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Welcome To The Raine Report

I want to be the minority,
I don't need your authority. - Green Day
Welcome to the very first issue of the report that is going to change your
wealth forever. A bold and slightly arrogant statement I know, but this report
has been a long time in the making.
You see, I have been broke exactly three times in my life, the first was when I
was thirteen, and yes I know, I was not technically broke but my parents were.
My dad had racked up a bunch of debt and at the worst possible moment was
made redundant. We were living o social security, my mum and dad were
going hungry just to make sure I ate and got through school, life was shit.
At the time my parents tried to hide just how dire the situation was but I
always knew, and I tried to help out. My grandparents would give me pocket
money and I would put it into the bills pot, I would wash neighbours cars and
do odd jobs and leave the money in one of the envelopes they had put aside
for car insurance, school uniforms, or the dozen or so other itemized cash
stashes they were trying to build and hope the total was reached before that
particular bill was due. It was a hopeless time and I even though I was trying
to do my bit, I felt, and was ultimately powerless.

This time in my life however was also what made me who I am today. Without
that hardship I would have never really appreciated the value of money, I
would have never really understood what it was to go without and be totally
broke, and most importantly I would have never have felt that total lack of
control I had over my life and the overwhelming urge I had never to let that
happen again.
Forward on nearly ten years and we reach the second time I ended up broke
however this was entirely my fault. After starting my little publishing business
and earning a ridiculous amount of money, I began spending, and spending,
and spending.
I was young, reckless, and wanted to have fun. I was never into flash cars or
expensive clothes and watches, no my particular vice was that I liked to party,
and so did my friends.
At the time I wouldnt think twice about spending thousands of pounds on a
night out. I would rent river boats and have booze cruises down the Thames,
or book out the entire floor at the Savoy for a birthday bash, it was a wild time,
and I was living like I had just been diagnosed with some terminal illness
determined to spend it all before I left an inheritance to my ungrateful and
also imaginary children. But alas it had to come crashing to an end at some
point.
And that point happened quite suddenly. It was simple math really, I had
spent way more than I had earned, I had taken my eye o the ball and I had
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run out of cash. I also had a whopping thirty two thousand pounds in credit
card debt to boot.
At that time my business required me to spend tens of thousands of pounds
up front each and every month on advertising then wait and see the results of
those ads in a couple of months time. When you screw up a couple of ads, run
out of money, and have no credit left, you cant buy any more. This was the
end my friend. End, fin, finito. I was screwed.
Now I am not going to go into the pain and misery I suered for the next
couple of months, no, instead I want to share with you what got me through
this time.
And that was my undying self belief in the fact that I could make money.
I had done it before, and I could do it again. Yes my situation was currently
dire, but I would fight my way out of this corner, learn from the stupid
mistakes I had made, and come back stronger than ever.
And this is why I wanted to write The Raine Report. It represents my
collected thoughts, experiments, practical experience, and get-out-ofDodge advice delivered in the most concise way that I possibly can with
absolutely no film flam, wae, or hype.

I also decided to write The Raine Report because for the last couple of years I
have been frustrated and somewhat disillusioned by the Internet Marketing
World, and those who operate in it.
It is, and continues to be, a deceptive place to hang out. This however is
nothing new. The make money venue now, or at any time in history, has
always been filled by varying degrees of honest and dishonest people, this
iteration - the Internet one -is no dierent.
I have great deal of respect for many people in the marketing and online
Internet business community, there are a lot of honest people out there with
great products, amazing ideas, and impeccable reputations.
But at the same time there are also a fair amount of unscrupulous people who
would rather be part of the marketing circle jerk, pushing second rate
products over and over again without care for the content or its value.
The Raine Report is my stand against that crap. I dont expect every one of you
to like what I write, I certainly dont expect everyone to agree with me, in-fact
it would be a dire reflection on the report if this were true. This is however how
I think and what I believe in, and if you will join me on this ride I know you
will benefit from it.
Each month I will present to you one big idea, an idea which you can run with
and build a business around. Some of these ideas will be very specific to a

niche or market, others will be big ideas you can use to attack any industry you
are interested in.
In addition to the big idea, each month I will be covering a subject which you
can go and take immediate action on to improve your business. This month I
am covering subject lines.
As always I would love your feedback, good, bad, or indierent, and if you
hang around I am sure I will fill you in on how I ended up broke for the third
time with over four hundred grand in debt and how I paid it back in five
months starting from scratch without a bean to my name.

The Big Idea: The Fast

Follower Advantage
"There's nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen
to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no
scruples whatsoever." - Alfred Hitchcock
Like all really big ideas simplicity is often the key, and this BIG IDEA is no
exception. It is, in a nutshell:
See what is working in the market - something that people actually want,
use, and pay for. Then do it better, cheaper, or both. And do it fast!
I would also like to tag on that being a better marketer cant but help a little
either.
So there you go, big idea number one outlined in a single paragraph. Nothing
more complex than that.
This idea has made people MILLIONAIRES, it has even made a few people
BILLIONAIRES. But wait, I can feel your interest waining right now, so let me
give you some examples from history, the bigger world as we know it, and
more specifically one from this little Internet Marketing community of ours.
An example which just twelve months ago you could have taken, copied, and
profited from significantly.
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Here we go.
When looking at fast follower strategy we first need to understand what gives a
company a first mover advantage. That is, being the first to market with a
product that stays first for a pretty long time, and thwarts competitors
attempts to gain significant market share.
The key element to this is entering a market which has a slow pace of
innovation where you can establish yourself as the de facto brand. A prime
example of this would be Coca Cola, Hoover, or Ford with their Model T
automobile.
Coca Cola is still the number one soft drink brand and Pepsi can only ever be
number two in that race. I still refuse to drink in any bar that only sells Pepsi,
it does nothing more than ruin a good Vodka (so does coke, but to a much
lesser degree).
Now Hoover was number one for
decades, I still say Im just going to
HOOVER the living room even though I
have the one product that really has
kicked Hoover into place with its
innovation, and that is of course a
Dyson.

The final example above was Ford with its Model T. Using its innovative
production line process it pumped out car, after car, after car. It had a great
position in the market because innovation in this marketplace was expensive.
But it happened, and quicker I think than Ford expected. Along came a fast
mover, namely GM, which initially oered cars in dierent colors rather than
just Fords black, and finally dierent models with dierent designs.
GM soon overtook Ford with its Car for every purse and purpose. The guy
who was second used his fast mover advantage, watched as Ford honed his
production line, saw that customers really wanted dierent colors and
designs, and then filled that need.
So these are big historical examples, but before you get bored lets look at
some examples from recent years - namely the iPhone and Google.
Both of these players are fast followers. Blackberry used to have the major
business market sown up, people just stopped competing with them, and
Motorola and Nokia were the consumer brands. Oh look at them now.
And can you believe we used to go to portals such as Yahoo when we were
looking for things, and if we wanted to actually search the Internet we would
use AltaVista, Excite, and Infoseek.
Those were the days and we were happy.

Then along came Google with their clever little algorithm and its lofty mission
to Organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and
useful.
The rest as we say is history.
The trouble with all these big ideas so far is either you really had to have a
major innovation or a shit pile of money to take your fast follower advantage.
Lets get a little closer to home.
We all must remember the good old days of MySpace with their user created
profile pages, which often elicited the same response as giving me an actual
razor blade and ordering me to flail recklessly in the direction of my eyeballs,
and then of course there was Friendster which was a little more friendly on the
eye but sadly also just as short lived.
We all know what happened here Facebook.
Now Facebook didnt really have any great advantage here, no great leap in
technology, just a singular focus of creating the best user experience, and at
the same time making the network somewhat exclusive and not accessible to
the none college crowd.
They had a simple but eective viral social platform, and of course they were
in the right place at the right time - as is often the case.
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But in the model I am talking about trying to compete with a service like
Facebook, or say an app like Instagram, really is a no win situation.
There is such an infinitesimally small chance that you are going to build a
more successful version (Note here: I didnt say better version, just a more
successful one) without a good bit of luck, and quite frankly having a bit of
luck shouldnt be part of any business strategy in much the same way reading
your horoscopes shouldnt influence what you do that day.
I would also like to point out that the sole purpose of horoscopes is actually for
us sane people to make fun of the people who read and believe in them.
Anyhow, we have just had a bit of a meander around how you are NOT going
to take a fast follower advantage, I think therefore now it is time to get to the
meat of it as it were.
To understand this I want to tell you another story.
Lets step back to earlier last year. I was sat in my oce watching some videos
from Yanik Silvers Underground Marketing X conference. There was a guy on
stage whose company I think pretty much all of us know, and he was sharing
how he had built his business from scratch, how many sta he had etc.
Now in September 2013 this guy had taken in five million dollars worth of
venture capital to expand his business, which was when my curiosity first

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peaked. We even had a meeting at the labs about this but decided we couldnt
go ahead and compete (see the other article on Focus & Disrupt in this issue.)
Anyhow, back to the conference. So this guy is standing there on stage talking
about his business, how many customers he has who are paying monthly fees,
and I do a little back of the napkin calculation and Jesus, I really kicked myself
for not being in a position to compete (again, see the Focus & Disrupt article).
But obviously I wasnt the only one with the same thoughts.
Over the next six months a whole bunch of competitors came along, some just
duplicating the service (and in some cases with the skill of a blind art forger),
others however took a dierent approach and instead of oering a monthly
subscription service they introduced a one o payment with a host it
yourself package.
BOOM.
The company I am talking about here is LeadPages and its owner Clay Collins.
Personally I have a lot of respect for the guy, he had some good success with
his LeadPlayer software (a video player which allowed you to take opt-ins),
saw that the Internet Marketing crowd were willing to pay for tools that help
build their businesses, and created LeadPages.
Now just in-case you have been hiding under a rock over the last couple of
years, LeadPages is an online service that allows you to create nice landing
pages for your business. You have probably seen a million of them this year,
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but if you have no clue what I am talking about then head on over to his site
and take a look.
LeadPages certainly wasnt the first company in this marketplace, but they
were the first to do it right and actually oer a product that most people
wanted.
At the time LeadPages launched I was crafting my own landing pages from
scratch, or using a WordPress plugin called OptimizePress. I had tried a
couple of other services but they really were aimed at corporates, and
developed by geeks with no design or marketing experience. In our Internet
Marketing community there was however a first mover, and that was Kajabi.
Kajabi allowed you to build out landing pages, sales funnels, membership
sites and had a ton of features.
But I am guessing (and I have no real insight on this) that Clay took a look at
Kajabi, thought jeez thats an expensive service with a lot of bloat, and picked
o one part of it that would be useful to nearly everybody in our community
i.e. the landing page builder.
He is also just as likely to have looked at OptimizePress and thought he could
build a better product which is simpler to use, and comes with some amazing
pre-designed templates.

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What he did know was that people wanted to collect leads and that they would
pay good money for it.
And so LeadPages was born, it worked, and they signed people up by their
thousands. This is fast follower in play - they just created a tightly focussed
competing product that was cheaper, more attractive, and easier to use.
But remember, this is not the end of the line.
Landing page builders were now sexy, they were also evidently very profitable,
and anybody watching that same conference video as I was would have
probably had the same thought - and then the competition came.
There are now a dozen or so hosted landing page and funnel builders out
there just in our Internet Marketing space alone, and there are also several
more which are targeting the more corporate realm.
There are at a rough count about 20 WordPress plugins which are trying to
provide the same service, and I dont doubt that even if Clay hadnt come up
with LeadPages there would still be many out there. It was just the right time.
But lets get back to fast follower strategy.
One of the fast followers who released a plugin as a direct result of watching
the same video as I did made over $110,000 in sales in the first week and
continues to generate a decent monthly income from residual sales. His total

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cost to get the plugin developed was $1,200 and he now pays the developer
$500 a month for bug fixes etc.
Another fast follower who saw what LeadPages were doing created a hosted
service just the same as them, added a bunch of extra templates, a bit of
slicker interface, charged $20 less a month (based on monthly rather than
yearly billing) and now has over 700 paying customers a month.
And there are a bunch of Internet Marketers who are copying the service right
now, adding a bunch of bloatware features in a race to be the next Kajabi ;)
So that was really just one example which is directly relevant to our little
bubble, and one which any one of us could have replicated by either being a
fast follower of Kajabi or OptimizePress at the time, or LeadPages a year or so
ago.
The key here is doing it fast, making it that little bit better - but not so much
that you spend months developing the extra features - and if you have to,
dropping the price a little.
Finally before I wrap this article up I want to mention a couple more of my
favourite fast followers.

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Firstly The Illustrious Samwer Brothers.

These two brothers are responsible for creating more than seventy five
companies using the fast follower strategy, except they dont really try to make
a better product, they just look at what Internet service is working right now in
the United States and duplicate it in Europe, Asia etc.
They have created Zalando which is the Zappos of Europe, Lazada the
Amazon of Indonesia, CityDeal which is Germanys Groupon.
They just became billionaires.
The second is a friend of mine, Peretz, who lives in the rather tranquil island of
St. Kitts. He started on his own just over ten years ago and now has a team of
fourteen people working for him full time running his little empire.
What Peretz essentially does is monitor marketplaces such as ClickBank and
JVZOO, looks for up-and-coming products in the non Internet Marketing /
Business Opportunity niches, works out how they are making their money
(whether it is up-front or backend), and then copies them.
He makes over five million a year with this model.
The fast follower strategy may not be the most ethical of business models, but
to be fair there are very few new ideas, most businesses are just better
mousetraps.
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I really wanted to cover this strategy as the first big idea because essentially
this is how I really got my start on the Internet, but thats a story for another
issue.
Go forth and duplicate.

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Get Focussed & Disrupt

True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your
past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of
businesses. - Peter Diamandis
Just before Christmas 2013 I decided to make a huge change in my life. It was
a change that would impact a lot of people including friends and family,
business relationships I had built, and ultimately my own income.
Lets roll back to eight years ago when I set up my Internet Training Program
The Immediate Edge which is still running today, and I think that probably
makes it the longest running online marketing training site out there.
Previous to setting up The Edge I had been building and running a bunch of
sites in a wide range of niches. At that time we were making an absolute
killing, but my business partner had had enough of the daily work and wanted
to sell everything.
I of course didnt. The monthly income was fantastic but to keep it all afloat
we were both working 18 hour days, which at the time I didnt mind but my
partner did.

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I eventually caved - there really was no other option - I had control issues and
didnt think I could trust anyone else to work with me if I bought him out, so
we sold up.
It was a landmark event for me.
I had a ton of cash in the bank, but for the first time in a long time I had
freedom. Freedom from not having to get up and do the daily grind, to keep
balls in the air as it were.
But I was bored and I wanted to share what I had learned, so I set up the
Immediate Edge.
Now this isnt really a history of my marketing career, and I promise I am
getting to a point here, but let me continue.
Like I said, roll forward a few years, it was just before Christmas 2013 and I was
sitting in my oce which at the time was in a 10,000 square foot industrial
building I had leased.
Over the years I had moved from a small 340 square foot oce to a 3,750
square foot building, and then finally to the big unit.
Why?

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Because I had gone back to where I was many years ago. As part of The
Immediate Edge training I had built numerous businesses, and of course they
had needed their own sta and space.
I had built a manufacturing company purely for an example of selling on eBay
and Amazon, and I was importing a ton of product from China and selling that
on dozens of retail and wholesale sites.
Combine that with the fact that I was a bit of a Mythbusters geek and had
pretty much every gadget out there from Laser cutters to 3D Printers. We had
built Aeroponics systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Robots, and way more
weird shit that I was playing with but not really building a business around.
It was a bit of a mess really. I had a bunch of employees and a huge payroll bill
to boot, a building with monster overheads, and of course I still had the same
problem in that I was a micro manager and couldnt let go.
Now apart from the experiments the other businesses were doing well. They
all paid their bills, most even brought in a decent profit, so I dont really have
to work again if I dont want to. But none of them had hit the big time.
I had too many fingers in too many pies.
And this, in a long winded way is what I really wanted to say in this article. It
has taken me twenty years of my life to figure it out, but I got there in the end
and I dont want you to make the same mistake and waste the same time I did.
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Every one of us has the ability to build a business in our particular niche. You
can build a lifestyle business that pays the bills, but if you really want to be
rich, and I mean really fucking rich, then you need to focus on just that
business, nothing else.
I am not saying dont build multiple products - every business needs more
than one oering - but make sure it complements everything else you do.
Something that the same passionate customers of yours will buy.
For me that Christmas of 2013 was a watershed moment.
Over the last twelve months I have sold most of my businesses, others I have
given to loyal sta who have worked for me for a very long time.
I no longer have an oce, I am now working from home and plan to focus my
energies on my marketing business and start a software company providing
killer tools that will disrupt this industry.
And that really is the final point. Huge multi-million or billion dollar
businesses are built on disrupting the market.
How can you change the way things are done in your niche?
If you are looking for some inspiration then I recommend reading the
following books. I dont always agree with all of the points (especially in Peter
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Thiels Book), but they are a great starting point and are certainly books I wish
were available and had read years ago.

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Winning The Email Game:

Proven Subject Lines That Get
Your Email Opened
Gentlemen, you had my curiosity, but now you
have my attention. - Calvin Candie, Django Unchained
Email is by far my number one source of income, and as such improving every
aspect of the email funnel is the number one focus in my business.
Over the next couple of issues of The Raine Report I will be delving deeper into
every aspect of maximising your income using email, but in this article I am
going to be sharing with you everything I know about writing subject lines that
get your email opened.
Whether you have just started building an email list, or if you have one with
tens of thousands of contacts and you want to get a better response from your
list, then using one or more of the tricks below is sure to increase your open
rate and consequently your bottom line.

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Optimizing The Opening

67% of all emails are read on a mobile
device, predominantly on a phone.
Long subject lines that dont convey the
point and dont peak curiosity in the first
few words get less opens. Fact!
For example, consider these two:
Discover the secret technique to double your open rates
Double your open rates with this sneaky trick

When you are writing subject lines you should always think of them in the
same way as you would if you were writing a sales page headline. BUT, you
need to get the core of your message across and peak the curiosity of the
reader in the first few words.
Even though Discover the is a traditional headline opener, starting with
what they are going to discover generally works better as a subject line.
The second example above says what the email oers right up-front. You get
the idea.
However, if I was writing that email in the real world I probably would have
gone for something like this:
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113.7% Opt-In Rate Booster [pdf]

But we will get to that in a bit. The key point here is make sure the sexy part of
your oer is front and center otherwise mobile users wont get the bait.

Using You
You is an interesting word. It is a pronoun along with words such as he, she,
him, they etc., and used as part of a subject line can be incredibly powerful
indeed.
How YOU can run an extra 10k
You can have this for free
Dont believe the experts, YOU can do this
Whats in it for you
You will learn how...
I will show you the funnel I used
This is how you double your opt-in rate
You can reactivate an old list
You wont believe the response...

Whenever we have squeezed a You into a subject line and split tested the
open rates, You always comes out on top.

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Peaking Curiosity
The goal of any subject line is to peak curiosity. Once we have their attention
we can sell them our message, and there are many such ways you can do this.
Lets take a look at a few.

The Hack Method

We all like to think there are better ways of doing things, that people are either
keeping from us or just havent discovered yet, the Hack plays on that. For
example:
Subject Line Hack Doubles Open Rates
Simple Mind Hack To Boost Productivity
This Landing Page Hack Made Me $8,392

The Reality Shift

These kind of emails really get high open rates and they rely on the fact that
the readers cant process what they are actually reading, or it forces them to
question what they are reading.
The Elephant Told Me...

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DO NOT BEND: Photos enclosed!

The only thing with these kind of subject lines is that you have to back them up
with a good story right at the outset which ties the subject line with the
message, or you will get in incredibly low click through rate.

Weird And Odd

By now you must have seen all the ads on the Internet for this one weird trick
to a thin belly weight loss system or for fast abs etc. These work really, really
well as subjects:
This one weird trick for better open rates
This one weird word compelled visitors
This odd ancient method doubled open rates
This odd trick got baby to sleep quickly

You can also of course use actual weird shit in your subject lines, and as long
as you can carry the story o in your message you are good.
I used the Vulcan mind meld technique
Yaks blood coffee, I have seen it all
I improved my golf swing because of a rabbit

Again these all have to be part of a story that you then proceed to tell in the
email message itself.
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Asking Questions
When people scan through their email inbox they are looking for important
messages to read first, a good subject will interrupt the scanning process and
make them think about your email (this is the goal of all subject lines).
Asking questions is a good way to make the reader pause as it causes them to
think, if only for a fraction of a second, about your email. Ask them questions
that they would like answering, ask them questions that spark curiosity, ask
them questions that confuse them. Just ask them questions.
Did you get your complimentary access?
Did you get the package?
Have you seen these split test results?
2 minutes a day?

Using Percentages
These work especially well when trying to convey an increase or decrease in
some specific statistic that your customer would be interested in.
86% Increase In CTR in under 2 minutes
How To Decrease Facebook CPC by up to 90%

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Numbers And Lists

You see these all the time on Facebook because they work. These are
especially good if you are giving away a free report and will increase the click
through rate of the mailing.
7 Tips For Writing Better Subject Lines
The 9 Secrets Of Richard Bransons Success
3 Steps To Getting Up Earlier

Using Single Words

This really goes against the conventional wisdom that the subject line must
sell the open. We have often found that using a single relevant word can get a
better open rate:
Ready
Panic
#WINNER

My thinking behind this is that short subjects stand out when you are scrolling
down your inbox, even in Gmail where the first line of the body is tagged on to
it as the first line is not bold like the subject line, and short words spark
curiosity.

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Controversial, Shocking, Or Negative Subject Lines

These should be used only if your market will accept it or if your personality
can carry it. The last thing you want to be doing is telling a new mum that her
baby is stupid, even if you are going to sell her the greatest guide to getting her
kid into MIT by the age of twelve. She will have already turned against you.
Your marketing sucks: Heres the new Facebook strategy
You will FAIL if you dont take these steps
Landing pages dont work
Are you getting too old for this?

That last email subject was sent to a small list of around four and a half
thousand people who I had segmented because they were over sixty five.
It was very sympathetic to their age but reinforced that they could still do what
I was trying to get them to do (and pay me money for). It worked like you
wouldnt believe, I nearly fell o my chair, that one email made 316 sales and
many more in the follow up blasts.
If you are using negative subject lines then you have to make sure that there is
a silver lining to the email message.

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Brackets
Very few people actually use this trick but is a great way of framing within a
prospects mind what to expect when they open your email.
Your 7 Step Guide To Writing Headlines [PDF]
The Ninja Wall Climbing Technique [VIDEO]
How To Open Any Lock Without A Pick [VIDEO]

If you are oering a PDF download or a video which actually gives away useful
information, then sticking one of these bad boys on the end will give you a
boost. Just make sure that you dont do it on every email otherwise it will lose
its eectiveness.

Using Other Peoples Credibility

This trick can be used in many ways from directly leaning on a third partys
credibility to reinforce your own, to simply quoting a celebrity in your niche
group.
The Frank Kern Landing Page Template
3 Of Tony Robbins Best Kept Secrets

You can even use other companies credibility. For example, if you are selling a
Kindle Book Creation product you could use a headline such as:

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Amazon wants you as partner

Funny Subject Lines

To be fair most emails you receive are boring. Having a funny subject line
often implies that the content of the email will be funny and this may be
enough to peak curiosity.
Customer Surveys: Baby Got (Feed)back
Touch Me! Mobile Interaction Design Tips

Subject Line Symbols

You have probably seen them crop up in your email from time to time, the
little stars, ticks, or aeroplanes that appear in the subject.
These actually work really well when used scarcely. If used too often then
people just associate it with a gimmick and it can actually decrease your open
rate. The thing with using these symbols is they dont always work in all email
clients and may just get replaced with another symbol, or worse yet a numeric
code.
Here are some that work in almost all mail clients. You should be able to
highlight them and copy directly into your mail system
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Using Personalization
Personalisation is still the number one way to increase the open rates of
emails. Combined with one or two elements from the list you can turn a really
crappy open rate into one which makes a big impact on your business.
Over the years I have seen marketers turn away from this, and yes sometimes
if you are just marketing to a jaded IM crowd then you really need to run split
tests. But in normal real world niches, personalisation wins hands down.
Dan, here is your free report [PDF]
Dan, your download is ready
You are invited Dan, can you make it?

There are other ways you can personalize your emails, and in this months
Gold edition I cover how you can automatically find out a prospects age, sex,
income, house value, number of children, eduction level, interests - all from
just their email address.
This kind of data can be used to really fine tune and segment your list to
deliver some personalized content.

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Scarcity
Scarcity works. In fact scarcity works better than nearly any other technique,
and most marketers will tell you that the majority of their sales are made in the
first and last day of the promotion.
But heres the thing - it has to be REAL.
I for one am sick of seeing oer closes at midnight on Sunday only for it to be
available for another few days because they didnt make enough money out of
that promotion.
If you are going to use scarcity then you have to stick to your guns and shut the
deal down when the expiry time hits.

Getting Some Inspiration

I keep a swipe file for email subject lines that I spot that got me to click when I
normally wouldnt have, and you really should start doing that too.
If you already have an email account with thousands of unread emails then
now is the time to plough through them all and begin creating your first
subject line swipe file.

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But that should just be the start. If you really want to learn from the masters,
the people who are paid to write short and curiosity driven headlines, then
you should head on over to The National Enquirer Site.
(If you dont live in the USA then you will need to use a proxy as it will punt
you to a local version if they have one in your country).
The key to The National Enquirers headlines is that they use a bunch of power
words and phrases (more on them next) to get the maximum bang from the
few words they actually use.
I also like to take a look at buzzfeed, viral nova, and reddit for inspiration.

Using Power Words And Action Verbs

When I write copy, whether its for a subject line, headline, sales letter, or even
for an article like this, I write in a conversational style which reflects how I
actually speak in real life (with less swears ;)
But when writing any kind sales piece I try to additionally use as many action
verbs as possible.
An action verb describes what the subject of the sentence is doing, more
specifically in copywriting I use them to convey a sense of emotion and to give
the subject a sense of purpose.
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For example instead of saying Jon walked on to the stage to a round of

applause I would use Jon exploded onto the stage to rapturous applause.
It tells more of a story and conjures up more of an emotional response.
When thinking about any kind of copy think about where you can substitute a
sentence, a couple of words, or just a single word for a more powerful
evocative power word or phrase.
Well thats it for subject lines, I hope you find some inspiration in there, but
remember, when trying anything out make sure you split test your subject
lines on a small percentage of your list then send the winner to the rest. This
really is the best way to get the best results.

Power Words VIP Bonus Sheet

I have just created a Power Words Bonus Sheet to go along with this
months Raine Report, this is only available to The Raine Report VIP
members. If you would like to be added to the VIP list then all you have
to do is click here to shoot me an email to dan@danraine.com and let me
know and I will send you the bonus sheet.

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Opt-In Privacy Seal Split Test

Never stop testing, and your advertising will
never stop improving. - David Ogilvy
In previous split tests I have performed I've found that adding a trust seal to a
checkout page has always resulted in an increase in conversions, so I thought I
would set up a series of tests to see how well they worked when added to an
opt-in form.
In total I performed eight dierent tests on two dierent opt-in forms,
changing the position of the logo to either be included in the form or
positioned below the form, and matching the color of the form button to the
logo color or leaving it as it.
Here is an example:

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The two sites we performed this test on had consistent daily visitors and I
allowed the test to run for 500 views for each variance (including the control
which was the no logo version).
I was quite surprised with the outcome. The control won hands down and
the version you can see above on the left is the next best performer (the
control is on the right).
Even the best performer resulted in a drop in conversion rates of 3% with the
others averaging a 10.5% drop.
I am surmising here that the appearance of a trust logo is mentally associated
with a purchase, and because this was supposed to be a free oer the logo was
giving negative reinforcement therefore reducing conversions.

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What Im Reading Right Now

I have a couple of books on the go at the moment but the one I currently
recommend everybody read is Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How To Create
Brand Names That Stick.
If you have ever had diculty coming up with a decent name for your
business, one which is memorable, easy to spell, short, and describes what it
does, then this is the book for you.
Its a short book, but without a doubt one of the most useful books I have ever
read, I really wish I had got to it sooner.

A Call For Questions

This being the first issue of The Raine Report I have not for obvious reasons
put in a Q&A section, but feel free to ask me anything and I will do my best to
answer each and every one and will feature the best questions in the next
edition, I will also send you a little something for getting featured :)
Now one caveat, please no war and peace questions. If its 500 words and
needs me to write an essay to answer then its more probable than not that I
wont. So try and keep it to no more than a sentence. Send your questions to:
dan@danraine.com
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41

In Memory Of Rick Butts

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