An email I got the other day is going to turn into something really valuable for you.
A regular reader of mine — Art — told me he’s “hitting a dry spot with list building.”
He has an e-book in a niche market, and is serving his target client’s needs really well. When clients come to him and go through his e-book, they get what he promises and then some, and are satisfied.
The broad market for Art’s product is about 3 million people — and yet, his current email list is in the hundreds or thousands. No — that’s not a typo. It’s NOT hundreds of thousands. It’s hundreds OR thousands. Not very big, considering the targeted audience of about 3 million.
Art has been pretty happy with his progress so far, but he feels like he’s hit a wall.
He’s been organically promoting his website, and growing his list consistently, but slowly.
Now, he feels like he wants more… And I know a lot of people are in his exact same position…
Maybe YOU want to make more money online, too?
The thing is, Art is making many of the same mistakes other novice internet marketers make. He heard you can make money online. He found a good market, and a way to serve them with a unique and compelling offer.
And yet — all the money he was promised has NOT started to roll in yet!
He was asking if I had any resources he could invest in. If not, maybe there was something I could recommend.
And, if I wanted to, I could have probably pointed him to some $5,000 online-business-mega-multiplier-fancy-schmancy system that would be a huge investment (and affiliate payment for me)… But, in the end, it wouldn’t turn out to be a very good investment.
Instead, I recommended books.
Here’s the thing about books. Books are a horrible, horrible way to make any profits. Consumers expect books to be cheap. Like, sub-$20. Maybe up to $30. If it’s a textbook, they can get away with $100 or $150. But it’s nothing like an information product that can go for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
And yet, books need to be crammed with all the same goodness as an information product. Sometimes, they need to be EVEN MORE value-packed.
Which is bad for the author, who doesn’t make much until their book sales start to soar into the millions…
But it’s great for YOU, because it usually means you get a great resource for a tiny fraction of what it’s really worth.
Back to our friend Art.
You see, I recognized that he’s fallen prey to the same trap many novice internet marketers face. He’s doing all the good and right things — and yet, it’s not creating a solid business for him.
You don’t build a business just by satisfying customers…
It’s by far the exception and not the rule that someone will make money online today with a single e-book.
I suppose it can happen.
Joe Karbo somehow made a fortune selling just The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches, for $10 a pop, in space ads in newspapers and magazines. Apparently, for a very long time, he wasn’t even keeping the customer’s address after he’d shipped their book.
That was a rarity then, and it’s a rarity now.
Instead, if you really want to make money, you have to build your business on the models created by others who’ve come before you.
You have to flesh out your product line and your offers, to make each customer worth more.
The question isn’t, “How can I bring in more customers to buy the one thing I’m offering?”
The question is…
“What can I offer to my current customers that makes each one worth more, such that I have all the money I need to continue to feed new customers into the front end of the system?”
Jay Abraham is well known for teaching the 3 Ways To Grow A Business. Get more customers. Get them to spend more each time. And get them to come back more often.
More often than not — and I recognized this to be true with Art — he was only thinking of the first way. “I want to grow my list more,” really means, “I want more customers.” Because if 10% of your list buys your one product, you might assume that the best way to make more money is to grow your list.
However, what if you could get 50% of that 10% to spend twice as much? You’ve just added 50% to your revenue, without a single new customer.
Or, what if you could get some portion of that 10% to join on continuity, such that your average customer value doubled? You’ve doubled the business, without adding one name to your list?
Or, what if you did both? 100% growth on top of 50% growth is actually 200% growth — your average customer value is now 3X what it was before.
Suddenly, with those numbers, you’re in a situation where you’re making enough more per new customer that you may have some extra revenue to play with.
That revenue can be spent experimenting with paid traffic.
When you’re paying for traffic, you have a lot more control — PLUS, there’s usually a lot more of it than can be acquired organically.
Which means your list is growing faster. And each person on your list is worth more. Then suddenly, one day, you wake up and realize you have a pretty darn good online business.
Knowing the power of this well-rounded approach to growing an online business, I recommended 4 books — and I’m adding one more to the list…
I’ll give the list of books here, but let me underscore one point.
I did the math based on today’s prices on Amazon. I didn’t include shipping because I’m a Prime member, and I get free shipping (click here and you can sign up for 30 days free shipping with a trial Prime membership — and yes, that affiliate link earns me a measly $3 if you order through it, to support this awesome free content).
For a total of $66.63, you can get a MASSIVE internet marketing education in just 5 books.
Real, tested, proven methods and strategies for growing an online business. Starting from ZERO, and growing it far bigger than you might even dream today.
For $66.63.
Okay, so here’s the list.
Ask, by Ryan Levesque — $11.69
Ryan has perfected using a unique and proprietary methodology to figure out what your target market will BUY.
And not just the first product — following his step-by-step method will continue to show you, for as long as you apply it, what your customers want next, and next, and next.
One of the best ways to make money is to figure out what people want (and will pay for) and give it to them. This makes sure you check off that box.
Click here to buy Ask on Amazon.
DotCom Secrets, by Russell Brunson — $11.15
There’s something about Russell Brunson that I don’t want to like. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that he’s at least on the edge of some of the more questionable “Internet Marketing” crowd.
And yet, I’d heard so much good about this book, that I had to pick it up. Turns out all the good things people are saying about the book are true. This is one of the best books for a combination of strategy and actionable tactics to grow an online business today.
Click here to buy DotCom Secrets on Amazon.
Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, Brian Todd — $15.25
I believe that you MUST understand how to buy paid traffic if you really want to build and scale an online business. Free traffic is nice, but it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable, and only scalable under the best of conditions.
On the other hand, if you’re willing to pay for traffic, you can almost instantly start sending traffic to any page on your site that you want. Plus, paid traffic gives you predictability, control, and scalability well beyond that of free traffic.
Perry is the world’s most-quoted expert on Google AdWords. This book is where I learned it — and made hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for the IT Training company I worked for in Oregon.
Click here to buy The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords on Amazon.
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, Perry Marshall, Keith Krance, Thomas Meloche — $18.26
Again, I turn to Perry, because he knows what he’s doing and has put together a tremendous resource here.
I actually recommended this book OR the previous one to Art, depending on where he wanted to start buying traffic. In the beginning, it’s smart to get good at one traffic source. In the long run, your business will benefit from diversifying, and this is a great second step.
Buy traffic, buy traffic, buy traffic. If you want to learn fast, and build a business fast, this is REQUIRED.
Click here to buy The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising on Amazon.
BONUS: Launch by Jeff Walker — $10.28
Jeff is an interesting character. He definitely runs with the “Internet Marketing” crowd. But like Russell Brunson, he’s really sharp on strategy and actionable tactics.
While the “launch” model is not right for all businesses, it can be HUGE when used in the right way.
(My upcoming Story Selling Master Class will go through a launch — more details coming very soon. Nailing down the official launch date as I write this!)
On a deeper level though, Jeff’s campaign thinking that’s integrated into the launch model can serve you well, even if you’re not doing the Product Launch Formula style of launches.
Click here to buy Launch on Amazon.
If you were to study just those 5 books and nothing else — and use what you learn to build your online business — you’d be setting yourself up for MAXIMUM success!
There are a million books, courses, programs, membership sites, and so on that I could recommend to you.
And no doubt when it comes time to build your website, take payments, build your email list, and so on, there will be other resources you need.
But if you study those 5 books and really apply the strategies and tactics they teach, you could create a highly-successful online business within a year (and probably a lot faster).
And as for list building, and Art’s original question that spurred this whole topic?
Well, it will most definitely be taken care of. I will probably never cure you of the desire to get new customers. But you will have an exponential growth curve that includes building your list, getting new customers, increasing the average amount spent, and getting customers coming back more, and more, and more.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
