My Subscribers – An Apology

During the last couple of weeks many of you have been receiving an avalanche of emails from me, often 2 a day. I have literally just found out about this in the last couple of hours, and I can only apologise. Let me explain what has happened.

About 12 months ago I decided to partner up with one of the leading internet marketers in the UK, Nuneaton based Ray Johnson (link to his blog on the right if you’re interested). We had been collaborating on various projects for a while and we decided it made sense to make it “official”. In January of this year we set up Web 3.0 Marketing together. That’s also why there hasn’t been an update on this blog for 12 months, we’ve been using Ray’s blog instead. I’ve been mostly doing the product creation, and Ray has been doing the promotion and marketing.

One of the things we looked at was list building. Many of our customers ask us how they can quickly build up a list of subscribers and customers. Just over 12 months ago we put together a product called Adswap Masterclass which is all about swapping lists with other marketers to build up your own list quickly. That product sold extremely well and we have been looking at doing an “upgraded” version of it.

One of the points that came up was “how quickly can we build up a list of 1000 subscribers starting from scratch“?

We decided to test that. However, as you know it went horrifically wrong.

This is why – because we are snowed under with work on various projects we didn’t have the time to do this right now. So instead of waiting and doing it ourselves, we outsourced it. And 2 major errors were made:

1. Mailings were ONLY supposed to go to subscribers on the NEW list created a couple of weeks ago. See image belowThe new list is called “continuitysqz”. Mailings should ONLY have gone to this list, unfortunately they went out to ALL of them.
2. The second mistake was worse than the first. There should have been only TWO mailings per WEEK – one with some genuine free, useful information and the other a promotional mailing (an adswap with another marketer). As you know, and as I have just discovered myself, that didn’t happen. The emails were stacked up one after another, sent out one after another, in many cases 2 promotional emails a day. Madness.

Rest assured I have now stopped this. No further automated mailings will go out. Below is the up to date screenshot from my Aweber account:

You’ll notice under “Status” it says “Review”. This means they have been stopped.

I am however, a great believer in trying to take a positive out of every situation. These are the positive lessons I have taken:

1. Yes I got unsubscribes but I am amazed there weren’t more. Personally I would have unsubscribed much sooner. All I can say is thanks for being more patient than I would have been
2. Not everything can be/should be outsourced
3. Ironically as the first graphic above shows, our list building methods do work. In fact they work very well indeed – starting with ZERO subscribers we built a targeted list of just under 400 in 10 days. However……

The real problem with that graphic is 107 unsubscribes – over one quarter. We upset a lot of people by overmailing (if that’s a word). That upsets me; I tend to take every unsubscribe personally. But at least I know the reason why.

I thought about what I could do to try to make amends; those of you who have met me know that isn’t my normal way of doing things.

I know a lot of people struggle with building up a list of customers. We’ve just done a customer survey on Ray’s blog and that came up as one of the top 3 problems people have online. Your list is the most important thing you can have, without it you have no business.

So I’m going to give you a free copy of Adswap Master Class. This isn’t some crappy 10 page ebook containing stuff you’ve seen before. It’s a training program containing 12 videos, an ebook and several templates you can use. I personally wrote that ebook and personally recorded those videos (those of you who know me will recognize my voice 🙂 ). Last year we sold a LOT of copies of that at $200 each.

You can download it free from the link below, I’ll leave it up until midnight November 11th UK time so be quick! Since we’re still getting folks paying good money for that, I’ll have to take the link down after that.

***UPDATE November 12th – link now removed***

Finally I apologize again for the inconvenience. I’m not going to completely stop sending out emails with USEFUL content in the future but I think for now a period of quiet is in order.

Feel free to leave your comments below – good and bad. I’m a libertarian so I don’t censor anything on here!

Best wishes

Robert