How Email Lists Are Traditionally Built
The standard way of building an email list is to send traffic (free and/or paid) to a landing page / squeeze page / optin page where you collect email addresses (and maybe names too), for example:
Many times visitors to these pages are incentivised to hand over their information for a free gift, to watch a video or to get access to hidden training, for example.
But if you really take notice of these pages, they’re everywhere.
Some ask for more information than others depending on what they’re offering you.
But, because they’ve become ubiquitous, they’re not as successful at getting people to sign up as they used to be.
The novelty of these types of pages – for visitors – has worn off…even if they look fantastic.
An Alternative Approach
So what about not following the herd where list building is concerned and trying something new that still has novelty value for visitors?
That’s where the AI chatbot comes in (AI = Artificial Intelligence).
You’ve come across them before, especially if you use Facebook.
A chatbot is a collection of automated responses that the visitor gets as they interact with it.
What responses people get depends on what choices they make when answering questions in the chatbot.
It’s a way of directing people to the information they’re really looking for.
Companies also use them to answer common questions while reserving human support staff for unique queries.
There are several apps and services that allow you to create chatbots for use on Facebook.
But that’s the limitation – you’re stuck using Facebook.
A Unique AI Chatbot Service
A while ago, I bought a tool that was on special offer (as you do) and, as with many such products, it ended up on my digital “things to follow up on later” shelf.
Actually, it sat there for months.
It was a “one day…” product as in “one day I’ll get around to really having a look at this thing that I thought might be useful when I bought it” kinda thing.
A few days ago, I got notified in one of the 300+ emails I get every day about a new webinar.
When I checked it out, I recognized the face of the guy who would give it…and he was talking about the product I’d forgotten I’d bought from him several months back.
So I dusted off the product, opened it up and started learning about it. Again.
That product is called ConversioBot and its sole purpose is to create AI chatbots (check out the chatbot at the bottom right of this page or head over to a full-page chatbot for a special offer – they were created with the tool).
ConversioBot dashboard – click for a full-size view
However, these are chatbots that you can put on your own custom domain as full-page chatbots, widget chatbots on websites (like in sidebars or at the bottom of posts) or as exit chatbots which appear when someone tries to leave your site.
You can even put them over someone else’s site with a little coding magic that ConversioBot does for you.
The chatbots can be connected up to Facebook but I didn’t buy that option when I picked up the tool, so it’s not going to be part of the conversation here going forward.
There’s a ton of training provided with ConversioBot (over 100 videos) which covers everything from why using AI chatbots is a good idea to how to use them in affiliate marketing to how to build and deploy your chatbots.
Some of the ConversioBot training – click for a full-size view
All bots are hosted in the cloud at no additional cost so you don’t have to own a domain or website to use them or pay ongoing fees to have your bots hosted.
No subscription payment model here.
I’ve spent some spare time in the last few days following the basic training and am at the point where I’m ready to build my first bot and hook it up to my autoresponder.
I use Aweber but it’s easy to connect any of the popular autoresponder services to your chatbots.
This is the current list of autoresponders that can be connected (the list is constantly growing):
You’ll notice that Clickfunnels is not on that list but you can create a Zap using Zapier to hook up ConversioBot to Clickfunnels or any other service that’s not on the list that is able to collect email addresses.
In fact, ConversioBot works with all these services and more:
And you’re not restricted to just creating Chatbots in English.
Because the text in the chatbots is fully configurable, you can create your chatbots in any language you want (I guess so long as it’s supported by a keyboard!):
Each chatbot is linked to one list on one autoresponder of your choice.
You can even have different chatbots link to different autoresponder services, so you’re not tied to using just one autoresponder with the tool.
You can check out a demo of ConversioBot here:
Where I’m At In Building An AI Chatbot
The first chatbot I cloned, naturally, was the one for ConversioBot itself!
You’ll find it at the bottom right of this page (yes, you can have a chatbot appear only on one post or page or specific posts and pages).
There’s also a full-page version of the chatbot here that you can check out (with a special offer).
This chatbot does not collect leads so isn’t part of this lead generation experiment.
I’m at the point in the training where I’m going through the A-Z process of building that first fully-fledged, lead generation chatbot on its own custom domain, linking everything up and deploying it.
So what I’m going to do is create a brand new list in Aweber so I can test the effectiveness of ConversioBot in getting leads.
I’ll either use an existing domain name I own or buy a new one to put a full-page chatbot on.
I’ll then be testing out various types of traffic from free to paid from a number of sources, and tracking what traffic from where is actually converting into subscribers.
I use a WordPress plugin called Affiliate Linkr for this because you can add sub ids at the end of links to track where traffic comes from.
The free Pretty Links plugin for WordPress will allow you to create short, pretty links and track clicks but not track by subid.
You could create copies of your links, one for each traffic source you want to test, using a different slug for each link.
I’m pretty sure the paid version of Pretty Links can do this type of sibid tracking so you only have to use one copy of your link and the subid tracks the traffic source, so that’s one alternative to look at.
Other click tracking services to check out are ClickMagick and Click.org.
Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vitally important in your marketing efforts.
You don’t want to waste your precious time promoting on some platform where no one’s interested in what you have to offer.
And you certainly don’t want to be wasting money on ineffective ads on paid ads platforms.
Once enough traffic comes in to my own AI chatbot, I’ll get a sense of which platforms and sources I should put more energy into when promoting it.
Affiliate Marketing Chatbots
One thing I didn’t mention is that there’s an upgrade for ConversioBot that gives you get over 100 pre-built chatbots that you can clone (with more being added weekly), the majority of which are for promoting specific products from the likes of Clickbank, JVZoo, etc (I did get this upgrade myself).
A small sample of the chatbots that you can clone if you get the Done-For-You Pro upgrade
You can always customise these to change anything in the chatbot such as colours, image backgrounds, text, buttons, decision trees, product(s) promoted and your affiliate links.
Or you can build a chatbot from scratch.
Your imagination is the limit.
My Goal With This
I want to see how chatbots compare to standard landing pages in pulling in subscribers.
I’m starting with a cloned full-page AI chatbot on its own custom domain, as recommended in the training.
The initial goal is to build a list of at least 1,000 subscribers before directly promoting products rather than promoting affiliate products out of the gate.
Yes, if I promote a product directly, I’ll get more sales initially but I won’t be building my list or at best, building it much slower.
And I won’t have as many repeat customers as I could potentially have.
The goal is to keep building the list and growing the number of subscribers so I can email them promotions later and get more sales that way.
This is how all the successful marketers work.
The money is still in the list.
I’ll keep you updated on my progress in future posts, so stay tuned! 
Next post in this series: How I Built My First AI Chatbot
All the best,
Gary Nugent
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