Email Marketing Demystified With Matthew Paulson

Entrepreneur, Author, Angel Investor- Matthew Paulson

How to do opt-ins right. Leveraging Twitter and Facebook lead generation ads. What is co-registration advertising and why it can be a great source of good leads. Why you need multiple different lead magnets and how to do them quickly. What are list swaps and how to do them the right way.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

MyEmailMarketingBook.com

Check out MattPaulson.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Jaime:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire.  I'm Jaime Tardy, and I'm excited to have Matthew Paulson back on the show.  You can check him out and all the companies he's running at MattPaulson.com.  He also has a brand new book that just came out called Email Marketing Demystified.  What we're gonna do is go deep into that and ask him all the good stuff.  Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Matthew:	Yeah, thanks for having me back on, Jaime.

Jaime:	I know, so last time we talked, I was like, "Okay, we need way more of this because I really don't feel like people dive into e-mail marketing enough," and that's really what people need most of the time in their list-building: growth and how the heck do we make money off of it, so I'm really excited.  Tell me about the book, just a little bit of a summary so people can understand where they're at.

Matthew:	Sure, so I've gotten a lot of questions about e-mail marketing in the last 24 months just because the level of success up to 290,000 subscribers, so I thought hey, maybe I could stick this in a book and just create a resource that's pretty valuable to people.  So what I was hoping to do was to create kind of an end-to-end goal of resource of e-mail marketing, so how do you get opt-ins, what do you use to manage your list, what do you e-mail your list, how do you stay off spam traps, how do you make money from your list, just everything you would wanna know about e-mail marketing, and I just tried to condense it and do 250 pages of just really, good, solid, dense material.

Jaime:	Well, and it's funny, I told you this, too.  I hear a lot, and there's a lot of resources and stuff like that, and you sent me the book, and I was like oh, I don't know if I'm really gonna have time to look at it because I get sent a lot of books and stuff like that.

Matthew:	Sure.

Jaime:	But I wanted to help out, so I started skimming it.  I was like oh, wow, this is actually really good, not that I should be surprised, of course.  This is what you do for a living.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	But still, it's one of those things where you hear things about e-mail marketing, and they're all generic, same old, same old things, and that's what I was actually really excited about.  You specifically talk about tools to use and what to do when, so let's dive into it.  So let's pretend we have a fake person here, and we're gonna give them advice or something like that, so that way we can start going through from soup to nuts on what they should do, okay?

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	So let's say they have an e-mail list of 600 right now.

Matthew:	Yup.

Jaime:	They're like, "I get my market a bit.  I was able to get 600.  I really wanna level it up, and I wanna have 5,000 by the end of the year."  Well, maybe not the end of the year right now, but in the next few months, I want 5,000.  That's a lot.  That's a big jump, right?

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	What would you do?

Matthew:	Yep, so getting opt-ins is probably the most challenging part of e-mail marketing because once people are on your list, you can kinda figure out what they want and then give it to them, but I think what a lot of people do wrong is they stick an opt-in form on their website.  They leave it there, and they think, "Okay, I'm getting opt-ins.  This is all we're gonna get," but there are just dozens of different ways to get e-mails on your list, and most people just don't take advantage of them.  There's so many ways that you can get e-mails for free by trading with other people, you can do paid advertising and lots of different things.

Jaime:	Slow down, one thing at a time.  So I want you to give me a whole bunch.  This is gonna be so dense, okay, so we're gonna be like okay, Tactic No. 1, right.  Let's say that they're a social media marketing person.  There's a bazillion of them, right.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	It's hard to stand out if you're not a name already, so let's say they're a social media marketing person, and they wanna grow their list.  So Tactic No. 1, what would you do for the first thing?

Matthew:	Okay, so Facebook and Twitter both have what are called lead ads, but it's basically a type of ad you can do on Facebook or Twitter where you click a button, and then they get an opt-in form.  On Facebook it's just a form that's automatically filled out.  On Twitter it's a one-click kinda button, but once they click that button, they've effectively opted into your e-mail list, so Facebook or Twitter will pass you that e-mail address, and you can buy leads pretty effectively depending on kinda what industry you're in.  

So Facebook, it's called lead ads, Twitter it's called something else, but they both kind of effectively function in the same way.  Facebook just came out with theirs.  Twitter's had it for a while, but I've been testing that and have had some pretty good results with it.

Jaime:	So that's different than what you normally hear on the Facebook ad thing.  It's usually the regular Facebook ads manager.  This is something separate than the regular.

Matthew:	It's part of the ads manager, but it's a different goal, and I think it only shows up on phones right now, but people will see your offer.  You target them like you normally would.  They'll see your offer.  They'll click sign up or whatever, and then on their phone it'll show a mobile form that's in Facebook.  They click the one button.  You can get their e-mail, but you can get a lot of bits of information like their name, their gender, their age, that kinda stuff, too, if you want to.  

Jaime:	How much are those things costing right now?

Matthew:	It depends so much on your industry.  I've heard people getting e-mails for as little as $1.00.  For my finance space, it's a lot higher than that, so it just kinda depends on how competitive of niche you're in.  So it's something you have to test, but it's worth testing because it's potentially a huge source of e-mails.

Jaime:	Okay, tell me this because a lot of people are like, "Okay, I don't wanna have to hire someone to do that, but I also don't know how to do that," so if you were to tell me does your book go into enough detail on that, or is there a resource we can give people to start testing that, or let's throw them to the wolves?

Matthew:	Yeah, the Facebook ads have actually come out since the book was written, so that's not in the book right now, but if you just Google "Facebook lead ads," it comes up, and Digital Marketer has a resource on it, and several others have it.  Just Google that phrase, and enough comes up to teach you how to do it.  That's basically how I learned, and it's not really that hard, yes.

Jaime:	Okay, that's good to know like you didn't buy $1,000.00, $2,000.00 program and were like, "Oh, now I know how to do it."

Matthew:	No.

Jaime:	Okay, but you already had some Facebook ads experience from beforehand because do you do all your Facebook ads, or do you have someone to do them?

Matthew:	So I don't do a lot of Facebook ads because historically it's not a good niche for the finance industry.

Jaime:	Yeah.

Matthew:	But it just gets really expensive, and you can buy leads cheaper elsewhere, so I don't really have a ton of experience with Facebook ads, but I was able to click around and figure it out.

Jaime:	That's what we do here, which is good.

Matthew:	I think if I could figure it out in a couple hours, most other people could, too.

Jaime:	Oh, that's awesome.  Okay, good, so that's a great tactic that I wanna start trying, too, because I haven't even done that one yet.  How do we know how much is too much to pay?  I know we'll talk about monetization of a list later, but what if we're going like what tends to happen, especially with clients of mine, they start putting money into Facebook ads or paid advertising, and they're like, "How do I know this is gonna turn?  I feel like I'm just spending thousands of dollars, and yeah, I have leads, but who knows if they're gonna convert or not?"

Matthew:	Yep, yeah, it's a type of thing that requires an upfront investment, so what you do is you say okay, I'm gonna stick $2,000.00 in this.  I might let it run for two or three months.  I'll pause it, and then I'll wait for a few months to see how did those leads kinda perform in a backend, and did I make money off these?  Then if I did, then I'll go back and turn it back on and let it run forever if it's a profitable source.  You really kinda have to know your numbers on it, so it's where did this lead come from, what are they worth to me, and then just aggregating that data at scale among everybody.

Jaime:	How do you track these numbers because I know Facebook has its own thing, and a lot of the places have their own thing.  How do you deal with tracking all those leads?

Matthew:	Sure, so it is just an internal database that I created.

Jaime:	Of course, geeks unite.  Make your own internal database.  Come on.  

Matthew:	I don't think anything that I've done couldn't be done with Excel, so if you just have a table with all your leads and then a table with all your sales, then you can do a lookup to match it up, so it's not as scary as it might sound.

Jaime:	Okay, good, but this is why people avoid it like the plague because they're like, "Numbers, arggh," most people anyway.

Matthew:	Sure, yes.

Jaime:	I think that's why you're so successful in what you do is you're so nitty gritty on the numbers.  It just makes perfect sense because then you gather the data, and then you make the decisions based on the data that you have, which is awesome.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	And most people need to do it.  Make sure you do this, people that are listening.

Matthew:	Yup.

Jaime:	Okay, so that's Tactic No. 1.  Start testing that, and that's taking a couple months, pausing it.  

Matthew:	Okay.

Jaime:	Okay, what's Tactic No. 2?

Matthew:	There's two more, I guess, paid opt-in methods we'll talk about, and then we'll talk about free stuff.

Jaime:	Perfect.

Matthew:	So most people know about Google AdWords and use that to drive traffic to a landing page, but Yahoo actually has what's called their Gemini program.  It's their new AdWords competitor, and right now the clicks on it are really cheap like $0.10, $0.15, $0.20.

Jaime:	What?

Matthew:	Yeah, it's crazy cheap, so they're pretty good at clicks.  There are relevant people there clicking through, and you can target based on country and that kinda stuff so you know you're getting U.S. people, but you basically tell them the keywords you wanna target.  You give them an ad and a link.  Some of the advanced tracking isn't there like with Google AdWords yet, but they're really cheap clicks, and I think they're pretty good quality, so if you can send those people to a landing page or anything else where you get them to opt in, that's been a pretty effective source for me and a couple of other people I've talked to so far.

Jaime:	I love new tactics.  Okay, so where do people learn how to do that, or is it very, very similar to Google AdWords, or is there a resource?

Matthew:	Yeah, I think it's just yahoo.com/gemini or gemini.yahoo.com, but it's kinda really easy because it's very similar to AdWords.  You type in your bid, you enter your keywords, and then you enter in some ads, and you upload a picture to go with your ads, and that's really all there is to it.

Jaime:	Okay.

Matthew: 	Then you just let it run for a while, and yeah, cross your fingers and hope and make sure that you're making money off it after a couple months.

Jaime:	Okay, so same tactic, so everything like we plug it in, especially paid advertising.  You won't really know until later.  I know one of my friends does how much money did I make after 30 days, how much money did I make after 60 and then 90.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	What we'll talk about later, though, is what we do with those leads to try and see how much money we can make, but first things first: traffic.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Okay, so what's Tactic No. 3?

Matthew:	So that'd be co-registration advertising.  A lot of people don't know what that is, but if you went to MarketBeat.com ? that's my website - if you sign up for the e-mail list, immediately after that you'll see an ad for somebody else's e-mail list, so you can make money with those as a publisher and also by e-mail signups with those as an advertiser.  We do about $2,500.00 a month in co-registration advertising right now.

Jaime:	Okay.

Matthew:	So I can buy a lead for $2.00 or $3.00, and it ends up being worth $7.00 or $8.00 for me over the course of a couple years, so that's basically an ATM machine or a slot machine where you always win, I guess, would be a good way to put that.

Jaime:	Okay, so one of the millionaires I had on a while ago, he had a dating site.  He was like, "I make more money having people register for other dating sites right after they've joined mine than I do actually making money on my own dating site."

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	And it's like oh, my gosh, that's insane, and so how do we do this?  Is there a program that we go into?  How do we sign up for this?  Give me the step-by-step if you can.

Matthew:	Sure, so it is more available in some industries than others.  There are like in the Internet marketing space, AfterOffers' Tim Bourquin has a network called AfterOffers.  He is in a few different niches.  There's a lot in the finance base.  There's investing media solutions.  There's investing channel.  Then there's a few others.  You just have to go "co-registration advertising network" and kinda dig through and see what there is.

Jaime:	Okay, and you said that you trust, or spammy, you know what I mean?

Matthew:	Yeah, I'm a big fan of - it is, and it isn't.  If it's a space you're really interested in, go track down Tim Bourquin.  Just e-mail him and say, "I've got this website.  What can I do?"  He'll point you in the right direction.  He is the guy that used to run Podcast Expo back in the day, and now he runs just AfterOffers, and it's a really big co-reg network, and it's friendly to a lot of spaces that people listening to this show might be in.  

Jaime:	Cool.  AfterOffers.com, okay.

Matthew:	Yes, yep.

Jaime:	I'll check that out.  Okay, cool.

Matthew:	So those are, I guess, the three kinda paid methods that I thought of.

Jaime:	Give us like what to expect on some of those because I think paid traffic scares a lot of people.  Especially when they don't have a ton of cash to invest, they're like, "Eh," or maybe they've tried Facebook ads before and were like, "I lost a whole bunch of money.  It really sucked."

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Give us some ideas.

Matthew:	So I think you'd probably expect to pay $1.50 at the very low end and maybe $3.00, $4.00, $5.00 at the high end, and that's gonna just vary depending on your niche because clicks are more expensive in some industries than others.

Jaime:	Yup.

Matthew:	If you're not in a very competitive space, you can get those clicks for pretty cheap, which will turn into cheaper e-mail signups, but if you're in a more competitive space like Jaime or I are in, then it's gonna cost more.

Jaime:	It's a pain in the butt.  I know I have some friends in the relationship space, and they're like, "I get $1.00 leads all the time."  I was like, "Yeah, we did Facebook ads, and they were like $5.00 to a webinar."  

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	We could probably get it down to $2.00 or $3.00 for just a challenge or an opt-in or something like that, but Facebook hates my name.  They hate the term millionaire, so I'm kind of a little out of luck.

Matthew:	Is it time for a rebrand to Eventual Billionaire?

Jaime:	Seriously, they're gonna hate me even more for that, right.  Oh, man.  But those other two options that you have are actually really intriguing, and I should test those out, too. 

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	So okay, let's say we've got paid traffic, but there's a lot of people that are like, "Okay, paid traffic.  I'm not making any money on my stuff right now.  What can I do free-wise if it just takes time?"

Matthew:	Sure, so everybody should have a good set of opt-in forms on your website.  This means you should probably have a pop-up.  Some people hate them, but they work really well, so if you decide that you don't wanna have a pop-up, I guess you're a person that hates money, so stick one on and get over yourself and put it on there.

Jaime:	I'm not gonna do the pop-up.  Do you hate money?  Yes.  No, right, that's your pop-up.  

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	That's what my pop-up should be.  What the heck.

Matthew:	Yes, so there's a couple good plugins that do this.  SumoMe is one.  OptinMonster is another.  I like both.  There's lots of plugins that do that, but -

Jaime:	Both my friends, so Noah Kagan runs SumoMe, and Syed runs OptinMonster, so I haven't interviewed Noah, actually, but I have Syed.  I have both of those, and I like both of them, too, just so everybody knows.

Matthew:	Sure.

Jaime:	Because there are some pop-ups that are just super, super scammy and look like crap.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	And that's not what anybody wants, so those are two great ones also.

Matthew:	Yes, yep.

Jaime:	Okay, so get that, perfect.

Matthew:	Okay, then the key with your pop-up is going to be that you want to have multiple different lead magnets, so a lead magnet is just something you give away to get people to sign up for your e-mail list, and depending on what part of your website that is on, you might wanna show them a different lead magnet.  So you probably wanna have maybe four and five, six lead magnets that get shown based on the category you're in in WordPress, so if you have a make money online website or whatever, and you have a section about Google AdSense, you might want a lead magnet for that.  

If you have one about Facebook ads, you might want a lead magnet for that.  If you have one for Twitter ads, you might want a lead magnet for that.  That way, the lead magnet that shows up on the page is the most relevant to the content on the page because the more relevant that - chances are if somebody's searching for Facebook ads, they're more interested in a lead magnet about Facebook ads than they are about Twitter ads, so if you just try to get the content for your lead magnet as close as possible to the content on the page, then that's usually a big help for opt-in rates.

Jaime:	I agree 1,000 percent, and it's funny.  We've been doing that a lot more now lately.  Sort of go back to the social media person.  That makes sense they would wanna have a couple different lead magnets, and they don't have to be crazy lead magnets, too.  I think that's the thing.  At the very beginning I had a sixty-page e-book, and now my best converting is two pages or three pages.  It's my "Five Tools that Millionaires Use", and everyone's like, "Oh, five tools."  I don't know why.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	But being able to have more than one.  Some people think that that's crazy, though, to create that many because that takes some time, right?  What are your Step 1, Step 2?  Which one should they start with?

Matthew:	Yeah, so I agree that the mistake that a lot of people make is they spend too much time on their lead magnet.  Most people aren't gonna open it anyway, so it doesn't matter that much, so if it's more than a two- or three-page PDF document, you're working too hard.  I'd focus on the type of content that you just write about the most, so if you write about Facebook ads the most, you do that.  If you write about Twitter ads the most, you do that, and you just kinda keep doing it until you see diminishing returns.

Jaime:	Yeah, a lot of my clients are doing checklists or templates, and people are really all gung-ho on that.  One person was doing a free little software thing, and that's actually been working really, really well.  I have a client that has a site called PrepDish.com, so she gives a whole week worth of meals that you can prep ahead of time, so whatever it is that we can give them in a bite-sized chunk that they can get if they do it, of course get some sort of result.  That way they actually love you.  

I know Paplin talks about this a lot, but I highly recommend making that lead magnet actually mean something if they actually look at it.  Most people won't look at it, which is so sad, but that's awesome.  Okay, so once we're like okay, let's say I've got three lead magnets.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	They're all in different sort of niches, which means they're sort of different avatars, right, so people are looking for specific different things.  Then what?  So we're sending the targeted traffic free.  We have a lead magnet.  What do we do?

Matthew:	A couple more tips on your opt-in forms before we get to that.

Jaime:	Yes.

Matthew:	I recommend having multiple opt-in forms on your website, so don't just have the pop-up.  Have another one below the content of your post because once somebody is done reading an article, they're gonna want something else to do, and get them to sign up for your e-mail list.  That'll give them something to do, and then maybe stick another one in your sidebar, and you can just catch a few more people that way.  I always have done three opt-in forms on my websites, and they're not necessarily in your face or anything, but they're just there so you don't miss it.

Jaime:	Yeah, we've been testing action guides at the end of all of our podcasts, so that way you read that, and it's just specific to whatever that content is that they already went over.  I don't have the numbers back from that, though, but we're testing that because everybody kept saying that that was working really well, too, at the bottom of the page.

Matthew:	Yep, and then finally, just make sure that you collect as little information as possible.  I always only collect e-mail address.  I think we talked about this in my first interview, but for every additional field you add, you're gonna lose about 30 percent of your opt-ins, so just keep it as minimal as possible on your opt-in form.

Jaime:	What should our site be getting for conversion rates in general from visitor to how many opt-ins we're getting?

Matthew:	It totally depends on where your traffic comes from, so on one of my websites, it's called US Golf TV, we have a 10 percent opt-in rate.

Jaime:	What?

Matthew:	Yep, but it's all people coming from organic search, and the content is very relevant, so that's probably the high end.  On the low end MarketBeat and the financial stuff probably gets maybe a 1, 1.5 percent opt-in rate, so it's gonna be in that range.  If you're below 1 percent, you probably have some problems.  If you're into 2 or 3, 4 percent, you're probably sitting pretty good.

Jaime:	Wanna tell people how to figure out what that number is, too, because I think people get scared of numbers.

Matthew:	Yeah, so all you have to do is go into your Google Analytics or whatever you use, look at any given month, say how many page views did I get, and then how many opt-ins did I get that month, and then just divide.  So if I had 1,000 people on my website, and I had 100 opt in, 100 divided by 1,000 is a 10 percent opt-in rate.

Jaime:	Okay, and it's visitors, not page views, right, or is it page views?

Matthew:	You can do it either way, whether you wanna compare to your previous month to see if you did better, and that's really all that matters.

Jaime:	Ah, okay.  Ah, that's actually a good point.  Okay, do you have somebody that does that for you, or do you get those numbers every single month and really pay attention to that?

Matthew:	It's in the dashboard that I have set up.  It all happens automatically, so I don't think about it, but it's there.

Jaime:	And this is the dashboard you created, so we can't have -

Matthew:	No, yeah, it's -

Jaime:	Do you have any recommendations for that?  I know people have - there's a bazillion of them.  I've tried a bazillion of them.  I don't really like any of the analysis ones.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	So you don't have any good -

Matthew:	I know there are a bunch out there.  I haven't really tested many of them.

Jaime:	Like mine's great, no.

Matthew:	Yeah, I'm happy with what I got, but I'm a programmer with ten years of experience, so that's...

Jaime:	The rest of us.  Man, so annoying.  Okay, well, I'll keep looking for everyone.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	We'll see, okay.  I appreciate that.  Okay, opt-ins, keep going.  I keep stopping you.  Keep going.

Matthew:	All right, so one last free way of getting people on your list is you can do swaps with people, so if you have an e-mail list, and they have an e-mail list, you can just do a send for each other, and that way people on your list becomes aware of their list, and people on their list becomes aware of your list.  So usually these are people kind of in the same space, maybe not direct competitors, but I do swaps with a number of other financial sites pretty regularly.

Jaime:	Great.

Matthew:	We always get maybe 1,000 opt-ins, something like that, from each one.

Jaime:	What do the e-mails say?  Does it go to a lead magnet like do you have templates for this?  Do you have anything that you can show us?  I would love whatever you've got.

Matthew:	Yeah, I don't think mine are as very good as some of what people who do spots for me, but it's usually a lead magnet that says it'd be you sending an e-mail on my behalf, so I'd be like, "Hey, Eventual Millionaires, my friend Matt created this awesome training guide for marketing or this awesome book.  Go check it out here."  Then there'd be a link, and then it'd be an opt-in form with your e-mail address, and then that would go to the lead magnet, so it's nothing too complicated.

Jaime:	Okay, what do you think about can Infusionsoft, you can actually do a one-click to other things to pass your e-mail through?  Do you know anything about that stuff, or no?

Matthew:	Yeah, you can do that.

Jaime:	It's just a little shady, though, so I'm a little like, you know.

Matthew:	Yep, yep, so Infusionsoft and some other things can pass your e-mail to the other person, but then they'd have to have the API set up to capture that, and most people aren't that complicated or that sophisticated in what they do with e-mail, so it's more than likely you're gonna be entering an e-mail address on each other's pages.

Jaime:	So if you do a list swap because I've only done one or two, and I asked someone two weeks ago to do a list swap, and he's like, "Let's just do an affiliate thing instead.  I wanna make money off of it," which I think is awesome and hilarious.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	But when you're thinking about list swaps in general, do you wanna find the best converting lead magnet?  How good does it have to be?  You don't wanna have a crappy offer and send it and be like, "I got nothing," so do we test this stuff beforehand?  Give me the rundown of if somebody were to go, "Okay, I'm a social media person.  My list size is only 600.  I really wanna do a list swap, but my list size is only 600.  What are my step-by-steps to try and get that?"

Matthew:	Yeah, really it's probably 1) just sending your best content, but 2) if you really wanna know for sure, maybe you could just e-mail your list with what those lead magnets are and do three different lead magnets and send them three days in a row and see which one would get the best response and then maybe go ahead and send that one to the other list.

Jaime:	Okay, and the way that they can do, too, is even if somebody else has a bigger list, they can just send to a segment of it or something like that, right?

Matthew:	Yep, yep, that happens all the time.  We have almost 300,000 people on our list, and most of the people we do swaps with don't have that, so I might send 100,000, or they might send two e-mails for me for me sending one e-mail for them.

Jaime:	Oh, that's interesting, okay.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	I think that's really, really cool.  How do you determine the segment like what should people be looking out for to try and get the best segment?  How do you segment it based on when people?"

Matthew:	I do it pretty evenly, so it's -

Jaime:	It's nice.

Matthew:	I don't know.  Really what you want is the newest people on your list because they're the most engaged.

Jaime:	Yeah, okay, great.  Okay, so I remember chatting with Neil Patel, and he talked about list swaps, and I haven't done it enough just in general, but some of the people I ask are a little timid on it.  I don't know why.  Is it more prevalent in your industry?  People do it all the time, and they're used to it?  I feel like a lot of people, I have to explain what a list swap is.

Matthew:	Yeah, I think it is more prevalent in my industry.  It happens pretty regularly.  We at least do it twice a month or so, so yeah, sometimes you gotta sell people on it and just say, "Hey, I know a great way that we can build both of our lists for free.  Are you interested?"  

Jaime:	Who says no to that stuff?  My gosh.

Matthew:	Yes, yes.

Jaime:	So you'll approach people for this just off the beat?

Matthew:	It's not huge for us, so mostly we do it when somebody we already know approaches us and says, "Hey, we wanna do a list swap" and say, "Okay, we've got this date open.  You wanna do it?"  And they'll say yes.

Jaime:	So you keep it to a certain number because you don't wanna be doing one every single week, and everyone's like, "Okay, stop sending me a bazillion free things."

Matthew:	Well, it's not like that.  We know we could probably send three or four e-mails a week to our list and keep them pretty happy.  Above that the unsubscribe rates go up, so we try to reserve a lot of those for our paid ads where we make money to e-mail to our list.  Beyond that if we have some open space, then we can do a swap.

Jaime:	Mm, okay, that's really interesting.  So how do you pay attention to what you do for swaps because the thing is my target market might be on your list, but it might not be on your list, so how do you determine who's on whose because the only people that I want are my target market.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	I don't want just a bunch of random people on my list.

Matthew:	Yeah, so what you would do is just stick with swap partners that are in a very similar category that you are in, so for my finance list I would never do a swap with you, Jaime, just because it's just not a good fit.

Jaime:	Millionaire, it says millionaire in the title.

Matthew:	I did an e-mail for John Lee Dumas a while back just to say thank you for having me back on his show, but that e-mail didn't perform all that well.  I probably only sent maybe 500 clicks to his website out of 200,000 people.  It just wasn't a good fit.

Jaime:	And he's [inaudible] [00:32:25].  No, I'm kidding.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	That's really interesting, though.  That's awesome that you did that, though.  You didn't do that for me, Matthew.  No, I'm kidding.  He's like, "It didn't work, so therefore I didn't do it."

Matthew:	He did ask for it.

Jaime:	Of course he did.  That's so impressive.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	I don't know what it is.  I feel like guys have an easier time - or maybe not guys.  Maybe it's just a certain personality or something like that.  Some people have no problem asking.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Other people are like, "arggh" because whenever I ask someone, I'm always like, "Ooh, it has to be a really good win-win," and if I don't think it is, I won't ask.

Matthew:	Sure.

Jaime:	But John going, "I don't care if it doesn't work for you" and send out all that e-mail.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	That's crazy.  How did you feel when he asked you that?  Were you like, "Oh, sure," or was it weird?  You can tell everybody.  It's fine.

Matthew:	I had a new book coming out that was perfect for his audience, and it was just a great - he was giving me a lot of value for free.

Jaime:	Aw.

Matthew:	So I almost felt obligated in a way to find a way to say thank you, and that was a good way to do that.

Jaime:	How perfect.  See, this is what I love hearing.  Okay, I think more people need to hear that, too, where you're like, "It's not a big deal.  I'm gonna do this for him.  He's really helping me out."  I think that's awesome.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Aw.  Okay, cool.  So list swap.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Do you have any other free things?

Matthew:	No, that's probably about it for free stuff. 

Jaime:	What do you think about guest posting because I really am trying to figure out, or I'm always trying to keep my finger on the pulse of what's working free-wise because a lot of the people, especially that I work with in Millionaire Hustlers are like, "I don't have a ton of money to put into it."

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	So it's like okay, we need to get in front of their avatar.  What's the best way to get in front of their avatar?  Well, write on other blogs that have the same avatar, but what are you seeing in regards to that, or was that not a big deal for you?

Matthew:	It's never been a big deal for me because I don't like writing guest posts.  It's a lot of work, and you never quite seem to get the amount of traffic that you want, so I don't do a lot of that.  It works in the sense that if you get traffic on your website and then you get website opt-in, so yes, but it's not really a direct way to get e-mail opt-ins.  It's more just getting traffic back to your website.  I guess you could send people to a lead magnet if you wanted to, but it doesn't seem like ? I try to focus on scalable ways to get opt-ins, and that's not very scalable.

Jaime:	Yeah, well, so let me ask you this, then.  I know you talked about having it on your website and stuff like that.  Well, how do you get website traffic then, you know what I mean?

Matthew:	Um-hum.

Jaime:	So it's like okay, great, I have all these wonderful opt-ins, and maybe the conversion rates are amazing, but I get no traffic.  I have 600 people list on my e-mail list.  I get no traffic.  

Matthew:	Yup.

Jaime:	So how do I get the traffic there without paying for it?

Matthew:	Yeah, that's a good question.  That's a question a lot of people ask.  I'm probably not the best traffic guy in the world.  We do get quite a bit of traffic, but it's all stuff specific to finance and investing, and that's not terribly useful to anybody outside that space.

Jaime:	Is it SEO-wise or just because you have relationships?  I know your content is everywhere, though, too.

Matthew:	Yeah, so there are specific search engines for stocks and investing and places that basically have news for individual companies that we get our news into those places and get traffic that way.

Jaime:	Yeah, I remember you telling me about that.  It was like, "What the heck?  You tapped into an amazing source of traffic."  Well, never mind, stop talking about it.  It just makes everybody jealous.

Matthew:	Yep.  

Jaime:	Okay, so we've given them enough tactics that they should be able to get paid and/or free traffic for what they're coming up with.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	So actually before I move on, do you think social media is valid like when you talk to everybody, is anybody really getting a lot of opt-ins on social media that isn't paid?

Matthew:	I think it depends how engaged your audience is.  I've seen people just do a lead magnet where they put it all over social media, so you might have a lead magnet you share on social media.  People click through, they type in their e-mail, and then they opt in, so you can do that, but unless you've got a pretty big list or a pretty engaged list, I don't know how well that's gonna scale.

Jaime:	Yeah, I've tried having my friends tweet or Facebook or whatever a webinar or even a lead magnet and stuff like that, and the numbers just don't seem all that great and interesting.

Matthew:	Yeah, have you tried a Thunderclap?

Jaime:	My friend just did.  She just launched her book and did the whole - so I signed up for it, so I've actually seen the other side of it.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Have you seen a lot of good things with that?

Matthew:	Yeah, we did it for my book, and I did see a pretty nice bump the day that that went out, but we had oh, 120 people share it out.  So if you've got a big launch like that, it's probably worth doing, but I don't know if I'd count on it as the main traffic strategy, but it's a nice way to get your friends to share your leg for you and not have to think about it.

Jaime:	What's the URL for that again?

Matthew:	I think it's Thunderclap.it or something like that.

Jaime:	Yeah, it's a weird one.

Matthew:	But if you Google it, it'll come up.

Jaime:	Yeah, it was really quick and easy on the other side of it.  It's awesome that you can just sort of set it and forget it because otherwise when my book came out, it didn't exist, right, two years ago.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	But being able to just go and they ask you, you can sign up for it.  It goes out on that date anyway, so just to explain to people what it is is you actually sign up for whatever that date is, so all the social media stuff goes in one time.  So that way everybody will see it more than once, so they might actually take action on it instead of one little tweet.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	So it makes it way easier to ask because instead of going and asking everybody the day of going, "Please today, don't be busy," you can lead up to it and then have a whole bunch of people.  It also talks about the reach, right?  What was your reach?  You had 120 people.  That's a lot.

Matthew:	Yeah, I think was a few hundred thousand.

Jaime:	I didn't do it for you, did I?

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Did you ask me to?

Matthew:	I don't know if you did or didn't.  I don't remember if I did or not.

Jaime:	Okay, I would've done it.  You would've gotten my 30,000 Twitter followers and stuff.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	I don't have that many, but I still count.  So yes, we'll tweet about it now and make up for it.

Matthew:	All right, yes.

Jaime:	So Thunderclap I think is super cool, too.  So let's talk about how once they're on the list what we do and then how we monetize them because I know we don't have that much more time.

Matthew:	Yep, so once we're on your list, you wanna get them engaged with your content, so you wanna do an auto-responder series 30 to 60 days, an e-mail every two or three days, so some of those e-mails you're going to want to just make people familiar with your content and learn more about you and what you're about and maybe send them some old content just so they can become more familiar with you.  Then the other part of your e-mail is you can try to sell them.  If you have your own products, you can pitch them on those.  

I assume if you're donating an e-mail list, you have something to sell people, so if you have a course, an e-book, whatever, that's a great way to say, 'Hey, I put together this awesome resource.  If you wanna learn more about it, click here."  There are some samples of those types of e-mails in the book, so if you don't know how to write one of those, just go look in the book.  It's $3.00 for the Kindle copy on Amazon, so go get it.  It's worth the $3.00.  There's lots of other ways you can make money if you wanna monetize your e-mail list.  Say you've already got 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people on your list.  

There's a lot of neat things that you can do that aren't available if you have a smaller list.  People will pay if you've got a good list in a specific industry like finance or sports or even make money online or anything like that.  It's usually an advertising agency that kinda dominates any specific industry, but people will pay $30.00, $40.00, $50.00 for every thousand people on your list.  So if I can get an advertising agency that'll sell my e-mail list at $50.00 CPM, so if somebody wants to e-mail all 200,000 people, that's a $10,000.00 check I get, so it's pretty good money.

Jaime:	Heck, yeah.  That sounds awesome.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	That makes it so much easier to put money in paid traffic that if you know on the other side you can get it out.  The thing is, though, I know a lot of people get worried about e-mailing too much.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	But what you're saying is an auto-responder a couple times a week plus I'm assuming a broadcast, too.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	I don't know.  Do you do broadcasts also?

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	How much is too much e-mail?  Everyone worries about that.

Matthew:	Yeah, that again depends on the industry you're in, so one of my businesses is GoGo Photo Contest.  It's one e-mail a month.  MarketBeat is a five-day, six-day newsletter a week, so you kinda have to see what your audience is okay with.  Two or three e-mails a week is usually pretty good for most starting places.  Finance is a pretty aggressive industry, so it's more than that.  Animal shelters are not an aggressive industry, so we send one e-mail a month, and if we do more than that, people start yelling at us, but it's okay.

Jaime:	We don't wanna hear about the sad animals that we need to help.  Oh, my gosh.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	How come you're on the list?

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Okay, so how do we know what to sell?  So Digital Marketer talks a lot about funnels and that you should do a tripwire, which I hate that word.  It's like you're gonna kill people, right?

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	So when you go through, what do you suggest then?  Do you suggest a very small thing at first and then down the funnel?  How we do that, and how do we test it because you start sending people through, and it starts to get a little sticky on going okay, who bought this and where did it come from and that sorta thing?

Matthew:	Yep, yeah, I know Digital Marketer's big on tripwire sales.  I'm not a big fan of those because who really wants a $6.00 customer?

Jaime:	No kidding, right?

Matthew:	Yeah, so usually in my e-mails it's just what is our core offer.  What is the base product that we have that we try to sell to everybody?  For us it's a premium newsletter that costs $150.00 a year, so basically every other e-mail we're pitching them on that.

Jaime:	Every other e-mail.

Matthew:	Yeah, so Day 1 we'll send them an intro for the product.  Day 4 we'll send them content.  Day 7 we'll pitch them on the product.  Day 10 we'll send them content.  At 13 we'll pitch them on a product again.

Jaime:	The whole e-mail pitch on a product, so not like a P.S.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Oh, interesting.

Matthew:	Yep, so we'll do that.

Jaime:	I know in finance unsubscribe rates are probably different than they are in industry.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	But what are the unsubscribe rates that are normal, I should say?

Matthew:	So for mine the churn rate for free subscribers is about 5 percent a month, so if I have 100,000 people on a list, I'm gonna lose 5,000 a month.

Jaime:	That's crazy, so a lot of people are like, "Ah, that's so many," especially if you're paying $5.00 a lead, you're like okay.

Matthew:	Yep, but -

Jaime:	So you have to constantly be worried about - keep going.  

Matthew:	Yeah, it's all a question of whether the math works out.  If it does, I don't really care that I'm losing 5,000 people a month because I'm getting 25,000 new people on my list every month.

Jaime:	Are you really?  Are you getting about that?  That's crazy.

Matthew:	Yeah, it's 25, 30, something like that.

Jaime:	Wow, because that's impressive.  

Matthew:	Yup.

Jaime:	Okay, so I know you've been working on it a while, but still, it's ridiculously impressive when you find the tactics that work, and then you continue upping the ones that you already do.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	How much do you spend on paid advertising?

Matthew:	It's between $25,000.00 and $35,000.00 a month, so about maybe 60 percent of our leads we get these days are paid, and 40 percent are organic.

Jaime:	Oh, cool.

Matthew:	So it's kind of a mix of both.

Jaime:	Which ones convert better for you because I know cold leads to me sometimes don't convert as well?

Matthew:	Yeah, organic stuff always seems to convert the best.  None of the paid stuff we do does quite as well, but it does well enough for the math still works out.

Jaime:	As long as we're making money in the end, you guys have smaller amounts.  It's still good because you can level paid traffic up, and it's harder to level up organic.

Matthew:	Yep, I kinda figure if I make my money back in the first six months on a lead, anything after that's gravy.  That's worth it for me to keep going, so stuff I did in February and March, April, that stuff's all paid itself back already, and now anything else that comes out of those people is just gravy.

Jaime:	Which is awesome.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Tell us especially on the 600-person list social media person, right, so lower level not making 25,000 new people a month, right.  Let's take it down a notch.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	What numbers do they need to care about?  Give me the top five KPIs or however many you think are actually necessary that they should go out and get because I have a feeling they're not doing that, and they really should, so tell us the important numbers.

Matthew:	Yep, so it's really the numbers you wanna look for are the ones that'll get people from one end of the funnel to the other.  So it's 1) how many people am I sending to and are they opening my e-mails?  So I'm sending to 600 people.  How many of them actually opened the e-mail?  If half of them did, that's great.  If 50 of them did, that's probably not so great.

Jaime:	What are some normal numbers on that like what should we be shooting for percentage-wise?

Matthew:	20, 25 percent you're really engaged.  A smaller list might be 35, 40 percent.  If it's a really big list, and it's an older list, it might be down to 10, 15 percent.  Most of our stuff it's about 20 percent right now.  

Jaime:	So you can clear out the people that aren't responding, which helps your open rates and stuff like that even though your list is a little smaller.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Okay.

Matthew:	Yeah, we just deleted about 20,000 people from our list because they haven't opened an e-mail from us in a year.

Jaime:	We're running a campaign like that right now going oh, last-ditch effort to get them to open some e-mails, right.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Otherwise, we're clearing them off.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	That's a little painful, but that's okay.  I can only imagine 20,000 of them being taken off.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Okay, so that's the open rate, No. 1, right.

Matthew:	Yeah, and then out of the people that opened, how many of them clicked, so what's your click-through rate?  That should be at least probably 10 percent of the people that opened should click.

Jaime:	Ooh, okay.  That's pretty high based on what I've heard from clients and stuff like that.  That's interesting, okay.

Matthew:	Yeah, it can be done.  I think you can do it.

Jaime:	How?  What's the tip on getting our click-rate a little bit better?

Matthew:	Just have one purpose for each e-mail, so if you're gonna send them an e-mail to sell them something, that should be all that's in your e-mail.  Then just have multiple links, clear calls to action, so like "Click here to buy Jaime's awesome product."

Jaime:	Yes, everybody listening?  Do that.  No.

Matthew:	Basically you want them to have their choices are archive or delete the e-mail or click on your link, so it's just you don't have a lot to distract people.  All of our sales links are basically plain text.  It's "Hi, Jaime.  Hey, check out my awesome product.  Here, click this link."  Then maybe throw in some info about the features and benefits of the product, and then you have maybe another link, but if that's all they can do, they're either gonna click on a link or close the e-mail, so you make the choice really easy for them.

Jaime:	Oh, interesting.  Okay, so open rate, click-through rate.  What else?

Matthew:	Then just revenue.  How much money did I make off of any given e-mail, so it's I sent people to my landing page.  Maybe you pass in like a Google Analytics, UTM source, or you can kinda track those people.  Then what did I actually make from that e-mail?

Jaime:	So No. 1 I found way back, and I haven't tested this recently at all.  I usually go to a webinar or something like that because whenever I had done through straight through ? I have high-priced products, and a lot of the time I have a sales guy, and I sell, too, so usually we do something like that for the high-end stuff.  I don't have that many things that are lower-priced, but usually we do webinars to that, so we don't really know what the e-mail is.  Should I be testing that with like I have a $37.00 tripwire, you know what I mean, but a lower-priced product for millionaire productivity hacks.  Should I be testing that in an e-mail, or does that not really matter?

Matthew:	So your question is to send people to a webinar or to a tripwire?

Jaime:	I'm wondering how I can get the revenue off the e-mail because if I got to a separate webinar sign-up page, that's not revenue off the e-mail specifically, so I can't get the numbers, do you know what I mean?

Matthew:	Well, if you promote the webinar in your e-mail, then you can figure out how much revenue was made from that webinar.  I assume you could do that, and then really you do a number aggregate for the entire campaign that promoted that webinar.

Jaime:	Exactly, so usually we send three or four e-mails before the webinar, so it's kinda hard to know which e-mail really did revenue-wise, you know what I mean?

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	That's what's annoying like numbers start to get really annoying because it's usually not cut and dry, right?

Matthew:	Yeah, but you can usually assume that the one that got the most clicks is probably the one that drove the most revenue.

Jaime:	That is a valid point hopefully, right?

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Tell me this, though.  Revenue off e-mail.  How long do you wait?  So let's say we did send straight to a sales page.  This 600-person list social media guru, whatever, was like, "Okay, I sent an e-mail for a $97.00 product.  I made $100.00 off of it, and I have 600 people on my e-mail.  What do I do with that number?  Now I know I made $100.00 off of the revenue off that e-mail, but does that mean anything?  What do I do with that number?"

Matthew:	Yeah, so really kinda the end-game number you're looking at is how much money did I make for every thousand people that got sent the e-mail, so that'd be your effective CPM.  So I try to make $50.00 CPM off my e-mails, so if I sent it to 200,000 people, I wanna make at least $10,000.00 off of the e-mail, so 200 times $50.00, and then you can kinda benchmark it against what you're trying to make.  For most people it's probably a $20.00, $25.00 CPM that you're going for, so if you have 1,000 people on your list, you're just trying to make $25.00 from it, but if you have 10,000 people, you might wanna make $250.00.

Jaime:	Okay, so every time you're trying to figure out what that is.  So is $25.00 CPM sort of an average, and you've just been doing this a long time, so that's why yours is $50.00?

Matthew:	I think that's more on the space that you're in.  Finance, there's just a lot of money in it, so it's a higher ? pick a good niche.

Jaime:	Lesson learned.  Pick a good niche.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Go into finance.  I've also heard it's EPL, earnings per lead.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Have you heard that at all, or no?

Matthew:	I think it's just different ways to slice kinda the same thing.  

Jaime:	Same.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	So we were doing earnings per lead, and some of my numbers got sticky because we were doing retargeting, and there was warm traffic and cold traffic.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	Anyway, it's such a thing, you know what I mean?

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	So I had to hire someone to go over my analytics because I didn't wanna be the one to do that because it's a pain in the butt.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	But it was $60.00 EPL, and I knew I was spending $5.00 for a lead, so of course that makes sense all day long, but what if it's not like that?  What if you're starting to get your offers aren't that good or something, you know what I mean, and you're not?  So you're bleeding cash on how much it costs per lead and don't know how to recoup that in the end because a lot of new people have that as a huge issue.  Their funnels aren't great, and so therefore they're not recouping in the past, and then they stop doing the...

Matthew:	Yeah, yup, really it's something that's gonna scale up with you as you kinda grow.  When I first got started, I did zero for paid advertising.  I don't think I did it for the first year.  I probably wouldn't do it until you have 5,000 or 10,000 people on your list, so focus on the organic swaps first until you've got a list that's making some money, and then you know that your auto-responder series is doing well enough where a new person on your list would generate a certain dollar amount, and then you know you can just buy leads for less than a dollar amount.  So if you don't know what you're doing, I would not throw ten grand into co-reg or AdWords or anything like that right away.

Jaime:	Yeah.

Matthew:	It's probably not a good plan.

Jaime:	Good, good, I'm glad you said that because some people are like, "Oh, I'll just buy the traffic now and then figure out what to do with all the people later."

Matthew:	No.

Jaime:	That's not necessarily - especially if it's not really targeted.

Matthew:	No.

Jaime:	Okay, so small things at a time, and then once you sort of hit the tipping point and know what sort of numbers are, you can do a lot.

Matthew:	Yeah.

Jaime:	You can level it up a lot more.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	Okay, cool.

Matthew:	Yeah, paid traffic is really just kind of something that magnifies your earnings from a funnel that already works well.  If you don't have a working funnel, then you're throwing money down a toilet.

Jaime:	How did you make your funnel work, though, because that's the thing.  You either hire someone that knows how to optimize your funnel, or you start doing it yourself, and you try and tweak and test, and it's kind of a pain if you don't know what you're doing.

Matthew:	Yeah, I don't think it's that complicated.  It's 1) building an e-mail list, and 2) e-mailing your audience and say, "Hey, what do you wanna learn from me?" then building a product or service that matches that need.  It can really be that simple.  I think the problem is people just don't really understand their list well enough and what their list wants.  So early on I did a lot of e-mail just saying, "Hey, what do you like about this?  What do you not like about this?  What do you wish this newsletter did for you or that it doesn't do?"  That's kinda how my first paid product got built was just based on the feature requests that I got for my newsletter.

Jaime:	And it was the core product that you sell right now, the $150.00 newsletter for the year.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	That's interesting.  Okay, so you just created that based on what everybody said that they wanted.

Matthew:	Yep, that's all it was.

Jaime:	I love it.  What do you think about affiliate stuff so actually doing affiliates back and forth to try and grow your list and make money and improve your funnel?

Matthew:	Yep, so I guess I'm on a publisher side of you own your own list.  There's definitely some money to be made if you can have a relevant offer to your audience.  I think Paplin has proved that pretty darn well.  So if you're teaching people how to make websites, obviously yeah, a Bluehost affiliate thing is gonna work very well for you.  For me I can do an affiliate e-mail for TD Ameritrade or another brokerage and do pretty well with those.  So 1) is it a product I'm okay endorsing, and I think it's good, and I would send my mother there?  If it is, then 2) it's is it relevant, and can I make money off of it?  

Really the only way to do that is to do a test, and if you find something that works, you obviously just keep doing it, and you just stick it in your auto-responder series and make a go of it.  Then on the advertiser side, we have three or four different websites that run our opt-in form for us.  They saw our websites, and they said, "Hey, we'll generate leads for you.  Can we come up with a deal?"  So I was like, "Okay, I'll pay you $2.00 an e-mail," and now I've got three or four other financial websites running my opt-in form for me.

Jaime:	I love that.  Okay, and then you're cutting them checks based on that.

Matthew:	Yeah, just on how many opt-ins they send in a month.

Jaime:	That's awesome, so you know it's always $2.00 hardcore, and you know they convert, I'm assuming.

Matthew:	Yeah, and we don't pay for duplicates, so if somebody's already on our list, they don't get paid for it, and if it's a bad e-mail, we don't get paid for it, so when we have an arrangement like that, we know that every e-mail we buy is gonna be a good e-mail.

Jaime:	Oh, that's awesome.  All right, I can't believe we've been going for 55 minutes already.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Oh, my gosh.  Okay, so I have to start wrapping up.

Matthew:	All right.

Jaime:	I don't want to.

Matthew:	Okay.

Jaime:	Is there any last ?-

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Okay, keep going.

Matthew:	Let's talk about how to monetize your thank-you page because that is an incredibly valuable piece of ad real estate, and people don't realize that.

Jaime:	Yes, tell us more.

Matthew:	So 1) you can do a co-registration advertising unit on your thank-you page.  Just go to MarketBeat.com; fill out the opt-in form.  You can see an example of that, and if somebody checks an offer on your thank-you page, you could get about $2.00 for every lead that somebody checks an offer.  

Jaime:	That's so awesome because if you're sending paid traffic to that, and you're spending $2.00 a lead, and then you get your $2.00 a lead back, then it's free leads.

Matthew:	Yeah, obviously not everybody's gonna check a lead.

Jaime:	Okay.

Matthew:	But right now, so I think I get about $0.90 for every lead that comes through, so out of the $2.00 I paid, I get about $0.90 of that back right away, which is kinda nice.

Jaime:	Wow, yeah.

Matthew:	Yep, and then if co-reg isn't available to you, or you just can't figure it out, you can just have a blank page and just run a Google AdSense unit on it, so if you go to USGolfTV.com, and you fill out the opt-in form there, basically it's a white page that's centered vertically and horizontally, and it says, "Hey, thank you for signing up for our e-mail list," and there's an ad, and it says, "For more information about US Golf TV, go to our website."  

Then that AdSense unit does maybe $0.50 for every lead that comes through because people are either gonna click on that ad, or they're gonna navigate somewhere else, so when you don't give people a whole lot of other choices, they're pretty likely to click on an ad.  It's totally legit because you're not encouraging them to click on an ad.  It's just they don't really have any other choice to do that.

Jaime:	It's like an opt-in page for ads.  Do they get mad at that, though, like the people that are doing it?  Are they like, "This is weird?"

Matthew:	No.

Jaime:	That's crazy.

Matthew:	It works out pretty well.  Yeah, if you go -

Jaime:	That's a good idea.

Matthew:	Yeah, because typically if somebody has taken an action like throwing out your opt-in form, they are almost certainly ready to take another action right after that.

Jaime:	Yeah, especially on the same content type of thing.

Matthew:	Yeah, so whether it's co-reg, whether it's an ad or you're promoting your paid product on your thank-you page, don't let that space go to waste.  If you're just saying, "Hey, thanks for signing up for my list.  Go check your e-mail for the confirmation message," you're leaving a lot of money on the table, so find a way to leverage that thank-you page.

Jaime:	Wouldn't it be better to do your own product, though, instead of going to someone else's, or does it not matter?

Matthew:	It all depends on how much money you make.

Jaime:	Yeah.

Matthew:	For me co-reg is the best choice.  I used to promote my product, and co-reg just is a much better channel because people aren't gonna buy my product right away.  They've got to get a few newsletters to say, "Oh, this is valuable to me" before they wanna buy.

Jaime:	That makes sense, but it would be way easier to just sign up for something else that they think is interesting.

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	I love it.  Okay, was there anything else?

Matthew:	Yeah, that is the last one.

Jaime:	Okay, I love this.  We went crazy.  I have so many notes.  I have extra pages and stuff like that, too.  This was awesome.  I'm glad I could grill you again.  I really, really appreciate it, and everybody should check out the book, but let me ask you the final question.  What's one action listeners can take this week to help them move forward towards their goal of a million?

Matthew:	So if you're serious about e-mail marketing, this is gonna be self-promotional, but go check out the book.

Jaime:	I was gonna say it for you.  Man, I'm a bad host.  I should've said it first.

Matthew:	Yeah, so let me share one closing thought.  On a typical advertising-based website, a website that has Google AdSense or something like that, you're gonna make maybe $10.00, $20.00 from the ads on your website.  For my opt-in form, if you consider all of the backend revenue that it generates, instead of having a $10.00 CPM, it's $150.00 CPM.

So that ad unit pays, if you think of your opt-in form as an ad unit, it pay 15 times what a regular ad would be, so it's a huge opportunity.  Don't let the list building be something that goes to waste on you.  If you're having any kind of info product business or anything where you just sell to people, it's a great way to get customers, and I can't recommend it enough to anybody.

Jaime:	E-mail list, e-mail list, e-mail list, e-mail list.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	And go check out the book, so tell us where we can find the book.

Matthew:	Yep, so it's on Amazon.  It's available on paperback, Kindle, and there's an audiobook version of it now, so it's MyEmailMarketingBook.com, and that's pretty much it.

Jaime:	And it's ridiculously cheap, too, right?

Matthew:	Yeah, it's $2.99 for the Kindle copy and then $9.00, $10.00 for the paperback.

Jaime:	It's like one lead.  Come on, this is $3.00.  That's so insane.  You can get way more money out of that than what we have.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	In the book it talks about the tools and stuff that that we didn't really have a chance to get into because a lot of people are like, "MailChimp, AWeber," bla bla bla.  "Where do I go?"  You cover all that stuff in the book then, too.

Matthew:	Yep, the short answer to that question is it's MailChimp if you have no money and Chimp if you have some money.

Jaime:	I love it.  I appreciate that, too.  

Matthew:	Yep.

Jaime:	I love how much you're willing to give away for cheap because it's only $3.00 or for free on something like this.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Thank you so much for coming on the show again, and we're gonna hang out in December when I speak at Ryan Moran's event, and hopefully we can take selfies or something like that and post it on Facebook so everybody can see we're actually friends.

Matthew:	Yes.

Jaime:	Awesome.

Matthew:	All right.  Thanks, Jaime.

Jaime:	Thanks so much, Matthew.  Have a great day.

Matthew:	Yep, bye bye.

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services

Tags: Email Conversion, Email List, email marketing, email marketing tip, Facebook, Facebook Ads, lead generation, Lead Magnet, Matthew Paulson, millionaire interview, Sales Conversion, Twitter

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Sales

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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