One of the things that I am a massive believer in is the importance of your bribe in list building.
For those of you who do not understand what I mean by bribe, let me explain.
Dictionary.com defines a bribe as:
Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person’s views or conduct.
Now put this into the perspective of converting visitors to your email list:
Your bribe is the product or promise that your offer your visitors to influence their decision of whether to join your email list.
What Are Some Bribe Examples?
There are quite a few ways that we can ‘bribe’ or visitors into subscribing to our email lists.
Here are a few examples:
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Ebook
Quickly becoming one of the most popular bribe among bloggers and internet marketers alike. They are easy to create (with a word processor and free PDF creator) and with the inclusion of a creative ebook cover – they can convert really well.
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E-Course
But why not ease your new subscribers into your emails? An e-course allows you to slowly introduce your readers to regular emails and it helps you package your content into more manageable chunks of information
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Newsletter
Quite popular in early internet marketing, but unless you have a unique selling point or are extremely popular or successful, it will be hard to make a newsletter successful. And why would you only want to email your list once a month? This seems like a waste of resources to me.
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Product
Products work extremely well as bribes because they are a lot harder to copy. There are a whole lot of internet marketers with ebooks teaching you how to make money online, but if you have a have created an blog comment software or have some free squeeze pages (shameless plug), there is not as much competition – therefore more likely to convert.
The Problem With Bribes
That is an overview of the types of bribes that you can use with your squeeze pages, but finding a bribe is not the problem. But consider that everyone seems to be able to find a bribe – the real problem is finding a bribe that converts.
Since every list builder is using bribes, visitors are becoming a lot thicker skinned and it is getting harder to convert them. We are no longer able to to use mediocre bribes and expect our lists to grow.
So what’s it going to take?
The Irresistible Bribe
Obviously there is a way to increase the value in your bribe or I wouldn’t be writing, so let’s take a look at a few things that you can do to up your bribe and make it to good to pass up.
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Make Your Bribe Unique
If someone can get your bribe from another source, why would they choose yours? Give yourself the best chance of converting your visitors and make sure that your bribe is something that you have personally created. This also allows your subscribers a preview of your writing style before they start receiving regular emails.
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Make Sure It Solves Their Problems
If your list is about traffic generation then don’t make your bribe an ebook about making money. Your visitors are at your website because they have a problem, it is your job to work out what that problem is, and then offer the solution in the form of your bribe.
Find out what your visitors problems are and create a solution that will stop them in their tracks and leave them with no other option but to subscribe.
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Make It Easy To Access
While this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the actual bribe, the whole process of subscribing to your list has to be made as easy as possible – with as little obstacles as possible.
‘If you give a visitor a reason not to buy – they won’t’.
Your visitors are looking for any reason they can find to not subscribe to your list – to not take your bribe. It is your job to make sure that they cannot find a reason and that the benefits of your bribe far out way any obstacle.
So one of the things that I did to make the process as simple as possible, is to only ask for visitors email address. Sure it is nice to personalise your emails, but that extra text field will drastically reduce your conversion rate.
What are you doing to make sure that your bribe is irresistible? Make sure you subscribe so that you do not miss the launch of my upcoming, unmissable bribe – that will cause your list to explode!
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