Some new ideas on making money from a marketing/mailing list

[USN-Ken]

Sharing for fun….

Here is an interesting way to make money from mailing lists – become the connector, or the middle-person, the broker, and make money by connecting people who are on the SAME list.

I come from the real estate investing world where we regularly target mailing lists of absentee-owners (landlords who have a different address than the property they own). If your list contains the date the house was purchased – BINGO!

Any absentee owners who bought within the last 3 years are ACTIVE BUYERS of real estate.

Any absentee owners who bought 15+ years ago are POSSIBLE SELLERS of real estate.

All on the same list – just bought at different times. You send a letter to the buyers asking them to contact you and let you know what they look for in properties, THEN you send a separate letter to possible sellers and ask them to call you and give you details of their property.

Then, you connect the buyers with the sellers…a broker the deal.

ONE LIST – JUST CONNECT THE BUYERS WITH THE SELLERS.

So, what If you have a list that isn’t real estate related?

Well, using the list to connect buyers and sellers can still work!

Jay Abraham tells the story of working with a business broker. They got hold of a list of all the Certified Public Accountants in the state of California.

They sent a letter to all 60,000 CPAs asking if they are ready to retire or sell their practice. 600 CPAs responded to the letter and said they were ready to sell.

Then, Jay and the business broker sent a 2nd separate letter to the other 59,400 CPAs who didn’t respond to the first letter…. and asked them if they wanted to BUY other CPA practices.

Then, they connected those who wanted to sell to those who wanted to buy CPA practices. They made 60 official transactions and the broker made around $1,000,000 that year. All from mailing two letters to ONE list.

: )

 

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[Fastlane Liam]

Hmm okay interesting, I like the idea.

How do you make money from it? Do you take a cut?
How do you find the mailing lists?

 

[USN-Ken]

Hello. Thanks for the reply.

There are several ways to make money from lists:

You can sell the lists themselves (anywhere from $0.05 - $0.13 per name) by cold calling businesses that could use the list. Or, put an ad on craigslist and sell it that way.

You could upload lists into facebook and use the list as a custom audience and target ads to them....do this for businesses and charge a fee.

You can rent out the list (Thats where you keep the list in your possession and your customers give you their marketing materials and then you either take it to printer and have the printer put the name/address on someone else's materials and then you mail them.) Renting lists keeps your list private while you market to it using other peoples materials and then get paid per name, or per lead that comes in, or a percentage of the sales they get from your list. You can 'rent' it out to lots of companies in a related industry.

You can trade the lists for other things. I once traded a list of tax delinquent properties in a county for MLS access. So, a real estate agent gave me their login into so I could research properties on my own without bothering the agent to do it for me......and, in exchange, the agent got a list of high-probability prospects. Win/Win.

You could use the list to find leads, get the lead under contract...then sell that contract to a third party (collecting a middleman fee). You can do this with houses. In the real estate world this is called flipping contracts aka 'wholesaling'.

You could market to the list yourself and then when someone responds to your marketing, you could sell that name and phone number as a 'hot lead'.

As for where to get the lists...there are several places...

You can get lists from public records offices in your city an county. They have lots of lists, like tax-delinquent properties, divorce filings lists, boat owners, absentee-owned houses, etc.

You can buy lists from places like infousa.com or databaseUSA.com.

You can sometimes get a library card from a large university because some universities have contracts with list companies so you can -- as a library card holder -- get as many lists as you want for free (this is what I do using carnegie university library). If you dont live near a large university you could put an ad on craiglist in the same town as a large university and ask a starving college student to give you their library card number in exchange for a fee. Worth a shot.

Hope this helps!