How To Start Building Your List Today

Right from when I first started online people have been telling me that ‘the money is in the list’ and that ‘you must build a list.’

I’ve been agreeing with them and saying it myself for years – yet the funny thing is that it isn’t until the last year or so that I’ve actually seen for myself why it’s so true and the results that you get from sending a promo out to a decent sized email list of responsive subscribers.

My sales from a typical promo are usually nothing earth shattering, but even if it’s just a product priced at around $10 and you make 15 or 20 sales that’s a pretty decent return for sending an email.

I still find it exciting that I can send a promo email out to my list and see sales landing in my inbox within minutes. My Mac makes a ‘ping’ noise when I get a new email and as silly as it sounds I get a rush of adrenaline every time I hear this noise and rush to my laptop to see if it’s another sale

As my list grows and my relationship with them grows too I know I’ll make more money on each promo.

In my opinion as an internet marketer your number one priority should be building your email list…

So how can you start building your list today?

It’s actually pretty simple. All you need is:

1. An autoresponder account (I use Aweber)

2. A simple squeeze page offering a free product

3. Traffic to your squeeze page

Let’s deal with each one in turn.

I use Aweber because they seem to have good delivery rates, I find it easy to use and I like the ability to track my stats in detail. There are free alternative autoresponders out there but in my opinion the investment in a quality service like Aweber is absolutely essential.

The second piece of the jigsaw is a little harder but still pretty easy.

To get people to sign up to your list you need some ‘bait.’ You need to give some sort of product away for free (whether it’s a report, eBook, video etc) to persuade people to opt-in to your list.

Crucially it must be something which people really want and are prepared to swap their email address to get hold of.

The mistake most people make is to think that just because you’re offering something for free you can give away any old rubbish.

What you need is a quality product, something which you would opt-in for yourself or which people would actually pay money for. If you can do this it becomes a real no brainer for people when they see that you’re offering it for free!

Ideally it should be something unique – but it doesn’t have to start out that way. You could use PLR for example and then change the name of the product and the graphics to make it unique to yourself.

I do this a lot and it works very well.

Putting on my other hat as a PLR provider, one of my squeeze pages gives away a report with private label rights, including all graphics, editable sales page, squeeze page – the full works. This is an absolute steal for people who want to get hold of PLR because it is of the same quality (if not better ) than PLR you might pay for.

Give people something they can’t refuse and they will opt-in to your list.

You’ll also need a squeeze page. Now some people will disagree with me here but I’d say it doesn’t have to be the best looking squeeze page in the world. The most important thing is what you’re giving away.

All of my squeeze pages convert at around 50% and sometimes as high as 75%. The reason is because I offer top quality freebies and my squeeze pages make it clear why people should opt-in (although I have to say that whilst they are ok, they could be improved and I’m currently testing different squeeze pages to see if I can up my opt-in rates even further.)

Just find out what your target audience craves. Look at paid products that are selling well and create a free version. Look at forums, blogs etc and see what people are talking about. You should be able to find out what’s hot and come up with an idea for a freebie product pretty easily.

The third element of list building – getting traffic to your squeeze page – is where most people go wrong.

I’ve used various methods over time to get visitors to my squeeze page. Some have been free methods and some have been paid.

I’ve blogged before about how effective WSOs (Warrior Special Offers) can be when you’re promoting a freebie. They just plain work and will send you an instant surge of targeted traffic to your squeeze page.

Most recently I’ve been doing a lot of solo mailings.

A solo ad/mailing is simply where you pay someone else to email your offer to their mailing list. If you choose the right person to buy a solo ad from (ie. it needs to be someone who is in the same/similar niche as you and who has a responsive list) you’ll be amazed by the results you get.

I’ve been working recently for example with someone I found over at the Warrior forum who has a REALLY responsive list. For $80 he will send out a solo mailing to his list and he guarantees you 200 clicks on the link in his email. Last time this resulted in me adding around 130 people to my list within the first 48hrs of the email going out – which is pretty cool – and you’ll find you get similar results from other solo mailings IF you choose the right person.

Yesterday I sent out an affiliate promo to my list and my stats show that 3 of the buyers were people who had joined my list as a result of that solo ad. Another 2 came from another solo ad I recently paid for.

Tony Shepherd is an expert on this area and I’ve learned a lot from him on the subject.

If you’re using paid methods like the above to drive traffic then it’s a good idea to stick a paid offer behind your freebie in order to monetize the process and draw back the cost of paying for the advert. Do it right and you’ll make a nice little profit on it too, so you’re effectively building your list for free.

Your paid product could be an affiliate product or your own product – but it must be something which is related. For example if your freebie is about blogging then offer another product or course about blogging which goes into things in more detail.

Other good ways of driving traffic to your squeeze page which I’ve found effective include adswaps (like a solo mailing but instead of paying for the email you simply offer to return the favor and email your list about your partners offer), blogging/blog commenting, forum signatures, article marketing and viral reports.

I’m a particular fan of viral reports for example because you can put them out there with your links inside and you’ll get traffic from those links for years to come without you needing to do anything further. It’s one of those methods which just plain works but which people tend to dismiss because it’s not particularly sexy.

I don’t know about you but I’d prefer simple and effective to sexy but a waste of time!

So in summary – the key to building a list is to offer a quality product which people want to get hold of – something they’d even pay money for – and then give it to them for free.

From there, drive traffic to your squeeze page using the techniques I’ve talked about above. Use WSOs or solo ads to get you started and drive an instant surge of traffic to your squeeze page. Doing each a few times over the course of a few weeks should get you your first 2,000 subscribers.

Once people are added to your list you can work on building a relationship with them (remember it’s not just about how many subscribers you have but the relationship you have with them), sending out promos and adding messages to your autoresponder sequence (that’s how you make money in your sleep).

Just build your list!

I hope you found this post useful.

Comments welcome…