I recently made a post on email marketing and thought it would be a good time to introduce you to my secret weapon except, for those of you that know me, it’s not really a secret.

If you’ve done any kind of email marketing before you’ll know that it’s not always easy to get people to subscribe to your list. Or maybe you have a list and you simply aren’t making any money.

I have been using various techniques in Lee McIntyre’s Mailing Lists Unleashed for some time and to great effect.

Those in the know will already have a copy of this book but if you are one of the few who don’t I highly recommend that you check it out.

Take a look at the salespage over at http://www.mailinglistsunleashed.org which explains the book in more detail. Let Lee show you how to build a list the right way and how to keep it profitable.

If you’re not sure that this book will be right for you take a look at the following excerpt:

To download directly, right-click and select save as on the link below:

http://www.mailinglistsunleashed.org/leakedchapter.zip

If you decide to go for it be sure to check out the chapter on “Creating a Sizzling Squeeze Page” as this could have a huge impact on your conversion rate and profits!

Take Care,
John Szram

I wasn’t sure I should share this with you as it makes me look rather silly, but I thought you might find it amusing, if not a reason to get started building your mailing list today.

Sales Confusion
I checked my email on Monday night and saw that I had a sale for a product I hadn’t yet promoted. I sat scratching my head wondering where the sale had come from. Just then, another payment notification – another sale and then another!

Don’t get me wrong I was pleased but I was a little confused because I like to keep track of these things and I couldn’t remember promoting this particular product.

What am I selling?
The product in question was Terry Dean’s Foolproof Method of Choosing Slam Dunk Markets for Beginners which I recently bought with the intention of promoting at some stage since it’s a great value packed product.

This product makes use of the $7 script and during the sales process there is an option to send a recommendation message to a bunch of people but I’m sure I didn’t fill that out. In fact, I know I didn’t.

Moment of Clarity
It slowly began to dawn on me. Being a subscriber of this blog you know that I don’t send many promotions to this list. In fact, I hadn’t sent any until a couple of nights ago.

There are no follow up messages on this list and no promotions, which some might think is crazy. Anyway, on Monday evening I decided that I should test an email series to go along with my blog broadcast messages.

I grabbed a sample email from my desktop and pasted it into AWeber to make sure the formatting was correct. I sent the message to myself to test. Everything was fine, but before I had the chance to change the message I was interrupted in the middle of the process and I hit save.

As you know when you add a follow up message to your list it’s not only your new subscribers that receive this message. Depending on where your subscribers are in your follow up sequence previous subscribers will also receive your message.

As I had no follow up messages at all on this particular list my new message was sent to everyone.

Startling Results
I have a small but loyal following here at JohnSzram.com but I was taken aback by the results. A staggering 13.3% of people on my list bought this product from me which as you can imagine was a nice surprise.

That’s quite a startling percentage when you consider I never even edited the body of the email. I just changed the links, put my name at the end and hit save (send). It was simply Terry’s default message with my links in it, no other changes.

For those of you that bought the product from me thank you, you simply have it in your hands sooner than I thought you might which is great since you can start using the product and making your money back immediately.

For those that don’t yet have it, you might want to try promoting it yourself, you can pick up a copy below for only $10. I made my money back in no time and much sooner than I had planned too!

>> Choose Your Market <<

Let me know how you get on.

You probably know by now that it’s important to build a list and develop a relationship with your subscribers. So what do you need to get started?

You’ll need 3 things:

• Autoresponder
• Opt-in Box
• Free Gift

Autoresponder
A “follow up” autoresponder is software that simply allows you to collect your visitor’s details (usually just name and email address) and send out emails to many subscribers at once.

For this I use Aweber but you could equally use GetResponse , or another of the popular autoresponder services as they all operate in much the same way.

Aweber has all the features I need and more, including some great analytical tools so that’s what I personally recommend. You can take a free test drive of their software at their site.

Opt-in Box
Next up you’ll need to create a webform or opt-in box like the one you see at the top of this page. Aweber makes it really easy to create multiple webforms and also lets you track their performance. You can then place it on your blog or squeeze page and this enables you to start adding subscribers immediately.

People will still need a compelling reason to opt-in though which leads to my next point.

Free Gift
Give something of value away in exchange for your visitor’s email address. This could be a free report, a video, an email series, audio series or similar. The rule of thumb is it has to be something of value. Something that you could sell, something that would ordinarily cost money to obtain.

But I’ve got nothing to give away?
Have a look at my current opt-in box and you’ll see the free report I just started giving away. I didn’t write that report it was created by Internet Business Coach Terry Dean .

It’s a great report full of extremely useful information for both aspiring and experienced Internet Business owners alike and contains a lot of information that really resonated with me the first time I read it.

The version of the report I’m offering is a brandable version, in other words it contains my affiliate links. You can download the original report at Terry Dean’s Blog .

Giving away a product of your own is, of course, far more valuable especially if it’s something that people can’t get anywhere else. But if you haven’t created a report yet why not find one, preferrably brandable, and give that away at least until you’ve created one of your own.

Easy huh?
Now you’ve started building your list you can keep blasting promotion after promotion to your subscribers and squeeze every penny out of them right?

I hope not.

The Money’s In The Relationship
You’ll have heard “The money’s in the list” countless times but hopefully you’ll also know that this is only half true. The money is really in the relationship you have with your list. If you treat your list like the human beings they actually are, your list will be much more responsive when it comes time to sell.

Before I sign off I thought I’d share a couple of videos I recently stumbled across from Frank Kern that will shed more light on the subject of mailing lists and that go over the process in more detail. I hope you find them useful. Check them out here: http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/?page_id=9