Viral List Building: Choosing Your Automation System

In the previous part, I talked about putting your offer together. If you have your offer ready, it’s time to put together the website. In this part, I want to talk about choosing your viral list building software.

With my recent OptinDesign.com, I settled with the OTO-type model. This is where you offer something for free to get the sign-up and after that present your new subscribers with an upsell to a paid membership. With the OTO model, every subscribers is automatically an affiliate. They can later promote your viral website and earn commission from the upsell.

I like this viral list building model because you can build your list and make money at the same time.

I also use this model with my DIYMiniSite.com.

The difference between DIYMiniSite.com and OptinDesign.com is the software that is powering it.

With DIYMiniSite.com, I coded everything from scratch. Though I know how to get things done, I am not really a diligent programmer. I am a bit lazy when it comes to coding. After I finished coding for DIYMiniSite.com, I just managed everything from phpMyAdmin. Yes, I am pretty good with SQL and I can write the commands to edit, view and delete records. And I do that all from phpMyAdmin. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to know all these things with your site. I found you a better solution.)

Of course, in the long run, it’s a bit of a hassle. But that’s how I manage things at DIYMiniSite.com.

And because of zero documentation, lack of planning in the development and the absence of a control panel for administering the system, it’s not easy to duplicate the site for other projects. I can’t give my system from DIYMiniSite.com to others because they won’t be able to use it.

Actually I was not really happy with the code at DIYMiniSite.com. And when I wanted to launch WOWPopUp.com, I started coding everything from scratch all over again. So it’s back to the drawing board. Though the general engine to the viral list building and the membership management is a lot better, I still don’t have a control panel.

It still works. The bad thing about that is I lost a lot of time coding and debugging. What I should be doing was planning for marketing, create the freebies, create the products, put more value in the website and putting together joint venture deals.

One time ago, I found a system that was sold with Master Resale Rights. It can do what I have in DIYMiniSite.com and WOWPopUP.com. And I thought that this could be the answer to my problems. I have two websites running with this viral model that this system supports. I could write a case study and later sell copies of this system.

I bought the master resale rights. But when I looked at the system – boy, it was a mess. There were bugs everywhere. Things weren’t working right. And the codes were not document and it was a terrible mess. Not the mention that there was virtually no support at all.

That was one bad investments I did. And I couldn’t get a refund for it too. That was months ago, maybe a year ago or so…

So remind myself that I need to find a good, robust system, backed with solid support.

With OptinDesign.com, I don’t want to code everything all over again. I just want to build the website, create the products and get joint venture deals. And I need to find a system that can do what I want.

I know there are few out there. Of course, there’s the Butterfly Marketing by Mike Filsaime. Then there’s Easy Members Pro. These two are good products. But then I found Viral Sale Generator. And there are things that attracted me to VSG more.

Remember my frustration with the other script that I bought previously. After that, when looking for any software, support is my main priority. With VSG I found that it was developed by one of the top software development house in the world. I found out that they guys that developed VSG are the same guys that created Post Affiliate Pro. And Post Affiliate Pro is one of the best affiliate tracking software out there. It’s being used by thousands of happy merchants all over the world. In fact, they also won the best affiliate software by Affiliate Software Review in 2006.

That boosts my confidence in them. If they can develop and support an affiliate tracking software, I guess something like a VSG shouldn’t be much of a problem. From my point of view, VSG was developed by a real software house. No offence to the other viral system, but most of them are created by marketers. So that is where VSG is different.

So I decided to go with VSG for my OptinDesign.com. This way I can concentrate more on product creation and marketing.

VSG is great because it handles the affiliate sales tracking, the email system, the reporting, paying affiliates and many more things. It does make my life easier.

Well, I didn’t mean to get into the system part too early. But I was writing and this came out. If you are thinking of putting together your own viral list building project, you may want to consider Viral Sale Generator.

Alright, since we have the system part covered, your assignment…

• Design the website
• Write your copy for the squeeze page (for your free offer)
• Write your copy for the one-time offer

Get start on that with all the marketing know-how you have right now. Maybe I’ll cover that in the next part and you can compare how well you did. And after that’ll we’ll go through how to put your web design and squeeze into Viral Sale Generator.