Category: List Building

Once you start growing your opt-in list, you’ll want to ensure it is profitable. There are many ways to go about doing this. You want to make sure all your hard work is for a good cause, so you have to find ways to profit from your list. There are literally dozens of different methods you can employ to achieve results, but two seem to work better than all others.

The top two ways to profit from your list are also the easiest, so let’s look at them:

1. Build trust and loyalty among your customers. Your customers will not buy from you unless you are able to prove your worthiness. So, you have to spend notable time working to build their trust. You can do this many ways. You can join forums that talk about the products or service industry you have an interest in, and look for experts in your field to offer their advice and recommendations to your subscriber list.

Also, make sure your website is clear and offers your visitors relevant and important information they will find helpful during their journey. If you are practicing affiliate marketing, and even if you are not, make sure you tested or tried any products you plan to sell so you can provide your subscribers honest reviews of them. This is the #1-way to build trust, and trust always leads to higher profit margins.

You should also build a user-friendly website, one that has a navigation bar placed in a prominent location. Make sure you provide your customers with a contact us page and always respond to customer or visitor inquiries within 48 hours if this is possible. The sooner you get back with your visitors, the better reputation you will build.

When responding to customer’s that contact you through your website, make sure that you remind them to sign up for your free newsletter if they haven’t already, which will contain more information on the subject they are looking for. Don’t automatically assume they want to be subscribed to your newsletter just because they asked a question on the topic. Tell them what your newsletter offers, and how they can subscribe.

When you build trust and loyalty, your customers are also more likely to refer your business to their friends and their family. Some web owners design a page after the order page that allows the customer to input the names and emails of two to three of their friends that might also be interested in your products. This is another simple way to build your list. Make sure you provide them an incentive for checking you out, in the way of a free report, book, checklist or newsletter subscription.

2. Fulfill your subscriber’s needs. Everyone has needs. The whole point of doing business on the web is to fulfill the needs of people surfing the Internet. If you want to make money selling a product or a service, you first have to find out how that product or service will fill your prospect’s needs. How will they benefit from the product or service you offer? Have other people benefited? If so, how and why? Providing your customers with this information will help you create a profitable opt-in list, one that will transform visitors into paying customers.

One of the simplest ways to tell your customers how you can fulfill their needs is by listing the ways you do this on your landing page, or on another prominent place on your website. Make sure you bullet each benefit and explain to the prospect exactly how you plan to serve them, and why your product or service is better than that of the competition.

The more content you provide, the more secure your customer will feel about their purchase. They are also more inclined to believe you are fulfilling a need they have.

Let us take a moment to look at the first bullet, trust. Many people fear that building trust among strangers will prove difficult. Realistically speaking, anyone can build trust easily. How do you build trust?

First, run a legitimate business that you know something about. Don’t try selling aromatherapy to someone just because it is a hot trend. You have to know what you are selling to sell it well. Next, if you want to encourage your customers to buy, offer them some form of guarantee. You can for example, offer them a 90-Day money-back guarantee on any products they use on your site, provided they use the products in the time frame appointed and have a legitimate reason for returning them.

Statistics show that even when customers do not feel satisfied with a product they will often not return it because they either (1) forget about it or (2) are too busy to mess with it. Nonetheless, when you build a guarantee into your sale, you put your customer’s mind at ease, and they consider their purchase less risky.

Lastly, provide your customer’s helpful hints and guidelines that will help them get the most benefit from your product. This shows your customer you have a vested interest in helping them succeed. This builds trust and loyalty, and converts subscribers to buyers. That is your goal to begin with.

To win big, you have to start out small, as Demosthenes suggests. Small opportunities will often lead you to great successes. The process of creating a list leads to the potential for greater success and wealth, regardless of the business you are in. In this section we’ll talk about some simple tools you can use to build your list. Let’s look at each method independently.

Sometimes it is best to rely on simple tools and small opportunities when you are just starting out in the industry. You will have much time to grow your business and expand your customer base if you follow the simple steps outlined in this guide. So let’s begin first by talking about subscriber leads.

Subscriber Leads

One easy way to build your list is by collecting subscriber leads. This is one of the best ways to expand your business. There are many ways to acquire leads, but the best way to collect leads is to gather them automatically, through email or by your website through various forms. In the next few sections of this book, we will go into greater detail about the ways you can grow your subscriber list and maintain your list over time.

You will find as you run your business that your subscriber leads prove vital to your businesses success and ability to grow and expand over time.

Opt-In Leads

Like subscriber leads, opt-in leads are a good tool for building your business. Opt-in leads are leads you get when you invite someone to enter their information into your database. When they do this, they are granting you permission to contact them in the future about new products or updates to your site.

For example, when you create your website, you can set it up so each person that visits has the choice to sign up for a newsletter or some other type of routine e-mailing. By signing up, visitors are “opting in” to your list. Setting your site up this way allows you to gain visitor’s email addresses. While you can never force someone to do what you want them to, this approach often works if you encourage people to sign up by describing all the benefits your site offers. You can then reap the benefits of gaining important subscriber leads.

Survey Leads

Another way to produce automatic subscriber leads is by conducting surveys on your website. This is a simple way to increase the number of subscribers to your list. You can place survey ads on your website so they pop up when a customer checks out.

How do you get someone to fill out a survey? It is not as hard as you think. For starters, some people enjoy filling out surveys. For those that don’t you can employ some simple tactics to encourage them to offer their information to you. For example, tell your customers what benefits they will reap from filling out your survey. Don’t assume your customer’s know what benefits they will gain by filling out a survey. You have to tell them. Maybe they will gain access to your website, which contains thousands of free articles on the topic they are researching. Maybe you will enter them into a contest to win a free gift. Giveaways are a great way to encourage people to sign up for just about anything.

It’s funny how quickly people are willing to give up their personal information, including their name, address and email for a gift. We’ll talk more about gifts later in this guide.

Make sure you offer them an irresistible reason to fill out your survey. Tell customers how they will profit by signing up. This is a very easy and successful tool marketers use to produce new leads. Most times visitors are willing to offer their email address for a survey.

Let’s talk now about the next simple tool you can use to build your subscriber list.

Affiliating

One way you can collect leads for your subscriber list is by affiliating. Affiliating means joining in or offering an affiliate program. When you take part in an affiliate program you immediately realize the benefits of getting leads that an affiliate will create and then forward to you.

For this process to work you need an opt-in program and an auto responder programmer. We will devote an entire section to auto responders later in this guide. Using these programs you can gather information and instantly send out confirmation emails to new subscribers on your list. Don’t worry about having people fill in their address fields or phone number. Most people are hesitant to provide this information, but very willing to provide their email address. There is much less pressure involved when you are collecting email addresses instead of personal information.

In the last section we talked about some simple tools you can use to build your subscriber list. There are many possibilities and opportunities to expand your list if you are willing to put in the time and effort. Once you have a solid list, you are positioned to sell your product or service more efficiently on the Web or off the Web.

In this chapter we’ll look at some more ways of building your subscriber lists. Many people decide to build their mailing list by buying a mailing lists or subscriber lists. There are many places you can rent or buy mailing lists. Generally however, these lists do not work as well as collecting leads on your own. Sometimes buying a list causes problems. For example, many subscribers on these lists are people that didn’t want their personal information sold, so they may end up resenting you for contacting them, and even report you for Spam.

While you can use these lists and they might work, you have to consider whether the price is worth it as they are very expensive. If you are short on time and have some free capital to spare, you might start with a rented or bought list and then work on building your own subscriber list.

Building Your Own Mailing List

You can’t rely on others to build your mailing list for you. If you want to succeed you must do everything possible to create your own success.

Building your own list is the best way to earn the trust and loyalty of subscribers and to ensure your personal success and satisfaction. While you are building your subscriber list using the tools we talked about in the first chapter, you can also use the information you gather to start building your own mailing list. Some new business owners are afraid to ask their customers for personal information to include on their list. But for many, a mailing list can make or break a business.

A mailing list is a must have if you want to create large-scale sales and realize significant profits on the Web. Want to know why a mailing list is important? Here’s why. Typically the average customer will visit a website seven or more times before they buy something. As long as you give your customers a reason to revisit your site, they will. That is why you need a mailing list

You can mail a newsletter to your list to encourage your customers to visit your site and look at recent additions or updates. There are many statistics confirming that customers repeatedly buy from email advertisements, so don’t think you don’t need a mailing list. You do. And you need a good one at that.

How To Avoid Mistakes When Creating Your Subscriber List

Before we talk more about the steps you should take to build your subscriber list, let’s make sure we are clear on what you should NOT do when building your subscriber list. Many newbies fall victim to scams or programs offering free traffic that will boost their sales. Unfortunately many of these programs are nothing more than scams and may end up costing you more money than they make.

They can even prevent you from restarting your business and achieving the success you deserve. So let’s make sure you do not make these common mistakes.

Let’s start by looking at some things you should avoid when trying to build your list.

List Building No No’s

There are certain things you should never do when trying to build your subscriber list. The #1 mistake list builders make is buying bulk emails. Here is a tip:

NEVER BUY AND SEND BULK EMAIL TO PEOPLE

You won’t make any money sending bulk emails to people. Why? Because they are garbage. They are worthless. By now you must have done some research on list building or you wouldn’t be reading this book. You may see ads that promise thousands of email addresses for less than $50. If you see ads like this, know you are working with a bulk mail company.

While having thousands of subscribers would be great, it isn’t great if you are getting your names from a bulk mailing list. Bulk companies get their email addresses by using automatic tools, including robots on the Web.

If you buy the list, there is a very good chance you are buying a list of names of people that don’t want to be advertised to for the product you are offering. You risk being labeled a spammer. If no one asked to subscribe to your mailing list and you send them an email, what are you doing? You are spamming them.

Spamming people is the number one way to fail at building your subscriber list. Bulk mailing ads are useless. Avoid them at all costs if you want to run a successful campaign.

Bulk mailing lists also are not targeted. Targeted lists are lists that have the names and contact information of people that would have an active interest in buying what it is you have to offer. If you buy a bulk list, you run the risk of trying to sell a female hormonal cream to a man interested in sports gear. Not a good combination.

Now let’s look at another popular scam used on the web to pull new business owners in and trick them into spending their hard earned money on traffic and list building programs that don’t work.

Guaranteed Traffic Scam

Many new business owners are tempted by offers of “guaranteed” traffic for a very low price. Now, these companies may send 100,000 or more visitors to your website, but you may not get a single subscriber or make a single sale.

Why? Traffic is generated by pop up windows appearing on other websites. Your website is loaded into a pop up window. So, someone may be surfing the net and your website pops up below the site he is searching. This results in sending out your website to thousands of untargeted customers. The key to success in list building is creating a list of TARGETED customers.

Targeted customers are customers that are most likely to be interested in buying your product. They have, in some way, offered their information and stated that they have an interest in a product. Let’s say you sell beauty products. You want a targeted list of consumers, mostly women, interested in buying beauty products on the Web. If you get a list of untargeted customers, your business will go nowhere. Most untargeted customers won’t buy anything, and they don’t want to be hassled by traffic generating pop ups.