Build Your Mailing List With JV Giveaways
By Derrick | December 21, 2009
It’s often been said that the key to making money online is to build a list of followers who know you, like you and trust you. But how do you go about building a list like that?
People in the ‘Make Money Online’ niche tend to behave a little differently from those in, say, the knitting and scrapbooking niche. In some ways, they’re more jaded – they’ve fallen for all the Internet marketing tricks before. One time offers are no longer new and exciting. Countdown timers, viral videos, artificial scarcity – they’ve seen them all. They’re well aware that when they sign up for a free report, it’s not really free at all – they’re trading their name and email address for the shiny new thing.
So on the one hand, they’re hard to impress. On the other hand, they’re quite happy to sign up for your list, provided you offer some value. And if you can get them to stay for long enough to become aware of you, if they see your name in their inbox frequently enough for them to become familiar with you, after a period of time you can get them to trust you.
How do you get them to sign up in the first place? One of the quickest ways to build up a mailing list is through joint ventures. But when you’re just starting out, it’s unlikely that you’ll be in a position to offer any joint venture partners much of an exchange.
A possible solution to the ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma is the JV Giveaway. This is a special kind of joint venture arrangement where you add your gift – a special report, an ebook, a free membership – to a list of giveaways from other marketers. Each marketer then promotes the giveaway event, using their own mailing list, their blog and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You get credited with the number of subscribers who sign up using your unique link (as well as for any contributors who sign up under you).
The important points are that everyone who wants to download your giveaway has to sign up to your mailing list, and that you benefit from the promotional efforts of all the contributors.
JV Giveaways generally last for a short period of time, perhaps 2 weeks. The rules regarding the type of gift you can offer, the number of subscribers you need to get signed up and your ranking in the list of giveaways varies from site to site. If you don’t have a mailing list, or you don’t think you’ll be able to get enough subscribers to sign up, you can buy your way in – a paid membership generally gives you a higher rank in the giveaway listings, and may also give you premium promotional slots.
I should warn you that by signing up – either as a contributor or as a regular subscriber – you’ll be facing a veritable barrage of product offers. You’ll get upsells, downsells, cross-sells, upgrades, hard sells and soft sells. If you can stay calm in the face of yet another marketer advising you that “There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen – and those who say “What happened?”, you’ll be fine.
If you’d like to see how a JV Giveaway works from the subscriber perspective, you can sign up for the Christmas JV Giveaway here.
If you’d like to give it a try as a contributor, here are some up-coming JV Giveaways:
The New Years Giveaway (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 12th 2010)
The Peoples JV Giveaway 2 (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 31st 2010)
Self Improvement Gifts 4 (Jan 5th 2010 – Jan 19th 2010)
Topics: List Building | 54 Comments »
Make Money Online With Resell Rights Products
By Derrick | November 16, 2009
If you want to start making money on the Internet, there are three things you’ll need.
A Product
Having your own product is one of the best ways to make money online. Sure, you can sell other people’s products – but having something of your own to sell is the core of a real business.
It means that you can [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Online Business | 51 Comments »
Website Flipping – What’s It All About?
By Derrick | September 26, 2009
Website flipping can be a quick way to make money online. The term comes from the real estate industry, where “fixer-upper” homes can be purchased at discounted prices, renovated and then “flipped” to another buyer at a higher price.
With websites, the process is similar. You can buy and “re-hab” an existing site, or you can build a brand-new site [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Online Business | 84 Comments »
5 Ways to Make Money Online
By Derrick | May 31, 2009
There are thousands of ways to make money on the Internet. Some of them work, and quite a few of them don’t. Some are even downright unethical (or illegal).
Here are a couple of the methods that actually do work:
1. Create and sell your own information products. This is one of the best ways to make money, because you [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Online Business | 149 Comments »
Selling Services to Local Businesses
By Derrick | April 27, 2009
You can make a comfortable living selling Internet marketing services to local businesses. More and more people are using the Internet to search for local suppliers of items they want to buy, and business owners are becoming more aware of the importance of getting a high search engine ranking.
Some business owners are even starting to understand that it’s not [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Offline Business | 38 Comments »
Free Traffic
By Derrick | April 1, 2009
Free traffic? Anyone with a little bit of experience knows that, as with lunch, there’s really no such thing. You always pay for traffic – with money, time or effort (or some combination of the three).
With most paid advertising, once you stop paying, the traffic dries up.
On the other hand, with many of the ‘free’ traffic methods, the traffic [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Articles | 57 Comments »
Serious Income Secrets
By Derrick | February 28, 2009
How do you make an income on the Internet? There are thousands of ways that work, and hundreds of thousands of people whose income is directly derived from the net.
In the first six issues of my “Serious Income Secrets” newsletter, I’ll take you step-by-step through the process of building an online business – not a fly-by-night, “get rich [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Online Business | 47 Comments »
Does Outsourcing Work For You?
By Derrick | February 17, 2009
Small business owners often try to do everything themselves. This can work when a new business is just getting off the ground, as it keeps costs down. But as a business acquires more clients, it becomes more and more difficult for the business owner to do everything.
One way to solve this problem is for the business owner to identify [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Outsourcing | 46 Comments »
This should make you smile…
By Derrick | January 16, 2009
Thanks to Peter du Toit for finding this…
Winner – Best Narrative Short, Cleveland Int’l Film Festival,
Winner – Jury Award, Gen Art Chicago Film Festival,
Winner – Audience Award, Hawaii Int’l Film Festival,
Winner – Best Short Comedy, Breckenridge Festival of Film,
Winner – Crystal Heart Award, Best Short Film & Audience Award, Heartland Film Festival,
Winner – Christopher [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: General | 27 Comments »
Upgrading to WordPress 2.7
By Derrick | December 30, 2008
I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7. I tried it out on a couple of my niche blogs first, and it was pretty straight forward. A couple of plugins had to be upgraded as well, but this is simple (if a little time consuming).
WP 2.7 has a number of changes which I really like. For [...] Continue Reading…
Topics: Blogs | 33 Comments »
My mugshot.
