You Need A List!

Joie Thompson September 16, 2015 4 Comments

By now, i guess you have done your assignment, right? Moving to our next step, which is LIST BUILDING. It goes without saying that you need a list to build your business, i will be sharing with you a mail i got from a list building tycoon few years ago.

Please read this to the end cause the lesson is at the end.

“I crawled out from under my desk, almost hitting my head, and grabbed the phone…

“…hello” I muttered

“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING!?!” responded the stranger on the other line.

Confused I asked him what he was talking about.

“In the past 6 hours we have received over 30 spam complaints from YOUR IP address… Russell, you’re a SPAMMER and we’re shutting off your internet access.”

What…!?!

I was so confused…

I got a lump in my stomach as I hung up the phone and realized that I now had to explain to my new wife of just 6 weeks that I just got our internet shut off.

You see, just 6 hours earlier I had “officially” started my new business as an email marketer…

Or so I thought…

I had been trying to learn online marketing for almost a year now, and I kept hearing people talk about how the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can have is…

Your own email list.

It made total sense to me.

I did the math, and if I had 100,000 people on my email list, and I was selling a $5 product and I ONLY got 1% of them to buy…

Then I would make $5,000… (1% of 100,000 was 1,000 people X $5 = $5k)

It makes total sense… right?

And I saw others doing it. All I needed was an email list.

I just had no idea how to get one.

So I looked online and found someone selling a CD with over 1,000,000 “spam free” email addresses.

Sounded good to me, and when I did the math, 1 million names sounded better then 100,000.

So I bought the CD, found some software that would send out emails… Found a product that I could sell for $5, unplugged my phone line under my desk, plugged in my 14.4k modem…

…queued up the emails and went to bed.

I still remember laying in bed that night, explaining the math to my wife.

I actually told her that if she wanted to quit her job the next day, that would be fine, because I’d be able to support us from now on. 🙂

And that’s why that phone call stung so much…

As she started to walk out the door to her job, I grabbed her, and with shame in my eyes told her… “you probably shouldn’t quit today…”

She smiled, gave me a kiss, and walked out the door.

I felt deflated… my dreams of the night before had shattered down once again around my feet.

How were people doing it?

I know they were… unless they were lying…

No, they couldn’t be lying. There HAS to be a right way to do this… right…?

I sure hoped so as I grabbed my backpack and walked out the door.

I had a 9:00 AM class that day, so I needed to hurry.

When I got to class, I could barely hear a word the teacher said, I was feeling so down.

About 20 minutes into class I walked out to go to the “bathroom” and slipped into the computer lab next door.

Since my internet was shut off that morning, I hadn’t checked my email yet today.

When I logged it, I was shocked at what I saw…

At first I was confused… then I got a little nervous.

As I looked closer that nervousness turned into excitement…

I had made a SALE!!!….

No.. I had made a LOT of sales.

$5… $5… $5…

There were dozens of them.

Almost $300 in sales… all from the email I sent out the night before!

This worked… well, sorta.

The concept worked, but the way I executed it was wrong.

And THAT day is when I started my mission to learn HOW to build my own email list.

I knew it was possible… I had seen the fruits of it.

Now I just had to figure out the legit / legal way to do it.

And THAT journey has been one that changed my life forever.”

Do you want to know what he learned?

If you want to know, leave me a message in the comment section and I’ll share it with you the next time.

AboutJoie Thompson

The Content Marketing Executive at iVEN Digital. She helps brands develop effective marketing stories, to attract their ideal customers to their business, products, and services, engage with them and convert them to sales and also, repeat sales. She is responsible for digital content creation, curation, and editing on social media platforms and other digital platforms.