Inside my Daily Email House group, I recently started a discussion about list swaps.
(“List swap” = cross-promotion with another list owner. You send an email to drive your readers to my list… and I do the same for you.)
One big objection that lotsa people raised was “my list is too small to be interesting to anyone for a list swap.”
I don’t agree with this — there are ways out and around it, even with a small list.
But of course, there’s also an entirely different approach to doing something like a list swap, one which is much more direct, and which can lead to results much more quickly.
That other way is simply to pay somebody to promote you, instead of offering to do a quid pro quo with them. Which brings me to an idea I had recently.
I have long been itching to try running an auction, the way marketer Travis Sago teaches and practices.
An auction works just how you think:
Different people bid what they are willing to pay… the winning bidder takes the prize.
In this case, the prize would be a solo ad in my newsletter. Basically, a single email I’d send to my list, dedicated completely to building you up and to promoting your unique offer.
I would also work with you directly to define and refine the offer in your ad… so as to entice the greatest number of qualified subscribers or buyers to go to your page and sign up or buy…
… and I’d work with you to come up with a back-end offer you could offer right away, so you could liquidate your ad cost, and maybe then some, on DAY ZERO.
I’ve never offered an ad in my newsletter before.
I also don’t have a huge list.
But when I did run a list swap with Alin Dragu a few months ago — basically the same kind of thing I’m offering here, but getting paid in cross-promotion instead of cash — I drove about 200 clicks and got Alin about 120 new subscribers.
When I did something similar with Lawrence Bernstein last year, and promoted Lawrence’s $7 offer as part of a list swap, I drove 157 buyers to Lawrence’s list.
If those kinds of numbers get you interested even a tiny bit, here’s my question to you:
If I were to make this offer, and make a monkey out of myself by running an auction to sell it… would you bid at least $1?
If you would, hit reply and let me know.
(If you’ve already let me know inside Daily Email House, no need to write again.)
If there’s enough interest… I will put this auction on, and you will have a chance to bid $1 or more on a solo ad in my newsletter, and on getting my help to make it profitable immediately.
My goal is to help you create a little break-even funnel so you can turn around and run your ad again immediately, in another newsletter, and another newsletter after that, and so on… quickly growing your list with buyers and high-quality readers… and making yourself much more interesting as a list swap partner in the future.
On the other hand, if there’s not enough interest in my little auction idea, that’s fine. Really. You won’t hurt my feelings. I will simply go and sulk, and pretend like I never even considered making this offer.
Your choice. If you’re interested, you know what to do.