Affiliate marketing 101

Hi you can earn doing affiliate marketing if it is done correct. Start with small. When you get results. Rinse and repeat and scale it. It's learning process. I really appreciate that if you have business mindset. Here below I am sharing my way of doing affiliate marketing.


First of all before starting affiliate marketing we need to understand these things first.

1. Always have positive mindset, this is very important. We need to believe from our core that affiliate marketing works and we have to make it happen. Say big NO to Negativity.

2 Always have business mindset (not free) that you have already. Every business needs investment. Whether its small or big, it depends on our size of business and our goal. Investment requires for our own education to learn about the business or affiliate marketing or this investment requires for our business or affiliate marketing to make it run. (I am here talking in the context of affiliate marketing)

3. Always take action. We don't take action and waste our time thinking whether this will work or not. Stop thinking and start taking action. There are so many articles on blogs and training on you tube that we can learn about affiliate marketing but finally it is we have to take action. No body will come and take action own our behalf. Right.

In affiliate marketing there are some other points to consider.

1. Know our Why. Why we want to do affiliate marketing. Everybody knows what to do and how to do but nobody knows Why we are doing?.

2. Choose a Profitable Niche. Choose a niche which is profitable. There are four evergreen niche we can choose 1. Health it can be anything related to health but weight loss is very lucrative 2. Dating 3. Make Money Online 4. Insurance. There are so many profitable niches or field or sub-niches out there in which we can go according to our taste, interest and passion. It is up-to to us. But above four are broad niches. We can drill-down them. And here mine is make money online.

3. When we have chosen our niche then we choose a product that solves the problem of people. Choose a product that something we really believe from our core heart that it will solve the problem. Product must have customer support. Product must have great commission. Product must have big competition too, mean to say lots of people selling it. But before promoting any product It would be better to purchase the product first and then come to the conclusion about it. And for that we can go to ClickBank | A Global Internet Retailer, JVZoo.com - Instant Commission Platform for Sellers and Affiliates, CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction), www.warriorplus.com and ShareASale. For a product to promote we have to go one network out of above said affiliate network and we have to create account. Its a simple process to fill up the form.

4. After choosing product we need strategic funnel/selling system. We need a true system that works. We need strategy that works. It must have zero resistance point of entry. It must engage visitor. It must have multiple streams of income in a strategic way. System must sell without selling. What comes in strategic funnel/selling system or what we need for this?

1. Great Product. It must be great product as described in detail above.

2. Lead magnet. Lead magnet is something valuable related to interest of visitor that we can give away for free in respect of getting name and email or only email of visitor when he lands on our landing page). Lead magnet can be in the shape of ebook, cd, dvd, video training etc. It can be our own or we can outsource it from www.fiverr.com or some other places.

3. Landing page or squeeze page. A landing page when a visitor first time lands on our web page. For professional landing page we can go to https://www.leadpages.net/, https://www.megaphoneapp.com/, OptimizePress - Create Landing Pages, Sales Pages & Membership Portals — OptimizePress etc. It can be webinar page too.

Note We also need Thank you page, bonus page or download page. But it depends.

4. Tracking tool. There are so many out there but I will mention only that I use and that is ClickMagick - Track And Optimize All Your Marketing, All In One Place. Through this tracking tools we can track all over visitors, sale, conversion etc.

5. Autoresponder. We need autoresponder for automated email follow up sequence and to make a further relation with our customer, lead, client etc. Some of best autoresponders are GetResponse and AWeber.

6. Targeted Traffic. When we create our landing page then we need targeted traffic that converts. We can divide it into two part.

1.Paid Traffic. This include PPC (pay per click) such as google adwords, yahoo gamini, bing ppc, facebook ppc (social platform), media buying such as https://www.buysellads.com/, BidVertiser - Pay Per Click Advertising On Sites Of Your Choice., twitter advertising platform, Instagram advertising, youtube video marketing it can be free too. Solo ad such as Safe-Swaps - email ad swaps
and Buy Solo Ads | Udimi

2. Free Traffic. This include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but it takes time and requires patience. Forum Posting such as warriorforum.com which I am doing, https://forums.digitalpoint.com/ etc. Facebook posting, guest blogging, blogging, article marketing. Youtube videos by creating your own.
Note:- This type of traffic you will have to need when you will choose option 1 in near future.

Thats it. Always provide immense value to customer, visitor or client, whatever the case. Always keep providing value column first in making strategy to promote product or services. Don't just go and pitch for sale. Help as much as we can. Always be authentic marketer. I hope this will somewhere help you to start earning with affiliate marketing. Best of luck.        

Google Alert Method

The Google Alert Method is very simple.

Here is how you do it.

Step 1 - You simply go over https://www.google.com/alerts and set up an alert for keywords in your niche.

When setting up your google alert be sure to pick the following options...

1. As it happens (you will get an email as soon is content is posted using your selected keywords)
2. blogs - This will make sure you only get alerts about blogs that have just created a new post using your keywords.

See the screenshot below...


Step 2 - Once you receive a google alert via email, then you go to the blog that just posted new content and comment on their post.

Note: You will want to be one of the first people to comment because the first people to comment will be at the top of the comments and more people will see them when they comment on the post.

Your traffic will come from the link (your name will be linked to your website) that you are allowed to leave when submitting your information before making your comment.

Few tips when using this method...

1. Some people will tell you to figure out a way to add your link in your comment. I don't recommend that. Most blog owners are not stupid and they will see that you are just comment spamming.
2. Make a great comment. Your job is to make other readers of the blog post want to learn more about you so they can get more of your insights. So..your comment can not be something like (I love your article..keep up the good work). It needs to either add to the conversation or even start a new one. For example: You could read through the blog post, take one main point from it, and go into more detail about that point in your comment.)
3. This method is very time consuming so it may be worth the investment to hire a virtual assistant to do this method for you. I have never used a virtual assistant for anything but I have heard that you can hire 1 for as little as $2 an hour.

solo ads 2012

Hey everyone,
I have found a lot of cool things on here and have been using them, but now I would like to give back. I found this method where you create an email list and then use that to market(I'm not the first one to use it but it could be helpful to some people). Basically what you are doing is buying solo ads, sending people to a squeeze page and getting them to opt-in to your auto responder, where you can send them cool products. It might sound complicated, but keep reading and it will get cleared up a bit. First I will just give some definitions.


Squeeze page - This is a webpage that?s entirely dedicated to capturing a visitor?s name and e-mail address. This is what allows direct response marketers to build a list on the Internet ? develop a relationship with that list ? and then sell products and services to the prospects on that list.

Auto Responder - Automated programs which are established to return a prewritten message upon receipt of e-mail. Program will grab the return address from the ?header? of the message. Typically, these programs will send out the canned message within seconds of receipt.

SLO - Self-Liquidating offer. Pretty much means however much you spend on solo ads, you will have this offer on the other end, making almost all if not more of your money back (usually more, but we'll get into this later)

Conversions - People who Opt-in to your email list. Basically the higher the conversion rate, the better your squeeze page is and the more sales that you make. You want to have a high converting squeeze page.

So now that you know the basic terminology, we can get started. I will try to be as thorough as possibly.

The Whole Idea : You want to build the biggest list possible. On average, per month, for every subscriber on your list you would make $1. If you have 100,000 people on your list, and you send out an email promoting a product where you make $50 per sale and only 2% bought it, you would make $100,000. From sending 1 email. Now obviously this is rare, but if you send emails every day, you can easily make $40,000 a month from this method alone. Now to the prices of solo ads. You can buy a click for about $0.35 on average, so say you have 25$ to start. You can buy about 71 clicks. From those 71 clicks, 28 Opt-in. They are then sent to your SLO and 2 people buy it. You will make all of your money back and more. That's an average 28$ a month just from 1 ad, and you have your money back from the SLO. Now lets say you buy some every week adding 25$ each time, but including the money you previously made. The nest week, you send out 142 ads. 56 Opt-in, and 3 sales. You made the money back plus 58 subscribers. Now you are making around 80$-90$/month. Within just 3 months, you would have about 2,500 people, and thus around 2500$/month. At 6 months, 10,000 opt-ins, 10k a month, and at just 1 year, 40k people and 40k a month. Just remember we are talking about average statistics. So could be more and some could be less; nothing is guaranteed, but it is likely you will have similar results. Some people say the money is in the list, but really the money is in your relationship with the list, so be as nice as possible and build a character that is easy to relate to. Now lets get down to business.

Step 1 : You want to find a good product to promote. Since this doesn't require SEO (Unless you want to get more Opt-ins by using this method with SEO ...) You should choose one with a high gravity. I go to CBengine to find products. Find one with a high gravity and go check it out. If it looks nice and professional, choose it. I recommend going on YouTube and looking for a review and what you will learn when someone buys this. Write down/type a few key points. You will need this for step 2.:

Step 2 : Time to make a squeeze page. I use 90secondsqueezepage.com which is one of Russell Brunsons products. It is completely free to use and it makes unique, high-converting squeeze pages. It basically makes it look nice. What you want to do here is either make a video explaining what you get and why you should buy this product, or you can just put bullet points (it automatically makes the bullets into green check marks which will increase conversions.) Then you will need an auto responder to make a opt-in form. I will talk about this in the next step.

Step 3 : Now you need an auto responder. The best one out there is Aweber. Everything with it is the best, including customer service. It is 1$ for the first month, but if you want a free one for the first month, go with GetResponse. I highly recommend going with Aweber though, because it is hard to transfer your list later. You want to set up your web form (with the thank you page being the offer you are promoting) and get the html code from it. Then paste the web form html code in the squeeze page (there is a box in the setup that requires this, you can't miss it). I won't go to much in depth on this because you can look it up on YouTube. You need to set up your follow up messages too. You can see how to do this on YouTube (its VERY hard to explain without a video, so try to find one there). You should have about 14 emails ready to send out through out the next month. After that month, you will have a very good relationship with your list. You can now send out broadcasts and products that you are promoting. Soft sell them. Also, always cloak your links. you can look up how to do this on YouTube (who would have guessed ). NOTE: I can't stress how important it is that you test all of this (With respect to making sure they are being send through your affiliate link and everything. You don't want to be sending 1000 clicks through the offer and not your affiliate link). Once that is done, you want to start sending traffic, which brings us to step 4.

Step 4 : There are a lot of solo ad providers. I only go with ones that have good reviews. You usually can find this with Reed Floren's reviews (soloaddirectory.com). You can read more about solo ads there. You can usually get about 100 clicks for 40$. Remember, this is HIGH quality traffic. I just recommend staying away from Bilaal Hussain, he doesn't deliver as promised. Everyone else seems good though. Some you will need to write a swipe for, other will do it for you. A swipe is just an email for the advertiser to send to his/her list. Just write something that you think will convert well... Mini pre-selling sort of. Just make sure to start small, with the lowest offer they have, and if it works for you, then move up to the bigger ones.

Step 5 : Make sure you are consistent. Always check to see how many opt-ins you have and how many sales, and always cloak and track your links. Build a good relationship with your list and you will be successful.

I hope that this helped some of you out. I would like to thank Tristam for making good music that I can listen to while making threads like this. I would also like to thank all you blackhatters for sharing your methods

And as a great man once said, "One other thing. I'm non-violent by nature...BUT...I see one of you idiots
rehashing this into an ebook and selling it on, and I WILL hunt you down and
make you sorry you ever read my threads, LOL
Let's stick to sharing, and helping, for FREE - ok?"

If you need any help, just comment and I will help. I'm gonna go parkour now. Thanks for reading!    

how to increase email list in 2016

An email list is never big enough. It also never gets overcrowded. Yet, you’re still not quite sure how to grow it big enough to match your appetites. Who is to blame you, really? You aren’t the only trying to solve this cyber-marketing puzzle. Here are a few tips, which can definitely come in handy. At the same time, we encourage you to share some of your own, which have proven themselves to be efficient, with us and our readers.

#1 There’s no impressive list without the impressive content
Pay attention to your email’s content and you will be properly rewarded. People will decide whether or not to join your email list based on the quality of content you provide to them.

#2 It’s both smart and fair to share
Don’t you even dare to forget to include social share buttons in your emails. An email has never been a one-way street, has it? One email, which is being shared more than once, can bring you a dozen of new invaluable contacts.

#3 The more subscription types – the better
It’s reasonable to expect that you’ll try to address more than one target group. That’s why you’re strongly encouraged to provide multiple email subscription types.

#4 Don’t forget your own email signature
This is a great way to redirect email readers to your landing page where you offer services or products. Make sure there are not too many links in your signature.

#5 Make social networks work for you
Both Facebook and Twitter should be your top recommendation tools when it comes to “recruitment” for your ever-growing email list. Just make sure you use them wisely.

#6 Who wants more needs to sign
This simple formula works only if you have something interesting to offer to your potential customers or users. That’s why, it’s essential for them not to treat your offer as one more email “harvesting” tool.

#7 Watch YouTube, but don’t forget to download
This is one more important message, you need to deliver to your new email subscribers. Use your YouTube channel to share invitation links and messages. It goes without saying that top class videos pay off in the long run with numerous contacts.

#8 Call-to-action buttons all over the place
Every single page on your website should include a thoughtfully placed call-to-action button. Of course, some interesting and engaging content needs to precede it first.

#9 Offline events – online benefits
Who says that the only way to get new emails is through online activity? You would be surprised to find out how offline events can provide you with an impressive number of new emails to use.

#10 Host a web-event and share the moment
Web-events are an excellent opportunity to exchange interesting know-how for new emails. You won’t have a problem asking for an email in return, if you keep your event attendants focused all the time.        

solo ads steps 2

So right, firstly let me outline the general method:

1) Create an autoresponder account
2) Create a high converting squeeze page
3) Create a high converting funnel
4) Create a good follow up series
5) Buy solo ads to grow your list (making back most of your cost through your funnel)
6) Once your list is built - Sell solo ads
7) Keep your list replenished - spend around 30-50% of your profits into new traffic for your list.
8) Bank and enjoy.

Right so what have I done so far and what will I be sharing in this journey:

I will be sharing my exact method MINUS - squeeze page link/design, follow up series, funnel.

Currently I've set up my autoresponder - I'm using Aweber (it is the best in the industry).
You will need a domain name - this should be something relating to earning online but without sounding like a scam. I prefer domains like: yourroadtosuccess.TLD, joinmebecomefree.TLD etc etc. << This is important. You will of course also need hosting.
I'm working on my squeeze page (I have developed my own plugin for this), funnel and follow up series.

In every post I will be outlining and going into detail on all the steps I take along with keeping a cost to revenue amount at the bottom.

Costs so far:
$1 for domain (godaddy coupon)
I will not be counting hosting costs in this as I have multiple servers but for the purpose of this case study/journey we will say $10/month.
Aweber is FREE for the first month! - $0

TOTAL COST: $11
TOTAL REVENUE: $0
TOTAL PROFIT: -$11

Solo Ads Steps 1

Before you are able to create your squeeze page, here’s exactly what you need:

1. Domain Name.

If you do NOT have a domain name, make sure you get one from:

http://mysupercoach.com/cheapdomainname

Enter your desire domain name. However, there are two things you need to remember:

• Choose a domain name that is a .com extension.
• You must purchase a domain name that is non-proxy. — Why is that? Domain Name proxy means you do not own a domain name. It also means that if a domain name provider decided to shut you down tomorrow, they will simply unplug your business the next day.

1. Web Hosting.

You don’t need a fancy web hosting services such as a private server or a dedicated hosting that costs a lot of money. However, it needs to have three different elements:

• Unlimited Domain Hosting. — This allows you to host unlimited domain names.
• Unlimited Bandwidth Capacity. — This is vitally important especially when you need to start receiving high volume of traffic to your website.
• Unlimited Storage. — Well, this feature is a must. As you grow your audience, you need to start adding more contents such as videos, PDF, software products, MP3, and much more. So, you need to haveunlimited storage for sure.

Well, go to http://xmturbosystem.com/cheaphosting

Click on “Get Started Now” button.

You will see…

Then, choose… “Plus” plan. You don’t need business pro as it is unnecessary at this point.

III. Auto-Responder Account.

This is where you host your email list. Wait, I know. There are people who told you that it is a good idea to host emails on your email account. Here is some fact that you need to know:

• If you host your own email list, be ready to have your domain name blacklisted by spam assassinator.
• If you host your own email list on your server, be ready to get a warning email from your hosting company in which they will shut down your account.
• If you mail out email manually from Gmail account, you will receive warning from Gmail that your account is blocked.
• If you mail out from any software script, be ready to get your server and domain name shut down the next day.
• If you mail out from free auto-responder account, be ready to waste your effort on list building as many free auto-responder account will put the banners or ads on each email that you send out. — This will definitely kill your sales conversion.

I can go on and on about your ideas and reasons why you don’t need an auto-responder account, but this is the reality you are going to face. The question is… “What kind of auto-responder services do you use?” Well, we recommend:

1) Aweber Account.

You can get it at: http://XMTurboSystem.com/cheapautoresponder

2) Send Pepper Account.

You can get it at: http://XMTurboSystem.com/autoresponder

NOTE: With Send Pepper Account, you can use it to send post card as well as upgrade it to a CRM system in the future. This is a useful service that allows you to get to know your customers as well as sell high ticket items.

1. Tracking Tools.

This is where the money is. In fact, there is a saying that if you fail to track your conversion, you prepare to fail. It is also true in everything you do. The question is… “Why do you need to track?”

• How much traffic do you receive from Facebook? If you have no clue about it, how can you know which traffic sources you need to focus on.
• How many subscribers do you receive for every subscribers you receive? If you have no clue about it, how can you get the right traffic for your business.
• Which traffic sources give you the most subscribers and sales? If you have no clue which traffic sources give you the most subscribers and sales, why do you keep spending money on advertising.

My point of asking you all these questions are really because I want you to figure out the traffic sources that give you the most money. This way, when you invest $1,000 on certain traffic sources, you know that you will get back $x,xxx.xx every single time.

Which tracking tools do I recommend? Well, go to Click Magic at:http://xmturbosystem.com/cooltracking (14-Free Trial)

You just simple click on the “Yellow Button” on the page. It works with Facebook, Social Media, Email Marketing, and much more. Basically, the sky is the limit. 

1. WordPress Plug-in to Build Your Landing Pages.

There are “two” ways to build your landing pages:

• Hard and expensive way. — You need to learn HTML code, Photoshop, integrate opt-in form, or you can also hire a programmer that will cost you dearly for sure. How do I know? Well, the average programmer could cost between $500 and $1,000 a pop for sure.

Here is some outsourcing companies you can use:

• http://Elance.com
• http://Scriptlance.com
• http://odesk.com

• Simply and cheap way. — You just need to choose the templates, enter your auto-responder code, and it will automatically display your website in less than 20 minutes.

Here is the WordPress plug-in you can use: http://xmturbosystem.com/wordpressbuilder to set-up your squeeze page in just few minutes.

NOTE: They have many different templates you can use. Some of the templates have been used to convert more than 40%.

How do you set-up your squeeze page?

First, login to your Cpanel account.

NOTE: If you have no clue what it is, ask your hosting account.

Once you are inside the members area, search and click on “Quick Install”.

Next, click on “WordPress” just like what you see at:

Then, follow a simple step-by-step instruction on setting-up your blog. That’s all it takes. Once you have completed the process, your next step is to install your WordPress Profit Builder plug-in inside your WordPress admin. It should look like: http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin

Once you are inside, you can add the plug-in under “plugins” tab.

After you have installed the plug-in, click on the icon “Profit Builder”:

Then, click on “Templates Management”.

Once you are on the page, scroll down and you will see…

Then, click “Install” any templates you would like to use to create your squeeze pages.

Once you added the necessary template, the next step is to click on “add new”  under “Pages” tab.

Next, write down the page name.

Then, click “Save Draft”.

Then, click on “Profit Builder”.

On the right hand column, you will see a lot of features such as:

1) Exit redirect. — You can add an exit pop-up info.

2) PBTheme Page Option. — Please do make sure you check them all. This way, your page will look professional. Make sure you click on “Save Draft” one more time to re-save the file.

3) Other Important Features. — There is retargeting pixels for Facebook, YouTube, and changing Background color.

Then, your next step is to click on “Edit Page”.

Next, click on “Load Page”.

Click on “Load Template” Tab and choose the squeeze page template you want to use for your website. Then, click “load” button.

You will be able to see a “load” template such as:

Of course, you can always click on any text or button to modify the template as you wish. The question is… “How can you redirect your page after people sign-up to your squeeze page?”

Click on “Click to Learn More”.

Then, fill in “Form HTML” with the code you received from HTML code.

That’s all it takes.

4x Your Earnings with These 4 Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies

Conversion rate optimization isn’t something I haven’t covered a whole lot on this blog. But it’s critical to achieving success as a marketer. After all, our goal is not just to drive traffic, it’s to make money! That’s why I’m super excited to share this guest post by my good friend Nathaniel Smith. The results he’s personally achieved with the strategies he shares below are truly incredible! By getting this foundation in place, you’ll be poised to generate repeatable revenue and increase your ROI.

—

Everybody needs traffic. It’s the “tree-in-the-woods” conundrum. If you create content or build a product, it’s as-good-as-worthless if you don’t have eyeballs on it.

That’s why traffic strategies like Search Engine Optimization and guest posting will always be winners.

But traffic alone will not grow your business. In fact, you can generate all the traffic in the world, but if it’s not converting, it’s pretty much a waste of time and money.  

If you read this blog regularly, you know how to get more traffic. But all the best strategies take time to deliver sustained results. Fortunately, traffic growth is only one of three ways to increase your earnings.

The other two ways to increase earnings are (1) sell to more of your existing subscribers and (2) earn more from each person who buys your products or services.

Conversion Rate Optimization, or getting more of your existing traffic to buy, was the fastest growth lever for my business, The 80/20 Drummer. In 2015, my profits grew 8x, while my list size only doubled. That means I can attribute a 4x increase in profit directly to improvements in my conversion rate, and in this post I’m going to share the 4 biggest wins.

1. Grow Your Email List and Nurture Your Leads

E-commerce marketers have it easy. If you need a widget, you find it on Amazon or a merchant’s store. Good photos and an easy-to-find “buy” button are all that’s necessary once a customer is on the product page.

But think about the last time you spent more than $100 on a digital product or service online. You probably didn’t buy right away.

And I’m not just guessing. “Selling the Invisible”, as Harry Beckwith, author of the book by the same name says, is hard. According to one statistic, if 15% of your eventual customers buy immediately, that’s an industry-leading conversion rate for digital products or services, which, along with SAAS, consulting services, insurance, finance, have notoriously long sales cycles.

That means the majority of your eventual buyers need more interactions with you before they’re ready to pull out their pocketbooks. According to Fergal Glynn, VP of marketing at Docurated, most customers need 6-8 interactions with you before they’re ready to buy. Even if you’re lucky enough to have 15% buy immediately, what are you doing with the 85% of potential customers who need longer?

Picture the buying cycle. Maybe your customer saw a popular piece of your content on the web. Then maybe he/she heard an interview with you on a podcast. Then maybe you got him/her back to your site with a remarketing campaign.

After a couple of months, if the customer still has the problem, he’s statistically more ready to buy.

Email marketing takes a process that can seem serendipitous, and makes itpredictable and repeatable.

The average sales cycle for digital products and services is 90 days. So what are you doing during those 90 days to tell your story? Waiting and hoping your customers will research you on their own?

What if you could send them a series of emails that would both provide immediate value to them, educate them about your premium solutions, and gradually earn their trust that you’re right fit to solve their problem.

That’s why things like perfect copy and dialed-in conversion rates are great, but not even the lowest-hanging-fruit.

If you don’t have an existing email list, or if you do but don’t have an autoresponder, that’s great news. Just by implementing a short autoresponder that provides valuable and relevant content, and occasionally reminds people you have things for sale, it’s not inconceivable you could double your earnings without growing your list one iota.

But say you already have an email list with some kind of autoresponder. The next step is making it convert better…

2. Know The Most Impactful Levers to Pull

James Altucher is fond of the story of a plumber who, after charging a homeowner with clogged pipes $100, taps one length of pipe and resolves the blockage in seconds.

“Wait – how is that worth $100 if all you did was tap a pipe?” demands the homeowner.

“Because I knew where to tap.” retorts the plumber.

It’s the same thing with conversion funnels.

I get paid for consulting because I’ve resolved enough kinks in my own funnel and other people’s, that I “know where to tap”. Below, I’m going to give you the crash course.

There are three parts of your funnel to look at:

• Traffic
• Email opt-in conversion rate
• Sales conversions rate

Mike’s got you covered with great solutions to the first on this blog, but I’ll give you some benchmarks for the second and third.

(“Benchmark”, as I’m using it here, just means a standard to compare you own funnel against, to see whether something is low-hanging-fruit or you should move on to something else.)

3. Increase Your Email Opt In Rate by Leading Your Website Visitors

Your opt-in conversion rate is the percentage of your web traffic that opt onto your email list. Of course your leads come from multiple sources, paid and free, and land on multiple pages on your site – blog articles, homepages, and dedicated landing pages. But marketing expert and I Will Teach founder Ramit Sethi says If your aggregate opt in conversion rate (across all pages of your site) is between 10-15%, you’re among the best in the industry, and you’ll probably increase your sales faster by intervening somewhere else.

If you’re using a fancy SaaS app for your opt ins, it probably calculates your opt in conversion rates for you, but you can do it yourself as long as you have analytics on your site.

1. Choose a time period, like 30 days. Check out your total website traffic for that time.
2. Next just log into your email provider and see how many new subscribes you had during the same period. (Gross; not Net, because if people are unsubscribing the problem is elsewhere in your funnel.)
3. That’s it! If you want to get more granular, use a plugin from Mailchimp or Optinmonster (which works like a voltage adaptor, plugging into your site and sending people to any email service you use), which will track your opt-ins forindividual pages. This will become important below.

If your overall rate is between 10 and 15%, great. Move onto sales conversion rate (which I’ll discuss in greater detail in my next tip). If it’s less than 10%, we need to get more granular.

Look at the opt in rates for your homepage and most popular content to see if some parts of your site are severely underperforming. When I did this with a client, her homepage rate was a decent 8%, but her posts had less than a 1% opt in rate.

Once you identify the suspects, here are some “common offenders” that might be hurting your opt-in conversions:

On your popular blog posts:

• Multiple calls to action. That means are you asking your reader to do more than one thing on your page? Share on social? Get your free report? Subscribe to the newsletter? Leave a comment? Get rid of everything but one opt in offer – hopefully your best performing one – that you’ll display in multiple places on your page.

• Not making the single offer in multiple places: blog sidebar, bottom of the post, floating “Sumo Me”-style opt-in.

On your homepage:

• Hard to find opt-ins. Let’s start small: can people find where to opt in? Do you have a clear opt in message above-the-fold of your homepage, with a clear description of what people will get in exchange for their email address? (Again, I recommend your most popular lead magnet.)

• Inconsistent messaging between linked lead sources and page copy. Is the opt-in offer what people were expecting if they arrived at your homepage from elsewhere on the web? Ironing out inconsistencies between lead-source copy and on-page copy will alleviate both confusion and “bait-and-switch” feelings.

• Double opt-ins. If your customers have to wait more than 2 seconds for a “next step” after entering their email addresses, you’ve lost a good number of them. As soon as your customer enters his address, is he redirected to a page that either delivers the promised content or promises it’s on the way to his inbox and makes him another offer? Double opt-ins (sending a customer back to his inbox to “confirm” before he receives anything) are bad for two reasons: first, even in a world with perfect email delivery, you’ll lose a certain percentage if you make them confirm. Second, email delivery is often delayed, meaning you’re now asking your eager customer to check back in ten minutes. Death.

But say you’re getting 10-15% of your website traffic onto your list, and you’re sending them an autoresponder with popular content that occasionally mentions you have products or services for sale. Are you done? If not, what’s next? Super-dialed-in copy? To-the-minute email timing? Red “buy now” buttons instead of green?

No need to get crazy. There’s an “80/20” (A small subset of interventions responsible for a large subset of results) of optimizing your sales conversion rate. If you do everything else wrong, consider using scarcity.

4. Close The Cart to Create Urgency and Increase Sales

I saw a slide on a call with one of Ramit Sethi’s conversion coaches depicting a student’s launch. When she put an end date to the availability of her digital product, conversions to the same list doubled. What’s more, 50% of the total sales happened the last day.

It reminded me of the time around a year ago that one of my mastermind groups did a competition to track our open and conversion rates on an email launch. Both a fellow member and I noticed the same thing: the “last chance to buy” email had the highest conversion rate of the series.

Here’s why that’s important: you’ve set up a list. You’re giving your subscribers an autoresponder that delivers valuable content, and reminds them occasionally you have solutions for sale that could solve their problem. Your opt-in rates to your list are good. But you’d still like to increase your sales. Now it’s time to look at those “reminders that you have stuff for sale.”

Primary takeaway? Your products/services aren’t perpetually available. You only open up access to the sales page intermittently.

It’s counterintuitive, but the math doesn’t lie. This doubled my conversion rates. I have some suspicions as to why.

• Scarcity accomplishes the same thing as sales without teaching customers only to buy at discounted prices: if you think this might be a good fit, better to buy now and take advantage of a refund policy than sit on the fence. You’re not sure when it will be available again.
• It also gives you an excuse to send emails educating customers about your product or service (because you’re announcing the “launch”).
• Finally, it gives you an excuse to send emails reminding them to buy (because the cart is closing).

You can do launches manually, simply by posting sales pages only at select times, and emailing your list to let your subscribers know. But you can also make them “evergreen”, by giving every subscriber a launch a certain amount of time after he/she subscribes. Tools like Timerlay will switch your sales page to a “promotion expired” page automatically, a given amount of time after a customer clicks to the sales page (unless she clears her browser cookies).

The other crucial bit is give people multiple opportunities to buy, with content in between. My site traffic converts at almost 2%, but that’s an aggregate, among multiple opportunities to buy. It sounds complicated, but you don’t need any fancy segmentation to do it. Here’s what I’d try to start:

• A week of content after subscribers opt-in, then their first opportunity to buy, for four days. Announce it, open the cart, remind them it’s closing, and close it.
• 3-6 weeks of content to those who didn’t buy the first time, then another “launch”.
• A few “whole list” launches, to everybody who’s been on your list more than 2 months, every year.

Remember this: going through a launch and not buying is part of your funnel for most of the subscribers who will eventually buy. They’ll know the drill, they’ll have time to think about it, and some will buy at the next opportunity.

Have more questions about starting a funnel, or the best copy to use in the emails?Click here to download the exact email sequence that – together with the timing and scarcity elements I discussed – converts at nearly 2% of my total web traffic, and I’ll send you my 2-module mini course on building your funnel from scratch as a bonus.

Big thanks to Mike for allowing me to guest post on his great site!