“The Money is in the List”--Building Your Own Mailing List

 

List building is one the most important steps to take in building a successful business online.  Building a list may take a little time but it is well worth the effort and easier than you may think.  Without a good mailing list you are pretty much dead in the water.

 

Building relationships:

 

It is one thing to bring in potential customers to your website but quite another to keep the traffic you draw and have them come again and again.  Just a note on your website saying sign-up for my mailing list will not WORK!  In order to get someone to give you their name and email address there needs to be real motivation or they will just move on to the next website.  Just directing traffic means nothing unless the traffic is motivated to take action. 

 

Why should anyone trust you with their name and email address?  What is in it for them if they fill out your form?  To build a mailing list you need to build trust and create interest.  This will motivate your traffic to ‘sign-up’.  There must be a good reason for your traffic to give you their email address and name.  No incentive—no address!

 

Incentives:

 

There are several ways to create interest and a real incentive to fill out your opt-in form.  Offering some kind of FREEBIE is the key here.  For instance;

·         Newsletter

·         Resource Report

·         eBook

·         Video

·         Software

·         Coupon

·         Free patterns or instructions

·         Exclusive offers for member’s only

or anything as long as it has credibility and real valuable information.  If you still need help, there are tons of free reports available that you can acquire to give away.  These reports are embedded with the originator’s links so they are more than happy to let you give their reports away for free. This is certainly a place to start but the ultimate is a report with your own links that you create yourself or at least one that you have rebranded.

 

The main object to your incentive is to answer the question every visitor has which is “what is in it for me?”

 

Promote!!!

 

Creating a great offer to get your traffic to sign-up is very powerful, but…if no one ever sees this great opportunity you have created it is purely a waste of time and effort.  So, promote your sign-up opportunity anywhere and everywhere you can.  For instance;

·         Emails

·         Websites

·         Auctions

·         Blogs

·         Articles

·         Forums

·         Domain name specific to your offer

or anything you can come up with to get your freebie noticed.

 

How to create and track your sign-up offers:

 

There are a lot of ways to create sign-up forms but the easiest and most effective is to use one of the big auto responder services.  The top two are Aweber and GetResponse.  These are programs that you can try out for free to begin or almost free and then it is a monthly fee.  Their value is easy to create forms from templates and valuable tracking.  No matter which method you use to present your freebie, these programs do all the tracking for you.  This is invaluable and a must-have!  Once your traffic signs-up for one of your freebies, all the bells and whistles must be ready to go. 

 

Don’t forget back-end sales:

 

Part of the value of building your own list is that once your traffic reaches the ‘thank you page’, you can add one or two offers at the back-end of your page.  They can click on the promised freebie link but will also see one or two of your products and may choose to click on those as well.