What is an Autoresponder?
An Autoresponder is an online tool that will Automatically Respond or follow up with people who have expressed an interest in a particular product, program or service.
Everyone at some point in time has subscribed into an Autoresponder to get more information about something or to get something free or to be notified of special offers.
When you subscribe at an Autoresponder, you become a prospect and you are giving that person or company permission to send you emails and they can continue sending you emails until you opt-out or remove yourself from their Autoresponder.
What is a Prospect List?
A prospect list is the result of any number of people who subscribe into an Autoresponder and the bigger a prospect list is, the more money the company or person will make.
To put this in perspective, if you were to buy advertising in a newspaper, you pay based on the number of subscribers a newspaper has because the more subscribers they have, the more people will see your ad and the more potential sales you will make.
People and companies that have large prospect lists make the most money because they can send offers and opportunities to more people. The more people you send a particular offer to, the more opportunity you will make sales.
If you don't have your own Autoresponder, you are only building a list for someone else and this is why most people never make money online. They don't have their own Autoresponder and they keep promoting affiliate pages or programs for someone else.
Why You Don't Want to Use a Programs Autoresponder?
You can do this if you want to build the programs list. You see all affiliate programs, MLM opportunities, any money making site will give you what is called a replicated website and almost always on that site is a sign up form where people can get more information on the program, product or service.
The program will even write the email messages for you so all you have to do is promote the page they give you and let the page do the rest--WRONG!
This is easy and it sounds great, but what do you think happens to the prospect that subscribes and does not buy? They are no longer your lead because they are not in your own personal Autoresponder. They belong to the company and you just helped build their list because they can then send outside offers to all those people that you and everyone else involved with their business are sending to these replicated pages.
When you have your own Autoresponder, you take control, you can still promote any affiliate program, but you do so on your terms and not the terms of the company you are selling for.
How Do You Build Your Own List?
You start by getting your own Autoresponder and this MUST be a real Autoresponder and not one of the free ones floating around. You also CANNOT use an Autoresponder script you purchase online and run it from your own computer.
Free Autoresponders include ads with all your messages for other offers--You are in this for yourself and not to promote someone else, so if you're using a free AR, you're wasting your time and still building another persons business.
Autoresponder scripts are very dangerous because anytime you use an Autoresponder, you run the risk of spam complaints and your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will shut you down the first time someone cries spam--even if they legitimately signed up at your Autoresponder, because ISP's don't care about anything but keeping their network clean.
Plus if you have hosting at places like GoDaddy and you get a spam complaint, they will close your site as well because their job is to protect their name and their clients who are not doing things wrong.
Once you have a good reputable Autoresponder, you will need your own Capture Page or Squeeze Page and this is simply a web page where you have information and a sign up form.
The form is created by the Autoresponder and as people subscribe at your page, they are placed into your Autoresponder and your Autoresponder starts working by sending the messages you have loaded into it.
Your only objective after you have your capture page setup is to advertise your capture page and nothing else because once you have a list, you can sell anything, but until you have your own list, you are really wasting your time trying to work online.
How Long Will It Take To Build a List?
Actually you will never stop building your list because remember the bigger your list, the more money you make and since your goal is to make money, you'll never stop building your list.
I've seen sites that tell you that you can get thousands of prospects for your list per month--WRONG! You'll be lucky to get a thousand a year if you do everything right and you focus only on building your list.
However a one thousand person list is going to make you a lot of money.
And remember, you are going to lose a certain amount of people each month or each time you send a message to them, but this is just part of the process and another reason why you never stop building your list.
So while nobody can give you a set time to reach a set number of subscribers, if you stick with it and you focus on building your list, you can average 50+ per month in new subscribers once your advertising is rolling and your page is posted in multiple places.
How Much Money Can You Make From Your List
If you treat your subscribers right and don't send them an offer a day, you can expect to average about $1 per month per subscriber.
Remember $1 per month per subscriber is an average because you might find a great offer that your list goes crazy over and other times, you will send offers that just bomb.
You also need to send your subscribers free things, e-books, helpful hints, funny things, etc. so you are not constantly hitting them up to buy from you.
This part of list building is extremely important because people want help and support, they want to know they are needed and not just for money and if you abuse your list, you will fail.
What About Spam?
If you are using a reputable Autoresponder and your list is a double opt-in list, and you don't abuse your list, you won't have to worry about Spam.
This is not to say, you can't get a spam complaint, but any reputable Autoresponder will work with you if you get an occasional spam complaint as long as you have done everything else correctly and especially if you are using a double opt-in method to build your list.
What Does Double Opt-In Mean
A double opt-in list is where someone comes to your capture page and subscribes and the Autoresponder will automatically send that person an email with a link that the person must click on before he/she can be officially added to your list.
If they don't click on the link, you cannot send any additional messages to them, and if they don't click on the link, you can never be accused of spamming them anyway.
The double opt-in keeps some bozo from using another persons email address and subscribing that person at all kinds of sign up forms. Even if they do this at your double opt-in page, the person would not click on the confirmation email so he/she will never get anything else from you and confirmation emails cannot be used against you if someone cries spam.
Can I Buy Leads For My Autoresponder?
Only if you're with a bad Autoresponder and you want to get spam complaints.
The problem with buying leads is each lead being sold online is sold multiple times, sometimes to hundreds of different people, so lets say you buy a lead and it is also sold to just 15 other people and each of you added this person to your Autoresponder list and starting blasting emails to him.
That means this poor person is going to be getting 16 emails from people he does not know, with messages he has no knowledge about and at some point, he is going to get fed up and start reporting you to the proper authorities.
It does not matter how much you paid for the lead or what the lead company said, if you get the spam complaint, you take the hit and you will suffer the consequences of not only losing your Autoresponder but you will lose your email address as well. Whether you use Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail or any other email service, spam complaints from your Autoresponder are tied into your personal email and it will be shut down.
If you're Autoresponder allows importing of leads, get a new Autoresponder because the delivery will be terrible and they are just setting you up for failure.
Why People Don't Get and Use an Autorsponder
The main reason people do not get an Autoresponder is because of cost. They can range in price from $15 - to over $200 per month. The problem with not getting your own Autoresponder is that you're paying for it, even if you don't use it. Let me explain this:
If you don't have an Autoresponder and you get involved with a program, you are instructed by the program to use their replicated sales page that all programs provide. As you read above, this is easy, but not practical because you are simply building the list for the program.
If you ever leave the program or the program closes down, all your efforts will be worth nothing to you. So you see that using a programs replicated sales page is only helping them and hurting you.
If you have your own Autoresponder that you fully control, then you are in charge, you are building your list and you use that list to send people to offers and opportunities you get involved with down the road.
Other reasons people don't get their own Autoresponder is because they don't think they need one or they may be intimated by the setup and while an Autoresponder can take a little time to learn how to use, the investment you put into your Autoresponder in both time and money will pay off a thousand times over your online career.
Scenarios of the Autoresponder vs. No Autoresponder Process
Scenario One—You have no Autoresponder and no prospect list: You come across a product that you want to sell to make a little money so you spend money and time advertising that product to try and make sales and if you make sales, great and if you don’t, you lose all your money. 99 times out of 100, you don’t even make enough money to break even as you are doing a cold sale to people you don’t know and they don’t know you.
This cycle continues for as long as you refuse to build your own prospect list. You find something you want to sell, you pay and spend time on advertising for the product and if you get really-really lucky, you break even once in a while but more often than not, you lose money.
Scenario Two—You have no Autoresponder or prospect list that you own: Let’s say you have been with a company for 12 months selling vitamins or whatever and they have supplied you with nice capture pages and pre-written Autoresponder messages that are sent from their system.
All you have to do is promote their capture page and when someone subscribes to get more information, their company Autoresponder does all the follow up. Nice, but only good for the company because if you ever wanted to promote anything else to that list, you can’t because it is not your list.
If and when you leave that company, all those prospects are now the property of the company and they can do whatever they want with them. This sucks because it was you who spent the time and money to get those people into the company’s Autoresponder, but it is their Autoresponder and not yours.
All you can do is walk away empty handed…
Scenario Three—You have Your Own Autoresponder and Prospect List: You have your own Autoresponder and you have been building your own prospect list using your own Autoresponder and customized capture page.
Now when you come across a great product you want to sell, all you do is login to your Autoresponder, click a few buttons and send a Broadcast message to your entire list with your link to the great product.
Depending on the size of your list and your rapport you have with your prospects, every sale you make is 100% pure profit and the entire process took you less than 5 minutes.
You continue growing your prospect list and you continue to send helpful information and great products to your prospects as you find them. They continue buying from you; your list continues to grow as does the amount of money you make.
If you never stop growing your prospect list, you will never stop making money.
Start with your prospect list and never stop building it and while this may take some time, it is imperative that you take this necessary step if you want to succeed online.
You can be one of the success stories if you start and never stop building your prospect list. Your time is valuable as you only have 24 hours in the day and working for pennies per hour is not going to get you where you want to be. Building your prospect list will.
Look at your prospect list as the foundation to your home. Your house would fall down if there was a not a solid foundation and when a builder builds a house, they start with the foundation and then everything is built around that.
The same is true for your prospect list because you will build everything around it. Now, I know some people are going to ignore this message because they will think they can make it online without their own list.
Let me give you another example of what it means to have your own list. Before I started building my own list, I was spending thousands per month on advertising and making a few hundred dollars per month in profit. After I started building my list and had it built to a few thousand people, my cost for advertising dropped to a couple hundred dollars per month, but my profit shot up into the thousands.
Which do you want, spend thousands to make hundreds or spend hundreds to make thousands?
You CAN make it online, but you need your prospect list and you need to never stop building it.
All The best
Eric Burgoyne
http://www.12-SECOND-COMMUTE.NET
No comments:
Post a Comment