Google AdWords, Trust & Profiting from eMail Lists

You've received a number of emails from me and some of you for quite some years. These emails have generally been about  search marketing in one form or another. More recently as you've probably noticed I have been promoting my unique "Adword & Beyond" workshop using information about Pay Per Click in general and Google AdWords specifically.

Ten people came to the first workshop and all of these people decided it was worth spending R5000 to attend based upon the trust I had developed in their minds over a period of time. It was up to me to ensure that the trust was never usurped and it's why I videotaped the workshop at a very significant expense in order to be able to offer workshop material that was tangible and extremely valuable in addition to the book and slides provided at the workshop. The testimonials I received were proof enough of the value of the workshop content. You can read these at seoza.com

The point is this ...

If I hadn't owned the list in the first instance I would never have got those 10 people to invest their trust in me and the workshop.

Being able to generate trust in order to sell something online is vital and more so when the product is a service or an expensive item like my workshop. Few people will blindly buy an expensive service without a considerable amount of persuasion and attention.

My Google Adwords PPC campaign is geared solely to collecting email addresses. It is not possible to buy my product directly online. My investment in PPC here can only show a return on investment at some future time.

In thinking about your product or service bear this in mind... pay for the click not just to make a sale but to collect the email address. More often than not the value of a service sold this way greatly exceeds what might be a small amount of money invested in an Adwords campaign.

Example of a List Value

A very specific example is the value of my pondkeeping and water gardening list which I've built up over the years using free search (SEO) techniques. Over the Easter weekend I ran a special discount off one of my own PDF books that normally sells for $21. Over the 4 days I sold 160 books. This is very considerably more than I sold via the website over the same period. The books were PDF and so cost me nothing in terms of direct costs.

There are 40 autoresponders behind my pond book list. In other words each subscriber gets a sequence of 40 useful articles and each one of the articles contains an offer.

I send a broadcast message to this complete list about every 2 weeks or so. This is a great way to offer a special as described above.

How to Organise and Manage List

It's almost impossible to manually collect email lists, get double opt-ins (ie confirmation to subscribe), keep the list clean and to send out pre-written messages automatically in sequence. I am often asked how I manage my lists.

Quite simply I use and have used for a long time a fantastic low cost service from Aweber. This organisation for a ridiculously low monthly price takes care of everything for me including full reports. All I have to do is create the email content. The rest is done on auto. I can slice and dice the collected email addresses, all of which are confirmed opt-ins, anyway I like ... eg just send to .co.za domains, or only those addresses collected over last month and so on.

In Summary

You MUST build your own lists... it may well become the most valuable component of your online business.

There are a number of services competing with Aweber but since I have never used any of them I can't fairly make a comparison. I would find it difficult to find anything that would want to make me change anyway.

Find out more about the workshop by downloading the PDF brochure or ringing me on 011-454-0105