I had spent about 4 years doing internet marketing and freelancing part-time while I was still active-duty. I had wasted a ton of time in front of a computer and a ton of money on stupid internet marketing products that I thought would magically fix everything. No luck. But, I figured if I did it full-time, I’d be able to achieve my goals. A lot was riding on this decision. A whole lot. I was leaving behind the job security of the Air Force and plunging into the waters of entrepreneurialism with a wife and four kids in tow, plus a fifth kid on the way. Failure was not an option.
So what did I do? I went down the typical road. The one you’ve probably been down. The one where you’re supposed to “build your list” with lead magnets and freebies and solo ads and forum posts, and - well, you get the idea. I poured myself into that and built a sizeable list (around 600) in a matter of a couple weeks. I had an autoresponder sequence set up with products to promote.
On paper, according to conventional wisdom, this should have been great.
But guess what. Almost nobody opened those emails and nobody bought anything.
Why? Well guess what a list full of freebie seekers will buy: nothing!
They’re freebie seekers!
And half of them don’t even give you their real email address. So good luck getting a decent open rate…
That’s when I remembered a lesson I had learned a couple years prior. A lesson I never should have forgotten. I had learned it from the great Alex Jeffreys and it’s possibly the most important lesson I ever learned in IM.
If you want to get ahead in this industry, you can’t do it with a freebie-seeker list. You need to launch a digital product, get affiliates to drive traffic to it, and build a buyers list. Once you have a buyers list, everything changes. These are people with real email addresses who actually take out their credit cards and buy things. That is when you start to actually earn affiliate income with your email marketing.
That is what all successful internet marketers have done and THAT is what you need to do if you want to achieve your internet marketing goals. There’s no other option.
I knew this was the only way forward, so I got myself a mentor and started working towards a product launch. It wasn’t easy. And I learned a lot of lessons along the way. But finally, in October of 2016, I launched a product in the IM space. And life changed forever. In the first two weeks, we had generated over $20,000, been awarded JVZoo Product of the Day, spent a week on the Top Ten Best Sellers list, and built a buyers list of 646 customers. Considering this was our first launch ever, these were pretty good results.
And in the months since that first launch, we've gone on to scale our business to six-figures! (Explained in the new bonus chapter)
