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..
