John Cornetta Lighting Fast List Building
Phil Ainsworth: Hello there and welcome to the Lighting Fast List Building system. Today I'm interviewing John Cornetta and I'm really pleased to have you with us today John. How you doing today there?
John Cornetta: Great how are you Phil?
Phil Ainsworth: I'm really good thanks mate, really good. Well it’s an absolute pleasure and an honour so I'm really excited to hear all the interesting stuff you’ve got to say, because John’s built a huge list in a very short space of time and John’s also a really good guy as well. I’ve spoken to John a few times on the Skype chat groups and John’s a really top guy, so I'm sure he’s going to share loads of tips for us all today. Just before we get started though John I'm aware that some people listening to this, they may not have heard of you. I know that’s a pretty crazy thing to say but it’s possible. So I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind just telling the people listening a little bit about yourself and your story just so they can get an idea of who you are.
John Cornetta: I’ve been online you know since the very late 90s, loving websites and building a few for mostly my offline businesses. And that was the extent of it. I learned web design and how to work on the internet just through having to, you know having people that were unreliable and just going in there and figuring it out myself. Never really went to make money until about a year ago and started building a list about a year ago and I built it probably as rapidly or more rapidly than anyone that I’ve met. And my background started where I was in MLM and network marketing and I recruited someone and within a day they started doing phenomenal numbers and I said what are you doing, and he said I'm not using the tools from the network marketing company. I’ve created a squeeze page and I said what’s a squeeze page and he took me and showed me the process and I went oh man I'm doing to duplicate that. And so I did and I quickly went out and kind of dug and found my own little way of doing things and I created a small list, eventually built to three or four hundred and then realised I could sell these people other products and then the rest is history. So I now have over 200 domains and lots of products and am very happy for that and grateful. So that’s my internet background. Really my speciality is being a list builder and being able to convert you know people into buyers where other peoples speciality may be sound or they may be more of a marketer or more of a sales person. I've been about volume and it seems to just work for me. And offline I did very, very well. I took my offline skills and brought them to the internet.
Phil Ainsworth: Awesome, well that’s a very thorough answer, thank you John. And just for anyone listening, would you mind sharing with us the size of the list that you’ve been able to generate in a year?
John Cornetta: Yeah very big. Phil Ainsworth: Very big, okay.
John Cornetta: My list is over 200,000. Phil Ainsworth: Awesome.
John Cornetta: And counting. I had about 1,200 new subscribers a day and to do that in a year any internet marketer knows is just almost impossible to do. My list was 600 in March of last year.
Phil Ainsworth: That’s absolutely insane. I mean, when I’ve… I spent my first 6 months struggling to get just a couple of hundred so to hear that, that’s absolutely insane John so I'm sure anyone listening right now is really keen to find out just how you managed to grow so quick. So I guess without any further ado let’s get cracking. So what would you say to someone just starting today who doesn’t have a single subscriber, where should they start John what’s the first thing they should do?
John Cornetta: They need to get an auto responder obviously. Phil Ainsworth: Sure.
John Cornetta: And so I’ll assume that they have these basics, and that’s a website or at least their own domain name, hosting and an auto-responder.
Phil Ainsworth: Of course.
John Cornetta: And once they have those basics of course they need to have the funnel in place and you know the funnel would be the squeeze page or the opt-in page where people could actually enter their name and email address. A one-time-offer if they were going to monetise that and then the area where the people would download the gift. So I'm skipping that, and we’ll assume that they have that in place.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah that’s fine, I’ve actually included a little guide of how to do that with this interview so anyone listening, you should all have the instructions how to do that much already so…
John Cornetta: Okay so assuming that they have that the first thing I would tell them is to turn off the auto reply on their email like Yahoo or GMail or anything else. That replies automatically with “thank you I’ve got your email please check out this site”. That does nothing but annoy anyone and they hit spam which I do as well and it’s not going to get you any subscribers. It’s going get you a bad reputation.
Phil Ainsworth: That’s a good tip, okay. John Cornetta: Go ahead Phil.
Phil Ainsworth: No I’m just saying that’s a good tip, that’s a really good tip for people there to switch off the auto reply.
John Cornetta: Yeah it doesn’t do anything but aggravate the person whose list you’re on. The better thing to do is if you’re on someone else’s list and they send you something that’s interesting, reply with a real reply, you know “hey Phil I got that email about the PDF on how to stop your children from teething pain, it was great and I want to let you know that I really liked it”. You get a
relationship that way with Phil and then eventually that can lead to something else. But moving right along, here’s how you build the list from absolutely zero. This is the way I did it anyway. I did it through social media marketing, I did it through viral list builders, and I’ll go into both those with you.
Phil Ainsworth: Awesome.
John Cornetta: Most people have heard of Facebook, you’ve heard of Twitter, you’ve heard of My Space, there are hundreds of them. And what I suggest people do is to build a following on all of the social media sites as quickly as they possibly can. And a tool that I'm going to give you right now, and I use it all the time, it’s not an affiliate link, this is just a really good site that people do not know about, it’s called Hellotxt.com and its h.e.l.l.o.t.x.t.com and when you to Hellotxt.com you sign up for a free account and they’ll list about 200 social media sites that are available around the world. Some that you’ve never heard of, and of course the standards ones that you have heard of, like Facebook and My Space and Twitter. And from inside the Hellotxt platform you can go create accounts at each one of the social marketing sites or you can enter the information for the ones that you already have, your current My Space page or Twitter or Facebook. And once you’ve done that you can then send out one message from Hellotxt and it’ll populate all your social media sites at one time. You can schedule them in advance. So where now a social media’s such a burden, you’ve got to go into My Space and you have to go to Twitter, you have to go to Hellotxt, I mean to Facebook. Hellotxt kind of combines it all for you and really supercharges your social media marketing. I’ve done some pictorials on that and I really recommend it. You can get a tremendous amount of followers through doing that. I heard you…. want to say something Phil?
Phil Ainsworth: No I just wanted to check that I’ve grasped what you were saying John, for the people listening. So this is a service where once you’ve linked all of your social medial accounts to it, it will then update all of your social media accounts for you. So you could type for example one message “I'm currently at the Clickbank Affiliates Seminar having a great time”, for example, hit enter and that then updates all 100 of your different social media accounts with that message. Have I got the right end of the stick there John? John Cornetta: Absolutely. It will also populate a blog for you if you have a blog with
blogger or several other blogs that are integrated with Hellotxt it would put that on your blog post for you and update your blog. It has an RSS feed. So it will do all of this at once for you so what used to take hours for you to go to each of these sites and do, this one little site does it for you.
Phil Ainsworth: Awesome.
John Cornetta: The other cool thing is that while you’re at Hellotxt you’ll find social media sites that you may never have heard of before that you can join from right in Hellotxt and join that to your interlink of social media sites. Of course you still need to go to each of those sites and grow them. Add friends and so on. But once you do that, or to post links like “check out this great free product, it’s all about dog training at www.blank.com” and you will start seeing some traffic to that site where people have joined your list to get that PDF. Phil Ainsworth: Sure.
John Cornetta: Social media marketing has a conversion of about 3%. It’s not as great as say ad swapping, it’s not as great as giveaway events or doing solo ads or any of that stuff, but it’s free, it’s still 3% and it’s something that you can start without having any money and it’s something that you can start, start your
list from zero. So 3% of 100,000 people seeing that message is still a lot. It’s 3000 people that might click through and you might have 1000 people on your list in no time. That’s how I built my list. It’s just one of the strategies. And it’s a strategy available to everyone today. I highly recommend it to this day, I still post to my social sites two to three times a day, I haven’t forgotten that strategy. And then the next one… shall I go on Phil?
Phil Ainsworth: I just wanted to pick your brains just for 2 minutes more about social media marketing John.
John Cornetta: Sure.
Phil Ainsworth: Because I know that people will have heard of it and I just wanted to give them a couple of dos and don’ts. I mean personally I’ve managed to build a Twitter following of a little under 24,000 through being just on Twitter just for a few months and I love Twitter, it’s kind of one of my favourite things, but something I’ve found that’s very hard to make sales directly from social media, and I just wanted to see if you agree with that or if you’ve found a way of selling directly on social media or if you simply use social media as lead generation and then try and convert that into sales further down the line in a sales funnel or down a follow up sequence for example?
John Cornetta: Well exactly. I don’t sell directly on social media and I don’t find that people buy because there’s not that intimate relationship.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah sure.
John Cornetta: Unless you’re somebody who is a very well known blogger or Paris Hilton or somebody who has this huge following and you’re posting good content all the time and once in a while a sale, you’ll find it hard too. So I do it as a… simply to generate leads to a squeeze page and then once they’re in my funnel I’ll eventually sell that, you know sell to that market. People always like free stuff. You know. So if you put up a free blank, or free piece of software available you know for the next 24 hours some people will still click on it. I’ve got to be honest I don’t put just content up there on that…
“Chinese restaurant eating noodles”, I do put mostly internet marketing free offers and it does something for the… it’s not the greatest thing in the world as far as you know getting people on your list but it’s a nice place to start and it’s still worth my time, 15 minutes a day to hit them.
Phil Ainsworth: Definitely, yeah definitely. Cool. Awesome thanks John. John Cornetta: You’re welcome.
Phil Ainsworth: Okay, I just wanted to clear that up because obviously something I do see on Twitter and Facebook is you do see a lot of people posting just spam and I just wanted to kind of warn people listening away from trying to post spam or trying to post “salesy” kind of updates, it’s steering them more towards the kind of updates that you’re talking about John which is links to free offers, squeeze pages that kind of thing. So I guess that’s what I was driving at there. John Cornetta: Yeah absolutely and then there’s a trick to… now if you’re going to use
social media later and ad swaps, or if you’re going to use viral marketing sites which I’ll talk about next and ad swaps or solo ads, there’s a technique for that as well. That traffic cannot be compared to list traffic. I said if
someone’s on your mailing list and you mail them, you’re talking about 35% to 45% conversion as opposed to 1% to 3% in social media.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah.
John Cornetta: So a click is not worth a click if you will, social media to a list. So it’s not fair. But the way to make it fair is to build what’s known as a splash page and a splash page is simply a very small say 8 inch by 3 inch picture of your offer and send from your social media accounts....on Twitter for example it says came across this great new product by Phil Ainsworth:, you should really check it out. And then it doesn’t send you to the offer, it sends you to the splash page which tells you a little bit more about the offer and then if they click this splash page it goes to the actual offer. Anyone who goes from social media to a splash page and them from the splash page to the offer is a real viable customer. You’ve now filtered out all the just clickers. And that turns social media and viral marketing into equal to somebody being actually on your list.
Phil Ainsworth: I see so this splash page is a kind of almost pre selling people or warming up the cold leads if you like to make them much more responsive.
John Cornetta: Yeah. Phil Ainsworth: I see.
John Cornetta: It’s like a billboard too and it filters out, for example if you and I did an ad swaps and you sent from your list and I sent from social media I might send you 1,000 clicks for… and you have 3 subscribers. You send me 1,000 clicks from your list I have 350 subscribers.
Phil Ainsworth: Right.
John Cornetta: That’s not fair. But if I sent 10 or 20,000 clicks to a splash page anyone that clicks through the splash page to your list is probably going to opt in. The opt-in rate is generally the same as if I had mailed from my list. Because they’ve taken 2 steps.
Phil Ainsworth: I see, right. I see. And to make 2 steps it’s a fairly good assumption that you’re going to be keen to get the thing because you’ve had to take 2 actions, so…
John Cornetta: Absolutely.
Phil Ainsworth: I see where you’re going yeah. Excellent.
John Cornetta: It’s a good way to augment your list building skills and certainly to start with them. And then the next are viral site builders and I'm not talking about traffic exchange because I was never big into traffic exchanges. I don’t want to have to go click on 1,000 ads a day.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah, no.
John Cornetta: There are viral sites out there, viral list builders, and there’s basically 2 scripts. One script was written by a partner of mine, Frank Salinas who has since gone on and sold that script and a lot of people are using it. And then
the other one is based on Mike Filsaime’s butterfly script and those are the two viral list building sites or software that are out there. I can give you other names but there’s only two to actually learn if you’re a user and they’re both pretty similar. And what they do is when you join up, you can join for free, or you can upgrade to one of three levels and if you were to join just for free it enables you to mail any one in your down line and up to say 300 members once every 10 days. And if you were to upgrade to the highest upgrade you could mail every 3 days and you get to mail all 5,000 members of site the plus your down line.
Phil Ainsworth: Okay.
John Cornetta: And it also gives you an affiliate programme where anyone you send to the site to become a member you will get a commission on the one time offer and then of course you increase your credits to mail. And basically what you’re doing is once you join is you’re giving permission to receive emails from this group and now you can email this group as well. Again the conversions are not as high as coming from your actual list but they’re a little bit higher than social media. You can very easily by joining 10 of these build up enough credits to mail out to 100,000 people a week. Again 3% conversion you might have 3,000 people coming to see your offer, and again convert them into regular subscribers on your email list. With these strategies combined, it’s a way to build that first 600, that first 500 subscribers on your Aweber or Getresponse list that you’re looking for. And those are 2 strategies that I still use to this very very day.
Phil Ainsworth: Okay. Right okay. And just to be clear you’re talking about using these viral list builder sites and the traffic that you get from that you’re sending that to squeeze pages to offer a free gift rather than directly to a sales offer. John Cornetta: Right.
Phil Ainsworth: I assume that’s where you’re going? John Cornetta: Correct.
Phil Ainsworth: Okay.
John Cornetta: And I send them to my offer. I usually… Phil Ainsworth: Of course yeah.
John Cornetta: I usually send my pages to them and then convert them into my actual subscribers. Between these 2 strategies I'm not looking to monetise and get rich, I'm looking to build, you know build people on that list starting out from zero. And then at that point of course you know there’s lots of other things that we can do and I’d like to talk about a couple more as well.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah okay. So just to wrap up viral list building there, I’ve personally be warned away from it in the past but I just wanted to get a couple of your thoughts on it. I’ve been warned off it in the past because I’ve been told that it’s a list of people that are all looking to email out to other people and I’ve been… the way it’s been explained to me in the past is that the people that joint these don’t have interest in reading the emails, they’re only interested in
emailing other people themselves. So it sounds as is you’ve had some good success with them. I just wanted your thoughts on that.
John Cornetta: Yeah I have. I’ve had good success. Phil Ainsworth: Okay.
John Cornetta: And I lost, I'm sorry I lost part of that question coming in.
Phil Ainsworth: Oh I’m sorry let me say it again then, sorry. What it is is I’ve definitely heard of these, I think they’re a bit like safe lists aren’t they, this kind of viral list building site, if I've got the right end of the stick?
John Cornetta: No it’s different. Phil Ainsworth: It’s different to safe list.
John Cornetta: It really is. Safe lists, it’s kind of like a safe list yes and it is in a way. But there is a difference. Tell me what you’ve been warned away about again. Phil Ainsworth: I’ve just been warned that for example you know you join the list and it’s
offered that you can join and instantly have 5,000 people in your down line if you join, but of course that the catch to it is that all of those people have also joined because they want people in their down line. So what I’ve been warned is that you’ll join and you instantly get 100 emails in your inbox and then the emails you send out don’t get read because the people beneath you have also got hundreds of emails themselves so… I mean it sounds as if you had good results from it, so I just wondered if, perhaps what I’ve heard is I’ve been mis-informed perhaps?
John Cornetta: No you haven’t. Okay. Phil Ainsworth: That’s right okay.
John Cornetta: That’s all true but there’s strategies to minimise the down side and to
maximise the up side. And I’ve mastered that. You want me to share some of those with you?
Phil Ainsworth: That would be really good, I think the people listening would definitely be keen to hear that yeah.
John Cornetta: Okay great. When you do this, set up a separate email account specifically for the viral listbuilding sites. Set up a new GMail account or a new Yahoo mail account so that your current inbox is not flooded with these offers. The other thing you could do is if you have a GMail account you can, once you join them, set up a new rule where when it comes into your inbox it automatically gets archived and tagged with a filter that says read later.
Phil Ainsworth: Right okay.
John Cornetta: That’s one of the things. Now I just taught how to not be bothered by these thousands of emails.
John Cornetta: The obviously question is well then no-one’s going to read mine because they can do the same thing. No, not true. I'm going to teach you how to get past what I just taught you.
Phil Ainsworth: Ah brilliant. Okay.
John Cornetta: What you do is this, you sent an offer, an email swipe, an offer with your link through your auto responder. Say it’s Aweber or Getresponse. And you receive it because you’re on your own list. You only send it to a list that you’ve created with one person on it, you. So it doesn’t go out yet. And it comes to you and it has whatever link you’re going to send out but as you know when the email arrives from an auto responder it’s encrypted. You’ve seen the encrypted Aweber link or Getresponse link right?
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah.
John Cornetta: So then what you do is you copy everything in the email except for the unsubscribe link. The entire copy from the bottom, from the CAN-SPAM, all the way up to Hi Jo and you paste that into the viral list builder send out. You then change the variables so that the name variable or email variable may be different, you know so it then inserts their name. And when you send out from the viral list builders there’s 2 choices. One send from the admin and if you do that it’s admin@list blank blank blank.com. Everyone has a filter for that. Or send from your own email address which you should always do because no-one has filtered out your email address constantly. They have only blanked out that site or set a rule for the site, and when they get the email from you it looks like they’re on your list already because it comes with an Awebber link or a Get Response link, everything but the unsubscribe link is there. They look at it like oooh I must have joined this list already. They don’t look at it like it came in from a viral list builder. So to them in their inbox it looks like an email they get, people that are joining lists in internet marketing are on 50 lists. They have no idea what lists they’re on so by mailing from the viral sites this way you increase your chances by 100%. My click through rate is incredible on these viral sites just because of that little trick.
Phil Ainsworth: John you’re a Jedi. I'm not joking I'm being serious. Anyone listening who hasn’t quite grasped that, I’ll put a little slide show up on the screen right now so you can have a better understanding of how it works but what John’s just said is solid gold. That’s incredibly clever. It’s a tiny bit sneaky but it’s perfectly ethical and it’s perfectly legal and everything, it’s just very clever. It’s a very ingenious way of having an email be much more welcomed by someone basically than if you didn't do that. So that’s a really really good tip. That’s really clever John that’s pretty…
John Cornetta: That’s why I use them, thank you, and that’s why they’re you know I think worthwhile so you’re not having to read all of them, the hundreds of them, but yours are being read. And in that you know, why not, and at that point Phil there’s no real argument to not use them. The reason to not use them is because people don’t know how to properly, the way I do it anyway, properly maximise them to minimise the effect of getting all the emails and maximise the effect that yours are being read, which now all your listeners know how to do.
Phil Ainsworth: You’ve hit the nail on the head. The reason why I’ve been warned off them is because the people telling me about them haven’t optimised it themselves, but if you can take something that’s essentially free traffic and optimise it so it’s reducing the amount of time you put in or the amount of time you have wasted, and leveraging and maximising that output you get from it, which is exactly what you’ve just told us how to do John, then why shouldn’t you do it? It’s brilliant. Yeah that’s awesome, thank you very much John.
John Cornetta: You’re welcome. And again those are 2 beginner strategies really. In list building there are one again that I still use today, but ones that certainly you can use if you have no limit and then of course then there’s a whole set of strategies from your actual list. So if I could take it to the medium level I’d be happy to do that.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah that….
John Cornetta: If you already have a list. Phil Ainsworth: Yeah let’s move on. So… John Cornetta: Great.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah sorry.
John Cornetta: Sure I’d like to talk about integration marketing. Phil Ainsworth: Oh perfect yeah okay.
John Cornetta: Okay in integration marketing and so many marketers miss this, and this is a little bit more mediate to advanced level, and I’ll assume that you already have a list of 1,000 or 1,500 and you’re ad swapping or you’re doing solos and things like that.
Phil Ainsworth: Okay.
John Cornetta: There’s just so many interactions with subscribers that people miss. I never miss any subscriber where I'm not giving them the opportunity to subscribe to something else or to sell them. And here’s just a few examples. One is a banner trade. And that is me and Phil both have a website and I say “Phil if you’ll put my banner on your download page and offer it as a free gift I’ll do the same for you”. And so on Phil’s download page it says “here’s your download, thank you for your purchase (or thank you for downloading it if it’s a free offer), by the way check out this free bonus I’ve got for you” and then a banner says “click here for six free reports on blogging”. And when people click that they’re taken to my squeeze page but me and Phil have set up tracking links where Phil knows exactly how many people click on that link and he’s sending me, and vice versa, I’ve done that for Phil. And then simply at the end of the month he and I sit down and we do a little audit. And he sent me 1,000 and I’ve only sent him 800 well then I mail out for Phil and I catch up on those 200 clicks and we’re even. But that traffic is the best traffic in the world, it’s evergreen, people have already entrusted Phil, they’re already into his list and Phil recommends, “Here’s my friends’ product you might want to check it out”. It converts the highest; I’ve seen 65 and 70% conversion rate on you know integration marketing evergreen traffic. There’s other ways. Never give a download product out like a PDF or a report where
they just, it downloads the PDF, it’s just a mistake. Always download everything in a zip file. And here’s why. Inside the zip file it only contains the PDF, what you want to contain in every single file that is downloaded by your subscribers is another folder that you can create on your desktop, right click if you’re on IBM, Windows. Create a new folder and then call that folder “bonus” or “bonuses” and put it inside the folder that you’re going to zip. Inside the bonus folder you create shortcuts by again clicking, right click, create shortcut and it asks you to somewhere on your computer or on the internet and you put it on the internet and you type in the code for whatever your integration marketing partner’s websites. I would type in Phil’s link that he gave me that will track traffic back to of course his site. And you can put your own sites in there. I put 4 HTML shortcuts inside that bonus link of other marketers. So when people download my product they hit the product and they get a folder that says bonuses they go oooh. They open it up and there’s 4 shortcuts to other marketers websites that I get a credit for every time somebody clicks on one of those links. And for them they have new people coming into their funnel that have just downloaded my product. It’s just one simple way, and people forget that one step and I get thousands and thousands of clicks a month just for doing that. And they’re credited to me. Phil Ainsworth: And again I guess those… you said that the integration banners convert really
well but I guess… I’d imagine those links in the bonus folders, I imagine they convert really well as well?
John Cornetta: Very very well. And you know what your partners love it. And so you make one of these bonus folders for your partner or your 3 partners and then you can even make ones for them because they’re going to be lazy and with their link back to you and say here I’ve created this, put it into your zip file with the product, the free products that you’re giving people and you’ll get some clicks that are credited to you. So you want to give your partners as much help to give clicks to you because paying them back you’d love to pay them back. I pay back plus 10%.
Phil Ainsworth: That’s… yeah that’s something else actually, something else that you’ve, I’ve seen that you do John as well is, talking about paying back 10%, is you have this idea of banking.
John Cornetta: Yes.
Phil Ainsworth: If people… I wondered if you wouldn’t mind, and I’ve love to come back to integration marketing in 2 seconds, but if you wouldn’t mind telling people your banking idea on ad swaps which I think is brilliant?
John Cornetta: Yeah well I don’t know if I invented it but I certainly you know maybe come up with most of the idea or made it a great idea and that is banking clicks. And what you’ll find is that there are bigger marketers out there that are not going to swap with you. A guy has a list of 40,000 and your list is 1,000 they say “I can’t swap” and so I found that as well. And what you do is you say “why don’t you bank clicks with me, or for me”. And what that basically means is you’re going to send out to your list before they send to theirs. So the reason I did this was there were so many people with 500 lists and 1,000 and 1,500, if I offer my list they’re going to get 500 clicks in a minute, it wouldn’t be fair to me.
John Cornetta: So I wanted them on the list, their subscribers. I said “look I’ll give you a link and you send me as many clicks as you can. And you can take a month to do this. Or 2 months. You could put it your downloads, in your signature or your follow up emails, you can send out to your list, anything you want. And when you reach let’s say 100 you let me know and I’ll send you back 110. If you send me 10,000 I’ll send you back 11,000”. And while it looked like I was losing 10% I wasn’t because here I was being able to gain subscribers from all of these smaller lists when people that had my size lists were not even working with these people, it was as if they weren’t even on… you know, the same place you know. So I’ve created a lot of friends and I’ve got a lot of list owners that love me and it’s helped them and it’s helped me.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah I guess effectively what you’re doing is increasing the number of ad swaps partners you can swap with by kind of combining their different swaps together to make them become a bigger swap partner than they effectively were before, so I guess you’re broadening your range of people you can swap with by allowing them to take a bit of time over sending you the clicks. And also you’ve obviously won those people over because they’re going to be grateful to you for being one of the big guys who’s taken the time to actually help, because they view it as someone that’s giving them a helping hand up, so they’re going to help you out in the future as well.
John Cornetta: Yeah and I'm surprised more people don’t take advantage of that. I'm working on something to automate the process now and make it easy for them to get their link and whatnot, but I'm surprised more people don’t take advantage of it actually.
Phil Ainsworth: Especially as it’s a common problem with the big list owners have is finding other ad swaps partners to swap with because the bigger your list gets the fewer people you can swap with because there aren’t that many other people with massive lists. So this kind of solves that problem. Yeah exactly. That’s great John. So just going back to integration marketing, you’ve talked about their putting a banner on a partners thank you page and they would do one for you in return, putting bonus folders into products, something you hit on just there actually is by doing a few things for your partners, to encourage them to send you clicks, you actually make it more likely for them to promote you. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that because something that’s always struck me is the most successful marketers are the ones that do things for other people that actually gives a benefit back for themselves in return, does that make sense?
John Cornetta: Yeah well it does on several levels. It does on a spiritual level I think, you know, on a karma level, it does. And then the other thing is that you know if you’re going to be great at something and this is what your passion is then I'm sorry you’re going to find most of the people that you work with are going to disappoint you because they’re not going to be as passionate and committed to it as you are. So instead of just getting disappointed every single day, why not lift them up and instead of saying place this banner here and create a bonus file there, why not make all of those tools for them? Take the extra time out of your day, make all the solutions for them, make a little 5 minute jing video on how to put them on a page, present them with the offer and say “hey would you like to do some integration marketing where we swap some clicks” and explain it. And when they say yes give them the zip folder with everything ready. Well now you’ve made their job so easy that
they actually do it, they actually implement it and they go wow that, you know Mary she’s on top of her game. And so instead of waiting you know all well and they say oh I’ll get to it, oops sorry the dog ate the trash, make it easy, give them it hand ready and then you know encourage, help them to get as many clicks to you as they possible can because that’s just building your list. And so now you’ve got someone who wasn’t as committed as you were acting as committed as you were because you gave them the shove.
Phil Ainsworth: Absolutely. I guess its basic psychology isn't it. The easier you make an action, the easier you make it for someone else to take an action the more likely they are to take that action, you’re encouraging them to do it, especially if they could see the benefits for themselves in it. And also you stood out for them as the one person that’s actually taken the 5, 10 minutes to actually help them out, so they’re more likely to help you back in the future as well, as well as send you those clicks?
John Cornetta: Yeah I usually, do my best t take any new person that’s in one of my rooms or whatnot and take them aside and give them some hints and strategies and a lot of times they would be like what do you want, you know what are you really after?. And I’d say “nothing really I want to help you out”. You know and one day he’ll help me out. I did that for a girl the other day, or last week, in one of the rooms and she turned out to be really good at making YouTube videos and you know what I mean she made a great little video for me, she didn't have to but she did. And so that was payback.
Phil Ainsworth: Awesome. Awesome John.
John Cornetta: A couple of other little things on integration marketing that people may not think of, is in your follow up email which is the first email that comes out from your auto-responder with the link to your download you can always place on there “here’s a bonus report for you as a new subscriber” and have the link be the same link that would be on a banner or in that bonus file inside the downloads as well, so another place to have integration marketing work for you.
Phil Ainsworth: So we’re talking underneath your signature at the bottom of the first email in the follow up sequence the same link that they’ve got on the banner, it’s just another place for your partner to put your link and you to put your partners’. John Cornetta: Absolutely.
Phil Ainsworth: So just another opportunity for people to click on. Excellent. And would you then have other ones in your other follow up emails with other partners maybe?
John Cornetta: Sure. You can do that, absolutely. And you can also do it to affiliate
programmes that you’re working. I mean never miss an opportunity that you have in front of a subscriber to present something for them to grow your list or grow your pocket book.
Phil Ainsworth: Definitely. The one question that’s popping into my head now John and I'm sure people listening are thinking this as well, is this is a great idea but first of all how do you monitor the fairness of it, so for example how do you make sure that you’re not sending someone 500 clicks a week and they’re only sending you 20 and I guess we can talk about link tracking then and maybe
you can recommend a link tracking service that maybe you use. And the second thing is then presumably you review this periodically to make sure that it’s working fair on both sides and I just wondered if you could talk for 2 seconds about that?
John Cornetta: Sure I happen to use Bud URL. Phil Ainsworth: Yeah me too, very good.
John Cornetta: Yeah it’s not like the most sophisticated. I have this incredible tracking thing, but Bud URL is real simple and you create you know you put in your URL on your website and create a tracking link which it shortens, and then you give that to your partner to use on the banner and to put on the follow ups and whatnot. And then what I suggest at the beginning if it’s someone you don’t know is that you agree that at the end of each week you guys will compare stats and whoever’s down in stats will make those up. So if I sent you 100 and you’ve sent me only 20 I pull your integration stuff, I put in another partner for a while while you catch up. And then as you begin to know someone you can do it monthly. I like to do it monthly and I do it with only about 3 people a month and then I switch the 3 people out and you know I know those people and I know about how we’re going to deal with it. If we have an off month and we go ahead and check it all up and I'm behind I’ll send out a solo mail to my list to catch up on those clicks and have them even out. So you make it just like a swap, it’s just like a swap but it’s a very long, over the course of a month, an integrated swap that takes no work once you’ve set it up. And the traffic from it converts much better than swaps. Phil Ainsworth: And presumably if you use the same code, the same link for, whether it be in
the email or whether it be in the bonus folder or it be the banner, all those clicks are going to go into the same click on Bud URL so it’s going to a very easy comparison procedure isn't it, because all of those different sources are all going to register as the same root click if you like aren’t they?
John Cornetta: Absolutely you have one link at budurl that you are able to check for that swap partner for any period. And then you know of course if they use it it makes it very easy. And if they don’t you’re going to still ask them to provide you know their stats but you’re going to have their stats anyway.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah.
John Cornetta: Because whatever link they do give you, you’re going to bud it. Phil Ainsworth: Yeah.
John Cornetta: So no matter what they give you you’ll bud it also so you’ll know the stats both ways. You following me?
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah definitely yeah, that’s a very good bit of advice, actually. Even if a partner gives you a click, a link definitely bud it, because you know in my experience 99% of people out there are trustworthy but there’s always the 1% that you have to kind of manage, so you’ve got to protect yourself.
John Cornetta: (Multiple speakers) seem to feel like 99% out there, but…
John Cornetta: So these are real basic ways but the basic way is to start a list from scratch and a way to continually grow your list on auto pilot and there are ways that a lot of other people do not utilise and use, but if you use it it’ll set you apart from the rest of the people out there and can really maximise your list growth experience tremendously. Tremendously.
Phil Ainsworth: John do you do any… it’s something that I’ve done in the past, and I wonder if people listening might do it, do you do any what I call permanent ad swaps which is after doing an ad swap with a partner you then just agree to insert each others ad swap copy into your own follow up sequence for the next month, 2 months, 3 month or however, how long, and so as each others lists continue to build you’re almost repeating the ad swap for each subscriber as they get to that point in the follow up sequence, is that something you’ve ever done or had any success with?
John Cornetta: You know what, I’ve done it, one time with one marketer, I haven’t done it to the extent that maybe I should look at. I don’t do a whole lot of follow ups series with my subscribers, is the reason I do about 5 and I'm done, but it sounds like you know a very good idea.
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah okay, just something… there you go there’s something you can try there mate.
John Cornetta: Yeah, well I appreciate that and I’ll look and see if there’s some way to maximise it and take it to the next level.
Phil Ainsworth: Sure, okay. I'm just looking at…
John Cornetta: Partners ad swapping and you put it in the fifth follow up and they’re each 3 days out so you know that 15 days later any subscriber that joins your list is going to get an email basically for your partner?
Phil Ainsworth: Exactly, it’s kind of like an evergreen ad swap for their future subs, the ones that weren’t their subs at the time of your ad swap but they’re the future subs that join them, they still get to hear about you you know further down the line, so it’s kind of like a way of evergreening the ad swap.
John Cornetta: And do you track that again through a bud and even up at the end of the month or something?
Phil Ainsworth: They just use the same link that you gave them for the ad swap, the original ad swap; they just re-use that link because it still flags up in Bud.
John Cornetta: And then you check stats once in a while?
Phil Ainsworth: Yeah like you agree beforehand shall we do this at… let’s have a look at the end of the month see if we’re both doing okay, because obviously it relies on your lists both growing at roughly the same level. If one person is growing at 3,000 a month and the other person’s only growing at 300 a month it’s not as fair, but obviously, but then you make good on that further down the line. But yeah, yeah it’s just a suggestion.
Phil Ainsworth: It’s something I’ve used when I first started out to try and get ad swaps with bigger partners was by offering that, by saying look I mean you’ve got a list of 5,000 I’ve got a list of 500. If we did an ad swap it wouldn’t be fair on you but what I'm prepared to do is to add your copy to my follow up sequence, as I continue to grow I'm going to be sending you more clicks over time and then, you know once I’ve made good on the deal we can then try something else. So just a suggestion there.
John Cornetta: No absolutely it’s a very good one.
Phil Ainsworth: Cool thanks. I'm just looking at my watch here and I can see we’re just running out of time here, so I understand your time’s really valuable and precious John so I don’t want to hold you up all day, I just wondered if you had any last tips or tricks for anyone, maybe is there going for the
intermediates, the more expert stage, so they’ve done everything you’ve talked about so far, so their list’s up to say 10,000, 15,000 by now, are there any other tricks or tips that you might be able to share before we call things to an end?
John Cornetta: Well now we’re talking about my real area of expertise. Phil Ainsworth: Oh excellent okay.
John Cornetta: I would go on for hours so I don’t know.... Phil Ainsworth: Oh okay.
John Cornetta: ...where to start on that, but you know because my philosophy on building lists and on mailing lists is so radical that it would, I would leave you and the listeners with such shock that they’re going to go who is this guy, I mean I would probably leave people with more questions than answers, but for example if you join my list be prepared to be mailed 5 or 6 times a day. Phil Ainsworth: Well yeah it’s funny; we’ve had a call with Shane Purcell already and Shane
talks about mailing 5 or 6, well more than 5 or 6 times a day, so it’s definitely a growing idea amongst IMers definitely.
John Cornetta: But there’s a lot of tricks to how to do that properly. Phil Ainsworth: Yeah.
John Cornetta: And there’s a lot of tricks to that, but you know I would just tell you… how about I leave you with this. Never say things like I’ll mail twice to match clicks, just say I’ll match clicks.
Phil Ainsworth: Right.
John Cornetta: Be prepared to send out for bigger partners ahead of time, find a bigger partner and in a way of banking clicks say please give me a swipe or a link, I’m going mail out to you for the next month, and you know what I mean they’ll mail back for you. And don’t be afraid to take one of the people that you’re on their list right now and respond genuinely to one of the emails you get. I get it with Frank Salinas and I thought, he was my idol. And one day I responded, I replied and said man I’ve been on your list for 6 months, I know you’ve never heard of me, but I’d love to ad swap with you. And you know
what he wrote me back? He said and we’ve been in a relationship but now we’re partners and I said of course I’d do business with him or the partners in sites and I’d swap with him but he wouldn’t have done that had I not asked of course and had I just replied with “see my MLM site”. So you know don’t be afraid to approach anyone and ask them to do business with you on the internet because most of the big guys are waiting for people to ask them and don’t get asked. It’s like the prettiest girl at the dance, sometimes she’s not dancing, because all the boys are afraid that she’s going to turn them down. Phil Ainsworth: It’s true.
John Cornetta: Yeah so don’t be afraid. I’ll tell you just go over and throw yourself out there and you’ll do well.
Phil Ainsworth: And especially John, as you suggested, if you do it by replying to, if you do it as a subscriber by replying to one of their emails to you, or if you do it as a customer from buying one of their products and sending a support email, because you’ve already formed some sort of link there, some sort of relationship you already subscribe, you’re already a customer, it makes it much more likely for that internet marketer to respond to you because they already know that you’re kind of connected to them in some way, you’re already a subscriber you’re already a customer. So that’s a real good tip by John there, thank you. Hello John?
John Cornetta: Absolutely, absolutely, still here.
Phil Ainsworth: Cool, I thought I’d lost you. Okay John I mean I don’t want to take up all your time so I’m going to let you go in a second, I just wondered, there’s obviously people listening right now definitely going to be impressed by what you’ve said, and they might want to learn more about… hear more tips from you, more chicks from you, I understand you’ve got a couple of interesting new sites that are being launched soon. List Launch Domination and All About Viral Marketing. I just wonder if you wouldn’t mind talking about those just for a couple of minutes and then we can give people the link to it and they can check it out for themselves?
John Cornetta: Okay well “All About Viral Marketing” was a site that I actually purchased and now have changed a little. I purchased it because it was the first site I ever made money on in internet marketing. And it’s just a real simple site that allows you to re-brand free PDFs with your links and when people, you can give it away to your list or give it away on Twitter and when people read it you get credits because the links are now yours, but if they come back to the site and join and they pay the five dollar fee to re-brand the books it goes directly to you, it’s 100% commission and it does teach the basics of viral marketing. It’s a cool, cool little site I use it to this day on my download pages.
Phil Ainsworth: Cool.
John Cornetta: List Launch Domination is a site that is going to teach people how to start a list from basically scratch like we’ve talked about today and some video training and social media marketing and tells you how to use the viral list builder properly - a lot more indepth than we went here. And to really launch that list to the level where you can then begin swapping and doing the other things that you need. And so, it’s a product by me and Frank Salinas and I’m
going to save a couple, I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s a couple of spoilers in there, it’s a really powerful way for people to, you know, take the learning curve in 6 months and turn it into, say, 6 days.
Phil Ainsworth: Wow excellent. Obviously there’s people listening they’ve got enough information that you’ve talked about today to be getting on with but if they want something that’s going to turbo charge it to get things done a bit quicker then there’s some tips in there that are going to help them so that’s excellent. John Cornetta: Yes.
Phil Ainsworth: Cool, so anyone listening that wants to check that out, if you go to… I’ve created a special page on my blog about this, if you go to
www.philainsworth.com/johncornetta, that’s j.o.h.n.c.o.r.n.e.t.t.a and that’ll take you to one of those products and you can see more and check it out and go ahead and go for it and then purchase it and have some turbo charged boosting to your list building and to your viral marketing. Okay, John thank you so much for the interview I’ve really appreciated it, I’ve learned loads, I know the people listening will have learned loads as well. You’re an absolute superstar mate, thank you very much.
John Cornetta: Phil, thank you for having me very much.
Phil Ainsworth: That’s okay, and I look forward to working with you more in the future and also thanks for everyone listening, I hope you’ve learned more today, and in fact I know you have because John’s shared some real good stuff with us today. So to everyone listening - keep going with your list building efforts and we’ll speak to you all soon. Thanks very much and bye bye.
