Love My Job At Home

In recapping my last article I am not wanting you tho think that downlines are bad or that you shouldn’t build one. In creating any long term consistent cash flow they are hard to beat. You just need to realize that it will take a little time to build and what you are really looking at when you build one. The key is quality and not quantity. Conversely, there is an old saying that if you throw enough stuff at a wall – some will stick. Internet marketing in any way you look at it is a numbers game. There is no big red “easy button” to push to make it happen.

That being said and hopefully understood, there is list building that is a “must” for doing business on the Internet. Now the reason must is in quotes is that it will depend on who you talk to. Some affiliate marketing types will not concentrate too much on building a list. If the product they are marketing is a ‘fad’ type, one-time purchase, or something that customers purchase quickly – they will probably not worry too much about building a list. Other products, especially the ‘make money at home’ niche type products will sometimes require some thought or decision making on the customers part so constant communication is required to let them get to know you, like you, trust you, and (hopefully) purchase from you.

This bring us to the one tool you will need if you are building an email marketing list – an autoresponder. Now there are a TON of these out there. The pricing is also dependent on the size of your list and frequency of your mailings. Which one to use is a bigger decision than you think. If you started with your own list, most autoresponders will not allow you to import a list. This means that you will have to send an email out for all your list to re-opt in for your new autoresponder. Not a big deal but you will lose some of your list. It is just a fact of life. The best thing to do is pick one you can AFFORD and has the features you want that you will stay with for a while.

It seems the trend now a days is to have an affiliate program associated with EVERYTHING. An autoresponder is a tool. If you can make money on it – great! Don’t choose one because it has what you think is a better paying affiliate program. This is going to be a constant source of drain on your money every month and you really need to be prepared to get it working quickly. Find one that has a ‘free’ period until you get a certain number of people on your list. This will at least give you some time to get things figured out before you have to start paying for it. List Wire is a great free autoresponder. There is also one in my Free Traffic System that you can get for signing up for my newsletter on the left.

If you have a website you can also purchase the software to do it yourself. It will be a one-time purchase and will save you money in the long run. The downside is that you will have more management with it and you will either have to install it yourself or pay someone to install it. You will also need to worry about SPAM complaints and being blacklisted. This is why you will see squeeze pages that have a long list of email services NOT to use as they have probably been blacklisted from the others for SPAM complaints. Using a paid autoresponder, they will at least fight for you if you do get a SPAM complaint as they can prove that it was a legitimate sign up. You can do this yourself too, but you will have to learn the proper ways to respond to a SPAM complaint and beat it. Food for thought.

Now if you are in a niche that is something that is purchased quickly, a list may not be needed or helpful. For example, if someone is in the ‘fix the red ring of death on a Xbox’ niche – most people want that fixed NOW and will purchase NOW. Once it is fixed – there is no longer any need for this information. So having a list of people who have had this problem is not very useful as it usually doesn’t come back for a while (I had this happen 3 times over 2 years). You will just be wasting your time and money using an autoresponder and the list will unsubscribe as soon as they fix the problem and you send them the next email.

If you are in the ‘improve your golf game’ niche, a list will help as people may not purchase immediately and you can send them helpful information with links to purchase with your autoresponder. Basically you need to do a little thinking and KNOW your market. If you have a large downline an the program has its own mailer that lets you email them, you don’t need an autoresponder. You need to understand that EVERYONE who is in the ‘make money at home’ market will try to sell you stuff whether you need it or not. So just because this ‘guru’ tells you you need it – don’t make it so.

Lists are like a garden; you need to cultivate it, nurture it, and let it grow. The people that tell you they make thousands a month from a list have done this for years. You will not do the same thing immediately. The response from the best lists is less than 10%. More realistically it is around 1 – 2 % of the list. So if you have a list of one thousand people, you will get 10 – 20 people who will purchase. If you make $5 per sale – you will make $50 – 100 per mailing of a GOOD and RELEVANT offer. The ones that make thousands of dollars a month have tens to hundreds of thousands on their list. This doesn’t happen overnight.

This brings me to the final point of this article. No matter what you do in the ‘make money at home’ niche you will probably need to spend money each month. If you don’t have at least $50 – 75 per month to spend – find another niche. If you are trying to get people to spend money with you to make them money, it will be hard to convince them using a blogger blog. Unfortunately, image is everything in this niche. Even if you are making a million dollars a month and drive a focus – people will have a hard time believing you. You will need a website and an autoresponder. The cost of that and a program (most will cost you something each month as that is how they work) is where this will be needed. Now there are other ways to make money without spending much in Internet marketing, but they are not in the ‘make money at home’ niche.

To give a little background, I started this Internet Marketing project to make some extra money from home without spending a tremendous amount of time doing it. To say it has been an adventure and an education would be an understatement. I have started and run several businesses in [...] Continue Reading…

After doing this craziness called Internet marketing for a couple of years now I have learned a few things. Now what I have observered many of you have probably already deduced – if you haven’t been “in trenches” long enough this will hopefully be enlightening. Now if you have [...] Continue Reading…

If you are like me you get a ton of emails containing the ‘next big thing’ to make you wealthy. If you believe the ‘gurus’ being wealthy has something to do with being on a beach and having a fancy car in front of your big house. Now you [...] Continue Reading…

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These are two questions I get asked all the time.

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WooHoo!! SFI is sponsoring a NASCAR! How positive is that? I have not been a big NASCAR fan to this point and have never been involved with any company that has actually sponsored a car in NASCAR.

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In this crazy Internet Marketing game I have learned a few things. Most of them the hard way so I hope you take these tips to heart and learn something from them.
Tip #1
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