In this interview you’ll learn how Mike Boyd helps entrepreneurs accelerate the growth of their businesses and his latest venture into making the morning coffee a more quicker and more enjoyable affair.

A Few Lessons From This Interview

Help Others and Make Friends - Stop trying to ‘network’ (stop the self promotion) with others in order to sell your services or become partners, and instead just help them, make friends and listen to what they have to say.

Build a Tribe - Creating some sort of free meetup or event in your local area (see http://www.meetup.com) is a great way to meet other likeminded people, build your own ‘tribe’ (as Seth Godin puts it) and build something that can really benefit your community and the world, all for only a small amount of time and effort.

Be first, be daring and be different – If you don’t stand out no one will ever notice you and if you do what everyone else does you’ll get what everyone else gets. If you don’t want to even try to stand out you may as well go back to working a 9 -5 job because your chances of success are slim to none.

Just do it – you have to have a go, you have to take action.

Action Precedes Clarity – Often you’ll have no idea how you’re going to pull something off, but once you start and step off that cliff you’ll achieve clarity. If you know what you want but don’t know how to get there just get started on anything you can do and figure out the rest later.

So you want to run your startup full time and commit yourself 100% to it? but you don’t have savings, a loan or investment capital to fall back on? Here’s how you can make your startup immediately profitable:

- Start a service business related to what you’re building
OR
- Find one or more large companies willing to pay you a retainer or large fee to use your software and develop the specific features they need.

For Example:
- If you are developing a website design tool, start building websites for businesses using the tool.
- If you are creating a check in service start working with other companies to increase their exposure with other mobile apps (and once your product is complete you can easily get them on yours).
- If you are building a customer feedback tool, approach enterprises that could use the tool and see if they’ll pay you extra or some sort of retainer for implementing the exact features they need. (It’s kind of like them hiring you but then you get to sell the product later to others).

For some products this seems impossible, but I bet if you think hard enough you’ll find something that you can sell to other companies (even if it is business consulting).

I know, I know, the whole point of having a software business is it sells all by itself and runs on autopilot. But the early days when you’re still building your product are hard and money is tight and if you already know a bit about your target market, and have some business skills (you know you do) then why not leverage them to get some easy initial funding? It’s a hell of a lot better than working a job.

Did you know 37 signals started off as a web design firm? Or that Uservoice got their early funds by doing paid pilots for businesses (where the companies paid them a large amount of money to develop the specific features they needed in the software)? Even the mighty Microsoft started out building their initial product (MS-DOS) for IBM then went on to resell it themselves later on.

If you look deep enough you’ll see that most big companies started out either by developing a piece of software for another business and selling it themselves, or by selling services of some sort to other companies and using those funds to grow their current product.

It’s really really hard to live off just the profits of your software in the early days. But if you start selling related services you can charge a large premium, live off very little traffic and customers, and have a much higher chance of longterm success.

Sometimes I think of myself as a bit of a slow learner, it usually takes a while for me to finally realize I need to do something that others seem to just get and implement straight away. So here are some things that once you’ve been running a business for a few years seem stupidly obvious but when I was just starting out nobody actually told me.

Build up an audience BEFORE you build a paid product

I did this backwards, and it seems most other companies that fail have done this too. They’ve built a product before anyone knows about them and don’t have any real strategy or method for getting their early customers. I’ve noticed one of the biggest reasons startups succeed or seem to release and immediately have a lot of success is they have one or more of the following:

- They are already known by their target market either by just being famous or having a blog or site that people already come to.
- They’ve made a product before and have that existing customer base they can leverage
- They are good at getting into the press (either by having some unique product the press love, or being part of y-combinator, or just knowing how the press world works)
- They have friends who are willing to promote them.

When you already have one of these leverage points it’s soooo much easier to launch a new product. You can also see right away whether it’s a good idea or not rather than spending 2 years trying to build up traction before finally realizing nobody wants what you’re selling.

If you don’t have any of the above 4 leverage points you must solve an existing problem

The only real alternative to having no leverage is to have something that people already want and are searching for. Because if nobody knows about you and you haven’t got any experience with the press and you don’t have any friends who are willing to help you get the word out about your product then it’s going to be a massive uphill struggle to get traction.

Thus the best way to get known is to be in a market where people are on Google searching for solutions to problems that your product solves. You can see who is searching for what at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. If you’re trying to build something along the lines of twitter, or foursquare, or chalk where you are solving a minor problem that people aren’t really searching for and you don’t have any leverage then I’m sorry to say that the chance of your startup succeeding is very very low.

If there is an entrenched competitor your product must be radically different

You can’t beat google by making a slightly better search engine, you can’t beat apple by building a slightly better music player and you can’t beat coke by building a better tasting cola. If you want to enter a market and succeed your idea needs to be a revolution not just a slight evolution.

Back in 1998 altavista, excite and yahoo were continually one upping each other in search but really they were all quite similar. Then Google revolutionized search by building a search engine that was simple, sleek and returned results wayyy better than anyone else. In 2004 there was a PDA war between Dell, HP and Palm they were all one upping each other feature by feature. Then Apple came along and built the iPhone a pda that was simple, sleek and a completely different take on the PDA and they dominated the market.

We had this problem with Zentester, we tried to compete against Google Website Optimizer. Sure Zentester was faster and more automated and easier to use but that just wasn’t enough. It was only when we made it fully integrate with WordPress that people began to see it as something completely different and it started gaining traction.

If your users constantly compare your product to the entrenched competitor and can’t tell the difference within 30 seconds of explanation, your product is just an evolution and unless you have lots of money behind you you’re fighting a loosing battle.

Build an email list, don’t throw away early users

I’ve seen quite a few ‘studies’ that show that if you get rid of your free version of your product you’ll often increase the sales of your paid version. But very few of these studies actually follow through and take the value of the free email list into account. Sure they are only free subscribers so aren’t usually as valuable as people who have purchased your product, but what’s not to say that they are active buyers who weren’t interested in your product at the time?

Worse still, most web services and products don’t even take advantage of this huge asset they’ve built up. The quickest way to piss off your customers is to blast them with promos and offers but why not start a blog and send them quality content each week? You’ll be surprised at how many consume your content for weeks or even months before noticing how much your product is improving and signing up. Even though I had my own helpdesk I read the Zendesk blog for about 6 months before finally taking the plunge and signing up with them, and am now a loyal happy subscriber. I’m sure I’m not the only customer to do this. Think about how many times you’ve signed up for a product just because you’ve enjoyed reading their content and strategies (I’m sure 37 signals gets a huge portion of their business this way).

Stop consuming and start producing

Most of your life you’re either consuming value (watching TV, reading blog posts, reading books, learning from training programs) or producing value (writing blogs posts, coding software, teaching others). The trap most entrepreneurs get into is they spend 80% of their time consuming value and “learning” and only 20% producing it which usually causes their businesses to suffer. Once you’re past those first few months of learning you should be spending at least 80% of your time producing value and only 20% consuming.

Most of the top entrepreneurs in the world rarely if ever read other peoples blogs or news sites and spend the majority of their consumption time reading high quality books, going to live training events or learning from mentors. These are all high impact tasks that will accelerate your growth a lot faster than wasting hours each day checking out the latest news on twitter / tech-crunch / hacker news, and if you focus your small amount of learning time into these tasks you’ll notice a lot more success coming your way.

The new low hanging fruit is here!

And it’s been sitting under our noses the entire time.

What I’m about to share with you, you must promise to not share around, seriously I want you to be able to exploit this as much as possible before every other internet marketer in the world catches on.

What am I going on about?

International Markets! (More specifically selling to languages other than English)

Now hear me out here, you’ve probably thought about this before, just like I had, but thought “Oh no that’s wayyy too much work, I don’t even know where to start!”

If you’ve thought that, this article could very well be the most important article you’ll ever read.

Why?

Because selling to other languages is so incredibly easy I could teach a 10 year old how to do it.

And the best bit? You don’t even have to have a product to translate. You can literally buy a PLR product or subscribe to one of those mega PLR sites for a few dollars a month, get PLR ebook and translate it, and start selling it online with ease in just a few weeks.

Better yet, get some PLR articles, translate them and start getting organic SEO traffic within days!

These non-english speaking markets are STARVING for quality content and products.

Starting to sound like this has some potential?

Did you know there are over 250 MILLLION Chinese people on the internet?

This is almost as many as those in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia Combined!

You’ve now (hopefully) realized just how big an opportunity and how much of a low hanging fruit this really is, and want to get started making some moolah right?

Where do you start?

We’ll the first thing I’d do is if you already have an ebook, get a translator. You can find them on sites like Elance or Rent A Coder for very little cost.

Even if your current product is audio or video translators can translate that too!

If you don’t have a product, simply sign up for one of the many many PLR websites out there and download whatever you like. Or even better, take a look at the warrior special offers forum as there are some very high quality PLR products in there that will work exceptionally well for international markets.

How to get traffic from non-english markets

This is the big one, the step 99% of internet marketers stumble and fall on, but not you, for I’m going to show you just how easy it is right now

Here’s the tool you use…

*drumroll please*

Google Adwords!

Yep, the same traffic tool you’ve been using all this time is just as powerful in other languages.

And you can get PPC traffic for as low as 4 cents a click in most foreign countries.

Now all you need to do is take your current PPC keyword list for the English speaking market, go to translate.google.com and enter your list of keywords, select the language you want to translate to and hit the big translate button.

Out will pop a huge list of translated keywords, all you do now is go back into Adwords, create a new campaign exactly the same as you would an English speaking one but choose the language you are targeting from the language drop down, then put all your keywords into the campaign.

And that’s all there is too it.

How cool is that!

How to get free traffic

But you want free traffic right? So you can sit back and relax without worrying about expenses.

Again, this is super easy, and SEO works exactly the same for other languages as it does for English.

All you need to do is take some PLR articles around your niche, and get them translated by someone that speaks the language you are marketing towards. Or you could simply hire someone to write articles from scratch, for languages such as Chinese and Hindi you can often find contractors to write articles all day long for $2 – $3 an hour (Elance is great for this).

Then put them up on a blog and start building backlinks to them. In little to no time at all they’ll float to the top of the international search engines and you’ll start seeing tons of free traffic and sales.

But what if I want more info? I want a step by step process showing me exactly what to do!

Ok so you’ve realized how easy this is, but you want a step by step process anyone can follow to build a huge income in an international market, even if they know next to nothing about it?

You’re in luck.

My friend Anna Bo has actually been marketing to non-english speaking markets for quite some time now, and making a killing doing so (earning over 6 figures AND the majority of her income comes from non-english speakers).

She’s just released a course called Global Launch Formula showing EXACTLY how to market to these international markets and laid out everything STEP BY STEP to take your product and have it selling by the droves to non-english speakers within a few days.

She told me to check it out a few weeks ago and I thought “ehh, not really that into international markets, but I’ll give it a go”…. After just 5 minutes of looking over the course I was blown away by how in depth she went and just 10 minutes into the first video I started thinking “Damn, I can’t believe how easy this is, why didn’t I think of this earlier??”

2 Weeks later, I’m working on creating my first ever international product something I really should have done years ago.

She has done literally 18 videos telling you “click here, enter data here, press ok” EXACTLY what you need to do to launch a profitable business selling to a non-english market in under a week. She even has a video showing all the most profitable countries and languages that she’s discovered herself (this is worth over $50 by itself!)

Not only that, but she’s done 6 PDF’s full of information that’ll give you the edge over everyone else like the best translation tools out there, a guide to SEO for foreign languages, how to find the best PLR products to sell and a step by step guide to creating your own products quickly and easily.

It doesn’t get any easier than this folks.

You can check it out here

Plus she even has a team of translators who you can use to translate your product and any articles you like (meaning even less work for you).

And if that’s not enough, she’s even gone ahead and added 20 PLR ebooks as a bonus that you can get translated and start selling immediately! (Normally it’d cost over $100 for these books but you get em free)

Sounding like a no brainer yet?

Even if your plate is completely full up you can start selling internationally with just a few hours of work, because just about every step of the process can be outsourced, meaning a huge income boost for you, for very little effort.

I haven’t seen low hanging fruit like this in a looong time.

Go download it now and start watching the first tutorial immediately, I personally guarantee you’ll be absolutely blown away by how in depth she goes explaining every single detail you need to know in a completely step by step process.

Enjoy the extra Moolah

- Tim

Just remembered I took this video with Aurelius Tjin a while back but forgot to post it to my blog.

It’s about the benefits of outsourcing. I’ve had 2 full time VA’s and a part time article writer for the past 3 months now and they are seriously the best business investments I’ve ever made. They take care of all the small day to day things and minor tasks so you can focus on the big picture and build an outstanding business.

Even if you have to dip into savings or take out a loan I’d still recommend getting a VA as they pay for themselves literally within the few month of hiring them. For just $25 a day (counting business days only) you can have someone take care of all the minor aspects of your business, stuff like building backlinks to your site, handling customer support, doing market research, tweeting for you etc. They can do it all.

Ok thats enough of my rambling, check out this video and to hear more about em go to Time To Outsource It (http://www.timetooutsourceit.com)

As for now, sit back and enjoy the most unedited, raw, to the point internet marketing video you’ll ever see

Benefits of Outsourcing and Outsourcing Services from Aurelius Tjin on Vimeo.

Ok so I thought I better address the recent (by recent I mean the past year or two) hype on membership sites.

A lot of people seem to think they are an absolute goldmine, because once you sign someone up, they just keep paying forever and you never need to do a damn thing.

uhhuh… right…

There is a flaw in this plan, have you seen it yet?

here’s a hint: People don’t sign up forever….

Of course the guys selling the membership courses *conveniently* fail to mention this, because it detracts from their message (“please buy my product”).

There are 2 flaws with most membership models that I think need to be addressed and really thought about before you go off and build your own membership site:

1. If you go for the weekly or monthly newsletter route, you have to keep creating content! Even if your subscribers dwindle down to just a handful you have to keep producing content for them month after month, and it can get really tiring after a while (unless you like that sort of thing).

2. Most people only subscribe for an average of 3 months.

On that second point, the best way to imagine it is that you’re not getting $19 or $27 or whatever forever from each person that signs up, you’re just getting 3 payments of that amount for your product. Which isn’t bad, but it’s pretty much just like selling a $57 or $71 product, not *infinate* like so many people imagine it to be.

Which brings me to actually fixing the problem, how do you build a membership site that actually works?

The best way of doing it I’ve seen is the Microcontinuity way (by Russel Brunson), if you haven’t seen it he gives away 2 free videos pretty much explaining how it works here and here or you can just get the full system shipped to you for free here. Not only do you learn pretty much the entire system from the videos He’s giving it away for free, but if you get the content shipped to you you get an ipod shuffle for free (which means even if you don’t listen to a word he says you still come out with a profit ), I haven’t receieved my mp3′s yet due to living in Australia but it’ll be coming soon and when it does I’ll give ya the rundown.

Anyway back to the point.

The Microcontinuity system pretty much fixes these 2 problems by:

1. Not having to constantly create content, once you create the system you’re done.

2. Users are only put into a 6 month subscription which is fantastic, because when they get to the 3-4 month and feel like quitting you can tell them “If you make it to the 6 month mark you get free access to everything for life” and they want to stick around for the long haul.

I actually heard point #2 of my friend Yaro who runs membership mastermind, and it’s very very important:

By just limiting your membership to just 6 months you can literally double your signup rates, and nearly triple your average visitor value.

Why?

Because most people when they think of joining a membership site they think “I wonder how much this is going to cost me in the long run” and $19 x infinity = a lot of money.

You know how it is, you’ve thought it yourself.

But $19 x 6 months, well that’s a bit more comprehensible.

Plus by limiting the membership to just 6 months when people start feeling like they want to drop off (at the 3-4 month mark) they usually stay on, because they can see the light and realize the end of their training is near.

Meaning you get an extra 40% – 50% more profit because you kept them on that little bit longer (and they go away happy that they completed the course and are now full of knowledge)

Just make sure to give them unlimited access after their 6 months is up and you’re golden.

If you’re wondering who Yaro is, he’s another guy who I’m good friends with (he’s a Brisvegas boy too), he runs Entrepreneurs Journey and also runs Membership Mastermind which pretty much teaches you how to build and run a successful membership site, it’s built off his own experiences and that of his blogging trainees.

and best thing is, his report has just about as much information as the full course and is 100% free

I’ve gone through this one and everything he teaches is right on the money, he’s a guy that actually enjoys teaching, rather than *selling* like most others.

You can check it out at here

The last piece of advice I have for anyone looking to run a membership site (mainly if it’s a membership site that you constantly release content for rather than microcontinuity style) is to have a launch for it.

I know launches are getting stale really quickly because EVERYONE is doing them, but the reason everyone is launching their products with big fanfare (PLF style) rather than just releasing it is simply that it works.

The thing is If you don’t *launch* it in the way most others do you’re going to be providing just a handful of members with content for very little cash and your motivation is going to die off very quick. So when first starting up your membership site you should be focusing on a big launch buildup (I know when my friends Giddian and Yaro launched their blog training system they took 6 months preparing for it).

Your next biggest focus should be that first month of content. Make it better than all the other months combined, it’ll be the best thing you can ever do to lower your attrition rate and have a heap of happy customers.

The rest of the content is last priority, as once you get a lot of customers in the door and they stick around for that first month you’re motivation will be at an all time high and you’ll be able to make some fantastic content for the other 5 months (and you can do all this after launch anyway).

Don’t have a big list or JV partners, no worries, head on over to the Warrior Forum and PM some people who are in a similar niche to you about some kind of partnership, as long as you are friendly and personal and not just spammy most people won’t mind checking out what you have to offer and maybe you’ll get a few large JV’s to help kick off the launch. (I’ll be posting more on this alter)

So there you have it, you’ve hopefully now realized that membership sites aren’t some magical profit pulling machines and that there is actually a right way and a wrong way to create them (and unfortunatly the wrong way is usually the most often taught way).

You’ve also got here IMO access to 2 of the best resources for building a successful membership site for free (can’t beat free & quality )

So don’t go and do more work than you have to, or cripple your signup rates due to overlooking the fact that most users don’t want to keep paying forever.

Have a wonderful day

- Tim

Do you think 30% is a good open rate for email?

10% a good click rate?

You’ve just become the next victim of IM BS.

I think email marketing is one of the biggest areas where most Internet Marketers drop the ball. They attack it completely in the wrong mindset.

The thing with email is this:

People want to recieve emails from friends, not salesmen.

Obvious Right?

So why are do all your emails still look like mini sales pitches?

Most internet marketers are getting better and better at writing “friendly” emails, but I don’t think they have quite grasped writing them like they would to a friend.

Here’s an example of a canned email from the makers of Launch Tree for the recent launch they had:

Subject: –Name–, You are owed money…

Hey –Name–,

I just saw the videos from my
good friends and Internet Marketing
experts, Anik Singal and Mike Filsaime..

These guys are about to reveal how to build
a $10 Million Business within days giving
away your product for free.

They’ve released the first chapter for free
along with the best video I’ve ever seen.
You have to see it to understand why…

http://www.launchtree.com/a/go?a=73&t=1&t_type=text

Anik & Mike reveal exactly how PPC
Classroom and Butterfly Marketing
built a $10M+ business in less than
a week!

===> How you’re leaving 456% of your money on the table…

===> How 3 quick tweaks made a marketer $350,000 more in 90 days…

This product is unlike any before.
as it shows you how to make tons of
money that you would have otherwise
left behind.

If it wasn’t for Anik and Mike, I would
be leaving Hundreds of thousands of
dollars on the table.

Their first chapter is absolutely free.
Download it right away, it’s quick
30 page read but incredibly valuable.

http://www.launchtree.com/a/go?a=73&t=1&t_type=text

Thank You,
<YourName>

Looks friendly and personal right?

Wrong

and this is the way 95% of Internet Marketers write emails.

It starts off all well and good, you start thinking to yourself “oh cool, good friends, $10 million, sounds interesting”.

But after that point it all starts going downhill, that’s when it starts to look more and more like a sales pitch and less like something a friend would write to you about. You start skimming and eventually just hit the delete button.

Next!

I don’t know about you, but when opening my inbox, reading another email from that marketer wouldn’t be my highest priority of the day.

Instead here’s how I would have written it:

Subject:  Heh, I like it

Body:

Hey {!firstname},

Thought you might like this. Just found out about it the other day.

It’s some new product Anik and Mike came up with, what I liked about it is that it’s teaching how to make more money without needing any more traffic.

They say it made them 456% more profits, which is pretty hypey caus that’s probably their best ever result, but I checked out the free report and it’s actually pretty good, I found a few tips to make me some extra money, you might find some golden nuggets of your own.

Anyway, download it and give it a whirl, let me know what you think.

- Tim

Yes it does take “personal” to a whole new level, which is a good thing.

You need to write your emails like you’re writing to your friend. If you were emailing your friend Tom would you ever start off with “Hey Tom, I just saw videos from my good friend x and y, these guys are awesome and do x, y and z. Both of them have actually done it!” then launch into a mini sales pitch thinly disguised as a *friendly* email?

No, you wouldn’t.

But you might send it out to some subscribers who you don’t know from a hole in the wall.

30% Is a fantastic open rate!?

I was amazed watching a video of Frank Kern a while back, and his best headline he’s ever come up with (“Bad News”) had a 30% open rate! and he’s supposed to be an email marketing genius…

his other “normal” email was 15%.

If you were emailing a friend, and found out they were ONLY OPENING 15% of your emails, would you be a little bit upset? annoyed perhaps?

I certainly would.

Yet 15% is considered commonplace for Internet Marketers! If you hit 30% you must be some kind of marketing genius.

The problem is nearly everyone is attacking email marketing from the wrong angle, they treat their lists like numbers rather than friends and most of the time don’t give a shit if their emails are only being read by 10 – 15% of their subscribers, so long as they make a few sales.

As you will learn, this is completely the wrong mindset if you want the most possible sales over a long period of time and value a long lasting relationship with your subscribers.

The Best Headlines I’ve ever used

So what’s my best headlines you ask?

I’ve never told anyone this one before, as I don’t want every man and his dog to start using it like they did after frank kern released his “bad news” video. (I found it hilarious that the very next day at least 7 different emails arrived in my inbox with that exact headline…)

But I guess I don’t have 60,000+ subscribers (yet) so you can use these if you like:

3rd Place – With a massive 73.5% Open Rate

awesome Tool that saves you thousands (literally!)

I actually didn’t like that headline much, felt a bit too salesy, but I gave it a run, turned out pretty well.

2nd Place – With a stunning 86.5% Open Rate

Some free goodies for ya

Goodies… that are free… who could resist?

1st Place – With an incredible 97.1% Open Rate!

Hey man, thought you’d like this

Simple, straight forward, and to the point. Love it.

Now the point of me showing you these high open / click rates isn’t to say “these are super fantastic headlines”, because as good as they are they aren’t. The reason I have such high open and click rates.

If you go ahead and use them yourself you may not get as good results (or you may get better results)

The reason I have such high Open and Click rates on my emails is this:

I Am Friends With My Customers!

I truely love my customers, I’ve actually met quite a few of them at conferences and around the place and they are fantastic people. The last thing I ever want to do is think of them as a bunch of numbers on a computer screen where I craft manipulating sales pitches to extract as much money as possible from them.

I just treat them like friends

thats it

and it works like gangbusters (heh, yea I stole that word of Frank Kern, who BTW is a fantastic guy and gives incredbile marketing advice, in case you thought I had some kind of grudge against him above, I wasn’t targetting him specifically, just the internet marketing populace in general )

Write all your emails, just as if you were writing an email to your best friend!

Simple isn’t it?

When you open up your email each morning who’s email do you read first: your friends emails? or your internet marketing mail?

Exactly.

So be friends with your list and guess what, you get read first, before they get distracted and run off to do the umpteen million things they have on their todo list.

they will WANT to read your emails, rather than going “hmm… got nothing to do, might see what generic marketer 42,572 has to say”

So how do you do this?

The best way I’ve found of getting into this mindset, is to actually write the email to your friend about whatever product / blog post / thing you are talking about.

As in, open up gmail, put their name at the top and start writing an email to them about the product.

Then replace their name with {!firstname} (or whatever your autoresponder uses), copy it into your autoresponder and click send.

Finally, sit back and enjoy the response.

Now go out there and do it, don’t let me catch you writing another salesly letter or I’ll unsubscribe

But What about profits?

I can hear you saying “That’s all well and good that you get a really high open rate, but how much MONEY do you actually make from your emails?”

The Answer: A Fair chunk of cash.

In one recent promotion of a new product I released which started at $7 and moved up in price to $11 and $15 after a certain number of sales the overall conversion rate for that product came out to be 20%.

Not 20% from sales page to sale, but 20% from email to sale. 20% of my list bought the product.

Considering the average is somewhere around 1-3%, I’d say that’s pretty good, even if you consider the product was quite cheap.

The average subscriber value for that one promotion was $2.10

In another promotion (of Launch Tree, which I didn’t actually do right, as you can see in the next paragraph) I had an average subscriber value of  $0.65

When Mike Filsaime was talking about a few promo’s his done I did the quick maths on amount of money he made versus how many subscribers he had and it came out to $0.07 per subscriber…

I’m not saying this to brag or say I’m better than these guru’s, as they are all absolutely fantastic at driving traffic, doing promotions, launches and everything. Plus I know most of them are really great guys.

I just feel that so far most Internet Marketers are doing email marketing wrong.

The money isn’t in the list, or even the size of your list, it’s in the relationship you have with your list. The better your relationship with your subscribers and the more highly they think of you the more profits you will make (and you won’t get mass unscribing every time you talk about a product)

Hindsight is always 20/20

I wish I could go back in time and resend the 2 emails I mailed out about launch tree, because I actually did break this golden rule myself and my open rates and clickthroughs sucked (average 30% open rate, 10% clickthrough).

It was only after the launch I realized why my customers didn’t want to read my emails.

It was becuase I broke this rule and started acting more like a salesmen than their friend, and I paid the price for it.

Don’t make the same mistake I did, or you too will be delegated to the “I’ll get around to reading this someday” pile.

Have a wonderful day,

- Tim