List Building - Pillar 6 (Part 3)

In "List Building - Pillar 6 (part 2)" we learned how doing your home work can save you a lot of frustration, unwanted attention from the Feds, & how to leverage the customer base of other businesses through the power of the Joint Venture. Now we'll see how all that works to help you with list building.

List building requires similar principals. It's all for naught without doing the home work first. You must know in advance if people want what you're offering or not. For this reason you're shooting yourself in the foot if you buy someone else's list.

Doing the home work for your own list (target market) will answer all these crucial questions:

--> What's going on at the search engines & the forums?
--> Are there enough similarities between what you and others are offering?
--> Who's buying from those places with similar products?
--> What needs are being mentioned at forums so you know you are on track to provide what is not being offered already?

Keep Information Systems Simple

It's time to start your web site. As a general rule, when choosing what content to place on your site you should Keep Information Systems Simple (K.I.S.S.). Your visitors should only be doing one thing there. Your site should be exclusively about driving traffic.

The ultimate treasure your site must offer you is captured prospect information. If you have no capture or splash page, then you can forget about regular sales.

A capture or splash page contains ad copy at the top with some sort of free offer of value to your prospect. A news letter, or a free ebook are good examples of free offers with prospect perceived value.

News letters or Ebooks contain a summary of the challenges revealed through your research at the search engines and forums so your readers see you are the expert they're looking for. If you target properly, this can yield 20% to 30% sign-ups. So you find your target market's challenge, develop a solution, then offer that solution on the splash page to capture their information.

Now it's time for the follow-up.

Your informative Ebook or news letter is your follow-up after capturing a prospect's information at the splash page, & builds you up as an expert. In either case, the goal is to help you build a "know, like, & trust" relationship with your prospect.

So how do you go about writing this news letter on a regular basis? There are 3 options.

1. Do-It-Yourself - If you already have a nack for writting articles you can follow the steps outlined above & then write your won articles. If you ever run out of material you can always search for articles on the topic you want to direct prospects to, & then craft a version of your own.

CAUTION: While choosing to fashion articles after pre-existing pieces is the chepest method, & so possibly the most attractive, be careful to change the title, & at least one sentence in each paragraph or one or more words in each sentence. If you can do this & retain content relevence, then you will minimize the risk of the search engines rejecting your articles for "duplicate content".

2. E-Lance Writers - professionals known as 'ghost writers' produce a 100 to 200 or so word letter that you buy and then 'self-brand' with your name and information. Some go for as little as $5 to $10 per letter. That's $25 to $50 for a 5-day news letter. So you can get a professional letter created for you each week that you in turn send to your prospects.

To make the most of this powerful relationship building tool insert a "Sponsored By" caption in each article mentioning your content related product. So you take the information you got from your home work on the search engines and the forums and then tell the ghost writers to research this and come up with articles on that information.

3. Instant Article Wizard: This is a software that does much of what the ghost writer does for a one-time fee of $67. IAW finds articles that have already been picked up by the search engines for your chosen category and takes one sentence from several to create an article of the length you determine.

You of course must do some editing to be sure the content is in line with what you want to put out there, but IAW can help speed up the process and reduce it to a potentially fun 15 minute puzzle.

The best part is IAW makes sure duplicate content is not created, even when the same category and key words or phrases are selected by multiple users.

You have 2 marketing choices - built in success, or built in failure.

You could choose Plan 'B' & hope something sticks while you lose your friends, your shirt, & your sanity. Or, you could choose plan 'A' & take a little time to do your home work. Then you'll know who your target market is & what they want. In turn you'll increase your sign-up rate by 20% or 30%.

Plan 'B' marketers may talk a good line, but they know nothing of the 6th Pillar for Success. Why not just pick up the your local phone book & start dialing from the white pages? At least it's cheaper.

Plan 'B' marketing is fatally flawed because everyone is different. Incomes, interests, & needs are all different. Everyone is in a different target market, so a filtering system, Plan 'A' marketing, is crucial to your success in network marketing.

Let's look at the splash page again.

OK, you have a highly targeted prospect. Do you ask for the sale? No! Most people aren't ready for that at this point. The few who will buy right now will go into the witness protection program as soon as you turn your back.

You can direct them to a thank you page. This is where your home work begins to pay off. That thank you page is there to answer the questions or resolve the problems you discovered in your home work or target market research.

This is also where your free offer comes into play. Now offer that free report or ebook. Magically you become a hero - the "go-to" person your prospect has been looking for.

I appreciate you,

Bill Tessore