I think this statement is going to upset a lot of people. All the Gurus are telling the newbie Internet Marketer that the list is your most important money-making tool and yet here I am saying the opposite!

As I continue to learn more on email marketing and working on my autoresponder follow up messages, I realized that the time of having many pre-written sales email is no longer that easy to make money.

One of the reasons why I recently unsubscribed from many lists is that I realized that more and more Internet Marketers use autoresponders to send out nothing but sales pitches. Where do these sales pitches come from? Well there are mostly swipe copies created for an affiliate program.

So I used to get 10 exactly the same emails with the same exact headlines in the same day. And because they are swipe copies from an affiliate program, the message of the email is basically asking you to “Buy this and Buy that” and “the offers will end pretty soon so get your copy while you still can”.

As I do more of my own autoresponder follow up messages I realized  that making long-term money with email marketing by just loading up these “buy this product now” emails doesn’t work. You can make some money but if my offer is just endless stream of sales pitches all I am asking my subscriber is their money and there is no value in the messages.

The fact that I have 10 emails in my inbox having the same headlines and message body means the affiliate marketers did not do anything extra to convince their subscribers why they should buy from him/her. Yes many may have added some bonuses at the end of the message but the motivation is the same “give me your money”. So the mentality of “I just want to get paid, no matter what” is not going to work and you can potentially lose a subscriber.

When I first started I thought that’s the way to go because the Gurus said so. I have been wondering why I am not making sales and subscribers drop off from my list. As I learned more on this subject I realized that just copying a swipe mail and send it out to the subscriber does not help them to achieve their goals.

Just the same when I read the emails from other Internet Marketer I keep asking myself if this product or information is going to achieve my goal. Well the answer is NO most of the times. Because I can’t find a good enough reason to buy I just ignore the emails. Instead of getting more “junk” mails from them which has no value I recently decided to unsubscribed from many lists because they are not providing value to me.

For now I am focusing on building a relationship with my subscribers and provide them with good information they can use immediately and put into action. This is another advice that Gurus advocate that you need to earn the right to recommend an affiliate product. I will continue to work on this aspect of email marketing further so that my subscribers see me as a friend and gain their trust.

The same concept can apply just like in a brick and mortar business. We need to think about the customers, what they need, provide goods and services that fulfil those needs. Give them enough and down the road they will return more often.

Because of the value I can get from good information that is beneficial to me I continue to stay in the lists of a few Internet Marketers because they constantly provide free information that I can use and can put into action.

So the money is only in the list when you have a list of “friends/buyers” and not just another bunch of “subscribers”.

A nice video that reinforce this message is here.

Whenever there is a launch of a new IM product, my mailbox will fill up pretty fast on the day leading to the launch, on launch day and the day after. It is really madness when you open up you mailbox after a long day to find 200+ unread mails!

Another source of the emails are from marketers who are going through their Ad-swap routine and since I am on their lists so I am getting many emails from these marketers trying to grow their list.

Looks like I am on too many different lists.

The reason I get on the list of many marketers is because I want to see what they have to offer and also I want to look at how they set up their website, sales copy and promotion and hopefully I can learn something from them.

If I get a dozen of emails a day then I will spend the time to go through them to analyze what I think they’er are doing. If their sales copy is something new I will make a copy of it.

If it is like today when there are over 200 emails I just can’t possible go through every one of them. Also as I start to read some of the email, I can sense I am being “sold”. No matter how clever they worded their email, there is always the element of the marketers asking for a “buy or don’t buy” answers. I normally just file the emails and move on to the next one.

How I wish these marketers will tell me what they are up to rather than asking me to click on a link here or there before I find out what they want.

I guess what I am hoping to get is a an email from a top marketer that explain steps-by-steps how they made their money. Something to the effect that when I open the email there is an instruction on what to do today and I can follow to implement my own program or campaigns.

I know this may sound like a fantasy or a dream that many newbie marketers wish will come true.

Anyway today I have reach a breaking point.

Last night when I got through my “follow up” folder (yes I created one) in my hard disk, there are more than 80 items that I haven’t even started looking at . Most of them are free eBooks or PLR that I intend to spend time reading or implementing.

When I saw the long list of unread new emails today I know I have to do something. As I click through each email that make a sales pitch I decided to unsubcribed myself from his/her list for now. For those that offer information without asking for an opt-in, I stay subscribed.

Even this took almost an hour to complete so I know I am definitely over-subscribed and having unnecessary information overload from just reading emails. During the unsubscribed operation, I noticed at time I am on multiple lists from the same marketers. That is one of the reason why my mailbox filled up very fast during an Ad-swap exercise among the marketers.

Now that I am subscribed to a minimal lists I can start to focus on what I lay out in my plan – drive traffics. I already started doing this via free ads, free safelist, free traffic exchange and free traffic generation sites. I do have a squeeze page but have very low conversion rate so I need to review my squeeze page set up.

I am still struggling to use Twitter as a marketing front and my other Web 2.0 presence are still not converting.

I definitely need to take a step back and reassess what I need to make my list building work better.

The common theme from the emails received from the lists I subscribed to lately has been on how to get more traffics to your site. Some of them has come up with ingenious traffic tactics that doesn’t involved Google while one found a way to exploit Google Gmail. Most of them offer the traffic tactics for free except the one who sell his new found secret using Google Gmail.

One of free traffic tactic that I am currently following is from George Brown. He found a way to send many backlinks to his website using Wikipedia and Wikia. If you want to find out more, check out his FREE video here and his update on this tactic in this FREE video.

Speaking about backlink, we all know that the secret to attaining top Google rankings for the keyword we are targetting is to have a lot of backlinks. One way to receive a ton of one way backlinks is to join a link building network.

Calvin and his partner Jonathan from IMBuzzMarketer are going to be launching their brand new link building network to the public in a few months time. Right now they are inviting Internet Marketer to beta-test the system and give them feedback. They are opening a secret backdoor to some of their friends to send to their lists. I am fortunate to be in one of the list and I am sharing this to everyone.

New Link Building Network

If you are looking for backlinks now, you can grab this incredible chance to secure a lifetime access to their membership site for free now. They will be charging a pretty hefty monthly fee when they do launch. Therefore go claim you exclusive lifetime access now.

I don’t know when they will close the backdoor but I guess it will be done as soon as they have enough beta-testers on board.

I have already grabbed my beta testing seat as I know this can be a very powerful system once it is launch. This is a sure fire way of getting one-way permanent backlinks that will benefit any of your sites. Yes, the membership allow a maximum of up to 100 sites per account. Check it out now.

New Link Building Network

This week is  a new milestone for me in terms of acheivement for my online marketing journey.

Instead of spending time on more learning and research, I started building make money mini sites. It was a little bit hard at the beginning but once I completed one of the mini-site, the other is so much easier. With the mind set of focusing on speed of execution I am able to complete my planned task for this week within the timeframe I set for myself. I am very happy to say that whatever I have learned so far have helped me in completing the tasks.

The first mini-site I put up is called the Fully Automated Mini Site. The idea is that anyone who purchase the same mini-site can set up the same mini site then sell it.

The mini-site package will be sold for only $6.99 and the buyer would then put up the package for sell for the same price. Once the buyer click on the “Buy Now” button and completed the payment via Paypal.com, he/she will be brought to a BackOffice web page where the mini-site package can be downloaded.

On the BackOffice webpage, instructions on how to purchase a domain, web hosting, and modification of the html files are provided.

To help the buyer to drive traffics to the mini site, different marketing tools are also provided including banner ads, text ads, Adwords ads, list of safelists, traffic exchanges, marketing forums, list of search engine to submit to, etc. This mini-site package has been designed to provide step-by-step process such that the buyer can set up a mini-site for sell and drive traffic to it.

As a token of appreciation I have also included in the BackOffice web page some free gifts consisting of 3 PLR eBooks. I have also included additional write up on how to optimize the mini-site package so that the buyer can obtain more moneys from referral links which is not including in the original mini-site pacakge.

My next task to promote my own fully-automated mini site is to drive traffics to it.

I am looking forward to making more money with this mini-site.

The second site is a squeeze page for list building. Visitor who enter their name and primary email address will be able to download a free eBook that describe a step-by-step system for adding 100 leads (or more) to their list every single day.

This eBook also provide informaton on how to get high-quality traffic to your squeeze page for free and how to automate your listbuidling and get a steady stream of leads every day without any extra work.

If you would like to have a copy of this eBook for free, you can download it from here.

Cheers
Nighto Chan

I took some time off around Christmas to visit relatives and really went offline for a week. I drove south to visit the island of Singapore and thoroughly enjoyed my holiday with my wife.

The first thing I got back from the holiday is try to recover my failed Vista partition. I have spent many hours trying to recover it with the Vista DVD but it just couldn’t recover my Vista OS so I finally gave up trying to resuscitate that partition. I had to do the most tedious work of copying whatever files that can be recovered through the Command Prompt windows! Fortunately I have restructured my emails folder back in Septemer so most of my old emails were kept on my Intermet email account rather than downloaded to my hard drive as I have done previously. Still I have to spend considerable time to reinstall most of the tools that I need into my Windows 7 partition.

Today I spent several hours wading through the thousands of unread emails from list that I have subscribed to. Like you I probably got about 1,000 emails wishing me “Happy New Year and Merry Xmas” which I appreciate as I know there is a person behind the autoresponder. The other theme that I read a lot is that a lot of Internet Marketer has make their plan for 2010. Now that I am settled and having to go through each email, with the new barrage of offers, free ebooks and VIP programs started coming in. I am starting to wonder how do I keep up with all the information overload? I think I need to plan to decide who should I follow and who should I unsubscribe.

Anyway, looking back to 2009, it was really a year of learning for me.

Overall I think I have taken action a little bit too late.

I have the tendency to learn about something and understand it completely before I take action. By the time I finally understood what it needs to get online, start serious blogging and do affiliate marketing, I have spent too much time learning and not enough of action to make things work.

What I lack was the speed of implementation. I now believed that in Internet business, speed of implementation is the name of the game. Even after reading all the Internet marketing materials in my hard drive, I find that no one actually will give you a perfect business plan or the exact steps that I need to take. This is so much different from a job where you have the job description written out for you.

What it means to me is that I have to be in charge of my own success. And that means doing something that I am not comfortable with and implementing something that I am unsure what the outcome might be. Now I know why many people fail online because they simply take tool long trying to perfect everything which is what I did in 2009.

Even though I make just a little money in 2009, I still feel humble with the failure. I only hope that this failure will be my key to progress in 2010. So moving forward, I will focus on the speed of implementation.

My main focus for 2010 is on list building. As everyone know, your list of subscribers is one of the most important assets in your business. You can leverage your list of subscribers at any time to funnel more visitors to the website of your choice. That’s the theory and now is the time I put this into action. I will be focusing all of my attention and marketing efforts in 2010 on sending visitors to my squeeze page.

Following my plan for “revival”, I also started to visit forum more often and try to look for affiliate marketing opportunities. I think I am begining to have a better feels of the Internet Marketing space since I started spending an hour a day reading through Warrior Forum. I am hoping that by doing this high-leverage activity per day I will be able to create some form of growth in my business this year.

One area that I am exploring for 2010 is on the finding a personal coach. It has been said that with a coach, you can achieve exponential grown in your business. It would be nice to have a mentor that can hold my hand every step of the way so that I always know exactly what needs to be done next. Unfortunately this is a high cost item especially with one-on-one coaching program. I am hoping that as I grow my business I can make enough to get a personal coach in 2010 so that I can achieve my goals faster.

Well this is a bit of insight into what I have learned in 2009 and looking forward to a successful 2010.