Why I’ve Deleted 30,000 Leads
When you’re starting out in the Internet marketing, an often advice you hear is “build a list” and “money is in the list”. I have too and I’ve followed the advice, I’ve signed up with Aweber and started building lists. I’ve amassed quite a list of subscribers at over 30,000 over the years. And yesterday I’ve deleted them all and canceled my Aweber account.
If you follow the general IM advice you must be thinking I’m insane. I believe in general it’s considered that a single lead is worth at least $1 a year and that’s 30,000 of them. I’ve just thrown $30k/year out the window, what’s wrong with me? Not so fast.
You see, general “truths” like “money is in the list” have a flaw and that is that the devil is in the details. Money is not in just any list, it is in the list of customers. And that’s not just a rule that comes from IM, it’s common business sense – you need customers to sell. And that’s the tricky part.
The general idea of list building in IM is to put up a squeeze page, give away a freebie and collect emails that way. Almost every guru tells you to start doing it as soon as possible because, well, money is in the list! You can then send them promotions and make money even if you don’t have any product to sell – you can send affiliate offers. Oh yes, the affiliate offers.
Now let me ask you a question. Do you like getting all those ridiculous emails from affiliates, all 159 of them every single day? Then why would you want to join their ranks? The matter of fact is, if the subscribers aren’t your customers you’re just spamming them. And everyone hates spammers.
So I’ve amassed a list. I can count on my fingers how many broadcasts I’ve sent to it over the years, and every time I felt terrible. I tried to make them as “soft” as possible, add as much value as I could and never push a sale. Obviously that didn’t convert well and I haven’t made any money at all. And even if I had been pushing hard and spamming like there’s no tomorrow, I’d have made very little but lost a ton of karma points.
So to cut the ever growing bill from Aweber I’ve thrown the supposed $30k worth of leads to the bin and cut the agony.
The matter of fact is that you only need a list of customers when you have customers, i.e. when you have products or services. I don’t have any products or services and I don’t want to have them. My business model is creating websites and earning from affiliate programs and advertising. I’ve chosen it because I’ve tried doing both and nothing beats the passive income that such websites generate without having to deal with support. Hence, I don’t need a list.
And my advice is, don’t build a list just for the sake of building a list. If you don’t have a base of customers to make a list of, don’t make a list. The last thing you want is paying a bill for the storage of a bunch of worthless email addresses and much less spamming them.
Oh and did I say all those pop-ups and forms asking you to opt-in for something are just plain annoying? Glad to finally get rid of those from my sites.
February 17th, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Where did you get your 30,000 leads? If you bought them then I’d suspect they’d be worth less than garbage. If you built that list over the years only to have no success than I feel terrible for you.
February 17th, 2012 at 2:27 pm
I have built it over the years. But having no products to sell and hating to spam people does that to you.
March 28th, 2012 at 6:22 pm
should’ve given those leads to me…i have no problem “spamming” people…it’s only spam if you pitch them right away, and peddle cheap products to them. I’m sure i could find at least 5000 quality leads out of that 30,000. ::shakes head::
April 10th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
People on the list know they can choose to opt-out. If they haven’t, they must have had some interest in what you were saying.
You probably should have pushed the envelope a bit, and recommended something you thought would be useful to them. If you’re marketing, especially to other marketers, people know it’s a business and the value you’re providing is in exchange for at least considering something you’re promoting.
Also, with a list that big there’s a middle ground. You can send out a poll and ask what kind of products and services they’re interested in. Then transfer individuals into more focused lists that would be more welcoming of certain types of products or services.
Anyhow, you have an awesome site here, and if you’re making good money passively, I guess you know what you’re doing…
April 10th, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Yeah, see, to do it the right non-spammy way you have to treat them as your customers. If they’ve signed up for a free educational ebook then they are your students that might pay for education or relevant tools if you take care of them. The taking care of them part is key. If you do a half-assed job like I did you’re not going to make money from it. But if I wanted to do that I’d still be running my little software shop.
Thanks for all your comments.
April 30th, 2012 at 1:18 am
Hats off to you! I have been on the receiving end of all the SPAM emails since I started my adventure to understand IM. Before I started signing up for those ‘splash’ pages, I typically received 10-30 emails per day. I had NO spam.
Today, I have had to abandon my old email. Last count I had over 10,000 spam emails. What is worse is that the IM spammers are becoming flat our RUDE in their approach. The subject lines are outrageous, and the content is nonsense.
If you think email marketing will gain you respect as a marketer, think again! I find that the good gurus have quality emails and limit them to 1 per month. It is easy to tell the newbies who don’t care about keeping my business.
Originally, I signed up for 1 or 2 programs via the email spam, but I recall both programs were a total waste of time and had NO quality content… cancel and REFUND. I don’t know what percentage sticks, but I am sure that the cancel rate is very high.
I have over 25 years traditional sales and marketing experience… rule number 1 is treat your customers like gold. I promise you will lose respect and lose all of your good customers if your only approach is to spam people every third day.
Seriously, there are so many others professional ways to earn money via the internet. Have respect for yourself and others and STOP the spam!
Thanks for deleting your list! You now have my interest as a quality website to follow.