If you’re interested in building big lists, this should be gold if you know how to do the right research.
Last week I got round to watching a very rare interview with a guy called Mike Geary.
Mike works about 2 hours per day, skis almost every day of the season in Utah, and says he’s only “got on a call” about twice in the last year. He still makes several million per month from a bunch of email lists he manages.
Of course, he has a team that does the day to day, but I know a ton of 8 figure business owners who are still absolutely swamped and have no time to enjoy life at all. Sadly the video didn’t cover management skills, so let’s look at what it did cover.
Big email lists, like huge. 7 figure sized sends every day. All in the health market, selling things like ebooks, cook books, supplements and info products.
What I want to share today are a few of the steps that he took to get here, because although some of the methods aren’t as effective today, they’ve also got a hell of a lot easier to execute on, so it balances out.
The first step: The Truth about Abs.
Mike was working as a gym instructor on top of his environmental science job, and he wrote an ab workout book to get some exposure. He picked this one because that’s what his personal training clients asked him about, so lesson learned there. Make what people are asking for.
So far so good, now he needed distribution.
His first foray was into SEO. If you look at the site it’s crammed with articles, and has a load of backlinks from article directories. The exact tactics won’t work so well today, but now we have social media, Medium and Substack who will all push your content in varying degrees as well as Google if you get a bit lucky. You need a solid work ethic and a willingness to write about the topic, so don’t just chase the cash in a niche you’ll hate.
His other smart move was finding Clickbank.
Mike offered the ebook as something that affiliates could sell, and gave them as much of the revenue as he could.
Mike understood that front-end products aren’t profit generators. They’re customer generators.
They’re the thing that separates the tyre kickers from the ones with active credit cards and a willingness to use them.
That’s one of the secrets of success of Mike’s list management business. Most of the names he manages have already bought a product, not just signed up to a newsletter. They’re from people like supplement companies who don’t have much else to sell to their customer, and don’t have the time to manage a whole back-end suite of offers from affiliate partners.
I had a dig into a couple of Mike’s sites and built a small experiment of my own.
It reminded me of something I learned years ago, when I first started doing this model in another industry.
You need a LOT of offers.
Mike’s model proves the adage “you don’t find customers for products, you find products for customers”.
Working with affiliate deals rather than restricting himself to a single business’ own offers means he has an almost endless supply, and he’s found some surprising things about his customers.
One of his lists is for PaleoHacks.com – a site about the Paleo diet that was in vogue a few years ago.
The site started from a Paleo cookbook offer, a bit like Mike’s original ab workout ebook.
“We thought we were building a weight loss list, but when we started looking at the offers they responded to, we’d built a cooking list.”
A single business would never make enough offers to figure this out, but given all the offers available as an affiliate gave Mike the chance to experiment.
I have a site in the back pain niche (40 years of hanging around rowers has taught me a lot about backs). The offers cover exercise programs, pills and lotions, and a fair few gadgets. There’s no way I could come up with all of these on my own, but between a couple of networks I’ve managed to to work out which one my list is most interested in.
(Guess what, it’s mostly the same type of offer they signed up for).
From there on in is just a hard grind of experimentation and knowing his numbers.
Mike is adding thousands of names to his own lists each week, paying around $2 for an email opt-in.
He makes about half that back in the first couple of weeks with the very best offers that he knows convert. From there it’s a grind of offer after offer by email to make the rest back, and a tiny percentage of hyperactive buyers put him in profit. That’s pretty much the pattern of any email list, but at scale you’re working with cooler and cooler prospects and the balancing act becomes harder.
I’m building up some more content on list building, so if you think it’d be good to do a deep dive on the affiliate model, let me know and I’ll see what I can pull together that’s not breaking confidences.
Until then, let me know, how are you building your list at the moment?
