In general when you’re setting up a mailing list, you’re trying to get as many people as possible to opt in to your page. Now you do this by giving away to them a valuable product or service which they may otherwise have to pay for. This is known as a bribe.
But the danger of doing this is you’re not making any money directly. Instead, you may make this money long term from your lead. But if you’re trying to cover the costs of advertising up front — for instance, by using Pay-Per-Click — then you need to be trying to make money make as soon as possible. The good news is that there are ways to make money from an optin page, and you just have to slightly circumvent the usual one step process you might otherwise consider using.
Three such options are first of all to include an offer on your download page that they can purchase. Secondly, to see how well you can monetise the optin download directly. And finally, you may wish to link to affiliate offers in the confirmation emails.
When you’re looking to include an offer on your download page, this can prove to be highly lucrative as an opt in measure. People get to your download page and generally it can be quite sparse. It may just be a quick box to let them right-click and save a PDF file. This leaves you a whole amount of screen real estate that’s completely unused.
Don’t fall into this trap. Instead, look to provide another opportunity for them to spend money that goes to you on the page. This might be going to a Clickback product or another appropriate product which provides an affiliate commission with it. A certain number of your prospects will follow that, and some of them may buy if you choose an appropriate offer for them. By doing so, you can get an immediate income from your prospect, even before they’ve read your own report.
Secondly, you should be looking to monetize the optin download as far as possible by incorporating secondary income elements into it. This is one reason why you should ideally be looking to create your own product in the form of an ebook. Ebooks can provide clickable links which will take people directly to another offer.
If you look for other services or complementing offers which will support the person in your ebook, you can include this information in there and make affiliate commissions, or take them directly to your own products, which you’ll make a complete hundred percent commission off. By monetising the optin download as many places as possible, you’re maximizing your potential to make money from this.
Finally, you should be thinking about the emails that are sent to your prospects as part of the optin process. Generally there are two of these. Prospects normally receive one email asking them to confirm their email address. This means that it isn’t somebody who has purely entered someone else’s email address in an effort to get a product for free. They’ll also receive an email when they have opted in to confirm that this process is completed successfully. This will often also provide a link back to their download in case they missed it.
By monetising these emails and offering affiliate offers and offers to your own products inside, you can be making some money even before they’ve gone to your download page, especially on the verification of email address message, which many people are misusing in this manner. So make sure you monetise the emails so that when people try and confirm their email address they see the offers, and they are then tempted to click on them, too.
This gives you three additional techniques that you should be incorporating into your standard optin process for prospects. Make sure on your download page there’s an offer that they can buy so they don’t solely get your free guide. Whatever optin download you give them, incorporate additional cash building opportunities into it. In the form of an ebook you can add these directly. Otherwise, you may just wish to give an additional piece of text informing them of these optin offers. And finally, use the confirmation email to add in further links to offers that will be of interest to your prospect.
By following an enhanced email optin process like this, you should manage to sell some additional products and services. You can also collect affiliate commissions. This can make an otherwise unprofitable optin campaign profitable, even before you’ve started sending regular emails out to your list.