Make Money Marketing to a Small Responsive List –
An Interview With Gary Scott

When we interviewed Gary Scott last year, he shared an unbelievable amount of information about how copywriters can build their own self-publishing business and make a very nice living.

Today, he’s back, and he shows you exactly how to build a small but highly responsive list that you can market to, promoting information you’ve written.

CI: A lot of people are concerned about the economy. Have you and Merri seen a slowdown in your income?

Gary Scott: Actually, we’ve had a tremendous increase – up about 45 percent year-on-year over the last six months. In fact, we’re thinking about increasing our staff just because we’re so busy.

The important lesson there is that when the economy slows down, not all of the economy slows down. And one of the beautiful things about having your own small, self-publishing business is that it is so flexible. You can easily shift into areas that benefit from a slow economy.

Now, I didn’t have to shift. The information we publish has always been about how to beat inflation, how to live in low-cost places, and how to invest in currencies all over the world. Those are all hot, hot subjects right now. So the slow economy and the inflation caused by a dropping dollar pushed our business right up.

But if our business had been slowing down, I would certainly be asking myself, “Okay, who’s benefiting at this stage? What are the problems? How do I help people learn about the problems and then find solutions?” As we say all the time to our readers … problems are opportunities.

CI: That’s a good point. The self-publishing industry, especially when you do it online as you and Merri do now, gives you a lot of flexibility …

GS: It’s phenomenal. You can go in fast, do some research, find out what’s going on, come up with an understanding of the problems that people are facing, and then come up with solutions.

For example, we’ve been writing about investing in green companies and alternative energy and water purification for years. Even with the market down, those types of companies are doing much better than the general market. We are running out of oil and running out of clean water. Those are huge problems, and, consequently, they create huge opportunities. It’s obvious when you really think about it.

CI: In a recent article on your website, you talked a little bit about the size of the list you market to. Compared to many publishers, it’s quite small, but very responsive. How do you build a small, responsive list that you can depend on for income?

GS: When Merri and I decided to make a lifestyle change, we had a list of about 23,000 readers of our print letters. Though that list was very small, we had made millions of dollars off of it. So, I wrote to everybody on the list. I sent them a letter saying, “I’m not going to send any more print letters. If you want to continue reading what I have to say, you’re going to have to go to my website.”

At that stage, about 2,000 – maybe 2,500 – readers switched over. So that was a start. And we grow a lot as a result of referrals.

We now rely on four different methods: PR, search engine rankings on Google, my free daily e-zine, and pay-per-click ads.

CI: Tell us a little about how those methods work to build your list.

GS: The trick with PR is very simple. When you’re reading a publication that has information in an area you’re focusing on with your publishing business, and a reporter or editor writes something that makes sense, send them a letter of praise … and always put your website’s name beneath your name. The person you wrote to is likely to print your letter, and that will attract people to your website.

I not only try to do a lot of PR, I do what I can to have my name rank very well on Google, so it’s easy to find me. If someone searches for “Gary Scott” on Google, they’ll get my website. If they follow the Google link to my website, there’s another link right there where they can sign up for the free e-zine that I send out every day.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of my list-building program. I send out an email message to my list seven days a week, 365 days a year, and then I post it on my website. And that helps my rankings on Google … a lot. Google likes websites that consistently post fresh content.

The Internet makes it easy and efficient for me to send messages to my list regularly. And I have my list split into people who are interested in living in Ecuador … people who are interested in being multi-currency investors … people who are interested in global health secrets. So when I have an idea related to one of those subjects, I can email those particular readers who will be interested in it.

I always send my emails as plain text, so it doesn’t take a long time for people to load on their computer if they don’t have broadband. Then I invite them to go to my website and read it with pictures added.

Having lots of visits to the website and having fresh content posted to the website every day allows even a little one-man operation like mine to rank well on Google.

On many days – probably three out of every seven – the text of my message, the heading of my message, will rank very high on Google. For example, I wrote a message about essential oil mists and their healing properties the other day. The head of my title was “essential oil mists.” On Google, a search for the words “essential oil mists” ranked my site number six.

As I said, when a particular search phrase brings people to my website, we offer them a free report or a free e-zine to get them to sign up and find out more about who we are.

The miracle of the Internet is that it enables you to come into people’s homes as often as you want and gain their trust and confidence. For me, the Internet is not about developing a huge list. It’s about developing an intimate relationship with people who have a very specific interest in things that I have some expertise in – and then communicating with those people day in and day out so that they come to trust me. Then when the time comes for them to act on that interest that we share, they’re going to act via me. I find that those people also give me many referrals.

CI: How does your pay-per-click program fit into the picture?

GS: I do that for my Ecuador business. One of the things we publish is called Ecuador Living. It’s all about living, owning property, making investments, and traveling in Ecuador. I have an aggressive pay-per-click program for it that brings about 20 to 30 new people to my list every day.

CI: In your business, you stick to things you love … things you are passionate about. Some of our readers are still searching for a business idea that lights them up. What advice do you have for them?

GS: The foundation of a successful business is to do what you love. Turn your passion into profit. (That’s a phrase I started using 18 years ago.) And there’s a practical reason for it. Because when we do things that we enjoy and that we find fulfilling, we put more time and energy into them. And I promise you that if you want to have a successful, small business, even if you operate from home, you will need to put a lot of time and energy into that business.

Don’t get caught up in thinking that you have to find the one perfect thing that you want to do all the time. There are aspects of any business that you’re not going to like to do. In my case, it’s accounting. I hate doing accounting. I hate doing my taxes. I’m not an administrator. I like to write. I like to market. So I do writing and marketing most of the time, and I do the stuff that’s drudgery for me only when I finally simply have to do it.

When searching for the right business idea, ask yourself this: “If I were going to retire tomorrow and could do any one thing that I wanted to do, what would it be? Would I travel? Would I ride horses? Would I go fishing? Would I paint pictures? Would I go to concerts? If money and time were not an issue, what would I do?

Getting the answer to that question is step number one.

CI: And what’s step number two?

GS: Recognize that what you end up doing may not be anything like what you thought it would be. But once you get going, nature will lead you in the right direction – to where you really need to be in order to feel content. Our publishing program with AWAI is called Self-Publishing – Your Complete Business Plan for Creating a Life Without Borders … because the self-fulfillment aspect of being in business is so important. Being in business isn’t about “Hey, I’m cool, I’m having fun. This is all one great big, jolly trip.” It’s about feeling a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, when your head hits the pillow. It’s about feeling good, even if you had to do a lot of the things you didn’t want to do that day.

So just go ahead and get something small started.

What do you feel enthusiastic about right now? That enthusiasm will help you turn your passion into a business. If, for example, trout fishing is your passion, you will want to learn more about which lures work best. You will want to learn more about which rivers are best. You will want to learn more about all the best gear to take and where to go and when to go and so forth. What you learn will lead you to take action. Whether that action creates profits or loss, the process will generate more information, which will lead you to new business ideas.

This May was my 40th year in business … and when I look back at what I was doing 40 years ago, in some ways it’s the same, but in other ways it’s very different. I’m living in a different place in a completely different way. And the message I’m sharing with my readers is completely different because I’m different at 62 than I was at 22. I’m still writing about the things that I’m doing and enjoying and that I’m enthusiastic about, but it’s continually evolved over the years.

First, I ran my business while living in Hong Kong, then while living in London, and then while living Naples, Florida. I’m doing it right now from up in the middle of nowhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, and shortly I’ll be heading down to Ecuador where I have a hotel. Running a hotel in a little Andean village may seem crazy, but Merri and I are having a ball doing it. We actually gave the hotel away to a charity, so we don’t make any money from it. But we write about the process of running it. We love writing. That’s what we do. We’re publishers.

CI: Let’s go back to the nuts and bolts of an Internet publishing business. You start with an idea that you’re enthusiastic about. You build your list and develop your products. What about marketing?

GS: When you are doing what you love and you have a really focused market, your product becomes your best marketing vehicle.

I have three e-zines that I publish – one of them every single day and the others four or five times a week. And they are, first of all, search engine optimized a bit. Let’s say I do an article about real estate in Ecuador. In the past, when I was writing my print newsletters, I would try very hard not to repeat words. But for my e-zines, I do everything I can to repeat the key phrases without sounding like a total idiot. So I may have the words “Ecuador real estate” in the first four paragraphs of my message eight times. That message will be providing valuable information related to something that I’m selling. Then I invite my readers to buy that thing and give them a link to my promotional copy. But my promotional copy is minimal. I have about 20 products. So there are 20 pages of promotional copy at my garyascott.com website, though the site has almost 2,000 pages of content in total.

Most of those 2,000 pages will kind of sell something a little bit. For example, I just wrote a page about essential oil mists. I get a commission of 15 percent on any essential oil mist that I sell through my website – but I can’t just send my readers hard marketing every single day. They will become suspicious, and I will lose my intimate relationship with them. They will stop trusting me. So I write an article about how good essential oils are, and provide useful information about how to use them. Then, at the end, I say, “By the way, I use this … and here’s a special being offered by my friend who I’ve known for 20 years.”

Doing it this way fulfills our mission statement, which is to give people valuable, interesting, usable information that makes their life better. So with every message I send out, I make sure I do that. And then I give them links so they can buy something. If they’re interested, they can go on to that link. But there is no pressure.

I’m sure that a strong copywriter could do much better at marketing. But when you are a small two-person operation – it’s just Merri and me here – you can’t do everything perfectly. This is where enthusiasm comes into the equation again. If I’m enthusiastic about these essential oils because I like them and use them and really think they’ve helped my health, I believe that enthusiasm will carry through to my readers. The product itself actually becomes the marketing message.

It’s kind of like Oprah. The reason so many people follow her is because her lifestyle is a huge part of her marketing message. She promotes things that she uses herself and sincerely likes.

There have been times when, writing to my investing list, I’ll talk about something that I’m buying myself … and it’ll tank. It’ll lose money. So I go back to my readers and say, “Boy, I really goofed up on that one, and this is what it cost me.” And I’ve found that readers don’t dislike you or lose confidence in you if you honestly make a mistake – especially if they see that you are suffering from the mistake as well as they are. In fact, showing that I’m sharing their pain probably even strengthens the relationship.

CI: You mentioned you have about 20 different products. Do you use any strategies to make those products appeal to different audiences?

GS: Most of the things I do get used in a variety of ways. When I put on a seminar, for example, I will then write about what I talked about in the seminar in my e-zine … and then invite people to come to another seminar. So the text and the visuals from the initial seminar become my editorial, and my editorial becomes my marketing for the next seminar.

Here’s another example of how I turn a product into marketing …

Our Ecuador Living subscribers pay us $119 a year. They get an email every other day about some Ecuador real estate that’s for sale or about some idea or information that’s about Ecuador. They also get discounts if they come to Ecuador and stay in certain hotels that we’ve organized for them. And they get free broadband while they’re in Ecuador and the use of a free office. But the main thing is that email they get every other day.

Then I have a list of Ecuador Living prospects. These are people from my pay-per-click program that have shown an interest in Ecuador. They gotten a free report from me, but they haven’t bought anything. I send them an email every one to two weeks.

Today, I sent my Ecuador Living subscribers a long report about Ecuador visas. It told them about seven different kinds of visas that they can get if they decide to come and live in Ecuador. The first one covered in the report was the Ecuador tourist visa.

So I took the first part of the report – the part about the Ecuador tourist visa – and sent it to my Ecuador prospects. And I told them, “If you are an Ecuador Living subscriber, you can get the entire report, which tells you all about six other types of visas you can get. For more information, go to …” and then there’s a link.

So part of that report was repackaged and used as a marketing piece. (Actually, it was hardly even repackaged, it was just stripped out.) And the only thing that changed it from being a pure product to a marketing piece was a link at the bottom.

Another way that I leverage my products is through strategic alliances. I work with AWAI, I work with International Living, I work with Taipan, I work with Sovereign Society, I work with many of the Agora publications. The understanding we have is that they can take any of my articles and send them out to their readers as informational postcards … as long as they put in my email address. And that turns those articles into prospecting tools for me, making it possible for me to reach out to their huge mailing lists. I can usually tell when they’ve mailed one of my articles, because my reader list will usually pop up 20 to new 30 subscribers in a day.

CI: Before we wrap up this interview, is there any final advice you’d like to give to copywriters who are thinking about becoming self-publishers.

GS: Being a copywriter is a great place to start. Because the first thing you learn in copywriting is how to communicate. Plus, as a copywriter, you already like to write. And once you’ve got that, all you need to do is focus on a subject you’re passionate – one that you can turn into a profitable business by sharing information about it with other people.

Some people worry that they won’t be able to come up with enough ideas to write about. But the opposite is true. The more you write about things that you care about, the more ideas will come to you.

My best advice to you is to open your mind to new ideas by writing about things that really interest you … every single day. I get up in the morning and I do a meditation, and then I go sit out on the front porch. I have a beautiful view in front of me and a cup of coffee – and so many ideas pop into my head that I can’t possibly write about them all. I go into town, I pick up the newspaper, I sit and watch a couple of deer frolicking in a field – everyplace I go and everything I do inspires thoughts about things that I want to share with my readers.

It’s easy. Just write about things that you’re interested in – and gear your marketing to attract people who are interested in those same things. You’ll see.