Build a Relationship First, Think of The Money Later
By Brian Terry
We’ll dig into this tip in a lot more detail later on, but it’s important to understand it right now as well. You need to focus on the relationship building part of your list first, and think about the monetary aspect later.
Sure, you want to make money, but if all you do is hit up your list for money, you’re going to get a lot of unsubscribes and make some people angry. The chances are good that they signed up for your list in order to get something out of it. Whether it was an e-course, a free e-book, information, coupons, notices, an audio, or something else, they expect to receive a lot of value for being a part of your e-mail list.
If you’d like some free brandable items that you can give away, check out http://www.BrandableStuff.com/tools – you can enter your affiliate link into these items and make money from the sales that result.
If you provide this relationship first, the money will come.
| "My optin rate has jumped a good 30%" – Pat Marcello Get the OptinPop Advanced Upgrade |
A very important article. As someone involved in the process, I keep myself constantly aware of the need to provide meaningful information to my readers.
I’t’s very nice to have people like you providing reminders of this principle, so that we stay focussed and not try to short-change our subscribers. Keep up the good work.
Authors website | September 2nd, 2009Hi Kelwyn, thanks for your message I appreciate it.
Finding a good balance between content and offers is essential and one way of doing this is to simply survey your readers by finding out how best you can help them.
I use this script for creating subscriber surveys:
Authors website | September 2nd, 2009http://www.willmaster.com/software/survey/index.php
Thanks for your response. I will be taking a look at the script. I am appreciating more and more the need to have my website visitors take surveys. That way I can get a better insight into their needs, and what I need to do to improve my relationships with them.
Authors website | September 2nd, 2009Hi Kelwyn, no problem, I’m glad to help.
Are you using an Autoresponder system where new subscribers are automatically sent an email from you every few days?
If you are what you might consider doing is setting up a very short 3 or 4 question survey for all new subscribers. This way you can get a better picture as to what it is they’re looking for from you.
When you do this be sure to incentivize it with a free offer in return for their questions to you. This way you’ll have more people giving you their feedback.
Once you have this in place you can then customize your other follow-up emails to make sure you give your subscribers “exactly” what they’re looking for based on their answers to your survey.
If you don’t yet have a professional autoresponder system we use this one here which I highly recommend…
http://brianterry.aweber.com
I hope this helps.
Authors website | September 3rd, 2009