What if I told you there’s a secret “backdoor” you can setup that lets you spy on the secrets and battle plans of the world’s most successful online businesses?

Imagine the unfair advantage you could have as an entrepreneur if you could walk in and out of your competitors offices… listen in on their marketing discussions… or know what product they're gearing up to launch before they actually launched it.

Well, for online entrepreneurs, this backdoor exits.

It’s called a “seed account”.

What’s a Seed Account?

A seed account is an email account that you only use to sign up for different online businesses email lists.

Why’s it called a seed account?

Because all you do is plant a seed (signing up to mailing lists with your email address) and over time, the account blooms into a gigantic money tree that’s worth more than its weight in gold.

The goal is to get on as many different lists as possible — preferably all lists that use direct response marketing to sell products and services.

Then, you use the account for industry intelligence and to see what our competitors are doing.

Direct response marketing is the one of the easiest industries to spy on your competitors.

What’s in a Seed Account?

Typically it’s what’s called an “e-letter”.

An e-letter is daily or frequent correspondence from a business over email.

Sometimes it has a name like “The Daily Productivity Tip.”

Or, “Pete’s Direct Response Daily”

It doesn't need to be branded, though.

Sometimes it could just be the sender’s name with a message.

When you’re about to signup for something, you’ll be offered something of value in consideration for your email address.

This is called a lead magnet.

Typically, a lead magnet will be a special PDF report… an e-book… or some video series.

In fact, everything you’ve gotten from me so far -- even this blog post! -- is a lead magnet.

As soon as you sign up to a particular list you should get a confirmation…

Then, you should start regularly receiving both content and marketing emails.

Why Do You Want a Seed Account?

Get to see what our competitors are testing. If you see a competitor send an offer over and over and over and over, you can be relatively sure it’s working for them. You should save and study something you see over and over. A good rule of thumb is if you see an offer more than 3 times in a two week time frame, pay closer attention to it.
You can get good ideas for subject lines and lift note copy.
You can click through and see actual promotions and landing pages, which you can draw from to find a promo per day to markup.
You can get ideas for products, headlines or subject lines, new promotional ideas, new offers, new landing page designs, etc.

What Should You Sign Up For?

Here are some recommended lists. This is finance heavy, only because that’s my preference. But, many of the finance lists I’ve included here are the absolute best at long-form direct response copyrwriting (writing sales messages that sell.) You can add to this list as you see fit.