List Building
Today my blog post is about building a responsive list. In fact its a step-by-step to make a profitable mailing list.
Many gurus simply talk about it in a manner that it’s as easy as choosing an incentive, writing a mini sales letter to encourage people to join your list, and setting up an auto responder series so that you can build relationships with your list. But its not!
List building techniques
To make it more useful, I will discus all sorts of neat tips and tricks to help you boost the responsiveness of your list.
But first, let’s talk about what kind of traffic you’re sending to this list.
You see, many times new marketers quickly build up a big list and they start expecting the $1 per subscriber per month income.
These marketers are shocked to discover they don’t earn anywhere near $1 per subscriber per month. Some earn zero – yes, zero – from their list. Then they decide list building doesn’t work.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But lists are only profitable if you do these two things:
- Pitch targeted offers. (I ‘ll talk about how to do this later on in this course.)
- Send targeted traffic to your offer.
You see, this blog post is all about building a profitable list. However, one of the keys to building a profitable list is by making sure the offers and traffic are both targeted.
So while we’re not going to focus on this issue in this course, it’s such an important issue that I did want to take this lesson to explain it.
Let me give you an example…
Many times I’ve seen people set up general sites like “joke of the day” sites. They then build a list by offering visitors the chance to get a daily joke by email.
It’s a great way to build a list, but the problem is that this list isn’t very targeted.
Sure, everyone who joins this list likes a good joke. That means the marketer could sell things like joke books, humour videos and similar products.
However, many marketers don’t do well selling to such a diverse group, so they start trying to sell other “mass market” products like ringtones, dating opportunities and a plethora of other products to their humour-loving list.
And then the marketers bomb out, because they started pitching untargeted offers to their list.
In other cases, some people build a list by offering a contest. Problem is, they offer something like a cash prize. Thus people who sign up to the list aren’t necessarily interested in the niche – instead, they’re just interested in winning money.
So when the contest is over, the marketer is disappointed to find a totally unresponsive list.
TIP: If you want to build a list with a contest, offer niche-related products as prizes. For example, offer a dog training book as a prize if you want to build a list of dog owners.
Bottom line: start with a tightly focused target market with a definite problem. For example, dog owners need to know how to house train their dogs.
Overweight people need to know how to lose weight (fast). People who restore old cars need to know how to swap out engines. Beginning gardeners need to know how to keep their gardens free of weeds.
Once you’ve selected your target market, focus on solving their specific problems by offering free niche information in your newsletter (which helps you build a relationship with these folks) as well offering paid solutions (via your affiliate link).
Now that you have the basics down and you understand the concept of building a targeted list, you’ll learn about the tools you need in my up coming posts in future, just as if you are learning in a list building academy.