Profits With Chris

I recently read the List Building Manifesto by Sean Mize – what can I say, this is “the best IM ebook I have ever read“.

If you want to know more about it, check out Sean’s site here: Secrets of Internet Success. By the way, that is not an affiliate link, in fact – Sean sells this via Paypal only!

Anyway, I was reading this book and it has really been an eye opener. And I say that having read many of the more popular ebooks around. Most ebooks tell you stuff you already know and if you’re lucky you might find out about a few killer techniques that you didn’t know of previously.

Sean’s book is incredible – as you can tell by the title, it’s all about “the list”.

Now, I have heard many times, “the money is in the list”.

I even once bought an Aweber subscription and it sat there gathering digital dust. I barely had a few opt-ins and didn’t really know what I was doing.

It seems that the list is always an afterthought – even for those people who use them more seriously.

e.g. you build a site, you drive traffic to it, you monetise the site with affiliate products or, shock horror, even Adsense. And then you add a list.

In the IM world, lists are even more popular. Most people now know the value of a responsive list. For instance, anytime you sell a product – ALWAYS have an opt-in box on the download page. Believe it or not, most people don’t do this!! I was recently told this no-brainer by Lee McIntyre and have integrated an opt-in box into DLGuard thanks to his excellent video tutorial.

There really is no excuse not to add this type of opt-in!

But here’s why I love Sean’s book…he treats “the list” like the chicken and the egg.

In his opinion, the list came first – everything else can follow.

So he shows how your main priority when entering any niche, is not to write articles or start to create a product or anything else – it’s to create a list. Let me repeat that and put it in caps: THE LIST CAME FIRST!

Concentrate on building a list and driving traffic to it. Then monetise with affiliate and your own products. But remember that the list is the most important thing. Think of your list as virtual real estate.

And the great thing about this strategy is that it applies equally, if not more, to the non-IM world. Much as I love working in the IM world, it is a little satisfying to make money in the non-IM world and operate “under the radar”, plus it does a lot for diversification too!

And how much money should you expect from the list? Sean and others have told me to aim for around the 50 cent per subscriber per month average.

So now you know why “the money is in the list”. Can you imagine sending only four emails per month and making 50 cents per subscriber? Imagine a list of a couple of thousand which is not even considered that big – that means that you make around 500 bucks per email sent!!

I can tell you, as well as product creation, this is going to be the focus of my efforts over the next couple of months.

So check out Sean’s site, Secrets of Internet Success, and while you’re at it – sign up to my list over on the right hand side of this blog