Igor answers personal and professional questions from list builders in this anniversary episode. Don’t miss the opportunity to get the answers to some of the questions that you too may have wondered. Moreover, two lucky list builders with the best questions shall win exciting prizes.
[01:30] The podcast celebrates its 300th episode with Igor answering some of the frequently asked questions of fellow and aspiring list builders.
How does it feel to reach 300 episodes?
[02:20] The adrenaline of constantly pumping things out:
- It’s kind of like running a marathon for like three years. It’s really challenging to stick to that routine of constantly pumping things out.
- I want to thank everyone who’s always working to support this movement.
[05:00] Should you email your list every day?
- I’m a great believer in emailing every day. I’m a great believer in emailing several times a day not just once per day.
- There are different business models and there’s also a matter of how much is enough.
- Are you content with not getting everything you can get from your list?
- It depends on where you enter the funnel. So my take on this is anyone who makes good money, emails nearly every day, if not every day, if not multiple times per day.
[10:00] Which would you like to clean first: your room, your desk, or your car, and why?
- I’d clean my desk, I’d then clean my room, and I never clean my car.
- My desk is the time and a place where I need my cognitive functions at their highest. So as far as I’m concerned, that place has to be clean so I can think.
- A room where I spend my leisure time, I would clean it second because I spent very little time in it.
- I almost don’t spend time in my bedroom, because even if I get into my bedroom, I don’t want to go to bed. Guess what, I’m starting to feel sleepy and groggy because of a habit.
- You get into an environment that dictates your behavior.
- The reason I don’t clean my car is that as far as I’m concerned, first off, it doesn’t affect the way it drives.
- This is an insightful question. It tells you a lot about people’s values, priorities, and prioritization of leisure over tasks.
[13:10] Evergreen, bullet-proof, and pandemic-resistant affiliate programs:
- The beauty market is pandemic resistant because people want to look beautiful even when they’re stuck at home.
- I would say “make money” is resistant. Financial markets are experiencing a boom because the stock market is very volatile. So people are always asking where they should move their money, and where they should invest.
- Losing weight will be a great market if not during the pandemic then getting out of the pandemic.
- I think salsa dancing or self-help retreats, workshops, and stuff like that are probably not a good market, but I think fishing is still a good market. Fishing is still a very good passionate market.
- Self-help doesn’t go anywhere. It’s still there. Dropshipping seems to have kind of taken off even further than it used to.
- Markets like health and back pain and bedbugs, those markets never go anywhere.
- Anything as far as photography equipment or anything like that still is very viable. Video games and social gaming are also very powerful.
[17:52] Igor gives an insight into his typical day when he was growing his list:
- It would depend on where I am in my journey because the way I break down my day-to-day is not the same way I would break down my day if I was just getting started to build my list.
- Back in the day, I was focused on putting together list-building funnels and trying to optimize them and trying to figure out how to get the highest opt-in rate and the highest email response rates, and looking for offers to promote.
- I wasn’t building a funnel then I was writing an email. If I wasn’t writing an email, then I was thinking of ways to run ads or create content for my blog.
- The first thing to do is to focus on your funnel because until you have one, you don’t have anywhere to send traffic. Then I would start driving traffic and then I would work on my follow-up and of course daily emails.
[20:20] Migrating your list from one industry to another:
- The legal answer is no. If they signed up to receive a weight loss newsletter, you’d better not mail them with a money-making offer. And if they signed up with the money-making offer, you better not email them with a weight loss offer.
- But in reality, if you want to do that, you could probably have a better chance of promoting a weight loss offer to internet marketers or people seeking a business opportunity, then you would vice-versa because there’s a good chance that there are unfit people on a biz op list than there are people who are interested in business opportunities on a fitness list.
- I would probably build a list from a list. What I would do is I would gently email my biz op list saying that there is a way to lose weight and that if they want to find out more about it, they can opt into this list to get more information.
- The problem may arise not from mailing that list once about weight loss. The problem may be from mailing that list with weight loss all the time because then you’re annoying them. After all, they signed up with the expectation to get one thing, and all of a sudden they’re getting something else.
[23:00] Ringless voicemails as a sole traffic source instead of solo ads:
- What surprised me is just how many people listen to their voicemails. And how many people open up their browser and go to your website, if your website domain is catchy and short enough for them to go and type it?
- I’ve never had much success with ringless. We used it as a follow-up mechanism, but we never used it as a cold mechanism.
- It’s a bit of a gray area because you’re not allowed to robocall anymore. There’s a law against it.
- If you want to find out if it works for you, you must test it.
[26:15] Using your picture to personalize the email:
- I didn’t notice whether a picture at the bottom of every email increases or decreases your conversions.
- We’ve just started testing a brand new template where every email does contain my face inside the email.
- I’m seeing higher response rates. I’m not sure if it’s because of my face or because of the formatting of the email itself. .
- You don’t want to use music in a marketing video if that music gets in the way of the message. But if you can use music to enforce the message, then you should use it.
[28:04] How has the pandemic changed market practices?
- I try to give them more solutions that allow them to get started in a shorter amount of time because everyone feels pressured.
- Right now people are afraid of spending a lot of money on the form of ads.
- If you tell people to spend $500 versus spending five bucks a day, now they’re much more sensitive to that.
- I’m seeing more buyer’s remorse. People are much quicker to go back on their buying decision and try to back out of a system and they need more reassurance that this is going to work and that they’re making the right decision simply because they’re afraid that they’re not going to have money coming in next month.
- More people go for the payment plan. So my guess is because they want to minimize the spending considering that their income has been limited in some way or because they’re uncertain about what’s coming up.
[35:15] Starting a business with $200 in the pocket:
- $200 only in your pocket is not enough to start a business.
- It doesn’t matter if you want to drop ship or anything like that. You need money to start your business.
- So instead of focusing on how much money you have in your pocket and how to make money with that amount, what I would do is I would get a skill.
- I learned how to build landing pages, I learned how to write sales pages, and I learned how to create email campaigns and write emails.
- I was able to match what I was earning online with what I was making offline working full-time by the way and I was able to take that money and invest it into my business buying tools, traffic, and things like that. Because without a source of income that you can devote specifically to your business, you’re going to have a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble trying to scale it.
[37:41] Are ad-blockers a threat to marketers?
- 20% of all internet users are using ad blockers right now.
- There’s still 80% of the internet that doesn’t have ad blockers. So as far as I’m concerned, we’re good.
- As a marketer, if you’ve got your ad blocker enabled, you are seriously missing out on tons and tons and tons of educational material you should be studying, looking at other people’s ads, especially in your industry.
[41:16] How to transition into the list-building lifestyle while having a demanding full-time job?
- First, you have to figure out whether you’re a morning person, a night person, or a day person.
- I’m a morning person and the only thing that worked, especially when I was just getting started and I had jobs, and at one point had two, was giving the first hour of every day to myself. You’d be surprised how much you can do in one focused hour every day. Then for the rest of the day, I can squeeze everything else, but until then I have to do what’s important first.
- That’s how I wrote my book. That’s how I created most of the programs that are now part of the List Building Lifestyle ecosystem. That’s how I built the solo ad business as well.
[50:00] List Building Lifestyle Podcast:
- Listen to more episodes at www.listbuildinglifestyleshow.com.
