UPDATE: Subscriber’s Magnet Is No Longer Available

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It’s been a while since I updated this blog with my progress in Alex Jeffreys marketing course. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and I have a bit of time to spare, so here’s what I’ve been up to during the course…

Marketing With Alex 3.0The core of Alex’s course is to build a list. I’m involved in a few online enterprises (writing software, building and maintaining websites, testing the waters with autoblogs, looking after customers, etc.), so I’ve had less time than I’d have liked to devote to Alex’s course. So my timetable has slipped over the last couple of weeks (a minor health scare and a short stint in hospital didn’t help either).

Putting The Course Into Action

The idea behind building any list is that you give away a product to a visitor providing they sign up to your list. As part of Alex’s course, he gave his students a product to give away in order to help in building their lists. It’s the Easy Cash Webinar (you may have heard of it by now). I’ve done a little bit of promotion on this but not as much as I should have and, consequently, I haven’t built much of a list here. The webinar is pretty much the first module from the Marketing With Alex 3.0 course and gives a good grounding in how you should approach running a business online. Everything stems from using that mindset. Alex’s course is no longer available, but if you’re looking for an affiliate marketing course, check out these current recommended courses.

Have I used that mindset myself? Yes, mostly. I did make plans at the start of the course using the methodologies in the webinar but I kept getting distracted with various things (which if I was doing things right, I wouldn’t have) and so I lost focus and as my timelines passed, I didn’t put enough effort into following the course’s tenets and making further plans. Worse, I reverted to old habits and started dealing with things as they came in rather than prioritizing and working on the most important tasks first. The result is that I’ve not got much done with my time, certainly not as much as I should have. So I’ve reviewed Module 1 again (Easy Cash Webinar) and will attempt to get back on track with planning and prioritizing.

Creating My Own Report

One of the other suggestions in Alex’s course is to create your own products as this gives you exclusivity. So, with that in mind, my first major distraction was in creating the Blog Linking Tactics report which my subscribers get if they sign up for my newsletter. The report has gone through a couple of revsions, so if you’re already a subscriber, you should download the report again to get the latest version. I also added 50 traffic videos to sweeten the pot for subscribers.

I’ve done better in building a list with this report. It’s still small but I was getting a signup every other day or so. So it was producing results.

Using a New Plugin

Then I received notification of a new WordPress plugin called Subscriber’s Magnet (no longer available) that would present visitors with different options for signing up for my newsletter. You’ll see its effects on my blog:

  1. When you visit the blog, there’s a semi-transparent bar at the bottom of the screen that contains the optin form and some information for subscribers. I’ve set the plugin up so that the bar only appears on the first visit to the blog during that session. I didn’t want to annoy visitors by having it appear on every page.
  2. An optin form is added below the first post on my home page, so it’s above the fold. I could have set the plugin to display the form below every post on the home page, but that’s just overkill
  3. An optin form appears at the bottom of every post when that post’s page is opened.
  4. The visitors name and email address are pre-filled in the optin forms, so all they have to do is click the subscribe button to sign up. I don’t know what magic the plugin uses to do this but it’s effective.

Now I got a pre-release version of this plugin and so I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks. The upshot is that I’m getting new subscribers at the rate of 1 or 2 per day now. So I’d say using the plugin has been a success. It goes on official release on July 27th.

Creating Another Report

While in report creation mode, I updated another report I’d written some time ago (before joining Alex’s coaching program). Called Getting Started With Clickbank, it details how to be a better Clickbank affiliate and seller (I’ve sold and still sell products in Clickbank myself so I just documented what I did and the approaches I took). This isn’t a report I’ve promoted in any way except in the Giveaway I’ll talk about below.

Yet Another Report

A third report I put together by modifying some PLR stuff. This one’s about list building so it’s kind of appropriate for Alex’s course. That’s not to say that it’s a replacement for Alex’s course. Far from it. Alex’s course covers a wide breadth of internet marketing topics that all fuse together into one cohesive whole and list building is only a part of that. But for those who want an introduction to list building, I think it’s a good start. Another report I haven’t promoted except in the Giveaway (mentioned below) .

The “Declaration of Independence” Giveaway

One way of increasing the size of your list is to join a Giveaway event and supply some products to it. In return, you get people signing up on your list. There’s usually a huge number of products available during these events and so my reports are competing for visitors’ attention with all the other reports, ebooks, scripts, etc. on offer.

Now in order to add my reports to the event, I had to stump up a “contributor’s” fee. In this case, that was just $15. Other Giveaway events I’ve looked at required fees as high as $97 which was too high for me for an untested avenue for building my list. $15 seemed worth a punt, and so I joined the “Declaration of Independence” Giveaway on the recommendation of “Gazzman”, another member of the Marketing With Alex forum (you know who you are!). I tried promoting the Easy Cash Webinar as well but someome beat me to the punch on that (all items in the Giveaway are unique).

The Giveaway event launched on July 6th and runs till the 20th. Anyone can sign up and get access to the hundreds of reports, ebooks, scripts and other stuff that a huge range of internet marketers are giving away. As far as I know, you can still sign up as a contributor if you have something to promote, though you’ll have lost a few days of exposure by now.

It’s July 10th now and I’ve had 29 signups since launch (20 for Blog Linking Tactics, 5 for Maximum List Building and 4 for Getting Started With Clickbank). That’s about 6 signups per day. At this rate, I can expect about another 60 signups before the Giveaway closes. To be honest, I was hoping for better results (a couple of hundred signups at least) but maybe I’m being over optimistic in my expectations.

Modules

So, while I spent time creating my reports, posting and answering questions in the Marketing With Alex forum and doing all the other stuff required to run my online business, I haven’t kept up with Alex’s training webinars (I’m on Module 9: JV’s & Affiliate Training, while Alex held the Module 12 webinar: Membership Profits this week). Luckily, they’re all archived so I can watch them in my own time.

Where To From Here?

Well, I need to get back on track with planning and prioritizing (a la training Module 1 or the Easy Cash Webinar for non-member of the course). I’ll be monitoring the signups I receive from the Giveaway over the next 10 days. I also need to set aside time to catch up on the webinars I’ve missed. And I need to find other ways of adding to my list. That’s one task I can’t afford to take my eyes off.

Then I need to work on the next release of my SiteBuilder Elite software, do an upgrade for LunarPhase Pro, update my astronomy website, submit articles to various places to get backlinks for my sites, continue playing with autoblogs to see if they’re worth the time and effort…yeesh, there just aren’t enough hours in the day! Alex’s Module 12 webinar is all about Outsourcing Secrets. I feel an urgent need to watch it coming on…

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

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Filed under: The Marketing With Alex Journey