DKSP EP10: Email Marketing Best Practices for Building and Managing a Responsive List

07/22/15 • 15 min

The Affiliate Marketing Simplified Podcast

Pinterest0 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 LinkedIn WhatsApp 0Shares “The Money is in the List” is something that you hear the moment you jump into internet marketing and it follows you whenever and wherever you go. And the fact that every experienced internet marketer tells you that the money is indeed in the list, goes to establish the fact that your list is your biggest asset and that it is the most important thing in your business. When I started my business, I never really cared about a list. Traffic generation was simple and Google Adwords and other ads networks were also very cheap. I built a lot of micro niche websites and I was able to generate huge amounts of traffic to these sites. I made and these sites did extremely well. But the biggest mistake that I did was – not build and email list. I never really cared about the “Money is in the list” thing because I was making money and that was all I cared. The next couple of years saw a lot of things change on the internet. The traffic to my sites dropped because they were not optimized and some of them did not even follow the guidelines from Google. Some got penalized and yet others dropped of the rankings. As traffic dropped, the money went down. And finally one day, by the time I could realize what was happening, pretty much all my sites were down. I am sure you don’t want to be in that situation. With the changing internet marketing world and the difficulty in generating traffic and visitors to your content and offers, the efforts that you are putting into generating every single visitor is huge. At the same time, the value of every single visitor coming to your website has increased. If you are not able to capture this visitor in the form of an email address, then you are losing a lot of money. If you haven’t yet started building your list, then start right away. Don’t waste time on planning and designing. Just launch it. Keep in mind that you will need some good and reliable tools in your list building efforts. I recommend using Aweber for your auto-responder. If you are looking for a self-hosted solution, you can use IMSC rapid mailer and use Amazon SES services to send your email. For building beautiful and high converting optin pages and landing pages, I recommend, Thrive Content Builder and Thrive leads. They are cost-effective and has a lot of features as well. Now, you have built your list. What next? Email Marketing Best Practices Building your list is important. It is equally important to manage it as well. One of the biggest mistakes that most people do is to ignore the list after you have built it. You don’t want a dead list where your subscribers don’t respond at all. Neither do you want to be building a list where your subscribers are unsubscribing faster than the rate at which they are subscribing. These 4 email marketing best practices that we are going to discuss today will help you build and manage an email list that is responsive and at the same time profitable. The Confirmation pages – I see a lot of people using the default subscription confirmation pages, which we also call the “thank-you” page, for the optin forms. These pages are hosted by the auto-responder services and have nothing but a message to the subscribers to confirm their email. This is sheer waste of a chance to better interact with you new subscribers. Build a custom thank-you page and give it your branding. You might want to personalize it while telling them who you are are. You might want to add a photograph of yours so that they know who you are. I prefer using this same photograph in almost all of my emails. People digest things better if presented visually. Rather than remembering my name, it will be easier for them to relate to my photograph.

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DKSP EP11:What are Buyer Keywords – Doing Keyword Research the Right Way!

Pinterest0 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 LinkedIn WhatsApp 0Shares If you have signed up to email newsletters from any of the big internet marketers, I am sure you would have heard about the launch and the discounted offers on Long Tail Pro – a keyword research tool. There were a ton of emails floating around and pretty much everyone recommended this tool. In fact a lot of marketers use this tool. A few days before Long Tail Pro was re-launched, there was another keyword research tool that was launched – Niche Genetics, which pretty much did the same job as that of Long Tail Pro – but with a difference that Niche Genetics helped you find profitable Niche and Long Tail Pro helped you find long tail keywords. How is this different? I still remember buying the “Keyword Elite” software from Brad Callen for about $197, when it was released about 8 years back. Then I found Market Samurai and then Micro Niche Finder. I bought both of these and if you are asking why, then the answer is plain and simple. I was confused, overwhelmed and struggled with the entire activity of researching keywords with the first 2 softwares. While I got a refund for Market Samurai, I couldn’t do it for Keyword Elite because by the time I tested it, I was already out of the Money-Back guarantee period. Market Samurai is a great tool and a lot of marketers use it, but somehow I felt it was just not for me. I was really overwhelmed with the many filters and options in there. Finally I found Micro Niche Finder and this is the tool that I am using until today. Almost all of these softwares use the same source for their data – Google’s Keyword Tool. The only difference lies in how they present it with some analytics of their own, so that you know which keyword or, niche to go after. Over the years, as Google changed their Keywords tools to the Keyword Planner and restricted the data that was available, these softwares also changed. But still their source remains the same. So, the question is – Do you really need a paid software when Google Keyword Planner is FREE? Let’s take a closer look at Long Tail Pro – This software adds a few aspects to the research. The source of the data for Long Tail Pro is also the same. But it uses a confidence score to tell you how hard or, easy it will be to rank on the search engines for that specific keyword. In addition to that it also gives you some additional data in the form of Domain Authority, Page Authority, Moz Rank, Domain age, # of backlinks etc. all of which will help you evaluate and analyze your competition. If you were to do all of these individually, you would have spent a lot of time doing it. Same is the case with Micro Niche Finder. It uses a competitive measure called as SOC or, Strength of Competition to evaluate the competition. So, what these tools basically does, is that they speeden up the process of keyword research. You can save a lot of time if you use these tools. But do you really need them – You might not. If you know the basics of what to look for while researching a keyword or, a niche and you are ready to spend time doing that, then you can do that with the help of the Google Keyword Planner tool. Doing Keyword Research the Right Way! What is keyword research and how does it differ from niche research? These are 2 terms that are used as synonyms, a lot of times but in reality they differ. In fact keyword research is just one part of niche research. While keyword research involved researching keywords that people use to search for something, Niche research involves a lot of other things like profitability of the niche, demographics, ad costs, content research, market research etc. Niche research is the first thing you need to do as you plan for your business.