by Jonathan Paston

As it says in the manual “Today is the day to email your list”.

Well, this is a bit presumptious, Mr Michael Green! So let me presume something.

Most of the people who are interested in The 2020 Challenge, (I presume), are not likely to be established Internet Marketers. As a result they are equally unlikely to have a list to email to!

To be fair to the manual the book does show how, during the training, you should have been collecting subscribers through pre-sales of the product. But even if you have your list is going to be pretty small compared to those of your affiliates. And, as we have seen from my test campaign stats, a conversion rate of 4 - 5% is typical.

So, once again, I put myself in the position of the ‘newbie’ and looked at how I could muster a big list to email. One of the ways of achieving a big list, quickly, is to buy into a ’lead-generated list’.

What is a lead-generated list? It is a list of names and emails of people who have opted into a page that offers information on a targeted market. Or at least you hope it is.

The problem with working with lead-gen lists is that you can never be sure that the subscribers are targeted to your niche. The names have usually been collected for pages that offer information of a more general nature. Information on ‘home business’ for example, which would cover a variety of Internet Marketing niches without particularly targeting any one of them.

So what can you expect from buying a lead-gen list? I set out to find out by buying 10,000 names and email addresses on the basis that, eventually, a percentage of them might just be interested in my book.

Now you cannot just buy a list and sell your product to them. It just won’t work. I mean if you were emailed out of the blue, from someone you had never heard of, with a message that took you straight to a sales page, what would you do? I know what I would do. Consign it to the Junk Mail folder!

So you have to introduce yourself first. Offer them a gift for subscribing to your list. Build up a relationship if you like.

This isn’t the place to go into the hows and whys of developing a relationship with your subscribers. Suffice it to say that it takes time, sometimes weeks, before you can presume to introduce your product to them.

But there are some interesting statistics (again) to what happens when you take on a lead-gen list. And I’ve detailed those in Are Lead-Gen lists Worthwhile?.

If you are interested go there to read all about it. Otherwise why not have a look at what The 2020 Challenge is all about by clicking here?