There is this saying I learnt from a motivational speaker. It goes, €the rule for making money has not changed since the first coin was made in Asia Minor - Just find a need and fill it'. It seems obvious that this is the only way to make money both online and offline. But although I have known this saying for donkey years, it was no more than mere mental knowledge until recently. The turning point came when I read an article that more than ever, exposed the secrets of email marketing to me. Yes, I realized my major problem was marketing. €Even if I know so many needs yearning to be met, and I had means of filling them€, I'd think to myself, €but how do I get people who have those needs to know I could be of help?€ That was it. It ended in self-defeat and my problem bordered on marketing.
Here are the points raised in that article that I found quite inspiring. If you want to succeed in email marketing:
i. You must have genuine answer to people's questions, and solution to their problems; and you must be ready to give out those solutions out for free in order to get a good number of surfers to have personal trust in you. Almost everyone will fall for whoever has free solution to his/her problems.
ii. You must place service first while money making should be secondary. Honestly striving to give real value to your audience with no strings attached, has a way of commending you to them in a way that words cannot explain. My mind framed a saying from this, €seek ye first service, and money shall be added unto you€.
iii. You must get a good number of people who are already interested in your niche to follow you by solving their problems as already said. These would become your followers. It is a game of numbers: the more in number they are, the better. You can get them via forums, social networks, and other such media. The trust established will enable them to willingly take anything you recommend. This is preparing the ground for point (iv).
iv. You must have a way to monetize your following. This should not be exploitative. All you do is find out what will truly benefit your followers, and which will translate to money at your end. In the article in reference, the writer picked a product from an affiliate program that he knew would be beneficial to his audience and he recommended it to them. As they were buying the product and were getting satisfied, he was making commissions. I was especially impressed to learn that once you build trust among your online followers, you no longer need to €market' to them per se; instead, you €recommend' products and services. This will have a long term value.
Armed with these points, my mind went afire, evolving my own unique ways to apply them. Since I hate asking people to buy something, my first concern was to see how I could possibly monetize my following without asking them to buy something. The option I had left was freebie niches in CPA (cost-per-action) affiliate programs. But there was a problem here: Although I would receive commissions for free actions taken by my prospects, these commissions usually come in pennies (something between $0.5 and $1 per action, or even lower!).
Then, I reckoned that if I could discover freebie CPAs in the highest paying niches, their commissions could be considerable. But the highest paying niches were highly technical: It is either information in those niches were hard to come by (such as medical and legal niches) or it had a specialized audience or both. No wonder they could be paying so much!
Now I realized that if I would ever do something, I'd have to make sacrifices. So, I took on the challenge of researching into one of the highest paying legal niches (Structured Settlement, or SS for short) to see if it had anything that could appeal to ordinary people outside the legal circle. I finally discovered that the niche is also a money making one. There is what is now called structured settlement investing which anyone could be involved in. Since money making niche is one of the most popular, I began to offer free online tutorials on the money making aspects of SS - which only very few people know about.
When I felt this was beginning to generate considerable interest, I began asking my audience to subscribe to my email list so I could be sending them further tips. In a period of only 60 days, I had over 4000 subscribers on my list. At this point, I felt it was time to monetize. So I went in search of freebie CPAs in the SS niche. I clicked on every link that has anything on SS and I was able to find a couple of them that has affiliate programs. Since the niche is one of the highest paying available, I was not surprised to learn they offer to pay their affiliates between $30 and $60 for getting a prospect to perform free simple actions such as sign-ups. I guess they could pay so much since the niche is very little known yet. I finally settled for one of the programs that pay me $56.5 per free sign-up! Once I determined that this was trustworthy, I sent out an email to my opt-in list recommending that my subscribers should sign up for the program for free - my referral link was handy. That was precisely on 26th May 2012. Today, as I write, it is barely a week since I sent out the email. The sign-ups are coming like the rain, but the last time I checked (just an hour ago), I had 1008 sign-ups and $56,952 as my balance, and it is still counting.
The owners of this program perhaps thought it was going to be extremely hard to get someone to sign up since it was a little known area with a specialized audience. But all I needed was time and idea to get a good number of people interested. I have written this to let everyone know that ideas truly work, although I hardly believed this before.
Here are the points raised in that article that I found quite inspiring. If you want to succeed in email marketing:
i. You must have genuine answer to people's questions, and solution to their problems; and you must be ready to give out those solutions out for free in order to get a good number of surfers to have personal trust in you. Almost everyone will fall for whoever has free solution to his/her problems.
ii. You must place service first while money making should be secondary. Honestly striving to give real value to your audience with no strings attached, has a way of commending you to them in a way that words cannot explain. My mind framed a saying from this, €seek ye first service, and money shall be added unto you€.
iii. You must get a good number of people who are already interested in your niche to follow you by solving their problems as already said. These would become your followers. It is a game of numbers: the more in number they are, the better. You can get them via forums, social networks, and other such media. The trust established will enable them to willingly take anything you recommend. This is preparing the ground for point (iv).
iv. You must have a way to monetize your following. This should not be exploitative. All you do is find out what will truly benefit your followers, and which will translate to money at your end. In the article in reference, the writer picked a product from an affiliate program that he knew would be beneficial to his audience and he recommended it to them. As they were buying the product and were getting satisfied, he was making commissions. I was especially impressed to learn that once you build trust among your online followers, you no longer need to €market' to them per se; instead, you €recommend' products and services. This will have a long term value.
Armed with these points, my mind went afire, evolving my own unique ways to apply them. Since I hate asking people to buy something, my first concern was to see how I could possibly monetize my following without asking them to buy something. The option I had left was freebie niches in CPA (cost-per-action) affiliate programs. But there was a problem here: Although I would receive commissions for free actions taken by my prospects, these commissions usually come in pennies (something between $0.5 and $1 per action, or even lower!).
Then, I reckoned that if I could discover freebie CPAs in the highest paying niches, their commissions could be considerable. But the highest paying niches were highly technical: It is either information in those niches were hard to come by (such as medical and legal niches) or it had a specialized audience or both. No wonder they could be paying so much!
Now I realized that if I would ever do something, I'd have to make sacrifices. So, I took on the challenge of researching into one of the highest paying legal niches (Structured Settlement, or SS for short) to see if it had anything that could appeal to ordinary people outside the legal circle. I finally discovered that the niche is also a money making one. There is what is now called structured settlement investing which anyone could be involved in. Since money making niche is one of the most popular, I began to offer free online tutorials on the money making aspects of SS - which only very few people know about.
When I felt this was beginning to generate considerable interest, I began asking my audience to subscribe to my email list so I could be sending them further tips. In a period of only 60 days, I had over 4000 subscribers on my list. At this point, I felt it was time to monetize. So I went in search of freebie CPAs in the SS niche. I clicked on every link that has anything on SS and I was able to find a couple of them that has affiliate programs. Since the niche is one of the highest paying available, I was not surprised to learn they offer to pay their affiliates between $30 and $60 for getting a prospect to perform free simple actions such as sign-ups. I guess they could pay so much since the niche is very little known yet. I finally settled for one of the programs that pay me $56.5 per free sign-up! Once I determined that this was trustworthy, I sent out an email to my opt-in list recommending that my subscribers should sign up for the program for free - my referral link was handy. That was precisely on 26th May 2012. Today, as I write, it is barely a week since I sent out the email. The sign-ups are coming like the rain, but the last time I checked (just an hour ago), I had 1008 sign-ups and $56,952 as my balance, and it is still counting.
The owners of this program perhaps thought it was going to be extremely hard to get someone to sign up since it was a little known area with a specialized audience. But all I needed was time and idea to get a good number of people interested. I have written this to let everyone know that ideas truly work, although I hardly believed this before.
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