Your Invisible Bank Account: Why the Money Was Never Really in the List

Somebody in your industry probably told you the money is in the list. You have heard it so many times it stopped registering as a claim and started sounding like a law of physics. Vic Strizheus opens this lesson by taking that phrase apart, because if it were literally true, he points out, you could pay a spam operation for a few million names, blast them all, and become a millionaire by the end of the week. Nobody does that and gets rich. So the saying, as popular as it is, is not actually where the money lives.

What he offers instead is a second account sitting next to your real one, invisible, unlisted anywhere, but every bit as real in what it produces.

If the money isn’t in the list, where does it actually live?

His answer moves in stages. Money is not in the list itself, since a giant unresponsive list is worth nothing. It is closer to being in the relationship with the list, which gets nearer the truth, but that still begs the obvious next question: how does a relationship like that actually get built? His answer is that it is engineered through value, delivered consistently, on top of the core why covered in the previous lesson. Every entrepreneur, he argues, is running this invisible account whether they realize it or not.

the more money you have in your invisible bank account, the more money you will have in your physical, actual, visible bank account

He draws it out as a simple graph: goodwill on one axis, number of pitches sent on the other. A brand new subscriber typically starts out with high interest and high goodwill toward you, right after you deliver whatever you promised to get them onto the list. What happens next is where most marketers wreck the account without noticing.

Why does a full inbox of pitches actually cost you money?

He describes the pattern bluntly: a marketer delivers the free thing, then starts pitching almost daily, sometimes within the first week. Every pitch that lands without value attached drains the goodwill balance a little further, until it flatlines. That is the mechanical explanation, he says, for why so many lists end up sitting at that same industry average of a 2 to 5 percent open rate. It is not that email stopped working. It is that the account got spent down to nothing and never refilled.

Vic is honest that he has been on the receiving end of exactly this pattern as a subscriber himself. A marketer sends a strong free thing, earns real interest, then follows it with an offer the very next day, then another one two days after that, until every subject line starts to feel like the same request wearing a different outfit. Unsubscribing, at that point, feels less like rejecting an offer and more like closing an account that stopped paying anything back.

None of this means you stop pitching. He is direct that staying in business requires making money, and pitching is how that happens. As he puts it, “Rule number one in business is to stay in business, okay?”

The move is not to avoid pitches, it is to fund the account faster than you draw it down, so the balance trends upward across your whole relationship with a subscriber instead of bleeding out after the first week.

What does keeping the balance high actually look like in practice?

In practical terms that means treating every pitch as a withdrawal that needs a deposit somewhere near it. A genuinely useful piece of training, a real answer to a question your list is actually asking, a result documented honestly, these are deposits. A bare offer with nothing behind it is a withdrawal. Vic’s framing is that only about 2 percent of a list buys anything the first time they see an offer, which is exactly why the deposits matter more than any single pitch ever could. The subscribers worth having are the ones who stick around long enough to see enough deposits that a pitch, when it finally comes, reads as a natural next step instead of an interruption.

Think through your own last thirty days of emails to your list. Count how many were pure pitch and how many actually gave something away first. If the ratio is upside down, that is the fix to make before you send another offer.

The full session lays out the exact strategies Vic uses to keep this balance high while still pitching regularly. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

All right, welcome back. So hopefully the first video kind of gave you a framework, right? And I know it went for a little bit longer than I actually expected it to be or wanted it to be, but hopefully you got the point, right? And I think it's important for you to understand this kind of stuff.

Now, with this video, what I want to talk about is we are going to start diving into specific strategies and specific ideas that will help you increase your conversions exponentially, okay? And I'm going to keep these videos a lot shorter than the 45-minute video that I recorded the last one for you here, okay? Just because these are going to be specific strategies you can apply and start thinking about how can you apply, how can you model this for your stuff, how can you kind of like put these ideas on top of whatever business, whatever marketing plan, whatever strategies that you are employing right now in your business to grow your business, okay?

And I know this stuff will work for you, okay? Now, if you are an internet marketer, if you are in the, you know, info marketing space or network marketing or, you know, doing business on the internet or if you are an offline marketer, right? Maybe you have an offline brick-and-mortar type business, you understand by now, hopefully, the importance of building your list, right? And so have you heard a saying that says something like this?

The money is in the list, right? I'm sure you have. You know, I've heard it for years, years and still hear it almost on a daily basis right now. The money is in the list, the money is in the list, the money is in the list, right?

So, and so what the model is, is the model is, you know, typical marketers and I call them typical because they get typical results which is almost nothing, right? I suggest you decide not to be typical so that you can get results that are not typical and then when you, you know, when you do your promotions or whatever and then you can say my results are not typical, right? Like when I'm marketing right now, I can say, my results are not typical because I do stuff that's not typical, you know? And so therefore, I am not typical.

But typical marketers, their model is this. Get list, just bombard the list, discard the list and start the whole cycle all over again, okay? It got to the point right now, so ridiculous and quite sad to be, you know, to be truthful with you, to me anyway, it got to the point to where marketers, okay, internet entrepreneurs, they're swapping lists right now because their lists are not responding to the person, to the owner, you know, to the owner of the list. Does that make sense?

I mean, it got to the point to where people are doing all sorts of shenanigans right now inside of our, you know, internet marketing community, network marketing community that is just, it's not only, you know, not only just not cool, it's illegal, you know, and people do that kind of shenanigans because their lists are not responsive. You know, they're building lists, they're, you know, they're slamming their lists, you know, like crazy and then they're giving that list to somebody else, to another marketer who tries to do the same thing again and they're just swap lists, you know, between, it's just crazy, you know.

So that's their model is get list, you know, spam the list and just slam the list and discard the list. Check this out, okay? Everybody says the money is in the list. So this is your list right here, okay?

Okay. If money was in the list, then those people would be rich, wouldn't they, okay? If money was in the list, I mean, it could be, it would be very, very easy to run a, some sort of a pay-per-view campaign or go to a CPA network and just get a whole lot of affiliates to just, you know, get you a giant list, literally, you know, 200,000 people on your list in a matter of the next 48 hours and you would become a billionaire, wouldn't you? I mean, if money was in the list, it would be, logically thinking, it would be easy for us to go out there on the internet, right, and go to one of those services that says, hey, you know, give us $100 and we're going to email, you know, we're going to email 10 million people for you, okay?

Or worse yet, we could go and find some sort of a, some kind of a spamming company, right, spammers, and just rent or just buy, you know, millions and tens of millions of names, right, a list. from them and email that list and we would become millionaires, wouldn't we, you know, if not more, right? But we both know that's not true, okay? So the money is not really in the list, okay?

Now, in the context, I want you to understand how this works, okay? There is two, there is two types of bank accounts, right, that you have. There is the physical bank account, okay, like Wells Fargo, Chase, you know, Bank of America, whatever bank that you bank with, right? And that's what everybody wants to grow, okay?

Everybody wants to grow that bank account, right? Everybody wants to get the dollars. Everybody wants to get the sales. Everybody wants to get the money, right, the actual tangible stuff, not realizing that what precedes that is something that very, very few marketers understand, okay?

So if the money is not, if money is not in the list, then what is it in? You know, people say, well, money is in the relationship with the list, right? Money is in the relationship with the list. Well, it's getting a little bit closer, okay?

If money was in the relationship with the list, we've got to ask ourselves, you know, how do we build this relationship? How does this relationship start? Does that make sense? So what I was crafting and kind of perfecting ever since I learned this principle, you know, none of these ideas, take it back, not all of these ideas are my original ideas.

I'm just a good student of the industry. You know, when I was, when I got started in this industry in 2005, you know, I was fortunate enough to be mentored by somebody who was earning a lot of money, about $200,000 a month in this industry doing what I wanted to do, you know, and at the time I was in debt. I did not know how to make money, you know, so I'm like, I became like a sponge. I was just soaking everything in like a sponge and I was applying this, right?

So when I learned this principle, that you know what, the money is not in the list, it's not quite in the relationship with the list which is sort of true, right, if you think about it. But what precedes that relationship? How is it being crafted? How do you engineer?

How do you cultivate that relationship? I guess it's a better question. Does that make sense? And so you cultivate that relationship, I don't know if you can actually see this, let me turn this down, okay, you cultivate this relationship by doing some of the things that I talked about in the previous video, right?

You have your core why established. You do your marketing the right way which is through education. You educate your ideal prospect, right? You're simplifying stuff.

So really what you're doing there, when you do that kind of stuff, it builds relationship. But really what you're doing to build this relationship is you are giving and providing value, don't you, okay? You're providing massive value that cultivates, right, and builds that relationship with your list. Does that make sense?

So this is kind of the million dollar circle, if you will, okay, that can literally change your business forever. Now, there's different strategies. How do you provide value to your list? If you're taking notes, you might want to take a note of that, and let me do this right here.

I'm going to actually raise this, and I'll show you the two types of bank accounts. Okay, so you got this, right? Everything cool? I can raise this?

List, relationship, value. Okay, I mean, very, very basic. I don't know why, but not very many people. Not very many people understand this, okay?

Okay, so I said there's two types of bank accounts, okay? Everybody wants to grow their actual physical bank balance, right? They want to make more money. They want to sell more stuff.

They want to do all that stuff. But there is also another one that is what I call the invisible bank account. Every marketer has that bank account, whether you want it or not. Every entrepreneur.

Every business has the invisible bank account. And I am a firm believer in the idea that the more money you have in your invisible bank account, the more money you will have in your physical, actual, visible bank account. Okay? And I'm not just saying this.

It's been proven. And I proved it for myself. I proved it for other people over and over and over again, and I'm sure that when you apply this. In your business, you will see that it's true, okay, for yourself.

So check this out. This as a marketer, as a business, okay, this is our value right here. Let this graph represent value, or we can just say goodwill, okay? And then this right here is your pitches, okay?

If you're an internet marketer, you know what I'm talking about, right? So typically, what happens here is this. Typical marketers. What they do is they will get a subscriber on their list, okay?

So let's say if I'm a subscriber to somebody else's list, and that somebody is a typical marketer, they'll pitch me some kind of a lead magnet, and hopefully it's good. They say, hey, opt in, get this lead magnet, it's cool, it's going to do this and this and this. And they've got my attention, they've got my interest. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's cool, I want to check it out.

So my interest is high, right? Okay. And because he delivered, hopefully he delivered the lead magnet, whatever the thing that he promised, right? And hopefully that thing is good.

If that thing is good, his goodwill and his value to me is right here, okay? My perception of him is, hey, this is cool, right? So his goodwill bank account is pretty full, okay? Does that make sense?

Now I may buy something right away, I may not. A lot of times I won't, right? A lot of times when you promote something. And get people to your list, a lot of times they don't buy right away, right?

And that's okay. That's how things work, okay? That's how it is for everybody, okay? Only about 2% on average, this is industry average, of people who are going to actually buy something from you right away, okay?

That's why that cultivation of the list is so important. But see what happens is, typical marketers, they will pitch something, okay? A free offer over here. The goodwill is high.

And then the next day, they'll pitch something again, and this is the number of pitches they'll send out. Okay? Let that represent your pitches right here. So he's going to say, hey, buy this thing right here, right?

And there is no value. He's just pitching. So his goodwill bank account right here gets lowered a little bit, okay? And so as time goes by, he's…

Marketers, if you get on somebody else's list, you will see this, right? They'll send you the free thing, and then for the first week, they'll hammer you like almost every day with offers, right? And then they'll send you an email like every other day or so with just pitches, just pitching you. Hey, buy this thing, buy this thing, buy this thing.

And so their goodwill bank account goes like this, okay? And eventually, it just plummets, and it goes down to zero. So when… If you look at his email open rate, if that was a brand new subscriber to his list, right?

Maybe his email open rate right here was 30%, 40%, right? By the time he is like a month into it, his subscriber, or a lot of times, he's actually less than that, right? This marketer's email open rate just went down the drain, and it's down to the 2%-5% on average email open rates. What happens is…

He started out good, okay? But then because he was pitching over and over and over again without kind of like, you know, without funding his goodwill bank account, okay, without providing value to his list on the ongoing basis, there is also, there is a way for you to do this right so that… I mean, you make money by pitching, right? I mean, you don't make money by giving away stuff for free, okay?

I mean, you got to be in business. Rule number one in business is to stay in business, okay? Okay. In business is you make money.

You make sure your business is profitable, okay? So I'm not saying not to pitch at all, but there is a way for you to pitch while simultaneously raising your goodwill bank account, okay? And the higher this goodwill bank account is, okay, the more money you're going to make, right? And the bigger this balance, if this is your, you know, number of pitches, and this is your marketing timeline, right?

You're going to make money here, okay? As you progress, you know, a year from now, two years from now, three, five years from now, right? There is a way for you to engineer your business and run your business so that your goodwill bank account stays high, right? And at the same time, you're pitching and people are buying and people are eager to hear from you and they cannot wait to buy from you.

Does that make sense? So some of those strategies, we're going to dive right into the next video, okay? Appreciate you watching this. Pay attention to this kind of stuff.

You know, think about this kind of stuff. Don't just watch it and say, okay, that's a great idea. Think about this. It's a framework, okay?

This can be worth literally seven figures to your business, right, if you just map it out for your business. I'm going to show you how to do some of that stuff coming up in next videos, all right? So with that being said, let's cut this video short and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.