to promote your business online.

Have you ever been advised to do this:

“After joining my program under me…”
Step 1. Go buy some leads
Step 2. Import them into an autoresponder
Step 3. Sit back and wait for the money to come in
Step 4. Goto step #1.

Honestly those were the same instructions (more or less) that I saw yesterday being sent to someone’s downline as a “how to make money online” message. Sheesh! Either the sponsor is the one selling the leads, or they’ve been told the same thing from THEIR upline sponsor and are just passing it along. Giving out those instructions to a new marketer is sort of like saying “Start with the most inefficient and costly marketing method, then do nothing and hope it works, then do it again”. On the positive side, it sure looks easy to do. In reality, it doesn’t work like that and you’ll quit if you try and do it. DON’T FALL FOR IT!

The problem is the “shortcut mentality” that is out there that dictates that since you need leads to build your business, it’s better to skip the steps of actually generating leads and go right to the followup. What you might not realize is that it’s actually NOT a shortcut. It’s actually faster, cheaper, and more profitable to do it the right way.

Yes, emailing to bulk leads can have a place in your marketing plan but you need to know a bit more about it before you can just go at it. Point being you should NOT be importing leads as your MAIN method of generating leads for your business. Here’s why..

There are many variables that come into play with regards to blasting emails to leads lists that you have purchased.

1. Lead quality – exclusiveness, age, country, origin etc.
2. Outgoing letters / subject lines / spam trigger words
3. Quantity of leads
4. Consistancy of mailings
5. etc..

One of the complaints I’ve had about email blasting is “I’ve imported 10,000 leads into your mailer and haven’t had one single signup. What’s going on?”

My answer: “Because you’ve only imported 10,000 leads and your leads are probably crap.”

Any time you’re dealing with “bulk” anything (leads,traffic,signups,clicks..), you need to keep in mind the number 1,000,000 (yes one million). That is how many leads you’d need to blast to in order to have any idea of the quality of those leads and the quality of your email campaigns. I guess the point here is that importing and blasting emails to people that probably don’t want to hear from you is not a very efficient way of advertising anything. It is “a” way of advertising, but shouldn’t be “the” way in your overall marketing strategy.

As a side note. A few months ago I spoke on the phone to an online marketer that ONLY does bulk email to generate her income. She was sending around 1.2 MILLION emails PER DAY through various email servers that she was paying for herself, to leads she was purchasing herself. She told me she was barely earning a full time income and she was now earning half of what she was earning a year ago, doing the same thing. Sound like fun?

Fact: Your money would be better spent in other kinds of advertising.

I’ll give you an example. Generally speaking, in this industry you should aim to spend between $1 and $2 per generated lead. A “generated lead” would be (in our case) someone that enters their name into one of your NPN capture pages as a double opt-in lead. These leads would be generated from your own advertising.

So…  If you bought 10,000 leads at 1cent per lead (which is really cheap) you would have spent $100. Out of those 10,000 you might get a couple people that say they might be interested in your opp. Maybe you won’t get any. A percentage of those leads will never see your email due to spam blocking, and a percentage will bounce back as undeliverable. To get to the $1-$2 per lead point, you would need to get 100 of those leads to optin to your capture page. I’m sorry but with cheap leads, that will not happen. Period. You’ve just wasted $100 and the time it took you to find, purchase, and to import the leads. This is where the frustration and the blame game starts kicking in.

So what’s your solution?

Answer: solo ezine ads, safelist ads, traffic exchange hits.

First off, what am I talking about here..

What is an “ezine”? An ezine, is, essentially, an “electronic” magazine. What exactly does that mean? Like a magazine, an ezine is something you subscribe to and it is “delivered” to you via email (ie. not spam). The beauty of an ezine lies in the fact that you receive articles, information and more, “specifically” on the topics that interest you. The owners of these ezines often sell advertisements either in the newsletters themselves, or as “solo” ads sent to their entire ezine database.

What is a “safelist”? A safe list is an email list you can join for free, and in return for joining you are allowed to email out to the entire list of members that join. Usually most safelists have different levels of memberships you can join at, and each different level will allow you to email more members more often. The best type of safelist to join is a ‘credit-based’ safelist. In this case the members would need to earn their mailings, racking up credits by clicking email ads from the other members. Most safelists sell ad credits as well which can save you from clicking all day.

What is a “traffic exchange”? A traffic exchange is similar to a credit-based safelist except that to earn credits you would be viewing other people’s websites for a determined amount of time (usually 15-30) seconds. Traffic exchanges will also sell you credits which would allow you to avoid having to click on other people’s websites all day to earn credits.

Now, for your $100 that you wasted on leads, you could have put out a number of targeted solo ads to probably thousands of people. And remember that these people are already expecting to receive emails like yours since they’re already active and in the same industry as you (The leads you bought are not). You would use your ezine ads to direct prospects to your NPN capture pages (or your own capture pages) where they would opt in and become generated leads.

The same can be said about safelists ads, and traffic exchange credits.

As I said above, you should aim to spend between $1-$2 per lead. So if you purchase an ezine ad for $20, a good return on your investment would be 10-20 leads that signed up through your capture page. You may get less, you may get more. If you don’t get as many as you’d like, change your ad, change your subject line and run it again. Use the NPN Ad-Tracker to see where your leads are coming from. Re-run what works, don’t run what doesn’t work. DON’T take your next $20 and buy leads. Remember that an ad that doesn’t work in one ezine, may work wonders in another ezine. Test, test, test. It’s what successful marketers do.

Basically, you will get more out of placing these types of ads than you would EVER get in buying and blasting to leads lists. I guarantee it. And it will even take up less of your time, and less of your money – which sounds good to me. We all want to make more money, perhaps we should do it the right way?

Have a great day.

And please please please don’t pass information to your downlines just because your sponsor sent it to you – unless they are actually using it and actually making money with that information.

– Geoff.

P.S. The guy you bought the leads from has already made more money from those leads than you will, just by selling them to you.

🙂 Feel free to COMMENT below..

Who makes all the big bucks in Global NPN?

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Something really cool has been happening at NPN over the past month or so. We have had more account upgrades in the last month than we have in quite a while. What I mean is people are either joining immediately at the DIRECTOR level or higher, or they are upgrading from a lower level. In fact by comparison very few people have joined NPN at the PRO level this month.

What this is telling me is that more people are seeing the benefits of being an upgraded member of NPN. It also tells me that more of our current members are pushing the higher levels of membership in their advertising. And when you do promote the higher levels to your prospects, what that does is immediately put you in the position of being a leader in your industry.

Put it this way, if you are trying to sponsor people, and you’re at the $10.75 PRO level, it’s a lot more difficult to sponsor quality people if all you can say is that you’re still at the entry level position. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but it’s a lot more difficult. The reason it’s more difficult is because these days, people are looking for two things.

1. A team (or leader) to join under.
2. An opportunity to join with that team.

The key here is that people are looking for other people to join, they’re not looking for businesses to join. So it’s much easier to sponsor people into the upgraded levels when you’re an upgraded member yourself and when you’re promoting yourself as the business, which is what you should be doing.

Don’t worry so much about asking people to join you at the director level instead of the $10 level. If they see that you’re at the Director/Silver/Gold, whatever, and if you’re promoting yourself as a leader, as someone of value to them, they will join you at the same level you’re at. Because they want to see some success and if joining at a higher level means they’ll be part of your organization, or your team, they will do it.

In fact I’d strongly recommend promoting the director level as the best place to start in NPN, because it is. That’s what I do. You get way more product access, and you’ll make a big worthwhile jump income-wise, 2 referrals at the director level and you’re already $10 in profit every month.

Bottom line: The people making good money in NPN are upgraded members sponsoring new upgraded members. That is a statistical fact.

Have a great day!

Be sure to comment below…

and..

Subscribe to my blog.

– Geoff.

Top 5 Ways to Get Your Email Messages Blocked

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Hello all,

If you’ve been in this industry for more than a month you’ve probably figured out that email deliverability sucks. Plain and simple. What I mean by that is many of the major ISP’s out there have some pretty extensive spam-blocking filters and processes in place that prevent legitimate emarketers from getting their messages to the appropriate inboxes. I totally understand why they have these filters in place due to the massive amounts of email spam that is currently moving around the internet – and there’s really nothing we can do about that.

The problem is we need to get our messages delivered. Period.

So… why are our messages getting blocked before they even get to the recipient? Well, the first thing you need to understand is that there are so many variables in email marketing that it’s impossible to tell if our messages are even going to be delivered.Every ISP has their own set of filtering rules and their own set of greylisted and blacklisted IP address and URL’s, which makes it impossible to guarantee delivery to ‘any’ of them.

For example, Yahoo may have your IP blocked, but hotmail may not. But.. hotmail may not like the words used in your message, but it’s ok with gmail. But then again, gmail may block your email based on a domain that is in your message, yet it’s okay with aol.. etc. etc. etc.

There really is no ‘guaranteed delivery’ of email no matter what anyone tells you. It’s a big game and all we can do is try our best to comply with as many rules as possible based on past experience and what we know now. Things would be a LOT different if ALL email went through the same ISP with one set of rules – but we’re not that lucky. We have to guess most of the time.

There are lots of websites with information out there that will give you tips on how to get your emails delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. I was going to make the same sort of post here, but I thought we’d take it from the other side of the coin. What is the best way to get your emails BLOCKED by email servers? How do you NOT get your email delivered. If we look at things that way hopefully you can understand that it’s not always the same reason that email gets blocked. ie. It’s not always the delivery server’s fault that email isn’t getting delivered – in fact it’s usually NOT their fault. We all need to take responsibility, it’s way too easy to blame someone else and move on.

So let’s have a look at some of the main reasons your email isn’t getting received. By no means is this a complete list, as I said before there are just way too many variables in this equation to list here.

Also this is NOT a list of what will ‘certainly’ get your emails blocked. This is a list of conditions that ‘might‘ make it LESS LIKELY that your email will end up in the spam folder – or not even make it that far. In my experience in running mail servers, here is a top-5 list of things that might kill your email campaigns:

1. Import and blast to leads that haven’t double opted in.

This refers to importing and ‘blasting’ to a list of leads that you have purchased. Or..  leads that you have that have not ‘opted in’ or given you explicit permission to send them commercial email.

2. Have “spam trigger words” in your outgoing message/Have a misleading subject line.

This is one that people often forget about that can really affect your deliverability. Yes folks it could actually be your fault that your messages aren’t getting delivered. If your messages and/or subject lines are full of trigger-words or phrases, your message will get junked immediately.

3. Have a blocked URL in your message

Sometimes ISP’s will get spam complaints, enough to block your message if a certain domain or website is listed in the email (ie. your affiliate link). The only way around this one is to find a non-blocked URL redirector service where you can mask your URL’s.

4. Deliver through a blacklisted IP address (server)

This one is fairly obvious. If the IP address of the email server sending the email has been deemed ‘questionable’ by an ISP, they may not let any emails from that server get to their users.

5. Deliver messages too quickly to the same ISP

This one is a little more technical with regards to how the emails are delivered and is probably out of your control. Example: if you try to send hundreds of messages all at once, all at the same time, to one ISP, they may block your emails because that makes it look like a whole shwack of commercial email (probably unsolicited) is coming their way.

There are lots of other variables at play here. Email header information, server configuration, country of origin, the list goes on.

I suppose the best way to get around all this filtering stuff, in the simplest way, is follow these 3 rules:

1. Always build your list using double opt-in confirmation.

2. Clean your messages of any ‘spam words’ that the filters may catch.

3. Don’t be misleading in your subject lines or email messages.

As long as you are following those 3 rules you’re more likely to get your messages delivered and, more importantly, opened and read. If you’re sending bulk email, try not to get too frustrated with poor deliverability rates, concentrate on building a clean list and sending them emails that actually have value to the recipient.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!

– Geoff

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