Build Your List

Hearing successful marketers tout “the money’s in the list” when you have no list can be disappointing and discouraging. You can already start to feel defeated as an internet marketer, seeing a long road ahead of you with list building and the task of building your subscriber base.

But while a list is beneficial in terms of consistently turning a profit from our efforts, it doesn’t take as long as you might think to build one. The disconnect happens when marketers listen to the adage “if you build it, they will come”. They mistakenly believe that as long as they’re blogging, people will visit their site and their list will simply happen with no other effort.

You can certainly earn money just by blogging and writing reviews as an affiliate, but getting your visitors to sign up to your list is so very important to the success of your business. That’s because list building gives you the means to contact an ever-growing pool of highly interested leads and customers – which is a huge asset on your journey to getting profits and sales. In other words, Email Marketing is one of the most profitable types of marketing available in the world.

Just take a look at the statistics:

Email Marketing has a ‘return on investment’ of 4,300%
91% of web users check their e-mail AT LEAST once a day
Over 2/3 of US consumers say they have made purchases as the direct result of an Email campaign
1/3rd of consumers say they open Emails based on the subject alone

When surveyed, companies rate Email Marketing as being more profitable than:

PPC Advertising
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Display Advertising
Mobile Ads
Social Media Marketing
Direct Marketing

Wow. So now that we’ve determined that List Building and Email Marketing are important to the success and profitability of your business, let’s move on.

Get the Technical Steps Down First

You can’t do anything until you have the technical steps done. So let’s get that out of the way first. Once this task is complete, you can implement a variety of strategies guaranteed to attract the right subscribers to your list.

First, you’ll need an autoresponder to automatically store your leads and automatically communicate to them through Email Marketing. Choose an autoresponder that has a long-term, good reputation. You ideally want a company with good customer service and a helpful catalog of tutorial videos to teach you the system.

Two companies many marketers use are GetResponse and Aweber. Both have been around for a long time and you can grow your business with them. The great thing about these email autoresponder companies is that you are charged less when you don’t have a big list, and they begin charging more as your list grows.

They both have a free option for those just getting started. This is perfect because you can use the autoresponder service as you grow your list. Once your list becomes large enough, you’ll begin making a profit from your subscribers, and will be able to handle the increased fee for a larger list when the time comes.

After picking your company, learn how their technical set-up works. Both Get Response and Aweber have tutorials to help you get set up and started. These lessons should teach you everything from how to set up your lists (segmenting them if needed), how to get the opt in code to paste into your site, and how to manage the emails and statistics for your content.

You will need to create and set up a series of follow-up emails to drip out to new subscribers. Then after they have received the automated Email series, you can start sending them broadcast (immediate, one time) emails. This allows you to queue up emails to go out for you on a schedule of your choosing so that you have time to do other tasks in your business.

Now, how do you get a visitor to join your list?

There are many different ways to do this, but the most popular is to offer a free gift in exchange for someone signing up to your list. This gift is many times called a “Lead Magnet”, since it is offered to attract the lead to your list.

Position Yourself as a Valuable Publisher

When visitors land on your site, before they make a decision as to whether or not they want to hand over their contact information, they’re going to analyze your content and see if you’re worthy.

People are very protective of their information, and understandedly so. Spammers often take their name and email address and sell it to others, causing an avalanche of emails they never requested to hit their inbox.

So, never post subpar content to your blog just to have something published for the day. It’s better to publish one epic blog post per week than it is to put up seven low quality, useless blog posts.

Quantity isn’t what sways a visitor to want to learn more from you. Only quality, epic content can do that.

If you outsource your posts to a ghostwriter or use private label rights, make sure you tweak them with your own personality and opinions so that the readers feels your blog is unique from all the others out there.

Aside from your blog post content, your free opt-in gift should be something exclusive and irresistible. Not many people find “future updates” appealing enough to fork over their contact information, anymore.

If you can, create something that the visitor can only get from signing up to your list. This should not be something you sell elsewhere. The exclusivity of it will force them to opt in if they want to consumer the content.

The free gift can be many things, including:

An Ebook
An Online Course
A Checklist
A Cheat Sheet
Bonuses
A Workbook
A Resourse List
A Quiz

Work hard on making sure the copy on your lead magnet page is persuasive. Look up power words and other tips that helps people’s copy convert into action taking. You only have a limited amount of space on a squeeze page, so every word needs to count.

If you need some help putting together a fresh, unique lead magnet, check out this training from a mentor of mine showing how to use ChatGPT to help create a lead magnet. Click here to check it out.