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

List Building - Pillar 6 (part 2)

In "List Building - Pillar 6 (part 1)" of this series we defined “network marketing” and examined the best MLM marketing method. Now let's look at the next component of list building.

Before you join anything do your homework. Make sure there is a market for it. Otherwise you'll be stuck waiting & hoping for buyers to find you. This is called "head hunting", which is where people sell something no one will buy unless they get paid to do so. It's also what the FTC looks for when they want to put company CEOs & reps into prison uniforms.

To put it plainly, it is illegal to recruit for profit instead of offering a product people would buy at any store like Target. So how do we speed up the work to cull out the felons?

The rule of thumb for detecting a head hunting company - they're only selling the opportunity. If the price is too high for anyone to buy the product without getting a check, then 100% failure is imminent. What a bother! Why not learn how to target your product market?

Do the homework- market research.

1. Keep in mind emotional attachment to the product kills businesses - this is about what your ‘target market’ wants.
2. Do your homework - visit Overture.com, using the Search Tool type in a key word/phrase(your product). If your product is Blue Berry Bar, then enter that into the Search Tool window. You want to see how many people are searching for Blue Berry Bar. 1,000 in a month is bad, but 30K to 100K is great.
3. See who your competition is - go to Google.com, Yahoo.com, & MSN.com to see the top 10. A whole page or more of people from the same company selling Blue Berry Bar begs the question, “Where is the competition? Generally this means everyone is going broke.
4. Use the Overture.com “Bid” search tool by entering a key word / phrase to see how much people are bidding to place the ads you find. A top bid of 30¢ or more plus 25 people making bids at that level means competition is strong. Strong competition equals strong buyer demand.
5. Revisit what you saw at Google, Yahoo, & MSN and ask yourself how they are marketing. See if their web page is nice and clean, look for how you can stand out in comparison by noting the things their sites are lacking. For example, maybe some pages are unattractive, or some are just sales pages while you could provide information on your page so you look like the “Go-To” person. Experts attract people to themselves with far less effort than everyone else.
6. Forums - go to any search engine and type in your product name Blue Berry Bar plus the word forums so it looks like this:

Blue Berry Bar forums

You may need to register at some forums. See what people are saying. Note the questions they are asking about Blue Berry Bar to get a feel for what your customers are thinking. Then, revisit the three search engines again to see if these questions and concerns customers are airing are being addressed on the top 10 pages of each search engine. You can answer any unanswered questions the top 10 sites are neglecting. Then you can provide the information that will draw the attention of the people who have the same questions and concerns as those who posted to the forums.

Now it's time for the Joint Venture.

Ask yourself, “Who else is selling to people who want Blue Berry Bar? Look for other companies or websites offering products and services your customers would buy. You're looking for a shot at a Joint Venture and it goes something like this.

Say Jim's health club wants to promote a free 14 day trial they are giving away to get more customers. You go there and let them know you'll be advertising your product in a local paper and you want to drive customers to Jim's health club. Then ask if they would pay you $10 for each person who comes in and signs up for the free 14 day trial.

Here’s where the power of the Joint Venture goes to work. You buy ad space and people see your offer which might look something like this, “Get a free 14 day trial at Jim’s Health Club when you buy one box of Blue Berry Bars.” People who see the ad think, “Wow, I’ve been wanting to check out Jim’s Health Club, and the Blue Berry Bar sounds good too. I think I’ll buy a box of Blue Berry Bars, after all it’s healthy and it may even help me with my results at the health club.”

NOTE: The true power of the Joint Venture is that it draws people who are in a buying mood. No need to hunt for buyers.

Now you have a customer, a joint venture partner, and $10 extra per customer. All for doing a little homework. Now it’s time to ask what progression you can take your prospects through. The fortune is in the follow-up, and the follow-up is ‘back end’ products (the second sale, the third, etc.) Auto-ship eases some of the sales side of this concern, but you should be consistently looking for ways to add value to the relationship you have with that customer or new team member. This will build team retention and encourage customer loyalty, and that can lead to customer conversion to opportunity seekers, who in turn become team members who build a massive business.

Set yourself up for success - do the research by determining if your customers are hungry for your product, how big the market is and how much competition there is. Then learn what customers want to know that the competition is not telling them and give them those answers.

After the research you can leverage the efforts of other businesses that are also selling to your customers. Now keep in touch with your customers and always look for new ways to add value to your business relationship so they will keep coming back to you.

I appreciate you,

Bill Tessore