Tutorial

How To Write Effective Emails That Make Money

Email marketing has been a part of business since the early days of the internet. Many businesses fail to implement its effectiveness in making sales.

Creating an effective and impactful copy for your emails is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan.

If you’re trying to decide if you should spend time creating all those emails, consider this:

The number of people using email is set to grow to 319.6 billion by the end of 2021, according to The Eradicate Group.
HubSpot reports that people with active email accounts had grown to 5.6 billion by the end of 2019.
9 out of 10 marketing professions say email is important or very important to their own business, according to a study by the Direct Marketing Association.
Forbes reports that emails produce 50% more sales as compared to other marketing practices.

As these figures clearly show, email is essential and to be expected in your marketing plan. But with the abundance of businesses sending emails, your content needs to be of the best quality and impactful to get conversions.

Of course, the first step is to create a compelling and irresistible free offer to get people on your list. Then you need to create emails that will be effective in bringing in the money from your offers.

There are different types of emails for different situations. There are welcome emails, promotional emails, new customer emails, client or lead engagement, cold list re-engagement, emotional trigger emails, special offer emails, new product or launch emails and many other types.

How do you know where to begin or what type of email to send?

In this post, we’ll show you where to begin with the basics of creating high converting emails.

Let’s get started.

Setting The Email Goal

Now that you know the importance of marketing with email, you might be at a loss as to where to begin. Like almost everything in business, it begins with a goal of what you want to achieve.

First, we’re going to assume you’ve created your lead generation materials and have started gaining a targeted list of subscribers. If not that’s the first step. Here’s a quick list of the steps you need to take.

Create a freebie for people to receive when they sign up. Have a way for subscribers to sign up. This can be an exit popup on your website, a static landing page or any number of ways to for subscribers to sign up. You also need some sort of email service such as Active Campaign or Aweber.

Now let’s begin creating our goal for the emails.

Before you send out just any old email, first determine what the end result is you want the email to achieve. Is it to get someone to purchase something or to open the email and connect with you? Is the goal of your email to create better click-through rates?

Typical goals for an email might include:

Getting freebie seekers to become first-time buyers your service or products.
Increase conversions by a certain amount in a specific amount of time.
Getting cross-sells and upsells from current purchases.
Increase click-through rates.
Building more engagement from current clients or customers.
Build more relationships for your community.
Getting feedback about your business to make improvements.

For each email, understand who’s going to receive your emails and what they want to get out of it from you.

Ask yourself these questions to define your email goals:

Where are you right now? Check your open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, conversion rates or your spam rates.
What action do you want the reader to take? This helps you tailor your content to get them to take the action you want. If it’s to read an article, for example, then let them know why the article will help them.
Who will be receiving the email? Know which segment of your list will be receiving the email, so that your copy, images and everything in the email speaks directly to that potential group.
How will you get them to say “yes”? Decide what you are going to promise the readers so that your email helps them be the best version of themselves with your service, product, or information.

Think about why your reader initially signed up. Ask yourself these questions:

How can you over deliver on that?
What do they want from you? From your business?
What questions do they have about your niche?
When do they need to hear from you?
What emotions can you evoke in them?
What are the next steps for them as your subscriber?

Now create a plan around the answers. Include the topics you’ll regularly write emails about, schedule email blasts in your calendar, and what areas people need support, guidance or encouragement.

When you know what you want to achieve with the email you can determine what type of email you want to send out and when it needs to go out. Spend the time setting your marketing and conversion goals before you begin the writing process.

When And Why Use Email

It’s a good idea to know when and why you are sending out an email. Most people who sign up for your list do so for a specific reason. And those who have been on your list for a while fall into different stages of interaction with you.

Some subscribers are loyal and open all your emails. Others have gone cold and need persuasion to begin engaging with your emails again. Some have joined you for a specific product or service you offer and only want to know about those.

You can tell what type of emails your subscriber wants by who they are and what they do when they come to your site. This can also help you understand when to send specific emails.

Maybe they:

Browse around, add some things to their cart, then leave: The Abandoned Cart email is triggered.
Enthusiastically subscribed to your list: Perfect time for the Welcome email.
Are a long-time loyal customer: Reward them with an anniversary email. These can be Milestone emails or Special offer emails.
Post Purchase emails to new buyers who have purchased something form you. These Confirmation emails are the first ones your new subscriber gets from you. It tells them about your business and your values, helping you begin building a relationship with them. It’s also a great time to give them options to see your other products.
Emails to boost engagement with your business and content. These can be Promotional emails that try to make an initial sale or promotes your new webinar.
Re-engaging cold subscribers. This email tries to get subscribers who haven’t been active to take some sort of action. These can be Review Request emails or Persuasion emails.
Nurturing your existing subscribers. These emails are the relationship builders. They provide value to the subscriber. Use Nurture emails to keep in contact and build communication with your loyal subscribers. These can be Newsletters or Curated content emails.
They are interested in a specific subject or product you offer. Here you would be segmenting your subscribers with targeted emails. Segmenting allows you to send emails that specifically target a group of subscribers. These can be New Product Announcement emails, Nurturing or Promotional emails.

Sending emails at the right time and for the right reason keeps your list engaged and converting.

For example, if you’re promoting a sale or affiliate product that ends soon, send out an initial email a day or two before the sale starts, then one every day or two and finally send one in the morning and one in the evening the day the sale ends.

This keeps you in front of them and helps remind them to take action.

If you want to know more about building and nurturing your email list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊

Develop A Content Publishing Calendar For Your Blog

Creating a content calendar that includes matching promos, helps ensure that you meet business goals, such as list building. When you plan your written content, match it to an existing or new opt-in freebie.

This will help grow your list and create multiple points of entry. You can also match written content to other types of promos, according to your goals.

Write it all on your content calendar so you can remember what purpose each item serves.

By the way, if you are serious and want to take your blogging to the next level, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint. This is a premium level training that takes you through each and every step of setting up your own highly profitable blog and profiting from it. You can check it out here.

OK, let’s look at how you can flesh out your content marketing calendar.

Set Your Goals

A few goals you might set are to expand brand awareness, promote thought leadership, increase word of mouth, get more leads, or make sales.

Determine what tactics work best for your audience. For example, sharing an informative article you published on “Huffington Post” can help spread thought leadership.

A funny meme can help you get more likes, shares, retweets, and spread brand awareness.

Product & Freebie Benefits

The best way to ensure that your content works with your products and freebies is to get familiar with them.

Whether it’s your product, an affiliate product, or an opt-in, you must know how it will benefit your people.

In other words, you must know “what’s in it for them” and what problem it solves.

Plan Publishing Frequency

Always publish to your website first and foremost. It will serve as the hub of your business and support content will lead visitors back to the site.

Begin by planning to add three to five new pieces of website content per week. Then, decide where you want to publish related content that drives traffic back to your “new” website content.

If you add “supporting content” on social sites, you can safely plan on adding something several times per day. Make sure each addition is “fresh”; otherwise, you will lose followers, instead of gaining opt-in subscribers.

Create, Curate, Or Contract

You’ll want to create some of the content yourself, but content can also be easily be curated or contracted out.

There are a lot of places where you can buy private label rights (PLR) content. You can also hire a writer through a company like All Custom Content.

Another option is to collect related bits of information from multiple places to create something new.

Write it Down

Once you have created your plan, write it down.

You can use a spreadsheet or even a Google Calendar. The WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin can also help you pre-schedule and keep track of your website’s content.

Begin planning your content at least three months before you intend to use it. This includes your written content (website posts, articles, reports, tweets, etc.) and any items that support or promote it, such as opt-in freebies, memes, info graphics, videos, etc.

All of this is content, so it makes sense to plan a week or more at the same time. Planning this way helps to ensure that you have every piece of content needed to meet your goals. In this case, the main goal focuses on growing your mailing list.

Post Content Regularly

Posting content on a regular basis is important. When you post unique content in a variety of places, it gives your audience more opportunities to see what you’re publishing and promoting.

Doing it once or inconsistently won’t get you the exposure you want. Forgetting to update your blog is not going to encourage more traffic to your opt-ins and build your list.

Therefore, stick to your plan and ensure that you add new, relevant content on a regular basis.

Website/Blog

Content comes in many forms. Add a variety to keep readers’ interest and meet their needs. Inform and educate your audience with relevant audio, video, memes, infographics, charts, interviews, how-tos, statistics, and more.

You can curate, create, or contract the content you need that matches with the information that is important to your audience.

What’s important is that you post something regularly, at least three times a week, to drive traffic to the content and the related opt-in offer.

Social Media

Each social media platform has a different “personality” so it’s important to post regularly. It’s also important to look at your analytics so you can identify when your audience is most active and reading.

On most platforms, posting three times a day is a good rule of thumb.

However, check the rules and “best practices” at each platform to get recommendations specific to that site.

Email

Don’t neglect to email your subscribers regularly about new content on the website or provide them with exclusive info related to that content.

Ask subscribers to “share” the website content with their friends, associates, and even customers/clients, when appropriate.

The bottom line is that if you want to make profits regularly, you need to write content regularly, and regularly ask for it to be shared.

Enlist the help of your subscribers and reward them for that assistance with a special offer just for them.

Guest Posting

To get more traffic and opt-in subscribers from your guest posts, link to an opt-in that is relevant to the audience in your author profile or byline.

This gives you a huge incentive to guest post exceptional content frequently.

Guest posting provides multiple benefits to all parties. So, consider accepting guest blog posts from trusted, experts and associates in your niche. It’s an effective way to get more content on your site.

This is a win-win-win opportunity when you post on a regular basis.

Providing content for a variety of locations helps to increase targeted traffic and targeted traffic increases opt-in rates. The more you publish, the more people read your quality content and see your opt-in offer…unless your headlines aren’t persuading viewers to click to read more.

And remember, if you want to know the best way to get started with blogging you can check out Rapid Blogging Blueprint, a premium training on creating and monetising a blog the right way.

Or you can simply click on the featured resource below for a free Blogging Fundamentals report; download, read it and take action 😊

3 Types Of Affiliate Marketing Landing Pages

As an affiliate, your job is to connect buyers and sellers. You’re a middleman. That means you have the power to decide where you send the visitor when they click on your links.

Of course, you will already have picked your niche and found a hungry market, right? If not, you can find out more down below 😊

When you’re out on the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, you will be linking the readers to a specific landing page.

The landing page is the initial place your traffic goes to – and there are different strategies involved in courting them to a sale.

Product Sales Page

The first place you can send someone is directly to the product. You can grab an affiliate link to your favorite product, go directly onto Instagram or Facebook, and write a short review with your thoughts.

You can do it in a shorter sense on Twitter. With Pinterest, you could write a blurb that gets them to click through.

But this strategy isn’t something you can build a long-term business on. It offers some benefits, but nothing that allows you to comprehensive conversions over time. For that, you’ll want to send them to your blog or squeeze page.

Blog Post Page

A blog landing page allows you to really go into depth on a subject with a product review that exhaustively answers all questions or doubts that the person may have.

It puts them in your environment, where they’re also exposed to other posts and ads you have on your site.

Make sure you have an opt-in form on this page so you can grow your email list, and embedded links to various offers in your post. If these links are to affiliate products, you can ‘pre-sell’ the product in the article and then they will be much more likely to buy the product when they get to the sales page.

Squeeze Page

A squeeze page doesn’t give you as much opportunity to convert the visitor into a sale right at that specific moment in time, but it does give you the ability to court the customer for weeks and months (if not years) afterward.

As stated in the previous section, an even better combination is to use an opt in form on your blog, so that you have the ability to give your comprehensive review and collect the contact information of your visitors.

The blog post page and squeeze page are examples of bridge pages in affiliate marketing and they are critical to your ongoing success because the biggest drawback to affiliate marketing is that you don’t get to build a list of prospects and/or buyers; these will be exclusive to the product vendor whose product(s) you are sending traffic to.

So, ideally you would never send traffic direct to the affiliate product sales page, but to some kind of bridge page where you can capture their details before you send them to the sales page.

That way you are building your list and maybe getting some nice affiliate commissions into the bargain 😊

Of course, the key to your online success is always testing and tracking. You want to see which of these landing pages delivers better results for you and then ramp up those efforts.

Then, once you find the one(s) that have the best returns for you traffic-wise, you want to take those pages and split test them to see if you can boost conversions by tweaking small elements to the page.

That might include colors, headlines, order buttons, text versus graphic links, and more. There are tools you can get to actually track it for you and rotate the pages for you automatically.

So, you know where to send traffic to, but do you know the best niches to target with affiliate marketing? Let’s take a look…

What Are The Top Affiliate Marketing Niches?

The top niches aren’t specific to affiliates versus product creators.

They’re all going to be the same. But some allow affiliates to make more money because they combine tangible and digital opportunities.

Bear in mind that all these can be further split up into sub-niches and the further you drill down into a niche, the more targeted your audience will be, albeit a smaller audience.

Dating

Relationships are one of the top niches online – people wanting to meet compatible matches and people wanting to save their existing relationships.

But there aren’t as many tangible items you can promote in this niche. It’s primarily info product related.

But this isn’t really a problem as there are some very good products or courses out there that you can promote if you are thinking about going into the dating niche

Money

Money is a similar niche that primarily has digital info product courses available to promote.

But keep in mind that these two top niches have courses online that pay out a nice amount per sale – and plenty of people searching for them online.

You can target people wanting to save money, people wanting to get out of debt (not the best if they are suffering with this) or those wanting to make money (could be online or offline).

Diet

Diet is a sub-niche of the health and fitness niche and is one that’s evergreen in nature, suitable for both genders and many age groups – plus it offers a bevy of opportunities to sell both digital and tangible items.

There are many online digital courses to help with weight loss, and many of them cater to a specific audience, like baby boomers or women.

On the tangible side, you could promote many things in the diet niche on sites like Amazon. You could do a review of an info product course and then pair it with tangible promotions for things like treadmills, elliptical machines, DVD exercise sets, Kettlebells, supplements and more.

Personal Development

Self-help is a popular niche. People are looking for more mindset advice – stress relief, for example.

You can pair an info product course promotion with the promotion of items like soothing candles, supplements, stress-busting gadgets, and even massage technology.

There is also the option to find coaching programs in this niche which will inevitably sell for a much higher price and therefore higher commissions for you.

Insomnia

Insomnia is a popular niche. Sleep disorders are very common and there are both digital and tangible products available for you to promote on your site.

Along with a digital course, think of tangibles like better bedding, soothing CDs, sleep masks, white noise machines, sleep supplements, and more.

A review site would be a great idea for many of these items; write a review, send traffic to the article and link out to the product(s).

Coffee

Coffee and other gourmet foods are popular.

When you have someone who is an enthusiast for coffee, they’ll spend top dollar on a variety of things – from courses teaching them about the topic to special tangible items like coffee grinders, brewers, beans, and more.

The coffee niche has exploded in recent years so this is one to definitely look into if you are interested in this kind of niche.

Parenting

Parenting is a popular niche, too. This is a niche where moms and dads like to get advice on raising their kids, but they also have many tangible items to buy like nursery furniture, toys, educational items, clothes and more.

It is also an evergreen niche because people will always be having kids!

Once again, it may be good to drill down a bit deeper such as pregnant moms, single moms, bringing up teenagers etc.

Pets

Pets are great affiliate niches – and you can specialize in one that you enjoy – dogs, cats, and tropical fish being the most popular.

You can buy both info products on things like how to care for tropical fish – and tangible items like fancy aquariums, fish food and tank décor.

And let’s face it, most pet owners are fanatical about them; some probably treat them better than their kids 😄

Homeware

Household items are a big niche – and this goes for both indoor and outdoor.

Homeowners are always buying like blenders, vacuums, lawnmowers, sheds, gardening supplies and more.

They also buy info products to go with them, like how to grow tomatoes – and you could sell everything from the seeds to the pots they grow in!

If you want to know more about affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 😊

Continuity: The Secret To Reliable Profits

When you first get started online, you might be worried. Frankly, you probably should be worried.

Yes, you made sales this month. But will you make sales NEXT month? And how will you pay the bills if you don’t make sales?

It can be scary going from a job where you know exactly how much you’ll get paid and when you’ll get paid to working your own business online.

If you are the entrepreneurial type, then you are probably not afraid of a little risk for yourself but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be diligent when thinking about a new business venture.

Of course, online businesses don’t have the large overheads that physical businesses do, and you can get started for virtually free, but for most entrepreneurs the slowly, slowly approach can be a lot to swallow and they want to dive in head first. Sound familiar??

Once you have your business up and running, what then?

In your business you might have a brilliant month and then two months of starving followed by a mediocre month followed by (hopefully) another great month.

The trouble is that if your business is your sole source of income, you want your profits to be a lot more reliable than that!

Thus, the question becomes, “How do you get stability in your business – and your income -as quickly as possible?”

Or… how do you KNOW for a FACT that next month you can make the mortgage payments and eat, too?

Simple – continuity programs. Call it what you want – memberships, recurring payments, monthlies, etc.

It all boils down to getting people signed up into a continuity program so you can continue to get paid month after month.

Now you have a choice here: You can either promote other people’s continuity programs or create and promote your own.

If you’re acting as an affiliate, then you don’t have to worry about sales funnels, membership content, customer service and all of that. You just need to focus on making the sales.

Drive the traffic, offer your own bonuses, and do what you’ve got to do to get people signed up.

The problem, of course, is that in exchange for less responsibility, you also have less control and more competition.

The membership site owner has control over content. If s/he takes a “churn and burn” mentality and doesn’t care about keeping members happy, then people won’t stay long. You’ll have to continually make new sales, which isn’t what you’re looking for.

You want stability. That’s why you only want to promote truly great memberships and continuity programs that deliver a ton of value.

As to competition, you are competing with every other affiliate who is promoting the same program.

If you have your own list, then this isn’t that big of a problem. After all, people on your list know and love you, right? And so, they’ll follow your recommendation.

Unless they’re on someone else’s list (they are) who has already promoted the program. In which case, you’re not going to make many sales.

Promoting affiliate memberships is a give and take. Less responsibility, no control and lots of competition.

And this is why you might want to start your own membership. Look around and see what people in your niche desperately want and need, and then fill that want with your site.

Outsource the content creation if you can, so you can focus on the important part – filling it with people.

Use either a WordPress plugin such as Wishlist Member or an independent solution such as Product Dyno to create your membership site.

Once you’ve got your membership site up and running, it’s time to get busy promoting it. Use every technique you can think of and track everything.

Find out what your best sources of traffic are, and then put all of your effort into just those methods.

For example, maybe you buy traffic from Facebook, Adwords and solo ads. You also get free traffic from guest posting, forums and social media.

9 out of 10 new members are coming from Facebook, so what are you going to do?

Drop all of your other methods and focus exclusively on the Facebook advertising.

Get your conversions up and your costs down and now you have a viable way of getting a continuous influx of new members into your site.

One thing you need to be aware of is that selling a membership can be a big ask with cold traffic and your conversion rate probably won’t be stellar.

So, what you could do is offer them a cheap product upfront to get them into your funnel, and then offer them your continuity program.

You could even offer a 7-day free trial to tempt them in. Also, keep the price of membership low. If your content is good, you shouldn’t need to keep looking for members because they won’t want to leave.

Plus, most folks won’t even notice a payment for $10-20 leaving their account every month.

Another thing to think about is whether you want to be creating content month after month, year after year. You could outsource the content creation if financially viable, or you could create a fixed membership site with 12 months of content that the customer pays to access.

Want even more members? Show affiliates how well your offer is converting, and you can get them to promote your membership site, too.

There are plenty of affiliates out there who want that continuous, month to month income that a good membership site provides. All you have to do is show them that your funnel is converting, and members are sticking.

Naturally, there are a lot more details than this to starting a membership site. But hopefully this gets you thinking in that direction.

Because if you want true financial freedom as quickly as possible and with as little stress as possible, then almost nothing can beat having your own successful membership site.

One more thing – the first site is the hardest. Once you have a membership site that’s clearing at least a couple of thousand dollars each month like clockwork, continue to build on that one while building your second membership site, and so forth.

Create a membership empire to secure your finances, and then you can experiment with anything you like.

Security first, right?

By the way, if you want to know more about outsourcing check out this article here and the featured resource below where you get a free report all about successful outsourcing; download, read it and take action 😊

How To Make Money With Your Free Blog Posts And Articles

As a marketer, are you one of those who has a blog or not?

Some marketers don’t use a blog to build their brand or visibility but rather prefer to use more direct response type marketing techniques and have a website to showcase their products with great sales pages and they constantly send paid traffic to those pages.

However, most marketers probably try to incorporate some type of blog into their business to try to gain some visibility using SEO and get some free traffic from the search engines to build the KLT (Know, Like Trust) factor.

Visitors will consume their content, come to think of them as someone they can trust, and will be much more likely to buy from them in future. This takes longer than the direct response marketer but is infinitely cheaper and is a good model for someone just starting out who may have limited capital to put into their business.

It’s the second type of marketer to whom this article is addressed.

I’m constantly amazed at how marketers seem to think free content and paid content are two entirely different things. The fact is your most successful blog posts and newsletter articles can make you more money than many of the products you’ve promoted or created in the past an it is super quick to do this and costs you nothing, so what are you waiting for?

The key is to pay attention to how your content is received.

Repurposing content is hardly a new strategy, but it mainly focuses on creating a video from an article, and then extracting the audio from the video, plus perhaps creating an infographic covering the main points so you now have 4 pieces of content instead of just one.

This works great for building brand awareness across multiple platforms and can indirectly lead to sales.

But now let’s take that strategy and put it on steroids and make it a much more direct way to make sales; after all, you are in business to make money!

So, this content repurposing strategy is designed to specifically make you money from your previous content!

Look back at your posts from the past year and see which ones gained the most attention. Which ones did people comment on and forward to others the most?

And don’t just look at blog posts but look at your posts on social media too; these are great because you get instant feedback if it resonates with your audience.

For example, a little 200-word FB post that people are engaging with and liking the content is trying to tell you that you’ve struck gold.

If it’s a longer article, maybe a blog post and it gets great feedback, even better.

You might choose to expand that article into a full-blown product and sell it or you could use it as a lead magnet that leads to a high-ticket offer (either yours or an affiliate offer).

And talking of lead magnets…

If you are producing free reports as lead magnets (and you should be using these to grow your email list) these are another potential untapped goldmine.

Take your most successful free reports and turn them into paid coaching programs. If you have 4 or 5 reports covering roughly the same topic, it is really simple to bundle them up and sell as a full-blown product.

Add some video and/or audio and some weekly/monthly webinars and you have your brand-new coaching program which has a much higher perceived value than a solely text-based product so you can now charge a premium price, all from existing free content!!

The other good thing about using these lead magnets is that you probably have links to offers peppered throughout these reports, so not only can you now profit from previously free material, but you can still profit from readers clicking on the links embedded into the reports.

Answer a customer’s question and then send that answer out to your list and see what happens. Do you get a lot of response? Bam! There’s another product waiting to be made.

This is such a simple way to do direct market research and you will know that the demand is there from your existing audience.

The point is to monitor the reception you receive on every piece of content you create, whether they’re posts, recordings, videos, launches, emails, reports or whatever.

If you’re not sure how something is being received, ask your readers what they thought of it.

Take the most popular topics and expand them or repurpose them into something else. You don’t have to continually come up with new ideas. Instead, figure out which ideas are working and then get most out of those.

And you can also purposely float your idea for a new product by creating a mini version of it as a post and then seeing how people respond.

Do you have 10 ideas for products? Create 10 posts, see which one is the most popular and start working on that product right away.

When creating the posts, if they are long, let’s say 1000 words or more, then offer the reader to download them as a convenient pdf. This is a type of content upgrade and they will need to give you their email address to get the report.

This way, you can easily see in your autoresponder which reports people are signing up for and start creating your product around those topics.

This stuff sounds simple and it is, but it also works so please don’t dismiss this strategy.

And because it is mainly using pre-existing content, you can be up and running in a matter of hours.

If you are just starting out and are building out your first blog, bear this in mind for the future.

And if you want to know the best way to get started with blogging you can check out Rapid Blogging Blueprint, a premium training on creating and monetising a blog the right way.