| I am going to title article, “How To Build Your Own Mighty E-Mail List To Get Rich With.” This information is tailor-made for Internet information marketers, but it could be used by others who use information to sell other products and services. For some time now lots of info marketers on the web have been making good sales on E-Books, E-Manuals, and E-Reports by giving away a chapter or two of the book, or a couple of the reports in a series of reports. Then they give the Table of Contents, and if people like the information they got on the chapter or two, or the report, and they like what they see in the Table of Contents, they’ll order the product. Here is a new twist. Several leading on-line book sellers on the Internet, led by Barnes&Noble.com and Amazon.com, along with best-selling author Stephen King, show us a new way to capture e-mail addresses and, hopefully, make a ton of money in the future. Recently, in just one day (that’s right - one single day) 400,000 copies of Stephen King’s new 66 page novelette, “Riding The Bullet,” were either given away free or sold. You read correctly - four hundred thousand copies in 24 hours! In one 24 hour period approximately 360,000 copies of this book were given away free while another 40,000 copies were sold by other online booksellers at $2.50 each. That means that $100,000.00 was generated in sales from 40,000 copies sold, while 360,000 were given away free. The smaller dealers sold the book and that’s not too surprising. They wanted the profits! But I think we can learn the most from the “big boys,” and that means Barnes&Noble.com and Amazon.com. They let people download the book absolutely free, and 360,000 people took advantage of this great give-away. The kudos really go to Barnes&Noble.com on this promotion! Barnes&Noble.com is a distant number two to Amazon.com when it comes to online book sales, but they really did rise to the occasion with this special promotion. They had a joint venture with the author, Stephen King, and the publisher, Simon & Schuster and they made online book promotion history! Within just 24 hours Barnes&Noble.com gave away 216,000 copies of King’s book. Now that’s big results! Hold onto your seat belts! One hundred and fifty copies were downloaded every minute for 2,040 minutes, which constitutes a 24 hour period! That is really amazing!!! Now, here is the marketing kicker that we can learn from. Barnes&Noble.com gave the book away free to 216,000 people. But they only gave the small book away (let them download it) when the people first gave their e-mail address. Ah ha! They captured 216,000 e-mail addresses! Now, they had some of those e-mail addresses already. But they estimate over half of them - something like 128,000 - were people that never did business with them before. They promoted this with ads in USA Today, but they also got tons of free publicity both online and offline to drive people to their site to get Stephen King’s new book. Two hundred and sixteen thousand copies - that’s amazing in a 24 hour period! If we’re information sellers, what we need to do is give away something that people will desperately want. A booklet, a manual, some reports - whatever - and capture those addresses. And then go for all the free publicity offline and online. Here’s what I am planning to do. I’ve started writing a small manual (or you could call it a small book) with the working title, “How To Really Get Rich With Internet Marketing.” I am going to give it away free on my web site, and heavily promote that fact offline and online. In the back of the booklet or manual I am going to offer several other of my books and home-study courses. And above all else, I am going to capture and demand the e-mail address of every single person whom I allow to download my booklet or manual. I hope you’ll put this in your pipe and smoke it! Now, it’s not likely you’ll end up giving out 360,000 books in one day...or maybe not even sell another 40,000. But if we could just get a few thousand per day of our booklet, our reports, or our manuals in the hands of people who gave us their e-mail address (an opted-in e-mail address), we have a valuable commodity we can use to sell them other things. |