The last few days I’ve been feeling pretty ruthless with my inbox. I am pretty used to getting large volumes of email, that is my norm. It is not uncommon for about 500 emails a day to land in my inbox. The last few days, I’ve been hitting the unsubscribe links a lot.

I’ve spent a lot of time exploring listbuilding and email marketing. There appears to be two schools of thought on the subject.

One is build a relationship with your list. Treat them like you’d like to be treated and they will want to buy from you when you send them an offer. There is a lot of sense in that approach. Think about how you build friendships, you don’t build strong friendships based on what the other person can and will do for you. You build up trust and rapport. When the time arrives you need some help, a friend will usually do what they can to respond. There is a mutuality in a friendship which doesn’t really happen when building business relationships but I think you get the drift.

The second approach is more of a scatter gun approach. Get the person on your list by what ever means you can and then just hammer the calls to action at them. I wont even say offers, as a lot of what I have been seeing lately is people engaged in ad swaps and sending me off to sign up for even more lists. Do they care if I unsubscribe? Not really, they are out there getting even more people on their list. The listbuilding continues forever.

The first approach takes time. It means you are committing to actually providing value to the customer or potential customer. You care that they have a meaningful experience on your list. People who take the first approach get a lot more of my attention and rarely do I unsubscribe. That doesn’t mean everything they send me gets my immediate response, or read, but I can usually see the person is trying to send me relevant material. Yes, they are going to send me offers, it is email marketing after all.

The second approach is what triggers my unsubscribe clicks. I get that building a list using ad swaps can be effective. Sending me emails that tells me you just found me this great resource and I should go there right now is not building a relationship with me. When I get to know someone and they start trying to push me around, I dump them. I don’t have to nor do I deserve that treatment.

If the resource you are sending out an ad for is so great, then why don’t you tell me about it before I spend my time clicking over to it and entering my info? Likely because you haven’t even looked at it and can’t be bothered finding out if the so called resource is any good. I’ve looked at all kinds of these ‘great resources’ and I’ll tell you, rarely are any of them worth my time. So why did I look? I was curious about just what is being offered.

Did it get anyone a sale? Definitely not. Will the tactic generate future sales? Definitely not, I’ll already be unsubscribed by the time you send me something I might have cared about.

Yes, I’m building a list. I’ll be using the first approach, not the second. I don’t want to be treated like a lemming and wont be treating others the same. I’d be honoured if you’d join my list.

Which list building approach do you prefer? What triggers you to unsubscribe? What motivates you to stay?

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How Not to Email Market

CB Giveaway

Anyone who has been online for even a short length of time knows about Clickbank. For anyone who doesn’t, Clickbank is the go to site for selling digital products and making a profit through affiliate marketing. They have a rock solid guarantee for consumers and dead easy process for vendors to sell their products.

Many of those vendors do in fact offer free stuff as incentives towards buying their product. Many of those free items contain some valuable nuggets of information for your marketing knowledge.

The free stuff is not always easily found, but I have found a site that gathers together the best of the freebies and provides you with directions on how to get to them. The site is CB Giveaway.

In the coming days I’m going to be providing you with some reviews of the products featured there and the free items offered. You don’t have to wait for my reviews though, go have a look at CB GIveaway now. It’s free to get into.

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Clickbank Giveaway

Working online can be a great experience. It’s wonderful not to have to get up in the morning and trudge into a job. To put up with the politics and squabbles which are often part of the work experience. Great isn’t it?

But, people by nature have a degree of social need. We need some input from others in order to know how we’re actually interacting in the world. That’s hard to get when working online. Other than the feedback you get from customers or potential customers, you don’t really interact with other marketers like you would in a job.

One way to overcome that is to join a forum like Dennis Becker’s insiders forum Earn 1K A Day. No, it is not some hyped up membership which promises you to that you’ll make 1K or more a day. Building on his book 5 Bucks a Day and his most recent 5 Bucks a Day Revisited, Dennis provides a supportive environment for you to be able to work towards earning that first $1k in a day. What a target to go for, eh.

Dennis doesn’t promote any particular business model, he provides forum areas for people in various models to interact and support each other. Check it out, it’s a great way to break out of the isolation of online business.

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Beating Isolation While Working Online

Came across an article on Mashable with described ten things you can do with your status updates on Facebook. I was particularly interested in this one:

To mention someone in a status update just type “@” (a la Twitter) in the status bar and start typing their name as it appears on Facebook. An auto-generated list will then come up with people in your social circle whose name starts with the letters you’ve typed. The feature also works with pages, brands, events and companies.

Hit the name you want, complete the update, click share and the name will become a hyperlink (you won’t see the @ symbol) and will appear in blue text

When you do this, your update shows up in that person’s newsfeed. The possibilities could be endless here for getting your status updates seen.

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Tagging People in Facebook Status Updates

It has taken me a while to get the hang of the configuration and model but at long last, I have this site configured as a membership site. Postings here on the blog will continue. Most of the posts will point you to the content within the membership areas.

Basic membership is free and will give you access to files, articles etc to help you learn internet marketing. Once in the membership area, you will be given the opportunity to upgrade to a premium membership for even more advanced materials.

If you are looking for promises of vast riches to be made overnight. You wont find that here. If you are looking for material to help you understand online marketing and building your business, you’ll find that here.

I’ve added Facebook functionality to every post and page. I encourage you to post your comments and questions so all members can help and support each other. Let’s build our businesses.

I’m off to start adding content into the site for you.

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Membership Site Arrives

Welcome to It’s All About Money. This site is dedicated to helping you to learn how to make money online. This site will not claim to show you how to make millions overnight.

This site will not promise that you will make easy money while doing hardly any work. Making money online is about establishing an online business. A business doesn’t appear overnight and it doesn’t appear without you knowing at least some basics on what you are doing.

So, if you’re looking for get rich quick plans/schemes. Thanks for stopping by. If you are looking to figure out how to establish your online business, please explore

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Welcome