First things first – What is a list?
If you’ve ever browsed the web and searched anything “make money” related, you’ve probably found the phrase Money is in the list somewhere. This is what I’m going to explain shortly, and list sabotage is something that happens when you go and do affiliate marketing.
You can think of a list in the terms of a rolodex where you store your contacts data, and mostly we’re talking about name and email. The purpose of this is that you can contact them anytime, using an autoresponder, and send them marketing emails. Hopefully, your contacts are willing to read what you send them, and hopefully, some of them will be willing to click the links inside. So when they buy something via your links, you will earn a commission fro the vendor.
Why you should have a list
A list of contacts is, generally speaking, literally the most important asset you can build for your business. It’s true for every business, by the way, and not just online business. Every business you have met in your life has some list of prospects and customers, they’re just handled differently, depending on the business. Your car mechanics knows who’s been there, your hair dresser has a notebook, even Walmart, Spar and all others know when you’ve been there, provided you show your loyalty card when you shop there.
In online business, we usually don’t keep notebooks with customers and prospects in a drawer. It’s online, right? So, these lists are saved in some kind of an autoresponder, where they can be further segmented and taken care of.
Having a list of loyal subscribers can actually mean the difference between success and struggle. Just think of it this way.
Imagine entering the room full of strangers, like 100 of them, and trying to tell everyone you have a great product available for them. Would they listen? Maybe, one or two, but more likely not. Why? Because you’re strangers. Simple as that. You can draw the parallel with online advertising – ads on Facebook, for instance. The people advertising are complete strangers to you, so how many ads you really see, read and click on?
Now, imagine the same room, but this time people inside know you. By name, service, whatever. More importantly, they share some common interest between themselves and you. So when you start talking, would they listen more or less than in previous example? Much more, you’d say, and you’d be right. Because you’re not really a stranger to them, and people tend to believe people they know better. You and me are no exempt, by the way.
This is the main point of having a list. The people you have there have interacted with you before, and they know you through your messages to them. So if you know what their interest is, your messages about it will reach far more people.
Money is in the list
Here, there’s that phrase again. Let me just shortly make it clear.
Generally, it is stated that every subscriber you ave on your lists is worth a minimum of $1 per month. So if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, you can easily calculate about $10,000 monthly income from that list.
That is, if you treat your lost correctly, which is another subject.
How to build an email list?
This is, like everything else in online business, a process that takes time, money and knowledge, in mixed quantites. The more time you can spare, the less money you’ll need. The more money you can spend, the easier it will be for you to hire someone – or advertise – and build a list. The more knowledge you have, the easier you will run email campaigns about a certain subject. But if you have no time, little money and not so much knowledge, you just might have a problem.
It’s an entirely other subject, and I will not go into that here. For the needs of this post, we’ll just assume you have a list already in place, let’s say of a 1,000 people. If you’re interested and are struggling with list building, I can asure you everyone had problems at a certain phase. Everyone had to learn how to do it right. And here comes the best advice anyone can ever give regarding that (or any other area of building an online business, actually):
Do not invent hot water. Look at someone already successful at what you want that’s willing to teach you, and hop on the training, repeating what they’re doing. They know it, they’re already successful at that, so… Just repeat after them. You may have to pay a bit more to enter, but you will save so much time it’s absolutely worth every penny you invest.
I can mention here two programs that are – based on my experience – the best for a beginner.
- Master Affiliate Profits: A complete affiliate eco-system that teaches everything about list building, nurturing and selling via email marketing. Over 50 hour of hands-on training, tools and tips. The main line here is to learn how to build a list and earn commissions while doing it. Great stuff – take a look at the free presentation.
- Online Success Coaching: A program that’s targeting people that want to succeed online as vendors of their own products. I’ve taled about this before, and I’ll say it again: there’s nothing better to succeed online then having your own product. In OSC, it’s all about how to create products that will sell, using AI, including over 30 AI tools that help you with that.
What is List Sabotage?
List sabotage is something happening to anyone doing affiliate marketing, and for a simple reason. I’ll try to keep it short.
A little bit of background
The vendors that sell their products via affiliates usually – not always, but mostly – use one or more of affiliate networks, such as JVZoo, Warrior+ or Clickbank, among others. So after you’ve approached them and got your affiliate links, they take prospects to the sales pages via network’s links. For instance, should you want to buy TokMate via my link, my affiliate link is
https://jvz6.com/c/631443/411066
You can clearly see that it’s on JVZoo’s server and includes some parameters – 631443 is my Affiliate ID on JVZoo, and 411066 is TokMate’s product ID. This is how the network knows who brought the traffic to the salespage. Should someone buy through this link, both the network and the vendor know who the affiliate was, and this affiliate (me, in this case) will earn a certain commission. Which is why we all do this, right?
Where List Sabotage actually happens
So, when someone buys via my link above (you can too, TokMate is a great software, by the way), their contact data will be saved by both the network and the vendor. And, you guessed it, will be added to their buyers list.
The logical thing to happen is they both start to mail this buyer with their own offers.
You see what happened? You have worked hard to get this contact on your list, paying for it, nurturing it, and now, this same contact is suddenly on three lists instead of only yours.
You will probbably see this contact unsubscribe from your list eventually, because only a few marketers can compete against affiliate networks like JVZoo with their list marketing.
The result is that you loose contacts from your list.
And this is what is called List Sabotage, because your list is getting smaller fast, the more you’re successful at marketing, the faster it’s gone. This means you have to constantly add subscribers onto your lists, just in order to replace those gone and to keep your business running. Which means costs and work, of course.
There is a great article on List Sabotage HERE, should you want to learn a bit more about it and what to do to avoid it.
How to avoid List Sabotage?
Well, truth be told, you hardly can. Not that it’s impossible, but not using the standard affiliate marketing work, meaning using one (or more) of the affiliate networks around today. To be fair, it also brings pros, because affiliate networks gather vendors from all over the world and make it much easier for you to contact them and start marketing their products.
But, there are systems – or eco-systems, as they like to call themselves – that promise to avoid that competely. This means that they never mail the contacts you gather via selling their products, so the contacts actually remain only yours.
One of the most promising I’ve come along is called Master Affiliate Profits, and it’s really worth checking. It’s not that cheap to join their Premium membership (I believe it costs $797 now, in Phase 2), but the benefits are much bigger than that. For instance, as a Premium Member, you get 75% commissions on everything that sells in the system via your link. Plus 25% of everything your buyers sell. Plus, you learn how to build a responsive list fast, earning as you go, so it actually costs you little or even brings you in the green.
For me, these are very important parts of an education and online business. Also, the list sabotage process itself is so nasty that completely avoiding it can mean thousands in savings in not so very long time. These savings can be directed towards advertising, for instance, which brings more sales and more commissions. And so on.
If you’re interested, click the image below and watch the free basic training. Things will be much clearer then.
What can we conclude about list sabotage
List sabotage is a process of disolving your email lists as you use them for marketing. They will simply get smaller and smaller, because affiliate networks and vendors who get the buyer’s data will take over and eventually take your contact away. The only way to really avoid list sabotage at its core is to join a network that doesn’t use your contact’s data for theselves.
One of such systems, Master Affiliate Profits, is all about that. Check the free training and you will understand more about List Building, List Sabotage and everything regarding building a successful online business from scratch.
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