How I went from Zero to 50,000 subscribers in 2 years
Posted by Guido Nussbaum | Posted in News | Posted on 25-01-2010
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Hey guys,
in my last post I promised some insights into my business and what I meant by saying that I’ll concentrate on the 20% of actions that have resulted in 80% of my profits.
Now, what does that have to do with listbuilding?
Well, first of all 80% of my profits came and still come from my lists… or from other people’s lists (stop and think!)
There, I just gave you one of the biggest secrets to online success… and I’m happy to repeat it for those who didn’t get it: You must get other marketers to promote your offers through their lists… so that you get their subscribers onto your list.
Now, don’t get me wrong… you don’t go out there and pump the subscribers of other marketers over to your list… this happens vise versa… you must also promote their products to your list.
That’s called a JV (Joint Venture).
Now, to setup these kind of JV’s you need 2 things:
1.) Your own product or service
2.) Some subscribers on your list to start out
The big problem here is that in most cases you’ll first have to promote other marketers products to your list. You know, give before you shall receive… that’s how it works unless you have a big name.
So your first step towards online success must be to create your own product or service. The second step is to setup a listbuilding system with your product or service. Then you promote your system on your own to get some subscribers on your list.
Once you have a couple hundred people on your list you can start to do JV’s with other marketers. Don’t try to approach the big marketers with your small list… start with marketers who have lists that are about the same size of yours and then work your way up to the big list and to the big marketers.
But wait… that’s only half of the truth!
You can actually create products or services that other marketers promote to their lists without you promoting back for them.
Still, you need to give them something back in return and that can be handled automatically through your product or service.
Let me give you an example: Many people promote my website Traffic Witch to their lists and I don’t have to promote their offer to my lists… that’s because they get free traffic if they signup new members for Traffic Witch… this all happens automatically without me doing anything.
On February 2nd you can see something like this happening again when I launch my next website (more about that later this week).
Let’s call these sites “Viral Membershipsites”.
Another related technique is: Running your own Giveaway Event.
When running your own Giveaway Event other marketers promote it to their lists without you promoting back for them… that’s because they get signups to their list automatically by promoting your Giveaway Event.
I guess most of you know how a Giveaway Event works, for those who don’t, simply signup for such an event as a Contributor and you’ll find out how it works.
OK, so let me resume the above said in one sentence:
“My two most successful strategies for building my list are: Running my own Giveaway events and running my own Viral Membershipsites.”
These 2 techniques are the 20% of action that brought in 80% of my 50,000 subscribers.
Now, I would really like to go more into detail about these techniques but I’d have to write a complete book to tell you everything.
You’ll get more information about both techniques in future blog posts here.
Maybe you have experienced similar results in your listbuilding efforts… leave us a comment and tell us what you think about listbuilding and how you do it.
To Your Success,
Guido Nussbaum
Contains over 200 directories that you can submit your sites to.
Hi, Mr. Guido N., your posts are the cherry on the pie… And i “grow up” with every piece of this marketing pie! MMMM, it’s very delicious… and useful for my business!
I fish you success with your new project and looking forward to see what it is…
Ivan Golemdzhiyski
Thanks Guido,
Exactly what I asked about on your last post
And I see Traffic Witch is currently in the top 5 TE’s on a ranking site I’m a member of (so I best get it on my list of sites to join)
Naturally running a TE involves a lot of effort and I don’t have the tech know how to run my own – but I can vouch that giveaway events can make a massive difference to anyones list building efforts (even just as a contributor without getting into the tech side of running them)
Though I am aware that you did try to make running one of our own far easier with a script you created a year or more ago.
I assume you might share more info about that in a later post?
I suppose getting a list 50,000 strong like you have would take a lot of effort, and as you’ve said – you served your time on that one.
I’ve taken a much slower route as I don’t fancy all those hours of work…lol
Hence I’m only at 4,000 subscribers.
That said – I’m earning a full time income for just a few hours each day. So I’d hate to imagine what you’re income must be from a list that big.
Needless to say – if people are prepared to work as hard as you did – they could have the same….
But I’d bet there are plenty out there like me who are quite happy to learn from your mistakes and cut the learning curve…… that way we can enjoy the full time income without the hours you used to put in
I look forward to future posts
Regards
Randy
http://www.RandolfSmith.com
Always to the Point and I like your Blog theme.
Owning THE LIST has been the “secret” of Business success for Eons.
When I Started in 1963 80% of my time was spent building the list of eager prospects who were clamoring for the solutions to their problems, I possessed.
The Internet has just made that List building a bit easier and less expensive.
I encourage my clients to Make List Bilding the First Massive Action when starting their NEW Business.
In fact many of my established business clients have appreciated the results form INCREASING their list of eager prospects
Thanks Guido, for this insight.
I have participated in a couple of Give Away events but my problem is that most of these are geared towards the IM market… thus, the list I gathered is not targeted to my niche and that makes it less responsive. My niche has nothing to do with making money online or marketing…
Since there are no Give Away events in my niche, I have thought about running my own, but I’m clueless as to where to start (and my budget is limited)… any suggestions?
Will appreciate your comments!
I`m new in List building system. And it is very hard for me to get subscribers to my list
I`m promouting my website in many TE sites but with little syccess only.
Hi Tammy,
starting a giveaway event in a niche other than internet marketing is a good idea as you’ll be one of the first people who does this (no competition).
You’ll need software to run a giveaway event, something like Giveaway Manager 2 or a similar software. Then you’ll need to get
contributors onboard, that means you need some contacts in your niche, established marketers, bloggers and website owners.
I’ll write more about how to run giveaway events in future blog posts.
Hi Guido,
thanks for this simple yet straight to the point post. Eventhough this is my first visit to your blog, in my opinion your blog is worthwhile to visit and especially for newcomers. Keep up the good work. My experience in list building. Well, I do believe that taking part in JV Giveaway as a contributor is the most easy for you to generate some hot prospects in your list because this is where I start getting my subscribers without any complications. Recently, I joined as a contributor in Graphics Giveaway 3 and I don’t have much time to create my own product. So, I just installed a minisite maker script on my domain where my subscribers can use it to build their own minisite without any charge. If you wish to see how it looks like, you just go here to http://nithiyaah.com/OMM. I
n the beginning,I didn’t earn a penny in IM because I don’t have a list. Now, this is totally different. I’m start earning money in my IM business now
Attn to Tammy:
Hey Tammy, why don’t you mention what is your niche in your above comment? And why you didn’t include a link to your website in your comment? I’m telling you this because this may generate some people to your list and this may ease your burden in running your own JV Giveaway event because you might get a potential JV partner for your upcoming JV event. Another thing you need to consider is you must have your own website with your own name because this is the front page where you can capture more leads for your niche. Hope this little info could have help you.
Attn to Briksons:
A little tip that could help you in building your list is creating your own product. It could be a video tutorial, short report, ebook,software,your own membership or whatsoever. The easiest product for you to create is templates. It could be a powerpoint template, pdf template, photoshop template and etc. Then, promote it in any giveaway. Make sure you take part in a giveaway that run by those trusted Internet Marketers like Guido Nussbaum 
I’m very sure this could blast your list. Hope this could help newcomers to build their list in an express way.
Hey Briksons,I’m glad that you are start building your list
That’s all for now. Keep up the good work Guido. See you in your next post. Have a great day ahead.
Guido, please explain to us how a Giveaway Event works if I am contributor:
I can contribuite with a product of others ?
Or only with my product
thanks
Iacopo
Hey, Guido!
Nice new looks on the blog – and good move to switch from the hard work oriented to the more leisure type, he, he… we all want that.
I drifted myself, from one side to the other of the IM ‘make money’ spectrum, but I was never satisfied completely.
Recently, I took a new approach and started building my list a bit more aggresively in th eIM niche, but also started to allow some of my time to be allocated to my Sci-Fi hobby.
I can tell you that, with my SEO expertise and my LOVE for the science fiction subject, I already started to see veeeerry good results there.
Now, back to the topic… it is a smart idea to build a list, but for all the readers here: Guys do not think only IM, ok? There are so many other easier to conquer niches. And a list may be built in all of them.
Okay, let me bookmark your blog and this post and give it a bit of a traffic boost now (not that you were waiting for me, lol, but any hand may help, right?)
I’ll be back, Guido!
Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso
Hi Guido
1st time I have been here – my current strategy is Integration Marketing (other offers on my download page and mine on theirs) JV List dumping – my offer goes on someones elses 1st email after opting in and theirs on mine – future will be MP3 recordings uploaded to clickbank for someone else to sell but me to get the optin and many many more.
I’ll share it in a blog post once i have pulled it all together.
Regards
Pete
Hi Iacopo,
you can contribute any product that you have giveaway rights to. The product doesn’t have to be yours. There are several Private Label Rights products out there that you can give away for free… and some even come with a Squeeze Page that you use to get the signups on your list.
Hello, Guido,
Very informative, and this certainly would be a step by step system, developed by you in the future. Add a flow chart to it.
As for me, I’m still developing my own system. I’m using iNetGlobal. They have many people signing up everyday, and it would good to get the emails, with permission, of everyone in my total team and their teams – horizontally and vertically. But, I digress.
Have a nice day and I look forward to seeing your next system.
Regards,
Stephen
[...] Well, I do believe that taking part in JV Giveaway as a contributor is the most easy for you to generate some hot prospects in your list because this is where I start getting my subscribers without any complications. …This Post [...]
I just joined Traffic Witch and am thinking about buying your Marketing Operator package. The question is about adapting the Squeeze page approach to my niche, which is fitness/sports/tennis.
I am not sure that most of the people looking at my site – and I am starting to drive close to 200 people per day to it – will respond. Put another way, how ’specific’ is Marketing Operator software, and what will it give me that using an Autoresponder or ‘manually’ building squeeze page won’t.
Thanks.
Giveaways are certainly the way to go, A key factor in my experiance is to add a good quality gift that you would like to recieve yourself.
Hi Larry,
the Marketing Operator is basically a management platform for your squeeze pages, one time offers, sales pages and upsell pages. It can work for any niche as you can plug-inn any products of your choice. The software will then for example track your visitors and signups for the squeeze pages so that you know which one gets the most signups. The software also tracks the OTO sales etc. so you’ll always know what works and what doesn’t.
The software doesn’t have an integrated autoresponder… you can plug-inn any external autoresponder of your choice.
Hi Guido,
I was recently in the JV Easter Giveaway as a contributer. It was a great experience!
Thank You
It is the very begining of my list.
I was thrilled with the response of new subscribers.
I look forward to more JV Giveaways
http://www.RealUniverseReviews.com
Resources like the one you mentioned here will be very useful to me! I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.
I bookmarked your post will read this latter . Regards, Mike
Thank you very much your information about traffic, I will be action about that …
Thanks for sharing the information. I really like your blog.
Hi Guido Nussbaum,
I found your this blog by accident and was looking for someone who has similar business as mine – Business dealing with Website Traffic.
Would like to get to know you and see if we can work out something. I understand that you also owns ViralTrafficBar and I think I have lots to learn from you.
Hope to hear from you soon!
Cheers!
Bernard Hoa Leonardoth