About 30 years ago I was in an agent training program for a life and disability insurance company called Certified Life. For those of you who don't know, insurance agents are basically nothing more than affiliate marketers for insurance companies. An insurance company's agent training program is designed to teach everything about insurance necessary to get a state insurance agent license, while at the same time teaching the agent trainees about proven sales and marketing strategies. One of the first things they teach about marketing is called the "Rule of Seven". The Rule of Seven basically states that a prospect will need to see your sales presentation seven times before they decide to buy. Now the actual number might vary. Some people may make a purchase on the first presentation, others might decide on the second, third, or fourth meeting, and still others may actually need seven presentations before they take action. The point is if you have multiple opportunities to present your information to the same prospect then the chance of making a sale increases dramatically. What this means is if you only give yourself one chance to make a presentation, then you're losing the bulk of your potential sales. With online marketing, what the Rule of Seven means is if you just send your visitors to the sales page without collecting a way to contact them again, then you're losing a lot of potential sales. That's why all the biggest marketing gurus and the top super affiliates all say the same thing, to make the most money online you need your prospects to opt-in to your list before sending them to your offers. I'm sure you've all heard the adage, "The Money is in the List". The reason that statement is true is because of the even older adage, "The Rule of Seven". So, if you're involved in any marketing where you're promoting specific products then you should try to get your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list before you send them to the offer. The easiest way to do this is offer your visitors something free that they'll recieve by email, once they request that info you can also send them second and third chance offers as well. One thing to remember about free offers though is don't target traffic campaigns for the free info. Always target for people looking to buy something. Once those visitors get to your site then you offer the freebie as a bonus for submitting their email. If you actually use a freebie offer to target for traffic, then the list you build will be mostly a bunch of people looking for freebies. What you want to target your traffic campaigns for is potential buyers, then the freebie offer will just help you build a list from those potential buyers.
Thanks for the info. A few months back I started building an opt-in list on the side and have been doing ad swaps to grow it. Something I am confused about your post though is you say to offer a freebie offer to get subs but then you say if you do that, then your list will be a bunch of people looking for freebies. So how do you offer a freebie but at the same time not attract freebie type people on your list?
I've found that offering your first product for a very low price, like $1, will weed out the freebie seekers.
LOL. Well ideally you want to actually make a sales presentation, and then make additional presentations that each progressively build on the previous ones. That's why it's explained mostly in terms of an opt-in email list. It actually works best for the marketers promoting an actual product. If your promoting a CPA offer (especially if your promoting email submits), then what your really doing is helping that advertiser build his list. Basically what will happen after your prospect submits his email, the advertiser will send out a series of presentations designed to get that prospect to but from them. But even if you are promoting CPA offers you can still build and use your own list to promote the offers. Some of the most successful CPA marketers using this principle are the CL marketers. The best of them are using the CL ad to get the prospects email and then sending a series of emails promoting the offer. Spamming on twitter is more like having a commercial that plays regularly on the radio. While the presentation might be short and not change much each time, the principle is still there. So yes, you will have a better chance of getting results on twitter by sending out more than just a single tweet one time.
One additional thing to remember is that once a person opts in, you shouldn't immediately start pounding affiliate offer after affiliate offer to them. Sure, you might make some sales now, but soon people will get bored of that and not open your emails or will unsubscribe. Of course, this is not a problem if you have huge amount of people subscribing on a constant basis... but that usually is not the case. Adding some value in the form of good and helpful emails between the promotions is a way to keep people opening your emails, which will lead to higher lifetime value of a subscriber.
What you want to avoid is using the freebie offer to attract visitors to your site. Basically you want to use the actual product your promoting to attract the type of visitors looking to buy that type of product. Then once those potential buyers get to your site, those are who you offer the freebie to. In other words when your site shows up in the SERPS, you don't want it to say "hey come to my website to get a free offer". You want it to say "hey come to my website to get the best info about this great product". Then you also want to target for keywords that buyers would search for. So don't target keywords like "Free info about X", instead target keywords like "Best place to buy X". (Those are obviously crappy keyword examples. They are just to explain the point. lol) Another thing you can do is what 75INZ suggested and make the email submit be for an inexpensive product instead of a free one.
Very, very interesting. I actually wrote about the "rule of 5" and the "rule of 9" but not in a marketing sense.
Well the "Rule of Seven" is specifically a marketing concept. As I mentioned it's a concept presented in just about every sales training course for as long as I remember. It's usually presented as an actual tested statistic, although I doubt there's any real science behind the specific number 7. The part that definitely has been proven though is that if you have a way to make multiple presentations to the same prospects it will increase your sales. If you search google for "sales rule of seven" or "marketing rule of seven" you can find much more detailed explanations about how you can use the concept to your advantage. I imagine the "Rule of 5" your referring to has to do with project planning and accomplishing goals. If you commit yourself to accomplishing 5 things everyday working toward a goal, then you'll have a very good chance of achieving that goal. This is a very good concept that everyone should take to heart and incorporate into their routines as well. I'm not sure what the "Rule of 9" is though.
