If you follow me on FB you maybe saw my post about my “Internet Marketing Retirement Plan.”
It’s a dead simple business model where you just send one email a day.
The first step however, is to build a big email list. This is the step that most people get stuck on. Lucky for you I just so happen to be a list building expert.
My record is 17,200 leads in one day.
That’s not “Internet bro” speak, I can actually defend the record in a court of law. I did over 10,000 leads a day for multiple months in a row. There’s a whole course on how I did this inside AdSkills.com and surely just that one course alone is worth the first month’s fee.
So let’s get into the nuts and bolts.
How to start with just $5/day.
The First Step To List Building IS NOT an Opt-in Page
This is why most people suck at building an email list. They jump right to building a lead gen page and lead magnet, but skip the most important step.
The step that makes every other step after it - ACTUALLY - work.
The first step is KNOWING what kind of page to make, what kind of lead magnet to make. You want something that people will love to opt-in too, instead of feeling forced to opt-in.
For example, if I were to say “How To Get Penny Clicks, Lots of Them, Fast” I bet you would love to opt-in to a free report like that. Well the reason I know that is because I have researched you for years. I know the marketing tips market like the back of my hand.
You need to do this too.
HOW?
Simple, choose any niche, anything with a popular magazine or “For Dummies” book title. Any of those niches will be plenty big and have plenty of buyers.
For today’s article lets choose “gardening” as our example niche.
What do gardeners want? They want to grow vegetables, they want to grow flowers, that’s all obvious shallow level stuff though. You know what gardeners really want “How To Make Unlimited Free Fertilizer DAILY Without Having To Wait For Compost.”
If you are a gardener, I bet you want to email me and ask if that’s really possible.
It is.
When I’m not writing you emails I’m building a farm in Roan Mountain, Tennessee.
The trick is WORMS.
Worms make a by product that is a liquid and drips out of your “worm farm” daily. It’s kind of gross but that liquid is like gold to farmers. It’s packed with nutrients and bacteria that can turn dry sand into great soil.
But how can you learn these insights?
There’s no shortcut, you have to dive into the niche. Immerse yourself.
I’m not saying you need to spend years doing this, I’m talking a couple weeks. Isn’t a couple weeks worth having 100,000 people to email offers to daily?
Market Research Methods For Finding Golden Insights That Drive Markets Wild
My biggest secret to niche immersion is…
Reddit.
Specifically, subreddits.
There is a subreddit for nearly every topic you want to know and plenty of them about topics YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW!
Subreddits are where all the “nerds” of a niche go to nerd out about their niche.
Hey… I’m a nerd so I’m allowed to call them nerds. I love my nerds. Nerds are my homeboys, literally!
Nerds run this planet!
Seriously, though subreddits are the best free place you can go to get a deep knowledge of a niche within just a few days. You’ll see dozens and dozens of conversations about what makes this good or that good in that niche.
For example, when I wanted to learn about “nootropics” I went to Reddit.
Within 3 days I came out with a Masters degree in nootropics lol.
I learned that people call supplement combinations “stacks” as in I use 200mg of L-theanine with 100mg of Caffeine as my “stack.” That’s actually one of the greatest morning nootropic stacks you can take. The L-Theanine takes away all the jitters turning your caffeine habit into an intense focus session.
Pick a niche.
Look up that niche on Reddit.
Spend about 3 days pouring over the top threads in the subreddit and you’ll know what makes that niche tick.
You are specifically looking for what gets x result fast, easy, and cheap.
Like worm juice for gardeners.
BTW, did you know worms can eat half their weight in food everyday! That means if you have 2lbs of worms in your worm farm you need to feed them 1lb of food a day! That’s 7lbs a week, 30lbs a month. They are like owning a large dog hahahaha
Ok…
List building…
Focus JUSTIN!
Once You Know Your Lead Magnet Then What?
Don’t overthink your lead magnet.
The thing they are opting-in for.
It can be a PDF, a video, webinar, whatever.
The medium of delivery is not what they care about, what they care about is the super sexy topic. They care about the worm juice, not the PDF. They don’t care if I tell them about worm juice in a text message or a webinar, just as long as I tell them the secret to free fertilizer daily.
Now it’s time to make your page, your opt-in form, and get some traffic.
Again, don’t overthink it.
Headline, 6 bullet points, email box, and submit button.
That’s it.
Master that first and then get fancy.
I promise you, I could spank your fancy page with a headline, 6 bullets, and email form, all day long if I’ve done my research well.
Start your headline with FREE DOWNLOAD, the two sexiest words on the web.
Free Download Reveals How To Get Free Fertilizer Everyday
BOOM! That’s gunna get attention.
Now you need 6 bullet points. Start your first one with something shocking. For example, I could say “You’ll Discover You Already Have The Secret In Your Backyard” and I’m referring to they probably already have worms in their backyard.
Did you also know you can buy them on Amazon?!?! What can’t you buy on Amazon lol
Hey that’s my next bulletpoint!
“You Can Buy Everything You Need For Under $20 On Amazon”
All 6 of the bullet points are about what they’ll see inside once they opt-in. Don’t stress if you only come up with 4-5 bullet points, no problem. You really only need about 3 to make it work, but 6 is best.
Scaling Your Listbuilding From $5/day To $100/day Profitably
At this point you’ve done your research, made your page, got your lead magnet ready for delivery. Use whatever tool you like for sending emails. I like ActiveCampaign, but Aweber, ConvertKit, and MailChimp are all decent options.
It’s never the “Tool” that makes the marketer.
I could get 100 leads a day with any tool as long as it allows me to have a form, an autoresponder, and tracks my clicks for me.
Now you need to get people to your page.
Because it’s just a squeeze page, it’s going to be hard with Google and Facebook. They don’t love squeeze pages. There’s a few things you can do though to make them compliant.
First of all, add some navigation to the top of your page. Home, About, Blog, Contact.
Next add some footer links and make sure you have a good privacy policy that explains how you are using the emails you collect. These are the basics you need for web etiquette. Make sure you have a picture of your lead magnet on the page like a digital rendering of the book if it’s a PDF or picture of the video etc.
They want the page to look “real” and not some janky white page with black text with no logos or contact forms. They want the consumer to feel like they can trust the company they are giving their private contact information too.
Once you’ve done that now it’s time to start your first campaign.
I like Google search because it’s so much more focused. I can target the keyword “free fertilizer” with an ad about how to get free fertilizer daily with a page that’s about a free report that teaches them how to get free fertilizer daily.
You don’t have to be a marketing master to make something like that work.
They were already looking for what you have to offer. It’s like going fishing and the fish are just jumping into your boat instead of you having to go find them.
If you prefer Facebook (I feel sorry for you) (just kidding) (no I’m not) (yes I am… a little).
Then you would just target stores that your target audience would normally shop at. For example, gardeners are going to shop at Lowes, Menards, Tractor Supply, RareSeeds.com, etc.
Start at $5/day, everyone can afford $5/day.
The Real Secret To Scaling Any Ad Campaign Profitably
Anyone can login and raise their daily budget.
It’s simple to “scale” but it’s not so simple to do it profitably.
The trick to scaling profitably is focusing on your EARNINGS more than your costs. What are you earning per lead? If you increase your earnings per lead then your cost per lead will take care of itself.
Everyone thinks they need cheaper leads.
But you know what cheaper leads are… they’re also called crappy leads!
What every pro knows is that you want to be able to outspend your competitors not underspend them. You want to be able to buy all the best leads, not all the worst leads.
How do you do this?
How do you increase your earnings per lead?
It starts with tracking it.
Don’t overthink it. Do it manually.
Everyone rushes to find some $99/mo tool that will do the work for them. No wonder no one has money left to buy ads lol.
You can just use a spreadsheet and keep track of your earnings and costs every week.
Week 1:
- Total leads = 100
- Total costs = $150
- Total earnings = $50
- Cost per lead = $1.50
- Earnings per lead = $0.50
Week 2:
- Total leads = 100
- Total costs = $150
- Total earnings = $100
- Cost per lead = $1.50
- Earnings per lead = $1.00
Week 3:
- Total leads = 100
- Total costs = $150
- Total earnings = $200
- Cost per lead = $1.50
- Earnings per lead = $2.00 (BINGO!!!)
By tracking your simple numbers you can see where you are at in the process. The first week whatever you mailed out only made $50. Obviously that didn’t work so you try something different and next week you make $100. Still not working so you try another offer and this one makes $200, now your leads are profitable.
That right there is the real secret.
That simple little process of tracking and testing is what so few marketers actually do. It’s the reason why so many markets jump from opportunity to opportunity without ever having a big email list.
I know guys who been in this industry 10+ years and STILL don’t have an email list they can retire off of.
Don’t be insane.
Just stick to this very simple plan.
Work at it for 3-6 months and you’ll get through all the mistakes and failures. Which are the cost of entry to success. Once you crack that code of getting your earnings per lead above your cost per lead, you’ll be able to scale your ad spend up to $100/day even $1,000/day or more.
I’ve given you the exact formula here.
All that’s missing is whether you have the discipline and grit to just stay focused on one thing long enough to see it through to the “promise land.”
I’ve pulled no punches.
I’ve kept no secrets.
That’s the retirement plan.
- Step 1: Build a BIG list
- Step 2: Retire (send one email a day)
See you next week.
Justin Brooke,
Founder of AdSkills.com
P.S. If you want to know how I got 10,000 leads a day with Google ads. It’s a masterclass I taught inside AdSkills.com which is the training company I founded. Check it out here.
P.P.S. We also have a 9 week beginners course that covers all the bare basics if you’ve never run an ad before. It's called the AdSkills Academy, and you can get it for free here.
