Joel Comm

Joel is a New York Times best-selling author of 12 books, including The AdSense Code, Click Here to Order: Stories from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs, KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays, and Twitter Power 2.0.

Joel has been building online businesses since 1995. His first website was amongst the first 18,000 sites in the world, and his efforts have brought experience in creating and selling websites, Internet marketing, blogging, social media marketing, public speaking, conducting live training events and more. Joel hosted and produced the world’s first competitive Internet reality show, The Next Internet Millionaire. He also created a #1 best-selling iPhone application which became one of the most talked about novelty iPhone apps of all time. Joel is always exploring new methods of leveraging his expertise and technology to educate, inspire and entertain others.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Joel’s success

Making offers on live stream to opt-in to your list

Result if you follow the steps in Joel’s session

Build up your list with video live streams connected to an opt-in offer

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

You know, we don’t own Facebook, we don’t own Twitter, we don’t own Snapchat, we don’t own any of these platforms. And yet, I see some people building their business solely on those platforms. And you know, things change, nothing is forever. Terms of service change, sites go out of business, sites get bought by somebody else, and the whole functionality can change.

And I’ve seen people’s entire businesses changed in an overnight by a simple SEO update that all of a sudden, their YouTube videos aren’t being viewed anymore. And so having your own email list is something you can control and it goes hand in hand with having your own website. You know, your website is your home, it’s your place on the web.

And I’ve had websites since 1995 but I’ve had a blog at joelcomm.com since 2003. And I still regularly release content on that blog, and I leverage the other social sites to drive traffic to those blogs.

And of course, on my blog, there’s opt ins, there’s offers, there’s free ebook offers, there’s you know, subscribe to my newsletter offers. And building that email list ensures that I have an asset that belongs to me that can’t be taken away by what happens with any other site in the world.

Alright, so just like your blog, you know, you own the content on their email, you’re doing the updates on your blog, but you’re collecting them. And you own that as well.

I see that has been obviously super important for the reasons you’ve just mentioned. What kind of impact has email had on your business in terms of, you know, whether it’s, you know, building audience or actually making money?

Oh, it’s tremendous. You know, from the very beginning, we built a newsletter, from my first site, worldvillage.com, and that allowed me to continue to bring traffic back to the site. And then when affiliate marketing started being a thing, I was able to send offers for products and services to that list as an affiliate, and generate significant commissions, really significant commissions from promoting other people’s stuff.

It’s also been huge for when I have my own products or services, to be able to announce to my list that I’ve got something I want to share with them. But what’s most important to me about the list is not that I can sell to people via what’s most important to me is that I can build a relationship with my fans and my followers or my subscribers via my list, which is why I’m a big believer that most of what you send to your list should be content, that you should always be delivering value, building relationship with the audience and nurturing them takes time.

So that when you do have something to sell, they’re already listening, they’re already engaged, they already know like, and trust you. And when you have built that into the relationship with your audience, then it’s not a very far hop, to get them to take an action for purchasing something.

Okay, that’s a great take on and when you’re saying, you know, it’s the cornerstone of your business, I mean, you’re building a relationship, obviously, through this method, and there’s probably people watching thinking, well, there’s loads of other ways to build a relationship. Why email?

Well, you know, there’s a lot of, the younger generation especially doesn’t use email, because they’re all about the quick social, but what we discover with emails that the majority of people still use it, and they actually want quality content in their inbox.

You know, the ability to reach people who have said, “Yes, I want to subscribe” to what you have to say that the number of people that will open and read your email is often much bigger than those that will see your posts on Facebook or on Twitter, or any of the other social sites.

And, you know, when you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg determining with his algorithm, what your friends and family and subscribers are going to see and what they’re not going to see. You don’t control that. But with email, we know that we have the power to go directly into people’s inboxes.

And of course, we can use HTML email and dress it up or we can use plain text, which I really like to do because I find that it has better deliverability rates. And we can do it as frequently as we want to and know that every time we send that email, there’s it goes to the inbox and there’s an opportunity for it to be opened and read and acted upon.