In our last post we discussed calculating value-per-visitor. This calculation is fairly straightforward when it comes to “front end” money to your website. However, when you start dealing with “back end” money, such as revenue from your opt-in email list, things get a touch more tricky.

Essential to this discussion is the concept of “discounting the future”. It’s an economic concept based on the idea that a dollar in your pocket today is worth more than a dollar you might receive a year from now, due to inflation.

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A lot of people seem to be asking the question, what is a reasonable amount of money to make from an internet marketing campaign? The answer is that it all depends on your leverage. Let’s consider some examples inspired by recent marketing campaigns in the internet marketing community.

Say for instance, that you decide to run a two-day webinar complete with video-conferencing, non-video call in lines, and bonus online resources. If your webinar has a sticker price of $1,999 and you sell 500 seats then your gross revenue is a touch shy of the 1 million dollar amount. Keep in mind with all these gross revenue figures that the profit margins on information products tend to be pretty high.

If you are more of a products-only kind of guy, you might decide to spend a few months producing a take-home study course. You could outsource the development of a book, workbook, and DVD. Pay someone to write a winning sales letter, pay someone else to create a course related website, and pocket the difference. If you had an email list of size 50,000 you might expect 3% or 1,500 sales. If your take home materials cost $299 on average, then you could be looking at around $450,000 gross.

If you prefer you could run a five week online course with weekly teleconferences, online course related materials, and ways to network with other course participants. If you charged $199 for such a course and 200 students signed up by paying tuition, then you would collect near $40,000. Such a take would obviously not bring anywhere near the amount cash as the two above mentioned examples, however with opportunities to up-sell your students as well as increased exposure for you and your brand, such a venture would definitely be worthwhile.

The examples above tell the story of the kind of money that established players in the internet marketing community are making. When you are just starting out in the field of internet marketing you should expect to make no where near this amount of money.

Factors that can help contribute to the kind of massive leverage that would be required to pull of the kind of numbers mentioned above include a huge opt-in email list, a massive black book of networking connections that can light up online forums with to-the-top threads that never seem to die, or serious connections with dozens of bloggers who can post you offering on a score of blogs and let the viral power of the net take over.

Obviously it is never easy to generate a million dollars in revenue in a two week period, however the important thing to remember is that it can be done, and that the people who are doing it right now are ordinary human beings just like you and me.

Email lists can be built up even if it takes a couple of years of hard work and determination, as can extraordinary networking connections whether they be comprised of social networkers, bloggers, forum members, or a combination of the above.

If you are interested in reading more about the basics of internet marketing check out our post on the essentials of marketing online.

Tags: internet marketing, marketing, marketing camapigns, make money online, webinar, teleconference

There is an awesome way to learn the ropes when it comes to email marketing, and the best part is that it shouldn’t cost you a cent.
Here is what I suggest, get yourself an extra free email account… Gmail, MSN, Yahoo, it doesn’t matter. Once you have done this, sign up for every email list from every email marketer you can find. That’s right, I want you to create an email account dedicated to SPAM!!! I am exaggerating when I say every list you can find, somewhere between 10 and 20 lists should do nicely.

As you study the more established names in internet marketing, it is important to be able to read between the lines. As you study their sales materials try not to get caught up in whatever “flavor of the month” cure-all is being pitched, but rather to be able see past the surface level sales pitch, and attempt to discern the techniques that the marketer is using to try to persuade his audience.

The upside of such a course of study, is that it should not take you long to familiarize yourself with email marketing technique. Many email marketers tend to borrow ideas from each other, and you should start to see patterns emerge very quickly.

I have often heard it said that great writers are great readers, so it stands to reason that great writers of email marketing are great readers of email marketing!

Here are some links to email marketing list opt-in pages. I won’t bother describing the type of product that each list promotes, when you get to their landing page that information should be self evident.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/index080111.htm
http://www.thesystemseminar.com/
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/newsletters
http://www.stompernet.com/
P.S. I am not a fan of giving out my address or phone number, however some email lists are starting to ask for such information in the opt-in form for their email lists. You will have to develop your own policy regarding how you wish to deal with such opt-in forms.

Let’s say that you are absolutely nuts about golf, and you have decided to follow your passion and build an email list around the subject. Imagine that at this point you have built your email list up to 100,000 leads and that you have several products in your pipeline, which you plan on release in the near future. This could include a product on weight-lifting for golf, a product for improved driving, and a product for achieving putting perfection.

A simple way to market these 3 products would be to create an email campaign for each product and send the entire campaign to every one of your subscribers. Of course even with such a simple strategy you would want to make sure to spread out each campaign. No list will respond well to being constantly bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch, and padding the space in between pitches with informative, and preferably unique information, on golf can only help your credibility in the eyes of your list.

A more complicated marketing strategy would be to divide up your list into a main list with several sub-lists. So you might send an email to your main list telling them that you have special information for anyone interested in efficient weight lifting for golf, which will add yards to their drives and fairway shots, even without a touch of improvement to their technique! This email would contain a link for anyone interested to follow.

Anyone who clicks on this link will be brought to a second opt-in page where they will have the option to become a member of the sub-list for “weight-lifting for golf.” Of course I would not advise you to use the term “sub-list” anywhere on this web-page, just some brief information to pique there curiosity, and get them to sign up.

Once your “weight-lifting for golf” email marketing campaign is completed you can send it to your sub-list. Please not that by campaign I mean a series of 5 to 7 emails designed not to inform but specifically to sell. At the same time you send your campaign to your sub-list you can send a brief series of sales letters, between 1 and 3 to your main list to try to encourage some extra sales.

Breaking up your email list in this way tends to cause better results in terms of conversion rate as opposed to treating all members of your lists as equals. You are always going to get a higher conversion rate emailing to your list of pre-qualified golf leads then you would to a list of 100,000 members of the general public. The reason is that your list represents leads that are pre-qualified based on the specific interest of golfing. It is the specific interest of the lead that gives it its value, and in a market as wide as golfing related products, there are bound to be even more specific interests which can be unearthed.