List Building

byebm47

336 followers

8 years ago

The following on list building is not meant to be instructional but informative. It's meant to give you another option to SEO.

I look at a lot of websites and I am amazed at how many do not have opt-in forms. If you are not collecting emails from visitors or buyers, you will have a harder time at making money online. Yes people are making money with organic marketing (SEO) but the real money makers have a list of customers and potential customers.

You probably have heard "The Money Is In The List". That is a fact. You can be a passive online marketer or aggressive. Being passive (at least in my mind) means you are sitting waiting for people to come to you (your website) and hoping they buy, or you can be aggressive and continually go after potential buyers.

Writing new content everyday or so and fighting with Google to get to page one is a lot of work and very time consuming. You should be spending a majority of your time (after your site is done) with marketing your site or landing page. Not writing content. Unless you really love writing content.

I was part of a webinar on facebook marketing last week, and one thing I walked away with was that if you can get a 1000 subscriber list you will have a good money list. I don't have 1000 yet but since I started collecting emails and mailing to them (eBooks, online marketing tips, product offers etc) business is better and a lot less work.

Online marketing is not easy but once you can get a list created and be more automated you will find yourself spending more time on marketing (advertising) then writing content all the time and trying to fight for page one.

How do you go about getting a list stated. It's pretty simple. You can find free opt-in plug-ins in WP to add to your site or you can join an autoresponder such as Aweber or Getresponse. I use Getreponse.com.

For beginners, just add an opt-in form to pages in your site (right or left side column) and ask people who visit your site to sign up (opt-in). Now you need to give people a reason to sign-up and you need to stay in contact with these subscribers once they do sign up.

To get someone to opt-in either give something away for free like an e-book, or offer to keep people up dated on when you add new content. This way they know when to come back to your site. People who leave comments would definitely be interested in more info from you as they are taking time to comment. These would be your prime potential buyers.

To me comments are really useless (except for helping with Google and SEO) if you cannot make them a subscriber. Once the people who have left a comment leave your site, you have lost contact with them and they may never return. You have lost the opportunity of a potential sale.

If you added an opt-in form to your site, many of those people that left comments may also become subscribers. You also now have a way to reconnect with them and try to turn them into buyers. Some comments forms do collect emails, but are you using them to create a list?

Now I recommend you eventually use an autoresponder because it will make life easier. On my landing page offers whether free or sales offers, I now do nothing, other than advertise. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of set-up to get to that point, but once you have everything set-up then it is all automated. All you see is either money from a sale going into your account or you see subscribers added to your list.

An autoresponder collects subscribers emails, names etc, and can send out whatever you want your subscribers to receive i.e I have several letters containing tips, reminders, and offers that go out to subscribers throughout the month on preset days. Every time I get a new subscriber these letters will go out to them automatically.

Having a list and doing nothing with it offers no value. You need to stay in contact with your subscribers. Again having an autoresponder to handle your mailings makes life easier and automates everything.

When you have a list you have potential buyers all the time. You are not continually waiting for people to come to you.

Now I know that this article did not give a lot of detail but I hope it sparked your interest to learn more about list building and how important a part it plays in making money online.

I am not sure if WA has tutorials on list building, but if it doesn't go to getresponse.com and/or Aweber.com and watch their tutorials to get a better idea on list building.