So today I was hanging out on the betternetworker (which is awesome btw) and someone asks the question: is reverse email marketing a good marketing strategy?
For those of you that don’t know what this is, I’ll give you an example.
Let’s say you opt into my list (which if you haven’t already, you need to do that) and then you reply to one of my emails with some sort of a solicitation.
That’s reverse email marketing.
It’s when you subscribe to someone else’s list and then sell to that person.
It’s a terribly ineffective marketing strategy and a complete waste of time (I’ll explain why shortly).
So this got me thinking…
…what are some more terrible marketing strategies that people are wasting their time and money on right now?
That’s how I came up with this list.
These are the 3 WORST marketing strategies that people are using in their business right now.
1.) Free solo ads. (aka list builders.)
This is when you sign up for a place like listjoe.com for free. Then they’ll let you send out an email to like 3,000 members every 7 days or so.
Sounds great so far right?
Except the people that are members of listjoe.com get credits for reading the emails you send them and clicking on your ads. They can then use their credits to send out emails themselves.
Think about what that means.
When someone clicks on your ad inside listjoe, they aren’t clicking on it because they like your content. They’re clicking on it, so that they can earn credits to market their own business. They don’t even care what your ad says, which makes that click virtually useless to you.
And even the few leads that you do generate with free solo ads aren’t going to be very good.
Here’s why:
Think about the people using listjoe. They’re using free advertising for a reason. It’s because they don’t have any money. They don’t have money to pay for ads, therefore they aren’t going to have money to buy your stuff and if no one buys your stuff, you don’t make any money.
Your goal as a marketer is to get your ads in front of people that are likely to do 3 things:
1.) Click on your ad. (if no one clicks, no one will see your product, and you don’t make money).
That means you need to show your ad in front of people that are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
So if you’re selling weight loss products, your ads need to be shown to people on weight loss websites.
If you’re selling make money online stuff (like I am), you need to show your ads places that people are likely to want to make extra income. (this can even be on job sites like Monster.com or Craigslist)
2.) The person that clicks on your ad then needs to opt in to your lead capture page. (this is easy to do, if you build lead capture pages the way I teach. If the headline on the capture page is 100% congruent to the headline on the ad the person clicks, your capture page will convert inbetween 40% and 50%)
List builders do meet one of those criteria. The people using them are likely to be interested in your stuff, but since they don’t have any money to spend on your stuff, you can’t make any money from list builders.
Make sense?
Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with people that don’t have much money. That’s where we all start, but for you to get to a place to where you DO have money, you need people that already have money to see your ads, websites, and products.
That is why free solo ad sites are the #1 worst place to market your business.
#2) Spamming social media sites like Facebook.
Maybe I’m just using this one for my own personal agenda (muahaha), but this stuff is just annoying.
There’s nothing more annoying than scrolling down a facebook news feed only to see that 85% of these people are just regurgitating the same old marketing lines that EVERYONE has been using, since the invention of the internet.
Don’t do this. It’s annoying.
Plus, it’s doesn’t work.
A much better way to market on Facebook (do this by the way because this does work) is to get a blog (kinda like this one, if you don’t have one, let me know and I’ll find a way for you to get one) and put an informational blog post on it.
If you want to steal my ideas and put it on your blog, I don’t care.
Just put SOMETHING of value on your blog (don’t sell anything in this blog post btw).
Then hop on Facebook and write some message on your wall about how you just wrote a blog post and people can learn How To [do something really cool that people in your niche would care about]
That wall post will get CLICKS. You’ll actually get traffic doing this.
Now we just need to turn that 100% free traffic into leads.
All you have to do is have an opt in form at the bottom of your blog post and on the right or left hand side of your blog. Kinda like how I have my blog set up right now.
I literally use this exact strategy to generate 5 to 10 leads per day for FREE.
The average online marketer generates less than 10 leads EVER and I do it every single day using a strategy that takes me 15 minutes and is 100% free to do.
Cool right?
Anyways, moral of the story: don’t spam facebook with your stupid affiliate links. People. do. not. care.
‘Nuff said.
3.) Reverse email marketing.
This must be a new thing because when I first got started online, I don’t think anyone was teaching it, but now I get unsolicited emails back from my list all the time.
If you’re doing this, don’t. It doesn’t work. It won’t make you money and the people that you email will never respect you as an online entrepreneur.
If you want to get the attention of a person whose list you are on, the best thing for you to do is just simply shoot them an email and say: “hey man good email.”
If you do that once or twice a month, eventually you’ll get an email back and you’ll get listened to.
I still think that’s a pretty slow way to build a business, but hey what do I know?
Anyways, if you know of any other terrible marketing strategies, leave ‘em in the comments below, it would help us all out!
Talk tomorrow.