Affiliate Tip #2
Autoresponder Series
Contact Frequency
If you chose to sign up for Aweber or GetResponse, you can set it up so that they automatically receive a series of emails delivered a certain number of days apart. If you used our free software, then you still have their email address saved and you can send them emails manually.
The first question we get from new affiliates (and often even from rather experienced affiliates) relates to how often you should send emails to new prospects.
Obviously the email containing the link to their free ebook should go out the same day they requested it. Put it in the first email that is delivered immediately after they confirm.
The first question you have to answer when you add the next email to either Aweber or GetResponse is how many days should go by before you send the 2nd email.
There are a lot of theories out there about that. Some people have the theory that people will unsubscribe if you send emails too often. They often arbitrarily pick out one week as the magical number. They feel that people will tolerate one email every week without unsubscribing as long as that email contains a lot of free content and isn't too salesy.
OK. That's one theory.
Others send emails every single day. They forget about the content and simply try to sell something to every prospect every day. They claim that those who unsubscribe are freebie seekers and would never buy anything anyway. It is better to get them off the list.
Others take a middle road and email every other day for a week or two and then every three days and then every four days, etc.
There is no correct answer until you decide what you want. If you want to build a huge list so you can use it for ad swaps and brag about having 100,000 people on your list, then you need to realize that every time you send an email to your list there will be some unsubscribes. Generally you will not receive unsubscribes when you aren't sending emails to your list.
So to build the largest list possible, you want to send less often.
On the other hand, if you want to sell more... you will get the most sales by sending an email every single day. Optimization involves testing different versions of emails, moving more effective emails up closing to the day of subscription and improving deliverability so a higher percentage of your intended recipients receive the email and open it.
If you are just getting started, I recommend sending daily and optimizing for sales rate rather than minimizing unsubscribe rate. It is more important to have checks to cash than points for having a larger list.
What To Send
The next question is what to send. Some people say you should play it very soft and simply send free information in the form of a long article. Don't ask for anything. Just give more information.
Others say you are basically writing another sales letter in your emails. You are pitching the product from a different perspective than is already given on the sales letter.
Others take a middle road again and offer more information in the form of an article and then end with a call to action that leads them back to the sales letter.
I am in the last camp. The first camp will never get the sale since they never ask for it. The second camp is just fine. You can write another sales letter and do well. However, that takes copywriting skills... and software... and you run the risk of losing a lot of subscribers by being too pushy.
It turns out that most people don't like pushy sales letters. The best sales technique is to jump into teaching mode and simply give good information. Thinking "article" instead of "sales letter" actually leads to a better sales letter.
End your article with a reason for them to go check out the sales letter again. You might notice that our sales letter is also basically just an article giving information.
Articles You Can Use
Of course we already have several articles that have already been proven to be profitable. You can get them here:
Article #1
Article #2
Article #3
Article #4
Article #5
You have permission to use them. You can even publish them with your own name. You can put your hoplink or your own web-site where you are gathering emails at the end of the article. You can edit the articles. You have all of the permissions you need.
How To Use The Articles
These articles can be submitted to article sites to get traffic. Portions can be posted as answers on forums or answer sites. And they can be used in your autoresponder series for those first few days after someone requests the free ebook.
They can also be placed on your site. On your site they become food for the search engines. The search engines will index them and send search visitors directly to the articles on your site and there will be a link including your hoplink at the end of each article so you can earn sales commissions directly from traffic from the search engines.
Back to your autoresponder series though. These articles can be used directly in your auto-responder series if you wish, but let me suggest a little different path that works a lot better.
Email Deliverability
We talked a little bit about deliverability earlier. Deliverability simply means that your message made it into the intended recipient's email box where they can read it.
Obviously, your email is worthless if it is never delivered to the intended recipient. This actually becomes a huge problem if you don't address it. The day we realized this problem was a huge eye opener.
We did a test to find out what percentage of emails were making it to the intended email box and found out that less than 10% were being delivered to the intended inbox!
Over 90% were being marked as spam and sent to a spam folder or simply being deleted or bounced back to us.
We were already using Aweber at the time and they work very hard to keep on whitelists with the various ISPs out there.
We used their spam scoring tool and made sure we had a score of zero for every email we sent. What could we do to improve our deliverability?
We tried a lot of things and tested the results. We learned that broadcasts were horrible for deliverability. If we put all of our emails in follow up series to go out automatically to new subscribers, our deliverability improved to almost 40%.
So I recommend that you avoid sending broadcasts unless you have to for ad swaps or something like that. Don't send broadcasts every day to your entire list or you will sink down to less than 10% of all of your emails being delivered like we did.
If your list is larger than 100 subscribers, you can do split tests with Aweber and use completely different words in your subject line and email message during broadcasts. This improves deliverability. We didn't understand why at first, but it did.
We still don't completely understand why because we will never be able to see exactly what every ISP does to flag emails as "spam" or not, but we at least have a theory now.
How ISP's Think
Think about being an ISP such as Yahoo or AOL. Your customers don't want spam in their inbox. You are responsible for catching as much of it as possible and putting it in their spam folder.
You could wait for customers to click "This is spam", but that is too late. The customer already had to wade through a lot of spam you could have caught by being more clever.
How can you be more clever? One thing you could do is to use information from one customer to save time for hundreds of customers. When a customer clicks "this is spam", you could go through the inbox of all of your other customers and find similar emails and move them to the spam folder as well.
That way when one customer clicks "this is spam", all of your other customers benefit.
What is similar? From the same email address? That's good. But maybe some emails from that address are good and others are bad. Maybe they have a virus that is sending spam, but they also send personal emails from the same address.
What about the subject line? Even better. If the subject line and the from address is the same, it will probably be viewed by the other customer as spam too.
What about if the email is identical in every way? Bingo. That is almost certainly a safe bet that if one customer clicked "this is spam" that all of the other customers won't like it either.
We believe the major ISPs do exactly that. Sometimes they may not even wait for the first customer to click "this is spam." Maybe they see 2,000 identical emails and know that prior customers clicked "this is spam" for similar emails from the same email address.
There are other ways to detect that a customer didn't like an email even if they don't click "this is spam." What if an email is deleted without being read?
That is a good indication that the customer thought it was spam. Why not go mark all of the other emails similar to it as spam to save the other customers of that ISP the trouble of deleting it?
What if the customer opens it, but then closes it and deletes it after just two seconds when it was a five page email? That is a good indication too.
See where I'm going? The ISP's customers are happier when they don't receive emails they don't like even if they aren't actually spam. You won't be sending spam because you are using Aweber or GetResponse and only sending emails to people who subscribed to your list and confirmed, but... That really doesn't matter to the ISPs in the end. They only care about happy customers who rave about how good their spam filters work.
Once you have a list of 100 or more subscribers, take a look at the emails on your list. Look for these domains:
Yahoo.com (including other countries like Yahoo.ca and their other domains like rocketmail.com)
Gmail.com (including other countries and GoogleMail.com, etc).
Hotmail.com (including Microsoft's other domains)
AOL.com
If you are like all of the rest of us who are gathering email addresses, you will see that 85% or more of your list are with one of those ISPs.
You can see how easy it is to drop to 10% deliverability by just having a few complacent subscribers on each of those four ISPs. You can easily get every single email you send to those four ISPs sent to the spam folder if you don't take action to make sure that doesn't happen.
What action?
Other Deliverability Tips
We already told you about the most major action. Don't send broadcasts! If you do send broadcasts, then do a five or ten way split test and send different versions to different sections of your list.
Here are some other tips:
1. Get rid of non-clickers monthly. Some ISPs actually rewrite your links and can tell when a customer clicks a link in your email. Others are monitoring open rates. A large percentage of those who never click never even opened the email. They are killing your deliverability to others at that ISP because the ISP thinks you send uninteresting emails on average and they might be spam. Get rid of anyone who doesn't click any email links in 30 days from your list. They are worthless to you anyway and they are killing your deliverability to others on your list.
2. Send very short emails. Remember the person who closed the five page email in two seconds so the ISP marked everyone else's version of that email as spam? What if your emails are all short? The ISP might expect that the reader read them in those two seconds so they weren't spam. In addition, friends usually send short personal emails. Companies and spammers usually send the long emails. If you look more like an email from a friend, you will be treated that way more often. Send shorter emails.
3. Once you are large enough to afford custom software, move off Aweber or GetResponse and manage your own email campaigns so you can really test everything and maximize deliverability. One way we found was by splitting up our sending into multiple tiny batches sent throughout the day rather than all at once like GetResponse or Aweber. When an ISP gets 10,000 emails all at once from the same source... you know the rest.
Email Length
How short should your emails be?
Well... you need a subject line. You need a link. You need to tell them to click the link. You need unsubscribe information at the bottom and your address.
That is what we send in our autoresponder.
The average email from us looks like this:
---
Subject: Weird testing results McDonalds and weight loss
Check it out here:
http://www.FadDietsThatWork.com/e/?s=554
-Kristi Daniels
555 Main Street, blah blah blah
To unsubscribe, click here: _________
---
That's it. The subject line has the teaser. It teases them into opening the email.
The satisfaction isn't in the email though. There is just a link. If they want to satisfy their curiosity, they have to click.
Guess what that looks like to the ISPs?
It looks almost like this kind of email:
---
Subject: Whoa... have you seen this video?
Check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch/8980w6
-Trey
---
You probably get those from your family and friends all of the time.
When they end up in your spam folder, you probably don't like that. The ISPs know that.
Call To Action
So put the articles on your website. Put one per page. End them with a call to action. What kind of call to action?
Here are our proven text ads:
Proven Text Ads
They were tested on Google Adwords, but they also work great at the end of articles.
What should you say on the first line of each email?
We did a ton of testing. The very best click through rate we have found so far is:
Check it out here:
That is what we put on the first line of every email. We Stested "Hi {firstname}," and a bunch of variations. That doesn't work. We tested "Click this link" and a ton of variations. "Check it out here:" won in our tests.
Go ahead and copy us. We don't mind.
Then you obviously put the link. You use click tracking with Aweber or GetResponse so you can delete their email address from your list if they don't click on anything after you send them 30 emails at the rate of one per day.
Then you end the email with your name. You can repeat the URL to your home page if you want. Everything else it put at the bottom by Aweber or GetResponse to comply with the laws of various states.
Pretty easy; right?
Subject Lines
Wait. I missed the subject line. How do you write good subject lines?
First of all, you know your goal. It is to get them to click the link. Curiousity is great for that. Dishonesty kills sales though. Deliver on your promise. Don't say "Cool cat herding video" and send them to the sales letter for the weight loss product. They won't like that and probably won't buy and will probably unsubscribe.
But you can say "Best foods for weight loss" and send them to an article entitled "Best foods for weight loss."
Use the testing tools in Aweber or GetResponse to find out the exact words to use. It is incredible how much "Best foods for weight loss" can differ in results from "Best foods for weightloss" or "Best weight loss foods" or even "Best weight loss foods."
The difference is a space or a period or a capital letter in some cases. It can cause your click percentage to vary from 1% to 38% based on a dang space existing between the words "weight" and "loss." That can mean the difference between earning $300 a month or $30,000 per month depending on how many things like that you ignore vs. how many you test.
Testing
Everything on our site is under test. Everything! So you can always get a head start by stealing something from us. Those words came from the title of one of our articles. Use it if you haven't done testing yet to find something better.
We use some extremely advanced tools for testing. We can test the above without even sending a single email. We use some fancy smancy software that does statistical analysis against stuff that has worked in the past. That software costs us hundreds of dollars per year to use. We know the owners though and can get you access to it for $10 per year if you are an active affiliate who has made at least 10 sales. We will personally pay for the rest of your license fees. When you have made 100 sales, we'll pay 100% of your fees to use that software.
Just drop us a note and we'll send you the link.
We also use the most advanced multi-variate testing software in the world on every page of our site (including this page). It monitors your mouse movements and compares them with the mouse movements of people who have visited the page before and done what we wanted them to do (bought something or signed up for something or put this information to use and sold us a lot of products as an affiliate... whatever each page is trying to accomplish). This software can score you in the first 3 seconds you are on our page and predict your interest level. It actively changes to different wording to automatically increase the percentage of visitors who do what we want them to do after visiting this page... and every other page on our site.
So when you are in doubt... steal it from us. You have permission to use everything on this site and everything we email you. You can change it if you want and put your name as the author if you want. Just know that if it is on this site, it is being tested with the world's most advanced testing software.
When you are ready for that software, drop me a note. We paid $120,000 for it and then paid programmers another $15,000 to integrate it into our site. When you have made 100 sales or more, drop us a note. It's yours for free and we'll even set it up for you on your site. You simply can't buy this software or anything as good as it on the 'net. The closest thing is being used by fortune 500 companies who pay $20,000 per month to run the competing software and it isn't nearly as effective at picking winning copy fast.
Until you get to that point... steal from us. You have permission to use anything you see on our site and you know that we are actively testing everything on our site using very advanced software.
Get Our Latest Version
And be sure to come back every month and get the latest version of anything you steal from us. It has been tested and improved during that month. You may not even recognize an article that has been under test for a month.
This also helps deal with the "duplicate content" issue. Some search engines put similar content in a list where it doesn't show up in the regular search results until someone gets to the end of those results and sees a message that says "some similar results have been supressed. Click here to repeat your search with the suppressed results included."
That's not good. But since everything on our site is under test and constantly changing and improving... it is unlikely that you are getting the exact same version of an article that another affiliate got from us just a couple of days ago. So fewer of the things you borrow from us will end up in the supression filter of the search engines.
You may have guessed that everthing is different here. You may have already guessed that you will learn more from this affiliate program than you will learn from affiliate marketing courses costing $997 or more. You were right.
Be sure to enter your information in the following form if you want to be notified when we have new affiliate training materials on this site.
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