Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”

If you read internet marketing forums, one of the suggestions given to you is that you need to create value first before you start ‘pitching’ your products or other people’s products. The assumption goes something like this:

• You get someone to opt-in to your list by giving something away for free….
• The next 2-3 posts you make yourself credible by showing them you actually know what you are talking about….
• Then..and only then…should you start to pitch products.

That is the formula anyway that is suggested by most marketers. Of course, this, just like so many other “blueprints” out there has some serious flaws that a marketer has to cope with. Credibility and Value are both subjective terms making reaching your list and getting them to respond to your offers very much so hit and miss.

So my questions are:

…what constitutes value and how can you make yourself more valuable to your reader?

What makes some marketers get people to pull money from their wallets while others struggle to get one sale even when they have a growing list?

How do some have very high open and response rates from their list while most of us sit at the industry standard 20% open rate?

To answer these questions, I am going to go way back about 10 years ago when I first started marketing online. By the way, at that point I was doing my “marketing” via a webTV and had absolutely no clue that what I was doing was “marketing”. I was simply doing what came natural to me….writing stuff in a niche that I was interested in. More on that in a second though…

I belong to a ton of lists. In fact, I am probably one of those people that marketers hate because while I will open their message to me, I rarely buy. I am just looking to see what & how other marketers are plying their trade. Most of these are not in the make money online niche but just over this past year I have taken a keen interest in the internet marketing list builders…

After all, you would think that the make money online niche would have the best and brightest marketers out there, right?…well, not exactly…here are some of the more negative characteristics that I have noticed from list builders in the internet marketing world…

• The “I am going to tell you a secret that really isn’t a secret unless you are a complete newbie marketer and frankly I am not an expert..yet” marketer- This marketer is usually brand new to the business and actually has just enough knowledge to help the absolute beginner to get started. This type of marketer typically doesn’t make much money online and is faking it until they make it. They start off with tips to try to prove their credibility. The problem is that they really don’t know anything. Because their expertise is so new, they are relying on other marketers’ advice to be convincing and powerful enough to make them look credible as well.
• The “I am going to follow ?{insert name of favorite popular guru..most likely Frank Kern…} and use his style as my template to success marketer- This marketer usually already has a list but is now struggling to get his list to actually like him. Perhaps he/she has ruined his credibility by making too many offers. Perhaps, he/she is hoping that the same magic formula that popular gurus use will work for them as well. Unfortunately, because so many of us in the internet marketing world are subscribed to multiple lists, we usually get inundated with the “bad news” subject lines or worse still, get a paraphrased version of the gurus original thoughts as their message.
• The “profit by attrition” list building blueprint- This model is a lot like Mike Filsaime’s model..but without the credibility. Basically, this marketer doesn’t necessarily care about the value they bring. They figure if they can get a list of 100,000, 200,000 or more, that even with atrocious open rates, they should make some kind of money. These marketers simply don’t care about value and don’t claim to care about their list. The bottom line is the $$ and so they make no bones about it…they are trying to sell you.

How I made $67k in the FIRST year on my first list without realizing I was “marketing”

I should caveat this statement to state that I forgot this for nearly 5 years after I left the niche partly due to my arrogance that I could replicate this success doing it like all the other marketers suggest. ?Bear in mind that when I first started doing this, I had no idea what I was doing and came across more as a friend to my list than what you would typically expect from signing up to a marketer’s newsletter.

This was a little over 10 years ago and I was in the beginning stages of “I am about to hit 30…now what?” phase of my life. You see, I played music and was chasing the ever elusive record contract, eating bologna sandwiches in the van with 4 other stinky, sweaty guys and depending on benevolent strangers to let me sleep on their couch. For those of you who are musicians, I am not trying to kill your dream but the lifestyle of most “rock stars” is very rarely filled with houses made for cribs and no-limit expense accounts.

I ended up gravitating toward the internet by accident and with no real thought that it could make me money online. In fact, my first “computer” was nothing more than a webTV. Without getting into the niche, let’s just say it was on the periphery of the make money online niche. Within less than a year, I had cemented my place as an authority in the niche. Here is how I unwittingly did it.

I found a couple forums that I was interested in.

Once again, there was no master plan to this. I was sincerely interested in the niche. My obsessive compulsive nature actually benefited me here because I started to learn as much as I could about the niche. I basically lived and breathed the niche. I became a regular poster and started to become a known figure in two of the forums. What was regular? Well, let’s just say that after a couple months, I had almost 1,000 posts to my name in one forum and over 1,000 posts in the other.

I also started to notice people “advertising” things in their signature. These things were programs they were in and things they suggested. At that point, I didn’t realize that these guys were advertising. I just figured that they liked these programs enough to promote them. When I found out I could make money, I decided to give it a shot. My first referral was worth $20. I was hooked.

I built a website and started a newsletter

At this point, I was still using WebTV and didn’t know a thing about the how to build a website. In fact, I had bought the html for dummies book and was feeling dumber than a box of rocks because I couldn’t understand that. I opted for a sitebuilder. The idea for the site had more to do with my passion for the niche than making money though. My idea was to give beginner’s a place to find out real information without have to scour the forums for it. I was, in effect, becoming a watchdog for the niche.

The sitebuilder also came with the possibility of a newsletter via GetResponse. I decided that I would write one newsletter a week and promote the newsletter via the forums. The newsletter wouldn’t be just a money making vehicle for me though. Remember, I was doing this without a marketing frame of mind. I was actually going to help people make the difficult decisions that they couldn’t on their own and more importantly, help them NOT make a bad decision.

Within 2 months, my list had grown to 1,000. By the first year, I was on mark to hit 10,000. This was all done with no SEO (I didn’t know SEO), no link building campaigns (I didn’t understand why it was necessary). In fact, I had stopped posting in the forums as much. But I was making money everytime I sent out a newsletter.

..Oh, and there was no special bonus for signing up other than they were going to recieve my newsletter…

….I should also state that my open rates (which I rarely paid attention to) were over 50% for my newsletter….

I didn’t realize that this was extraordinary at that time because I didn’t have anything to compare it to. This was my first and it was easy to assume that my efforts could easily be duplicated…

My last campaign was a piece of arbitrage software for forex. It was in its pre-launch. I casually mentioned it to my list as a potential to make money but unproven up to this point with my affiliate link.

The next day, I got a call from the owner of this software. ?I had sent him 1,100 referrals in the period of around 12 hours. He was astounded. I didn’t even realize that that was a big deal.

Anyway, I eventually moved away from this niche because the attrition levels were high and I was getting tired of having to wade through the scams. In case you are wondering what niche it was, it was MLM and the occasional forex product.

But there are some lessons in there for those of you who depend on lists for your dinner….

Know Your Niche

This should go without saying but so many marketers are willing to trade in expert knowledge for PLR crap to cut corners. I see it everyday in the crap that fills up my inbox from other marketers. They are either selling you stuff OR giving you rehashed tips and secrets that are common knowledge. As for the rehashed tips, this is the sure fire sign of someone that does not know what they are talking about. You can fake it till you make it. You just have to know what you are talking about and experienced it first hand.

Become the Alpha…Make yourself Visible

Most of us out there are content being mediocre because frankly being “Great” is so friggin’ hard. Think about it. When was the last time that you could say that you know (I mean really know) your niche? In 2 short months, I was able to be one of the Alpha’s in that niche BECAUSE I immersed myself in it. I may not have known the niche like someone who had been in it for 5 years, but I was able to cement my place by always being a visible member in the community.

Find an Angle and Provide Real Value to Your Subscribers

In my case, my angle was being a watchdog. I honestly viewed myself as this. As for value, my subscribers waited on my newsletter to arrive weekly and if they didn’t, I got an email from them. ?Dunno why but they did. ?If you can actually make yourself valuable or entertaining (which are really two of the same), then you don’t really have to worry about catchy subject lines to mess with your subscribers’ emotions…

Credibility Should Come from others, not just from your mouth

I didn’t really promote my newsletter very hard. I didn’t have to. In many cases, whenever someone asked a question on the forum, someone (hyper-responsive in market geek speak) would direct them to my site using my name (which was a screen name). After the first two months, the majority of my list came from referrals.

Do you think that the Frank Kern’s of the world have to state how awesome cool they are? They don’t. They have an army of followers who will spread the word for them.

Most of us marketers get so caught up with trying to prove that we know what we are talking about that it almost makes us come across as desperate. If someone else states for the record that you know what you are talking about, the proving bravado goes away…..you are because so many state you are…..

And what happens when others give you credibility? Your open rates are higher. Your response rates are higher. You make more money.

Internet Marketing and the Slippery Slope of Value

Okay, one last thing on Value and my take on it. You hear all the time that in order to get a list started, you need to make it valuable.

The problem is that value is so subjective and vague, it is easy to assume that value has to be simply the content you create.

So, the newbie marketer goes out there and absolutely kills it. He writes ebooks that he gives out to his list weekly. He writes how-to novels on whatever is hot. And in the end, he finds that his open rates are still industry standards. What gives?

Well, value doesn’t necessarily have to do with what you are giving in content. You could give away the farm and still not grow a responsive list…

Value is all about perception.

For instance, if someone is promoting you as a must read, then guess what?….your value has gone up before the person has had the chance to read anything you have done. Better yet, they will be more willing to read your stuff as you send it off and if a lot of people give you kudos, then your chances of success are enhanced through what I like to call the herd mentality (if so-and-so said it was good, then it must be good and I need to check it out).

Another thing about value that no one discusses is that entertainment has a value as well.

While most marketers will focus on the quality of their content, they spend less to no time on the actual entertainment factor of their email. People like Paul Myers understands how to entertain. If you can get in their heads with a story that ties into a product, then the chances are great that they will not only NOT feel like they are being pitched but will finish the story feeling like they have accomplished something (other than simply reading an email) AND even consider your pitch.

Frank Kern does this as well.

So do virtually all the very successful email marketers.

If you aren’t putting in the effort to create a back story to your email, then you are likely going to be like everyone else in that person’s inbox. And it doesn’t matter how good your content is or how “creative” your subject line sounds, if the person perceives you to be like everyone else, they are likely not going to click on to read.