Passive Income with a Mailing List
So you want to learn how to make $100 a day in passive income on the old Internet, using a simple mailing list that you could set up in like 45 minutes.
Well, you’re in the right place, because that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
We’re going to talk about how to build a mailing list, and how to make passive income with a mailing list, even you don’t have your own product, or even if you don’t have your own website yet.
I say “yet”, because you probably need your own website. But don’t fear! We have tools to teach you how to build a website that can capture leads into a mailing list in as little as 15 minutes.
We’re specifically talking about how to build a business that makes $100 a day in passive income, with a simple mailing list that you can start building 45 minutes after you’re done reading this blog post.
This is completely possible to do. I still make money today from people who were on my mailing list back in 2009. They just filled out a simple form, and I’m still making money from them today. This is something you can do as well.
Part One: History of Autoresponders, Mailing Lists, Marketing Sequences, and Making Money When People Ask for Free Info
Ads have been largely the same for the past 100 years.
If you were to look at a 100-year-old ad in a magazine, you’d be familiar with a lot of the different elements it would have. Ads would ask you to mail in so that subscribers could get something for free. So as a consumer, you would enter in some information. They would have something like an opt in page.
It can also be called a squeeze page. We know that the idea of a squeeze page is to get people from an ad or a site to put their name and email in a box, and then they go on their list. So the idea of this ad was to squeeze all the people from the magazine that are interested in this topic into a list.
So as a consumer, you might enter in your information. Maybe the ad wants you to mail in a coupon from the ad. Let’s talk about what would happen after that.
There would be a big mail house, where your mail and all the other mail goes from people who subscribed to the ad.
People would look at the addresses on the mail, and they would build a list out of all those addresses. They would have a list of people who were interested in that sort of thing.
Now, the advertisers would do what’s called a sequence. On the first day, they might send out a letter. So they would write letters, fold them up, stick them in envelopes, and mail them out to everyone who mailed in. If there were 100,000 people who mailed in, they would do this 100,000 times. That’s for day one.
On day two, they might send an informational report that was requested (perhaps promised when you entered your information in the first place), along with sales information.
Then the next letter they send, they might say that they noticed you didn’t buy anything, and they might suggest that you buy something now. Maybe the next time they send you testimonials.
And what would happen is they would take these people through a sequence, which they gathered from their mailing list.
That’s where mailing lists come from. This is where marketing started.
People often forget the basics of marketing. They forget that it’s all about getting people to take action. Marketing is about getting people to request information, getting people to a mailing list, where you can then send them an offer.
Ads themselves haven’t changed much, but the way that people see ads has certainly changed a lot. You’ve seen what happened when an advertiser would get people to subscribe, but think about what would happen before that.
In the old days, if you were an advertiser, first you had to design and create the ad. Then you had to pay a fortune to get the ad into circulation, perhaps in a magazine. It would take a month to run, and you wouldn’t even know if you’d get anything out of it. You’d pay whether people read the ad or not. And if someone didn’t like the ad, they could just rip it right out of the magazine.
You might do this 100 times with 100 different magazines. You wouldn’t know if anyone was interested. You just knew that people would walk by, and maybe they would take a look.
That’s not the way that ads work today. With internet marketing, we can target our audience in an insane way.
You can almost be so specific as to just marketing to a single person. You can literally market to whoever you want.
Making Money with a Mailing List Today
So you want to make $100 a day? That’s roughly $4 every hour. And that comes out to about $36,000 a year, which isn’t bad for something you could make from just a little mailing list.
Here’s what it’s going to look like.
Let’s say you have an audience. You have to figure out who your audience is. Perhaps they’re people who are interested in growing tomatoes.
You might see people on Google, or Facebook, or YouTube, all these people who are and learning about growing tomatoes. They watch videos on YouTube, and they search on Google for something like “Grow tomatoes” or “Why do my tomato plants keep dying”, or something like that.
Let’s say you were to offer these people something for free. Perhaps a free tomato book.
If you have an ad that 100 of these people see, how many of them do you think will want your free tomato book? Probably all of them.
How many will actually put their name and email on for it? Probably 30 to 60 percent of those people.
So let’s say you make an opt in page. You give people the option to request a free tomato book, if people send in their name and email. It might take you literally 20 minutes to make. Maybe 45 minutes or an hour If you’re new and slow.
Remember this: all ads work at the right price.
You might want to consider paying for traffic to get people to this site. You probably wouldn’t have to pay much, maybe 15 cents a visitor for people who are specifically looking up how to grow tomatoes. This will still be way less than the guy who spent $100,000 putting ads in old magazines.
And if you say in your ad that people can get a free tomato book, and they don’t want a tomato book, they’re probably not going to click. So you’re only going to pay for people who actually respond.
Maybe you could get 30 percent of your traffic to opt in on your site. If you get 100 visitors, that means it costs you $15. And out of 100 visitors, you get 30 to opt in. That means it’s costing you 50 cents for each person to opt in. Can you make 50 cents off a targeted tomato person who wants to grow more tomatoes? Yeah, I think you can.
You’re going to do this with an autoresponder. This takes all of your names and emails and puts them in a big database. Then you can go through this database and do exactly what other sequences do that we talked about before. It lets you send messages out to people on your list.
These can cost money, but they’re not usually a lot. To get started, it probably costs around $19 a month.
Now you would make your sequence. On day one, you might give your customers their free tomato report. That will get people back to your site. Day two you give them something else, and day three you give them something else. On day four, you might point out a product to them about tomatoes.
Remember that you set this up so that everything is automated.
You just set it one time, and new people will come in and get the new messages. You can do broadcast. You can do e-mails. You can do whatever you want.
It’s important that you understand this concept. It’s not just about a site, and an autoresponder, and this and that. It’s about understanding the core principle of what you’re doing.
You are building a database of people that are interested in a certain topic. Now that you have that database of people, you can do whatever you want with them (within reason, obviously, staying ethical and following the rules).
All ads work at the right price, if you can do it right.
So again, the question is this: If I get 30 percent of my traffic onto my list, and I’m spending $15 to do that, that means I’m paying about 50 cents per person. Can I make more than 50 cents per person? That’s the question.
Part Two: Mapping Out the Content / Offer Machine
So now you have a list, and a big database of people from your list. Your list is all of these tomato people.
What you want to do is map something out with what’s called a brain map. It’s a mixture of content and offers. You want to go through and brainstorm. Ask yourself: “If I were interested in tomatoes, what would I want to see?”
There are a bunch of possibilities.
People might like to see tips about tomatoes, or gardening tips, or tools, or information about seeds, or a growth chart, or tips about canning tomatoes, or techniques for cooking tomatoes.
So now you have all this content. Your next step is to pair the content with offers.
For example, think of your gardening tips. You might not know a lot of gardening tips yourself, but you could go buy some gardening books, perhaps on Clickbank. You go find some tips out of a book there, and you could send the tips to your list.
You want to be casual and sincere about it. You want to be friendly and really talk to your list about what you’re sending out. You might send an email like this:
“Here’s a tip I found for you. You should plant your tomato in the sun. I planted my tomato in the sun, and I found out that sometimes the shade affected the growth of my tomato. I used to have my tomato under a tree. Now it’s not under a tree, and it’s as big as can be. This works really well. Here’s a picture of my tomato. I got this tip from this book over here, if you want to check it out.”
And then you can give your affiliate link.
Pretty basic, right? “I got this tip from this book. If you like this tip, there’ll be more tips over there in the book.”
In another email, you can say, “Here are some tools. I have the best five gardening tools. You need to have this, this, this, this, and this. (Affiliate link, affiliate link, affiliate link, affiliate link, affiliate link.)
Now, your followers are going to say thank you, because you gave them all of this great information. They’re going to actually click and buy stuff.
You could take this further.
Let’s say you send them information about seeds. Maybe there’s an affiliate program for seeds. Or maybe you want to get the seeds yourself and ship them out. You could do that, or dropship, or send them books, or info products, or whatever you like. Info products are usually going to be the most profitable and the lowest risk.
If you tell your list about canning tomatoes, you could do canning supplies from somewhere like Amazon Affiliate. For things like fertilizer or garden beds, you could do Home Depot coupons or gift cards. There are all kinds of offers you could send out.
You could make a real living at this. Later down the line, you could come up with your own tomato book. You could test out a bunch of tomatoes and build your own business, and you could probably make a good living in the tomato market. A lot of people are obsessed with these tomatoes.
And remember this.
If I get someone on my list, and I give them good tips and really take care of them, is there anyone out there that doesn’t think I can make 50 cents over the course of a year with that person?
How many of you think that if you only paid 50 cents to get someone on your list, you could turn a profit?
Then why aren’t you doing it?
What’s stopping you from having a business like this?
Part Three: The Traffic Recycling Loop
So here’s what the feedback loop looks like.
You have the people in your niche come to your site, and they want to check out what you have for growing tomatoes. On your site, you have a picture of a big tomato, and you tell people to put their name and email in a box.
So they do that, and they get on your list. The people who get on your list are the ones that we’re interested in. They come to your thank you page.
Now, this is very important. Because your thank you page is where you want to make your 50 cents back. So what you do is this: you put your best offer on your thank you page. Maybe your best offer is some as-seen-on-TV tomato offer. That will be the best converter.
The next best thing might be a toolbar, or something free. Something that pays decent and has a low barrier of entry. Maybe it pays you between $2 and $5.
Now that you have an offer on your thank you page, you’re going to focus on creating posts.
These are going to have all of the content that you created in Part Two. So you might make posts on garden tips, or posts about tools. You could make posts about seeds, or growth charts, or cooking tomatoes. You can make different posts about all of these things.
On these posts, you’ll also have offers. I find it best to make the offer fit what the post is about. So if it’s about tools, offer some tools. If it’s about information, put a book. If it’s about seeds, give seeds. Try to make it fit.
Now, you’re going to mail these posts out. They’ll go out automatically in your autoresponder, and then boom, you’re going to make money as they come back.
And here’s the cool part. You’re going to build content while making money with your list. The search engines will start to pick this content up. People will start to buy stuff, and it’s just going to start to take off, if you stick with it. All of these clicks are going to start to multiply.
Part Four: The Numbers Game
At this point, you know what you’re supposed to be doing. But you may still be asking how you’re going to do it.
This is all done with WordPress, with a plugin that’s in your member’s area for MarcusMentor.me. The plugin is called Funnel Voodoo. It literally turns your WordPress into a funnel.
“Marcus, I don’t know how to set all this up. Should I use a blog? Should I use a click funnel? Should I use Clickbank? Should I use Builderall? Should I use HTML? Should I just go out and do the rain dance, and hope money falls?”
What I like to do is use WordPress.
If you guys are in one of my courses, or the MarcusMentor.me, you get all the plugins that make this work. So if you don’t have any tools, and you don’t have anyone to help you, go to MarcusMentor.me and sign up. It costs around $2 a day.
You get a free Affiliate Marketing Dude T-shirt, and you get an Affiliate Marketing Dude book that walks you through everything.
And we’re going to give you all my custom WordPress plugins. These aren’t white labeled or from other people. These are custom plugins that I had a developer make according to my specifications, so that you can do all of this.
You have to look at all of this objectively.
So many people are focused on getting a quick result right now, that they don’t realize the result can happen fast. They They just have to do the right stuff right. They spent so much time dreaming about a result, and trying to get the result. They get obsessed with the chase, and they don’t get obsessed with the actual work.
But if you take the approach we’ve covered here, you’re going to start to make more money. Your content is going to grow, and it will show up in the search engines. Everything will start to compound.
People put their heads in the clouds when it comes to internet marketing. And that’s why they don’t make money—because they’re focused on the stuff that doesn’t work.
People often come to me and tell me that they try other methods, and then they ask me to look at their sites.
I do, and I usually tell them that their sites aren’t good. And then they quit. They never run traffic. They never even test anything. And they never really build it. And this is why they don’t get success.
People don’t understand the value of a market. They don’t understand that a tomato guy on your list is worth 50 cents. And if you make one sale, you break even.
Everything is a numbers game.
If you know you can make $4 on every tomato person per year, how many tomato people do you want to get on your list? As many as you can. Once you get to thinking this way, you just have to go make it happen. You can do this.
To learn more, go to www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.