After two years I’m launching a new information product at www.RahsiaEmel.com
Here’s the teaser video:
Register now at www.RahsiaEmel.com to get a special bonus only for the first 200 people.
January 10, 2010 By
Email Marketing Is Still My Number One Marketing Tool in 2010
Since my Twitter account got suspended, I came to realize that social media marketing is just not my cup of tea. I’m just not genetically designed to chat and talk about everything under the sun.
I’m not alone – even Seth Godin says it’s not for him.
But that does not mean that I don’t communicate with my subscribers and customers. If you’re on my list, then you’ll know that the easiest way to reach me (or my support team) is by clicking on “Reply”.
Let me share something interesting with you:
The stats above are taken from my link tracking campaign for Host Commando. As you can see, the conversion rates I get from email marketing are way higher than from my blogs, affiliates.
You cannot get that type of conversion from Twitter or most other social media sites. Sure, you can get a lot of traffic, but the conversions usually suck.
Even by putting the link in email signatures, I got a conversion of 6.67%. And that took me like 1 minute.
Of course, the data may be a little premature, but it’s still a big difference from the affiliate results.
I’ve been telling people for years that they need to create their own email list, and build a relationship with their subscribers first. Twitter, FaceBook or whatever else you use, should only be driving traffic to a page where you can build your subscriber list.
I use Aweber, and I highly recommend that you do too. Or, you can check out the top autoresponders comparison and choose the one that fits your purpose. I also wrote an article that directly compares Aweber Vs GetResponse.
Either way, build a list now. Twitter may be gone tomorrow, but a list is forever 
September 27, 2009 By
Email Autoresponder Tips and Reviews
Over the past 4 years that I have been successfully running my home business, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go.
Most of them get into online marketing either wanting to build an AdSense site, or promote a couple of affiliate products. Some are moderately successful at first, but soon realize that every day they start from ground zero and struggle to build an online income that grows exponentially.
Here’s the thing: Although you can make money online from a hundred and one ways, at the end of the day the person who survives in the long term is the person who had taken the time to build his / her own email autoresponder list.
By building a subscriber list, you accumulate more marketing reach as each day goes by, and after you have about 5,000 or more people in your list life becomes sooooo much easier.
On my new mini site Autoresponder Profit you can get autoresponder reviews, autoresponder tips and (soon) pre-written autoresponder messages. For now, you can download the ebook for free while it’s still being refined and improved.
In the ebook you’ll discover:
- How an autoresponder works and why you need one
- Three type of autoresponders, and which one you should get
- How to build a huge email list in a short time
- And much more..
So go ahead and get your copy of the “Autoresponder Blueprint” special report right now.
September 5, 2009 By
Are You Still Relevant?
I spent the whole day clearing all unread emails in my Gmail account. An hour later when I had about 98 new emails, I decided it’s about time to unsubscribe to a few marketers.
Some people I unsubscribed from include Gary Ambrose, Jason Gazaway, Ed Dale etc. They either do nothing but sell, or simply aren’t related to what I want to know about or buy. In short they were no longer relevant.
It made me think about one important thing – “Am I still relevant?”
Like it or not, people only have that much time on a computer. In that limited space you need to compete with other marketers to get, and keep, their attention. If you fail to deliver what they expect from you, and keep it up, soon you’ll end up as one of those marketers facing the cut.
I know some marketers who send nothing but promotional emails to their subscribers. At least I send out free stuff too like some free themes, instructional videos, the Profit Blogger ezine and some other stuff, but is it really enough to remain relevant?
When someone on my Aweber list decides he has way too much email, will I be cut off simply because he cannot remember the last time I sent him something relevant?
Have I been relevant to you recently?
May 26, 2009 By
Aweber $1 Trial and Aweber Coupon Code
Aweber Coupon - Watch The Video
Aweber is perhaps one of the most important marketing tools you can have.
It allows you to build a huge list, and communicate with that list like no other software I’ve come across. There’s just one problem – How do you know if it’s right for YOU?
In this video I show you how to get Aweber at just $1.00 for the first month.
Once the video has finished playing you’ll be taken to the Aweber site where you can get your own $1 trial using the Aweber coupon code. During your trial month you can access all the features and then decide if you want to keep it or not. I’m sure you’ll be impressed by how easy it is to use.
On a side note.. If you want to get private label rights to videos like this, plus much more, create your membership account at PLR WordPress Videos. All members will get the complete Aweber / email marketing videos by end of this month, and they can use it to create their own high value products
Some other useful information on using Aweber:
January 10, 2009 By
Aweber’s Brilliant Strategy Wins Over Top Bloggers
There was a time when I was shopping for a good autoresponder service, and I was stuck between Aweber and GetResponse. At that time, both services were quite similar in terms of features and pricing. Boy how that has changed!
Over the past year, after speaking to god, Aweber’s tops minds have maneuvered the biggest u-turn among all their competitors, and have made Aweber not only relevant in the new Web 2.0 world, but an essential and integral part of it!
I was (probably) one of the first bloggers to start using the Aweber broadcast feature to integrate my RSS and email subscriptions, merge it and manage everything via an “ezine” format. This helped avoid choosing between building an email list or RSS list, since I could do both!
Since then a lot of bloggers have done the same, and in time Aweber was the top choice used by almost all bloggers in the “make money” niche including John Chow, Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse.
Then Aweber went a little further and introduced even more exciting features like the Feedburner integration, Twitter integration, email segmentation, and even their own “social proof” mechanism. Although other service like GetResponse followed suite with their own blog to email syndication service, it was perhaps a case of “too little too late”.
In fact, most bloggers who didn’t quite start out with direct marketing (like I did) have only ever used Aweber, due to strong recommendation from other bloggers. Besides, Justin Premrick does a excellent job at updating the Aweber blog with the best email marketing advice, tips, and tactics. His title of “education manager” further reveals Aweber’s strategy of perfecting the art of social marketing.
Aweber has also produced a lot of great online training and webinars. In short, they are no longer just an autoresponder service. They are also the experts, the market movers, and the source of great marketing knowledge. With their massive effort to reinvent themselves (after 9 years), I truly feel they have come to be synonymous with the term “email marketing” itself.
If you haven’t signed up with Aweber yet, I strongly recommend that you get yourself an account here: http://getstarted.aweber.com
December 23, 2008 By
Blog Announce Feature By GetResponse – Great News For Bloggers!
While Aweber did the smart move of integrating RSS feed syndication into email marketing, their competitors didn’t seem to quite get the idea. Only recently did GetResponse announce their own RSS to email syndication which they dubbed as “Blog Announce”.
Although it comes with much lesser features, there is hope. Blog Announce lets you send the latest post from your blog to your email subscribers, by simply specifying your Blog RSS URL.
Since GetResponse with it’s one-price-for-unlimited-subscribers model is also much more affordable than Aweber. I foresee a lot of bloggers using this service in the near future too. This just shows that the lines between a blogger and a marketer are diminishing even as you’re reading this.
Blogs have come of age.
August 20, 2008 By
Email Marketing In Malaysia
Does email marketing even work in Malaysia, when your target group is 90-100% Malaysians? This article highlights my findings and experience on email marketing in Malaysia, and how it compares to a more international market. Let’s go through the details one by one.
How I Get My Data
Firstly, it’s important to note that when I started out in 2005 my first successful product was targeted to the Malaysian market, resulting in a list that was safe to say, 100% Malaysian. From this list I eventually branched out to a more international market and now I estimate that my email list is only 25% Malaysian although the only was I can track this is by the IP addresses captured by Aweber, my email marketing service. Not fully reliable, but it’s the only tool I have to segregate my list, any not all Internet marketers seem to be able to do this.
I also have several Malaysia-only email list including the one I am trying to build here at InternetMillionaires.com.my. However I cannot say for sure that they are all Malaysians as even subscribers from other countries can be included as long as they find this site, and enter their details using the optin form.
The Data I Analyzed
My Aweber account is fully capable of producing advanced reports on my mailing list data, but the only data I was concerned about was the double-optin rate and the open-rate. When someone enters an email address they are sent a verification email with a confirmation link. If they clicked on that link, it means they performed a double opt-in. This process is crucial to ensure that you build a quality list instead and stops people from abusing your service.
I compared these 2 figures, between my Malaysia-only list and my overall international list from BlogProfit, for the same 30-day period.
Diagram 1: Malaysia-only Email Marketing Subscriber Stats
Diagram 2: International Subscribers Email Marketing Stats
As you can read:
GREEN indicates total number of subscribed (and verified), BLUE indicates total number unsubscribed, and YELLOW indicates total number of subscribed but unverified.
As you can see, a vast majority of Malaysians who subscribe did not click on the confirmation email sent by Aweber.As a result, they are never really added into my system. Compare this with the international list (who may also contain Malaysians) and you’ll see the yellow bar is much, much shorter.
In fact, more than 50% of Malaysians who entered their email and name on this site did not confirm using the double optin email.
So although I am getting about 40-60 people opting-in, I get less than half those people finally, since Aweber does not add them to my list if they do not confirm. As a matter of fact I prefer not to add people to my list who did not double confirm, as I hate spamming.
But why does this happen? I attribute the situation to the following 4 factors:
- Low Email Literacy – I suspect most of them do not know that they have to look out for a confirmation email. By the time they get to their mail box again it may already be full with other stuff.
- Low Email Usage – Some Malaysians surf the web only during office hours. I know when I worked in TM that a lot of my colleagues surf the web instead of doing work, but at home and especially on weekends they are not on their computers.
- Email Blocking – Some email address are work emails, not personal emails.
- Service Providers – Many Malaysians use unknown email service providers, which I suspect either routes my emails straight to the spam folder and makes it difficult for people to find it. Even common service providers like TM Net mail and Jaring web mail is crap in my opinion. Please use Gmail.
- Privacy Concerns – Privacy rights is a new phenomenon in Malaysia. I just need to look at how many times my Maxis mobile provider is spamming me and my friends to understand why a lot of Malaysians have irrational fears about divulging their personal information. I see a lot of them using fake names and email address to get access to content.
Do Malaysians Get Your Email Messages?
Another concern of mine is the open rate for email messages that I send out. For this however, I see no significant difference in the percentage of my emails that get opened. However, I did notice that the response time for Malaysians is much slower that for the overall international list. It takes a longer time for Malaysians to read their emails, probably also due to the factors above.
Improving Your Email Marketing Campaigns
I think with a few changes you can easily improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns:
- Provide Opt-in Instructions – Give better instructions to people on the sign-up page, what to do after putting in their names and email addresses, as well as where to look for the confirmation email they will receive.
- Prevent Bad Emails – Send the download / offer to the email instead of on a web page. That way they won’t be putting in fake emails.
- Be Choosy – Clearly indicated that you will not accept emails from certain providers that handle email very badly (MSN for example) as well as work / corporate emails
Overall, if you’re planning on doing email marketing in the long term, you need a good system like GetResponse or Aweber to handle your email management, because these services constantly monitor which ISPs are blocking emails aggressively, and try to cater to their requirements. In some cases, representatives from these companies are also involved in discussions with email providers to improve their deliverability rate.
If you need a better understanding on how email marketing works, read my older blog post here:
July 26, 2008 By
Marketing Without A Mission Statement?
Sometimes common sense is the hardest thing to grasp, when you’re so deep into “savvy marketing” and “Web 2.0″. Riding the wave of new marketing technology, we sometimes forget to implement basic marketing concepts such as a “mission statement”.
I’m not talking about the type of stuff you’re forced to memorize at work, the ones that go like “We strive to achieve excellence and serve the regional markets to provide better value-added services and increase our shareholder’s value..”
Those type of statements are crap, simple because (1) they are not memorable (2) they mean nothing.
If you’re trying to get opt-in leads from your e-mail marketing campaign, you need a “mission statement”. My definition; a simple statement of an achievable goal; of what someone should expect to get from surrendering their name and email address to you.
For example:
- Master the guitar in 30 days
- Lose 30 pounds in 2 weeks
- Quit your day job in 14 weeks
I was looking at my opt-in boxes for Internet Millionaires Club and I realized that it needs a stronger “mission statement”. Something that would spark the imagination (and curiosity) of potential subscribers.
So here’s the mission statement I created:
You may or may not agree with me, and I may or may not have hit the nail on its head. But don’t you agree that you need to set yourself apart from everyone else in your market?
November 17, 2007 By
How I Got 1,980 Subscribers in 7 Days
Yes, I did and it’s no lie. Not only did I get 1.9k new optin subscribers, I also made about $490 is sales of product upgrades. The method is simple.
There’s one list-building tactic you can implement yourself, which is the “Giveaway” model like I did with www.DiwaliGiveaway.com – all you need is (1) a theme (2) promotion partners
In this model, you promote a free giveaway, where for a limited time people can download gifts for free. It would be much better is these gifts themselves are selling on the Internet for any price, or if the product is not available publicly.
Giveaways themselves fall into 2 categories (for me at least):
- The big giveaways – Like the 12 Days of Christmas and the 117 Work at Home Gifts giveaway. To hold this kind of giveaway is usually a big deal, and you’ll need at least some kind of software to automate it. These kind of giveaways usually involved hundreds of partners and thousands of gifts, and if you cannot organize one you can always participate in it.
- The mini giveaways – This is much simpler, and I learned this from the master of mini-giveaways Edmund Loh. Unlike the big events, you only need about 8-10 partners that can contribute their gifts and also promote the event. Unlike the big giveaways, you don’t need any software to do this except maybe for a tracking software, I personally use GoTryThis. A big part of this promotion is based on trust, so you need to only invite good partners who can will go all out to promote the event. Instead of the big giveaways where there is usually an optin box on the main page itself, with the Mini Giveaway the optin page is only on the individual partner’s gift download page. Done properly, you can make as much money and get as much new subscribers from the Mini-Giveaway as you would with the big ones.
If you want to build your list, here are the 2 giveaways that you can join now:
112 Work at Home Gifts (live now, ends December 10)
12 Days of Christmas (starting December)
There are many other giveaways, but these 2 should be enough. Joining too many makes it hard for you to manage and track results. Also, you would do better promoting 2 events than promoting 10, since these events rank you by the amount of new members / partners you promote. It’s better to rank highly in one than to get a shitty ranking in 10.
Once you’ve joined, read the submission guidelines, submit your product, and do your best to promote the event. At the very least, I’m pretty confident that with just these two events you can add between 300 – 500 subscribers yourself!
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