How do you move someone from being on your main list to your customer list?

Yesterday I talked about the coaching program I enrolled in with Alex Jeffreys. I also told you that Alex teaches that money is being made by the business behind the products being sold. He then went on to create a product for his students just so they could focus on building that online business the way he teaches, and not be troubled by actually creating products to sell.

Alex is all about list building. So I actually posted a question to my fellow students asking when the product starts selling and we have new customers, how to get someone from your main prospect list to a new customer list.
Customers should be treated differently in my book. They should get more of your attention. They should get emails about support questions they may have. They should be sent free high quality information. You should really go all out and build a solid long term relationship with your customers because they’ve put their trust in you and you should deliver.

So the question I asked was, how do you move a person from the main prospect list to a new customer list so you could treat them differently?
It turns out that this isn’t that easy to do. Thank god I’m a part of a community of like minded online entrepreneurs from the coaching program so we could brainstorm about this. I couldn’t think of a solution all on my own so I thank everyone that helped with the brainstorming.

After some though, we came up with a solution! There’s an elegant way of doing this and to cut a long story short, here’s how to do it:

1.After payment, redirect to a thank you page asking for email address to send your product to. I think you should also ask for name as your new customer has now moved to a new level of trust with you so here’s a chance for them to give you their real name if they used a pen name (a.k.a fake) one before
2. The thank you page for this opt-in form is a standard one saying that you just sent them the download link
3. The confirmation email says something like ‘click this link to download’ (even though it’s the confirmation link of the opt-in form)
4. The thank you page for confirmation IS the download page
5. Have your auto repsonder delete them from your main list. This works differently on different auto responders, so just check how to do it with yours

If you look closely at this process you’ll see it has a natural flow, it’s non obtrusive, you actually had your new customer double opt-in for the new customer list. You’ve also deleted them from your main list so they’ll only get emails from you that are relevant to them (and that’s always a good thing).

So here we have it, the super smallish guide to move your prospects from your main list into a new customer list. I think this is critical for anyone trying to make it online and I thank everyone who helped me come up with the solution.

And if what you read over here looks too complicated and you don’t understand some of it, have no fear. All it means is that you still haven’t learnt enough for this to make any sense. So I suggest you stick around this blog as I’ll be talking and showing and teaching what I do so you can learn from my experiences.

What do you think about the process I just described? Will it work for you? Can you improve it? Put your thoughts into the comments for this post and let’s keep the discussion going

Who on earth is this Alex Jeffreys guy that people flock to him for advice?

Alex Jeffreys. To tell you the truth I never heard of the guy until very recently. He’s very young and hasn’t really been online for very long. I learned of him when I heard him on video talking about his coaching program.
Something about the way he was down to earth and humble, together with amazing testimonials from recent students of his (several of which were actually able to quit their jobs because of him) made me join his recent coaching program.

Several things about this Alex Jeffreys guy are different than other so called gurus:
- First of all, he’s non hype. Can you imagine that?
- Second of all, he talks about the complete opposite of what you normally hear online. He’s all about teaching the principles of online business. He talks about the money online being made not by what you see upfront, not by selling products, but by the business that was built behind the scenes.
Have you ever heard anyone explain this?
- It’s the business behind the products that actually makes the money. So much so that he actually created a product for his students for free just so they won’t be stuck creating products and actually take the time to build a business online
- He’s unleveraging his time. By that I mean that he spends an awfull lot of his own time in this training program.
For instance, he does a webinar about once a week and spend almost twice the time that was alloted for it, answering questions by his students. He recently did an additional brainstorming session where people just asked for his advice on their specific websites and blogs (and get this) he spent 4 1/2 hours doing that call. 4 and a half hours of non stop talking, giving out tremendous specific advice. No wonder he complained later on that his jaw was numb
- His goals for the training are phenomenal. He wants his training to have such an impact so that more of his students quit their jobs and go full time online because of it. Judging from what his recent students tell me, several of them have actually quit their jobs and a lot more are actually making money online!
- He has raving testimonials and reviews about him online. And we’re talking thousands of such reviews

To me, he’s the mentor that I can relate to. He’s someone that actually tells you what you need to know to get going online. And for some reason, I get more done under his mentorship than with anything else I’ve tried online.
This may not be the case for everyone, but a lot of people feel the same way so I guess Alex is doing something right.

I’ll update more about what I do online, what works and what doesn’t on this blog. I’ll post tools that I find useful (and I usually find free ones) and basically give you the real story about what you need to do to make it online.

All of these updates to the blog are in no specific order, but if there are things you want me to write about more in detail, write them down in the comments to this post

Good people are hard to find, but I just found the designer for me!

In a word – Michael Ottman. Well, actually 2 words but this is the man.

I’ve heard of Mike before on Alex Jeffreys training and from Alex’s students. They all have nothing to say other than praise for the guy as he’s done most of the design work on their sites. I’ve also seen his work before and he’s also quit his day job and started an online business called simpleecovers.com so you can look at his designs much like I’ve done.

So I really liked the things he was doing. And then came Iain Buchana and started a small contest on his blog www.iainbuchanan.me and the prize was having Mike design a blog header. I took one look at my blog’s header (and you can see the dismal thing for yourself on a post I did a few days ago on this blog) to realize that this contest was for me and that I knew I would win it.

And win it I did.

15 hours later and the Ottman outdid himself and presented me with the header you can see on this blog. I love it and I hope you do too. I especially like the image on the left, mainly because it’s obviously giving you the trophy. I think that pretty much sums up what I’m doing here.

I’m giving YOU the trophy.

I’m in your corner to help you make it online by showing you how it’s really done – both the successes and the failures. This isn’t rocket science in that everyone actually has a shot at quiting their jobs and making a decent living online. But it takes work. And that’s where almost everyone fails.  If you work on your online business and you get yourself  a mentor to show you the way, you’ll get there.

Take Michael Ottman for example. Not only is he a great designer (and cheap as it turns out. and lightning fast) but he’s taken Alex Jeffreys on as a mentor, as have I, and he’s already quit his job.

So that’s Michael Ottman and his great great designs.

Now I’m asking you for feedback – how do you like my new blog’s header?

Why Hostmonster is the best hosting company

Yesterday I posted on my blog that I started using hostmonster, after reading John Jonas review them.

It’s such a great review that I thought you should read it too. I’m still new with them so I can’t say that much, but John’s review pretty much sums it all up in such a way that I think it’s worthwhile for you.

So here it is:

Great review right?

I must be mad! Or am I? I actually started paying for hosting

So this  is what I’ve been doing today – I started paying for hosting.

I know I know, what’s the big deal right? Well, I’m known for finding the best things online that actually work and are free. And if you think these things don’t exist, look at this blog right here. It’s based on wordpress which is the best blogging platform there is and it’s free. Millions of blogs are based on it. My poing being, free on the internet does not mean crap. It might take some diging around to find the best free thing out there, but free works and works well.

I’ve setup several websites and they where all hosted for free. I just figured out that the best free hosting out there isn’t that bad and for test sites it’s really enough.

So why have I started paying? Well, the best hosting right now is not free, and I got pissed finding out my free hosting of choice couldn’t put pdf’s on my sites. So I found a great review by John Jonas on his blog about all the hosting companies he’s been through and he recommended hostmonster. There’s a whole review on his blog, I really like John and he’s someone you can trust (plus he’s a great marketer that you should learn from) so I got myself a hostmonster account.

I then had to recreate my first 2 free hosted sites. Fortunately, all it took me was an hour. It’s incredible just how virtual an online business can be. At least the way I setup my business. I’ve set it up so that I can be in business from any computer anywhere. And this little fiasco of mine, having to recreate sites on new hosting (and doing so within an hour) just made me realize just how shockproof my business really is.

So let me share with you the tools I use to make sure I can be in business online even if someone steals my laptop tomorrow. I hope they don’t but if they do – no biggie.  I’ll still be in business online within hours.

This is how I set it all up:

1. Dropbox – Do yourself a favour and make sure all of your important files are backed up. I use dropbox because using it means that I don’t have to manually backup the files. If you need to backup your files manually, you usually do it only once in a while which means that your backups are never up to date. With dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) the second you save a file or update it, it automatically backs up on the dropbox server. And you can access those files from anywhere

2. Delicious – I bookmark everything using delicious. Again, I can access these bookmarks from anywhere. So I always have all of mysites, analytics, blogs, newsletter, affiliate programs etc. etc. available to me

3. Sxipper – Most of my bookmarked sites need to be loged into. With so many sites you need to manage your passwords and this is where sxipper comes in. It’s a firefox plugin that saves your username/passwords and inserts them into the login box when you land on a site that it has a username/password for. It saves a lot of timeand  it works like a charm

That’s it. That’s the basis of it all. When you combine all 3 tools, which are all free by the way, you can access all  of your important files and information from just about anywhere, on any computer
I highly recommend you put fail-safes on your online business, and I suggest you use the free tools I mentioned above.

And if you use a different technique with different tools, drop me a comment to this post and tell me. I’m sure a lot of my readers will love to have that information handy