List Building

If you are serious about making money online, then you need to build an opt-in list of subscribers or prospects that you can send emails to. You may have come across the saying "The money's in the list". This is a term often quoted by successful marketers, and for good reason. Ask any internet marketer what their most valuable asset, and most will say their list of subscribers.

Let me explain why. If for example you have a new product or website launching, then if you have built up a list of say 10,000 subscribers who respect you and listen to what you have to say, then you could immediately reach all these people with one simple email. You obviously don't have to send 10,000 emails by hand, you can just use an autoresponder. This will immediately get upto 10,000 targeted visitors to your site, who are already interested in your products or sites. Even if you got just a 1% response rate, that's still 100 sales, and it didn't cost you anything either.

Obviously if you are to be respected you need to offer something of value to your subscribers. If you simply bombard them with product offers, all with your affiliate links included in the email, then you are likely to get a lot of people unsubscribe from your list. 

Offering free ebooks is a good way to attract subscribers, as are free reports on how to do something, particularly if you write these yourself. You can include your affiliate or site links in these reports, or make it viral by stating that your report can be given away to other people. To keep subscribers initially, rather than signing up for the freebies, then unsubscribing when they've received them, you can offer a multi-part course or tutorial. This should be spread out over a few weeks ideally. Perry Marshall is one person who immediately springs to mind, who does this successfully. 

Whatever else you do to your site, just keep building that list. Don't rely on just one source of traffic, such as search engines. You may find yourself at the top of the search engines, and get 95% of your sales from them, but what happens if the search engines suddenly change their algorithms, and you suddenly drop out of the top pages? Or maybe you suddenly get a load of sites who have overtaken you in the ranking through better use of SEO techniques, or even through using questionable black cloak tactics? If you have a decent sized list, however, this needn't be a major concern, as you will always have a large audience that you can reach.

Finally, I just want to point you in the direction of an excellent package put together by Keith Wellman, The ListFX. He's interviewed 7 internet marketing gurus on how to build your own list and just as importantly, how to profit from your own list. I got a lot out of these packages, and I'm quite an experienced online marketer. Please take a look, it's incredible value for money at just $9.95.