[Email] Journey to Banking Hard with Email Lists

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

I wasn't planning on doing a journey for this, but I love reading email journeys and there doesn't look like there have been many recently, so I thought I'd share my progress.

The Grand Plan
The plan is simple enough: Starting from nothing, build targeted double opt-in lists from a variety of traffic sources, free ones at first and reinvesting profits into paid ones. I'll update what tools, traffic, monetization and niches I'm using/targeting as I go along.

The Tools
Website: Wordpress with the following plugins (free versions): Advanced Ads, Content Views, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, Ninja Forms, Photo Gallery, Pretty Links and Yoast.
Email: Mailchimp

The Traffic: Classifieds, Social Media, Organic Search, Referrals, Paid Search, Display, Solo Ads.

The Monetization: AdSense, CPA, Solos Ads, Selling Leads.

The Niche: Real Estate

The Expenses: Start up expenses are $0 because I already had the domain and hosting and I'm using the free plan at Mailchimp.

The Thread Updates: Weekly

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

Week #1 October 15-21, 2018

This week was marked by getting things set up and ironing out bugs. I got things mostly sorted by Friday.

List #1: 10 Subs
List #2: 22 Subs

Spent: $0
Adsense: $3.26

Profit $3.26

 

[Sythix]

How die you earn your adsense? You're already promoting to a list of 20 people?

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

How die you earn your adsense? You're already promoting to a list of 20 people?

Hey Sythix! That was from clicks on my website after they had opted-in. I didn't send any emails last week.

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

Week #2 October 22-28, 2018

Things went well this week! Organic search and referrals started to trickle in even though I'm not doing any active backlinking. I sent out 3 broadcast emails and they all got solid opens and click-throughs. The emails themselves still only represent a small percentage of traffic, but it's great to see that marketing to these same people over and over again is going to be a thing. If you're curious why I have multiple lists below it's because each one targets a specific city (since real estate is very localized). As you can see some cities had greater interest in my offer than others.

List #1 68 subs | Change +58 | Emails 1 | Opens 25% | Clicks 13%
List #2 43 subs | Change +21 | Emails 1 | Opens 25% | Clicks 14%
List #3 81 subs | Change +81 | Emails 1 | Opens 29% | Clicks 18%
List #4 20 subs | Change +20
List #5 29 subs | Change +29

Spent: $0
Adsense: $31.64

Total Profit since Journey Began: $36.13

 

[Mariothecashcow]

Its an interesting Journey, definitely something different. So in terms of content, are you showing what properties are available in these cities? and I can imagine the CPC would be high for this niche

 

[red333]

Week #2 October 22-28, 2018

Things went well this week! Organic search and referrals started to trickle in even though I'm not doing any active backlinking. I sent out 3 broadcast emails and they all got solid opens and click-throughs. The emails themselves still only represent a small percentage of traffic, but it's great to see that marketing to these same people over and over again is going to be a thing. If you're curious why I have multiple lists below it's because each one targets a specific city (since real estate is very localized). As you can see some cities had greater interest in my offer than others.

List #1 68 subs | Change +58 | Emails 1 | Opens 25% | Clicks 13%
List #2 43 subs | Change +21 | Emails 1 | Opens 25% | Clicks 14%
List #3 81 subs | Change +81 | Emails 1 | Opens 29% | Clicks 18%
List #4 20 subs | Change +20
List #5 29 subs | Change +29

Spent: $0
Adsense: $31.64

Total Profit since Journey Began: $36.13

In what niche are your lists?
This niche has to pay out pretty good, if you get paid $31 for just 400 subs in total (round a bout).

$31 isn´t much, but it´s a good start and you don´t have many members yet, so it´s pretty decent

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

@Mariothecashcow yes. I'm basically doing what a classified site like kijiji does. People sign up for email notifications > The email points them to new homes when they're posted > The page with the home is monetized with Adsense. And these are legit home ads by the way. From the research I did it looks like the majority of real estate keywords (things like "real estate (city)", "houses for rent", "condos for sale" etc.) go for $0.50-$3 on Adwords. Although I'm not targeting specific keywords, I'm assuming those are going to be the majority of ads that get served.

@red333 Thanks! As mentioned in the first post, I'm in the real estate niche. See my reply to Mario above regarding payouts.

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

Week #3 October 29-November 4, 2018

This week wasn't as impressive for email list growth or earnings. But I was able to start gathering some information on the value of my email lists. On Friday I did no marketing of the website at all except sending out 207 emails. That resulted in 29 clicks which generated $2.51 of Adsense earnings which means ,in that test each email I sent was worth $0.012. I've only emailed each list once per week, but if those numbers hold up it means each subscriber is worth just under $0.05 per month. So I need to find ways to bring subscribers in at a cost that makes sense with that being the possible value of each sub.

With that said, here are the numbers for this week:

List #1 77 subs | Change +9 | Emails 1 | Opens 28% | Clicks 9%
List #2 53 subs | Change +10 | Emails 1 | Opens 23% | Clicks 14%
List #3 103 subs | Change +22 | Emails 1 | Opens 28% | Clicks 14%
List #4 32 subs | Change +12 | Emails 1 | Opens 42% | Clicks 15%
List #5 46 subs | Change +17 | Emails 1 | Opens 43% | Clicks 22%
List #6 20 subs | Change +20
List #7 8 subs | Change +8
-------------------------------
Total Subs 339 | Change +98

Spent: $0
Adsense: $16.80

Total Profit since Journey Began: $52.93

 

[noxiop]

Awesome journey. We have been missing some good email journeys!

Would love to help any I can and to keep updated on your progress. I've only done outbound email marketing for lead gen and link building.

 

[dobcho0]

Great one, will follow. I'm also building a list, but I'm far from your speed. 37 till now.

 

[lloydc]

great journey, I'll be following this.

your opens and CTR are pretty decent. I suppose thats the power of a double optin list.... you get a responsive list

 

[drehdinho]

@Mariothecashcow yes. I'm basically doing what a classified site like kijiji does. People sign up for email notifications > The email points them to new homes when they're posted > The page with the home is monetized with Adsense. And these are legit home ads by the way. From the research I did it looks like the majority of real estate keywords (things like "real estate (city)", "houses for rent", "condos for sale" etc.) go for $0.50-$3 on Adwords. Although I'm not targeting specific keywords, I'm assuming those are going to be the majority of ads that get served.

@rudrapada thank you my friend!

@red333 Thanks! As mentioned in the first post, I'm in the real estate niche. See my reply to Mario above regarding payouts.

Did you make use of any script to mimick Kijiji on your website ?


And can you tell me what kind of theme you use for the website?


I will like to setup mine as well, but this is all strange to me.



If you can give me permission to send you a message, I will like to have a step by step on how to set this up.


Just this yesterday I started building a blogger blog for a weight loss niche, and I am really making a progress.

Although, I have hosting and domain, since I'm only planing on monetizing via my hosted Adsense, I went for blogger blog.


With your method and consistency it will be quick to earn a decent amount daily.


I'm ready to put in the effort if you guide me.

Thanks.

 

[mhtro]

From where do you get the home listings? Do you use a script of some sort?

 

[karupoiss]

Awesome to have an email list building thread here. I still don't get where you are getting your subs from - what traffic source? Also $0.05/sub/month is like super low - especially for a niche as high profile as real estate.

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

@noxiop Do you have any experience with cold outbound emailing for B2B leads? I have an idea for another business.

@dobcho0 What's your niche?

@lloydc It's also early, let's see how the opens and clicks are after a dozen emails

@drehdinho No script. I'm using the Minimum Minimal wordpress theme with Content Views plugin. That gives me a nice clean look with multiple display options. Sorry, no private guidance. I'll answer whatever questions I feel comfortable answering here in the thread. I can tell you that I've made some money with AdSense on a Blogger blog too. It's better to have your own domain, but not necessary.

@mhtro Pulling them off of classified sites: craigslist, kijiji, oodle etc. I'm just copying and pasting. If you have the skills to write a script to do this for you it would be a huge help. Also it would be awesome if you can also automate the email content. That way all you have to focus on is driving traffic to your landing page!

BTW guys, you don't need to copy me exactly. There are lots of niches that would work great with the same system: houses, apartments, cars, trucks, jobs, services, pets, furniture, appliances, electronics...pretty much anything.

@karupoiss Right now my traffic is coming from a mix of classified ads, referrals from other sites, organic search, and returning visitors from my email lists. And you're right. $0.05 is way too low. It's a combination of email ctr + site ctr + cpc. I don't think I'm going to be able to do that much to improve any of those so I'll have to experiment with other methods of monetization.

 

[dobcho0]

I'm in self-development niche.

 

[kido]

this is so interesting, even in my journey in cpa i have not yet made $5. can you share you chare your method?

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

@dobcho0 I had a small personal development blog a few years ago. I found I was able to get quite a bit of high quality traffic by generously adding relevant links out to content on other blogs in my articles. Those bloggers would be notified and check my stuff out and reciprocate, often with social mentions. In fairly short order I managed to get mentions by several people with hundreds and a few people with thousands of followers. The biggest was when I wrote an article about social media and a guy with 25k followers twitted about it because I mentioned one of his videos. That brought lots of traffic. Unfortunately I wasn't building an email list at the time.

If I had known then what I know now I would have had a freebie offer to get people onto my list. Say maybe something like "Top 10 Ways to Reduce Stress at Work" and then reached out to those people who did social mentions and offered to do a guest post on their blog. That can bring a massive amount of traffic and signups.

Oh...forgot to mention. In my experience personal development is a terrible niche for Adsense, CPC is often pennies and CTR is around 0.2%. The real money is in selling your own products.

@kido Method breaks down to this: Drive traffic to squeeze page > Collect email > Thank you page links to main site with content and ads > Some people click on ads.

Later, I add new content > Send email broadcast letting them know > They come back and some click on ads again.

 

[QueenAnnesRevenge]

Week #4 November 5-11, 2018

Another good week! I focused my efforts on growing the existing lists more than expanding into new markets and had some solid list growth and earnings. Plus a couple of other interesting developments:

1) I figured out how to set up Mailchimp to automatically generate and send emails from my RSS feed data.
2) I did some advertising and found a couple of people interested in buying leads directly from me. They want a lot more information from each lead than an email address though. Still, if I can manage to pull that off I'll make dozens of times more money per lead than I'm getting from Adsense.

Plans for this week
1) Finish setting up the RSS emails for all of the lists.
2) Test out a more aggressive emailing schedule. So far I've been doing 1 or 2 emails a week. I'm going to push it to 3-5 per week per list and see what the effect is on opens, clicks and unsubs.

Numbers for the past week
List #1 81 subs | Change +4 | Emails 2 | Average Opens 24% | Average Clicks 9%
List #2 56 subs | Change +3 | Emails 2 | Average Opens 16% | Average Clicks 9%
List #3 147 subs | Change +44 | Emails 1 | Opens 27% | Clicks 15%
List #4 43 subs | Change +11 | Emails 1 | Opens 32% | Clicks 13%
List #5 69 subs | Change +23 | Emails 1 | Opens 41% | Clicks 23%
List #6 31 subs | Change +11 | Emails 1 | Opens 38% | Clicks 14%
List #7 36 subs | Change +28
List #8 57 subs | Change +57
-------------------------------
Total Subs 520 | Change +181

Spent: $0
Adsense: $26.98

Total Profit since Journey Began: $79.91