Introduction
Turning your email list into a passive income money maker isn’t as difficult, or time consuming as you may think.
Every day, thousands of online marketers are transforming their mailing lists into powerful cash funnels, and quite often, they don’t even have their own product line!
While many guides will tell you that it’s important to build your list up before you begin to monetize it, this special report will make it easy for you to start making money with your subscriber base even if you’re just starting out.
Because the truth is, the money really is in the list.
I know, you’ve likely heard that phrase more times than you care to count, but there’s good reason for it. It’s simply true.
Email marketing isn’t just a rock-solid, evergreen method in which to build an online business, but it’s also one of the easiest ways to maximize your income, even if you’re just starting an online business with little experience, history or outreach.
Email marketing offers many other advantages as well, including:
You’ll be able to quickly position yourself as an authority in your market, even before you ever launch your own product line.
Building valuable connections and relationships within your market will help you learn more about your audience and what they are most interested in. This information is incredibly valuable, especially when it comes to knowing how to best monetize your list with affiliate offers, or your own line of products or services.
With an email list, you’ll be able to generate passive income easily by powering up your email campaigns with high-quality content that your audience will love, combined with attention-grabbing offers that convert.
You’ll be able to set your income on complete autopilot by creating a marketing strategy that automatically sends out fresh content and relevant offers to your subscribers every month.
Email marketing can help you build a tribe of your own, dip your toes into the waters of affiliate marketing, test out different platforms, and generate valuable feedback that will help you create a bestselling product of your own.
There are very few opportunities that can match the profit potential and incredible benefits of email marketing!
In this special report, we’ll show you how you can join the ranks of successful list builders quickly and easily, while increasing engagement, building your tribe and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your market.
So, without further delay, let’s get right to it!
High Powered Incentives
While it’s true that you can start monetizing your list even if you have fewer than 100 subscribers, obviously the more targeted your list building efforts are, the easier it will be to convert those people into loyal buyers.
The size of your list isn’t the most important component in successful email marketing. The connection you have with those subscribers is everything.
That means that you’ll want to open a channel of communication immediately. As soon as someone subscribes to your list, you should introduce your brand and give them with a reason to stay subscribed to your emails.
You do this by creating a content marketing strategy that warms up your list and demonstrates to subscribers that you’re willing to provide them with the information they need.
Making money from your list is all about relationship marketing.
You can increase engagement several different ways, and we’ll get to that in a later chapter. For now, let’s focus on the best practices for creating a squeeze page that converts.
If you’ve ever read a guide or course on email marketing before, chances are you already know the importance of a well-constructed landing page.
These pages serve as the entry into what will be your sales funnel. They greet your visitors, introduce your brand and offer them an incentive to subscribe to your list.
Incentives are incredibly important because they act as a sort of bribe that entices visitors into giving up their name and email address.
With so many people being bombarded by email-based offers and advertisements each day, it’ll take more than asking them to join to persuade them to become part of your inner circle.
Thankfully, there are a few easy ways to build a high-converting landing page that is guaranteed to get results.
First up, design.
You want your squeeze page to be attractive, but more importantly to resonate with your target market.
This means you’ll want to spend some time coming up with a powerful, attention-grabbing headline that instantly tells your visitor what’s in it for them.
To do this, you’ll need to think from your average visitor’s perspective. What kind of incentive offer would likely convince them to subscribe to your list?
Most people in your market have probably already seen the same offers being featured on squeeze pages.
Incentive offers such as reports, eBooks or email-based courses are often used to motivate visitors into joining a list, but if you want to get their attention you’ll have to do something different – something to stand out.
Here are a few ideas that are proven to work:
Offer a checklist of the steps needed to accomplish a goal.
This checklist would be available in downloadable PDF format and would be delivered immediately after someone joins your list.
Tip: You can also direct traffic to your blog and give visitors the option of saving your content to their desktop so they can read it later. This is a great strategy for increasing visibility, improving engagement, and maximizing the value of your incentive offers.
Provide subscribers with exclusive access to a private membership site.
By making access available only to subscribers, and automating the signup process, you’ll be able to quickly build a highly-targeted mailing list in no time at all.
Membership sites are great ways of building your audience and connecting with your tribe because people often place a higher value on content that’s protected.
Give them a step-by-step action plan relating to your market.
You’ll want to make sure that your action plan clearly outlines the steps needed to complete a task or accomplish a goal.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to cater to the majority of your market, rather than a smaller segment, so you can maximize subscription rates.
This means you’ll want to consider creating a few different action plans and then allow visitors to choose which one they wish to download after they subscribe to your list.
Offer them private access to training videos.
You could easily create a YouTube channel for your niche and keep all your videos unlisted. Then, create a private page that features your videos and make it accessible only by those who subscribe to your list.
This is a great way of giving something new and exclusive to your market while also encouraging people to subscribe to your new channel that you can further monetize.
The idea is to offer something new and exclusive in exchange for their name and email address. Stand out from the crowd by taking the usual offer and placing it behind a protected directory.
The idea is that the more exclusive your offer is, the more value your visitors will place on it making it drop-dead easy to persuade them to subscribe.
What other ideas are you able to come up with? What would your target audience likely be most interested in? How can you take existing content and turn it into a powerful lead magnet?
In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at how you can begin to drive traffic to your lead pages, so you can beef up that mailing list with loyal buyers and take your income to the next level.
Transforming a Simple Page Into A Cash Funnel
While there are many different ways to monetize your email list, one of the most overlooked areas yet one of the most visited is thank you page of your opt-in form.
When people opt in for your offer, they’re interested in your brand and your products, right? So, turn these interested subscribers into customers right away by including an offer on the thank you page after they’ve already subscribed!
To increase conversion rates, make sure you are using a responsive theme such as the ones available through www.ThriveThemes.com
You should also add snippets of feedback from past customers if you have it available. Including reviews from satisfied buyers will immediately increase conversion rates as it provides social proof and helps to reassure potential customers who are just learning about your brand for the first time.
Your thank you page is the very first thing your new subscribers see after joining your email list. This is their initial greeting and so it’s likely they’ve never even read an email from you yet!
That makes it a prime opportunity to introduce those leads to your products or services, or at the very least move them deeper into your marketing funnel.
I know this goes against the grain of what some other email marketers teach. You know, those guys who tell you to spend months cultivating a relationship with your subscribers and building trust, loyalty, and all that jazz.
But the truth is, while you won’t convince every subscriber to purchase from you right away, what do you have to lose?
I’d rather strike while the iron’s hot than simply direct them into my mailing list while waiting weeks to even give them the opportunity to purchase a product that will help them.
It’s been said that at no other time will your subscribers be more engaged than they are immediately after subscribing to your newsletter.
After all, you’ve done your job at persuading them to give you their name and email address. They’ve let you into their life, they’ve given up valuable real estate in their inbox so that they can hear more from you.
So, give it a shot. Set up a simple thank you page that gives them the opportunity to purchase your best-selling products. Or, if you have yet to create a product of your own, introduce them to an offer you are signed up to promote.
If you’re nervous about promoting or selling so soon after they’ve signed up to your list, consider creating a trip wire offer.
A trip wire offer is typically a lower-priced offer (somewhere between $5-25) that is designed to move someone deeper into a sales funnel without requiring a huge commitment from them. Trip wire offers are a great way to speed up the subscriber-to-buyer transition.
And if you want to skyrocket conversion rates, consider creating a bonus product that extends the value of the products you’re promoting. Give your leads more bang for their buck and you’ll build a loyal following in no time.
Important Reminder:
I’ve mentioned earlier that successful email marketing is all about the relationships you build with your subscribers.
Your subscribers need to trust you and the offers you promote. They need to know they can rely on you as a quality and responsible source of information and recommendations.
This means you need to be extremely careful with the products and services you promote throughout your email campaigns.
The Power of Upsells & Downsells
You’ve worked hard to build a list. You’ve spent time (and possibly money) generating leads and cultivating relationships with your subscriber base.
So, you should want your efforts to count, right?
One easy way to maximize your email marketing income is to seize the power of a great upsell.
“Do you want to upsize your drink and fries?”
McDonald’s certainly understands the profit potential of an upsell, and so should you.
Offering subscribers that purchase from you the opportunity to upgrade or enhance their order by adding additional tools and resources is an easy way to skyrocket your income.
The key to an upsell is that it’s priced higher than the initial offer and offers clear value.
Your buyers need to understand how they benefit from spending that extra money to upgrade their initial purchase. This means that your upsell needs to double the value of the original product.
For example, if your customer purchased a 10-pack of social media graphics, you could offer them the chance to double their inventory by upgrading to a 20-pack of graphics.
The key is to keep your upsell tightly connected to the main product. You don’t want to stray too far from your original offer so that you’re able to paint a clear picture of how the upsell improves, extends or enhances the product they already have.
Consider what kinds of products you could create as upsells that align with your existing product line.
And believe me, there’s always room for an upsell. Even if you think your high-quality course offers everything a person could possibly ask for, chances are you’ve overlooked an area that you could fulfill with an upgrade offer.
In fact, some developers leave a segment out of their main products or training programs intentionally because they know it would serve as a killer upgrade.
Now, you don’t want your upgrade to be forced onto buyers, nor do you want it to cover a key area or step needed to accomplish their goal.
If someone purchases a product from you, it should do its job at fulfilling all promises made on the sales page, and should also serve as a stand-alone product. The upsell only works to expand someone’s knowledge, provide someone with alternative methods, steps, or extends the training they are interested in.
Thinking back to McDonald’s and how they’ve integrated upsells into their sales process, without upgrading the fries or drinks to a larger size, the meal you ordered is fulfilling and complete. Upgrading only gives you more of the same thing, right?
That’s the key to a killer upsell that’ll convert.
Now let’s look at the opposite approach: a downsell.
A downsell attracts a customer who is attempting to back out of making a purchase. They’re obviously interested in your product or service, but perhaps it’s too expensive for them at this time.
That’s when a downsell should kick in and do its job at saving the sale and moving the prospect further into your funnel, even if they’re not paying full price for your offer.
Your downsell should typically shrink the size of the original offer. For example, if you were selling 10 social media graphics, your downsell might offer only 5 graphics at a fraction of the price.
Or, if you’re in the business of selling software, your downsell might provide them with a limited license that removes some of the power packed into the full-price option.
Make sense?
Both upsells and downsells will help you to maximize your email marketing income. By directing people to one main offer but giving them multiple options depending on their actions throughout your funnel, you’ll be able to close more sales and make more money.
Cross Selling for Maximum Profits
Have you ever heard of cross-selling? It’s when you direct a buyer to additional relevant products that you feel they may be interested in.
Amazon has cross-selling down to an art form. Whenever you purchase a book from them, you’ll be immediately introduced to other books in that genre or category.
Just the same, if you browse an author’s website on Amazon you’ll see “Buyers of this Book have also purchased” (known in the publishing industry as “also-bought’s”), and they’re a powerful way to keep someone active within the sales funnel.
In fact, when it comes to self-published authors, many of them have seen an immediate increase of sales whenever they’ve appeared in another author’s also-bought’s just because they’re able to siphon traffic and connect with a competitor’s readers base just by being featured as a similar author.
When it comes to squeezing every dime out of your email marketing campaigns, directing people to other relevant offers is a great way to extend the sales funnel without having to have other products or services of your own.
So for example, if you are offering access to a training program that teaches people how to self-publish on Amazon, chances are you can’t cover every aspect of self-publishing.
After all, there’s: marketing, editing, proofreading, learning how to increase writing speed, productivity and focus, and the list goes on.
In other words, there are dozens of other tasks relating to self-publishing that new authors would likely want to learn more about. Rather than continuously adding new modules and training guides to your program, you could cross-promote guides and books featured on Amazon and make money from every sale you make.
Cross-promoting via email campaigns is no different from traditional email marketing. You’re promoting products that are in the same niche as your own yet they cover new ground.
Think about the different areas you haven’t covered in your own products or courses. What other avenues of training would your customers likely be interested in? What subject matter have you overlooked, or you couldn’t cover in one product or training program?
Those products make fantastic cross-promotional items that you can introduce your subscribers to throughout your email campaigns.
Quick & Easy Monetization Strategies
Here are a few fast and furious ways to monetize your lists.
Membership/Continuity Websites
Membership sites will never go out of fashion. People love receiving fresh content automatically every month without having to think about renewing their purchase or manually paying for access.
From a website owner’s perspective, it simply simplifies the process of keeping customers active within a funnel, while giving them the reassurance of a stable monthly income they can count on.
Regardless of what software or platform you use to create your membership site, you’ll want to tie it in with your existing email campaigns. For example, you could offer a subscription model that takes place entirely via email that gives your subscribers access to premium content.
You could also set up your membership site so that whenever a subscriber joins they are given access to a private Facebook group, or can view videos that are otherwise unlisted on YouTube. There’s no shortage of ways to incorporate a paid-access model into your email marketing campaign.
Membership sites also don’t have to cost a lot of money. You could simply start out with a lower-end price point just to move subscribers into your funnel so you can begin to qualify leads and segment your lists for better engagement.
Even subscription sites that charge as little as $10 a month are great tools for weeding out tire-kickers and converting readers into buyers.
Think about how you could create a subscription website into your email campaigns and maximize your income quickly.
Tip: Offer subscribers will early-bird access at a lower rate. This is a great way to jumpstart your membership site by offering people with a heavily discounted price for the first few months, or grandfather them in by letting them continue paying a lower fee as long as they keep their account active.
Email Based Coaching
Coaching and consulting is big business and more and more email marketers are getting into the game by charging for either personal or group training.
If you have an engaged email list, you could easily maximize your income by setting up a short-term coaching program that provides in-depth training on a certain topic.
Your coaching program could be designed to be completed over Skype, through email, via a private Facebook group, or you could set up a fully loaded training program via a site like Teachable.com in order to streamline your business and grow your audience outside of your email campaigns.
Training programs are also a great way to position yourself as an authority in your market and to increase brand awareness. They also serve as great testing grounds for future product launches as you’ll gain valuable feedback from students who move through the course.
There are many different training platforms you could use, including:
Email Based Service
You could easily set up a series of paid-access emails that go out every day, or every week. Only those who pay for access will receive this content. Just make sure that you mark your campaigns as private from within your mailing list account as by default some providers will make your email broadcasts available to the public, or anyone who shares the link.
Facebook Group
We’ve talked about Facebook groups already, but it’s worth mentioning again. Facebook groups are easy to set up and manage. You can add additional administrators or moderators who can help keep on top of posts, comments and remove any spam.
However, there is a major downside to using Facebook groups – you aren’t in full control of your community. Should Facebook limit your account or put you in what’s called “Facebook jail”, you could find yourself locked out of your own group.
The best way around this is to run your coaching program from your own website, but offer access to a private Facebook group as a bonus to those who subscribe.
Webinars
Webinars are great ways of introducing your brand to new prospects. You could easily set up a series of Webinars as part of your coaching program, or run them independently if you’re looking to gain new email subscribers.
Just make sure you email the registration link to existing contacts as well as a reminder link on the day your webinar is set to take place.
Affiliate Marketing
Obviously, affiliate marketing is one of the most common methods of monetizing your email list. It’s a great replacement for those who don’t have a product of their own, but even if you do, it’s a fantastic way to maximize your income during the times where you’re working on developing new products that aren’t market ready.
Just match quality products with your audience and earn a commission!
Here are a few affiliate networks worth considering:
ClickBank
Amazon Associates
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com
ShareaSale
JVZoo
http://www.JVZoo.com
WarriorPlus
Final Words
Turning your list into a money-making machine takes careful planning, but it’s one of the easiest ways to jumpstart your business, build a memorable brand and maximize your online income with very little start-up costs.
The key is to work towards constantly expanding your outreach, drive targeted traffic to your landing page, provide an irresistible, exclusive incentive that will convert that traffic into leads and work towards building your back-end system so that fresh content is being pumped out to your list every single week.
Then, monetize your list with affiliate-based offers as you learn more about your target market and generate valuable feedback that will help shape the outline of your own products or services.
Even if you never create a product of your own, your email lists can serve as the foundation for your entire business just by working towards creating the perfect blend of free, valuable content and promotional-based offers.
Test out different systems only after you’ve seen success with one. Broadening your outreach by dominating one email monetization strategy at a time will help you stay focused, while keeping a close pulse on what is effective and what should be abandoned.
Always be on the lookout for other ways you can monetize your email campaigns, such as by selling ad space in your newsletters to others in your niche market. This is a great way to introduce quality products to your audience while making money doing it. GetResponse has a great article that shows you how to do this easily. You’ll find that here: https://blog.getresponse.com/can-sell-ads-email-newsletters
The bottom line is making money via your email list is not hard. Build an email list, nurture a relationship with your leads by offering free valuable content, and plug in any of the monetization methods we’ve discussed in this special report and you’ll be able to make money easily.
To your success,
