Straight Talk - An Open Letter To You

Marketing to FFA leads - Gold Bars or Dog Food?

by John Glube, © 2003, all rights reserved of
Head's Up - A Copywriter's Journal

Hmm, leads generated by free for all link pages. Do you throw these leads in the trash can or do you keep them?

Marketing to these leads can be an extremely frustrating experience. Even when the directory you use requires a person to ‘validate’ her email address before posting, or bans the use of auto-responders, in marketing to these leads you are entering into a wild and wooly arena.

In my view, you have not lost your virginity in this area unless you have at least been sent one email containing a virus, along with numerous counter replies from posters who respond to confirmation messages using auto-responders, even when this is not allowed.

Well, you are probably thinking, why do it? Because it’s cheap marketing and when you do put together a descent lead generating letter, you will get reasonable results given the quality of the leads.

For example, using a totally free service, which you can get when you subscribe to my e-zine, (the shameless plug) I can get roughly 1.6 subscribers to my e-zine per 1,000 emails sent. I use just the email addresses and not the names, (which you get with this service.),

(You can achieve better results with paid services, but your message has to be different. Read on and find out why.)

In putting together your message and sending it out, there are a couple of key points to remember.

The first is the marketer’s trilogy:

* what is your target market?

* what does your target market want?

* give your target market what it wants

Okay, to get this right, you are going to have to do a bit of homework. What, homework. Yep, it’s back to school.

For starters, here are a few suggestions:

* Use a submission service and post your link, then read the headlines of the responses. Why am I suggesting this? Because you will get an idea of what is going on in the market. When you read the headlines, you can quickly tell the quick buck artists from the real players. How? Take a headline like ‘$5,000 a month guaranteed’ or even better ‘Retire in 6 months - making a 1,000,000 a year.’ Get real, please!

* You will want to have a swipe file to keep those headlines and messages which get your attention.

* Ask yourself, who is posting their link? Your first answer may be marketers, but quite a few people post their link to improve their search engine listing. Then ask yourself, what does she want? A newcomer may not know what she wants. Someone who has been around the loop a few times will want traffic to her site and she will want to convert this traffic into subscribers for her e-zine, sales for her product, goods or service, or new team members. Does this give you any ideas? No, okay, think tools.

* When you are sending an email to a person who has posted a link to your link site, think of it like you were making a ‘cold’ call. You are marketing to a person who does not know you, is leery of come-ons and will just as quickly junk your message as read it.

* In wanting to persuade your potential customer to become a customer are you going to use your first message to sell this person something? Ask yourself how you would respond to such a response. You are going to say no, thank you, even were someone offering to give you gold bars for nothing. You want to develop a relationship first.

* Once you have put together a message, you need to test it. Test it, test it and then test it some more. Watch your results. Do you get better results when you mail out early in the morning, mid day or in the evening. Are there some days which are better than others? Do you get better results when you send out your message on the same day when the person posts, 1 day after the person posts, or 20 days after the person posts?

* Write your message like you were writing to a friend. Get rid of all of the hype. Use a headline which is personal, yet at the same time is either benefit laden or arouses curiosity. Do not mislead your friend in your headline.

* People who post links are either newcomers, or pros. True, using a service which requires the poster to validate her address improves the quality of your leads, but it also means your audience is going to be more sophisticated. So, your message will have to be different.

* This is a volume game, so you will need to use a mailing service which allows for bulk mailing. What, bulk mailing, horror of horrors! Well sure, when you buy a list of email addresses without knowing where they came from. Not so, when done legitimately and properly.

Click here - "SpamCop and FFA boards - How To Deal With The Dreaded Problem"

--------------------------------

John Glube, Publisher and Editor of Head's Up, A Copywriter's Journal. Not yet subscribed to the Journal? To get the details, plus your Free Courses "Discover How Anyone Can Get More Buyers" as your reward and learn how you can place your 400 character business to business ad Click Here.

--------------------------------