Secrets Of Lists And Reports Friday, October 24th Daily News, Money Making

As I write this, my inbox is currently being bombarded with ’spam’ email. It seems that someone has used my email address to send information about a Russian dating site to almost everyone in the world (Therefore if anyone has recently tried to contact me via email, you might want to try sending the email again because I had to go through a mass deletion – literally over 500 emails last night!). Doesn’t seem to be going well for me lately, I might rename the blog ‘Wheres my luck?’ lol. However, first thing I thought when the emails landed in was ‘He’s not going to make money like that, it’s not exactly targeted is it?’…hence the post!

So why should you ‘build a list’, and what should that consist of? Well lets take it down to its very basic level – if you are advertising an eBook which helps people learn to do the twist (for example), then ideally you dont want to advertise that book out to everyone, but rather people who might be interested in doing the twist. Even then, its possible that they might not want to part with their money on a book that might not have sufficient information. However, if you had a list of emails of ‘twist enthusiasts’ who knew of you already, then its highly likely that a lot of them might buy some of your work. This allows us to not only target our demographic audience, but also gives us a list of people who have already ‘been in contact’ with us, therefore giving them a larger sense of trust with parting money for our book! It sounds brilliant, but how do we go about it?

Recently I wanted to build a list to promote my new eBook to (that I’m currently writing atm). So, to test out some advertising, I created another eBook (a lot shorter), a landing page, and a simple email submit form. I offered the eBook for ‘free’ to the user, saying that I would send the link to them via email. Once they placed their email in, they would receive a confirmation to join my ‘newsletter’, and once confirmed they would receive a link to the eBook. Now everyone who has got this far has expressed their interest in the free ‘taster’ almost, without even knowing about the other eBook that is in development. Each person will also have received a quality ‘free’ piece of information regarding the niche being advertised in. Now we have a targeted audience that we can send information about our new eBook to, and if these people enjoyed the free ‘taster’ they are going to be a lot more willing to part with their money on the ‘better’ eBook!

Example 1: Lets say you advertise a sales page with a $20 eBook, and 100 people click through at $2 a click. Lets say you have a decent sales letter, and 30 out of the 100 people buy your eBook – that would send you into a profit of $400. Not bad at all! However, lets say instead of advertising a $20 eBook, you advertise a ‘free’ eBook report with a decent sales letter. Now because it is ‘free’, your a lot more likely to have more people sign up, so lets say 70 people out of the 100 sign up to your ‘free eBook’. Now after 3 days of signing up and reading your free eBook, you send a series of emails (we’ve all received them…) hyping up your new product, and then eventually sending these 70 people the link. Now with already reading some useful information from your last eBook, lets say 50 people now decide to buy your eBook (the other 30 are either bad emails, ignorant people, or lions who signed up because they were testing out their new mail order oposable thumbs). That’s given you an extra $400 profit, all through creating a smaller ‘taster’ eBook. However this isn’t perfect, we have still lost $200 through advertising…so how would we rectify this situation? Well, the genius of ‘free’ eBooks is that we can create more than one, in more ‘targeted’ demographics…

Example 2: Lets say we have created an eBook about gardening, and that to get some gardening keywords it would cost us $2 a click…bit expensive there. However, lets say we create two ’spin-off’ free reports, based on the art of using a trowel and the way to get the greenest grass. Now the relevant keywords might only cost us $1 a click for those free reports. Lets say we bring in 100 people through these ’specific’ reports, which sets us back $100, whereas those 100 people through the gardening keyword would have cost us $200 (and we may of had less conversion rate without the free report!). Then, we know that these people we have targeted enjoy forms of gardening, and can then market them our gardening product via our list!

The key in the previous example is that if you can pull out specific things about your niche and create ‘free reports’ for them, you will be able to specifically target cheaper keywords, but more of them depending on how many reports you have. You might have a ‘make money online’ book, so you make three free reports about forex trading (never ever ever do that, trust me), eBook selling, and article writing. You then contact all the people who have bought these books and say that you have a new release coming out with all different ways to make money, and the book that you sell could just be a combination of all three things you previously offered! The article people get information about forex and eBook selling, the ebook people get information about forex and article writing etc.

Building a list with free reports is a very useful tool in limiting expenses and maximising return and when done right can produce amazing results! You don’t have to just create ‘free reports’ either, you could offer them information through an email newsletter, which would slowly build up to the release of your product, or a link to a video showing them how to ’cut their lawn perfectly’ for example (obviously the content of the video would change depending on the targeted niche!).

I would provide actual quotes from keyword searches on google etc. but it is 6am here, and I am writing this while working from home (until 8, and then I have to go into work!!). Therefore I apologise if the post is possibly a bit jumpy (and long) but I hope you get some use from what I have shown! Now I must go deal with some Russians…

Dan