Imagine having a list of 20,000 loyal and responsive subscribers that you can communicate with weekly, sharing insights about your own products, recommending other products you have used and liked – each time you send an email to your list,  you make a healthy profit – on demand!

List building is a critical part of making money online.

Buyers who know you, follow you, like you and hear from you multiple times are up to 7-times more likely to buy from you.

Without a list, you have one shot (possibly forever!) to convince your customer to buy your product – in most cases this happens to less than 1% of those who come to your site for the first time. 

Yet, conversions for your list can be as high as 7-10% – AND you can market to them over and over again as you release new proudcts, updates or recommend partner and affiliate programs. 

OK Then – How Do We Start Building A List?

It doesn’t matter if you have no list or you have a list of 2000  – you can improve both the size AND responsiveness of your list by folllowing this proven system:

1. Target a niche – operating a general website will be tougher to offer the value that is required to insent people to opt-in

2. Give them something they MUST have…what is the biggest desire or outcome desired by your market?  What do they want most?  What questions stand in their way or frustrate them?  You want to target this desire with an answer to their biggest question.  This could be a report, ecourse, teleconference, video, audio interview, etc…the key is that it will get them further toward their desired outcome.

3. Setup a landing page (could be a forced squeeze page, or it could be a combined content with strong call to action landing page) where your main focus is to give value in return for opt-in

4. Study the keyword phrases that relate most to your target market IN RELATION to the value you have to give them. 

5. Generate traffic through a combination of content development (write and submit articles, blogging, Squidoo, social networking, etc…) and paid advertising (PPC and and/or banners)

6. Study your results carefully.  Which keywords are leading to clickthroughs to your landing page and result in conversions (opt-in’s to your list)?  What is the overall conversion of your landing page?  Lots of traffic to your landing page means your traffic generation is working, but your landing page copy must be improved.  Little traffic to you landing page means you need to do a better job of targeting keywords, generating content or targeting ads. 

Do not ignore the value in #6 – many people I’ve worked with start off extremely slow, but those that stick with it and improve can see ongoing (and sometimes dramatic) improvement in 2-4 weeks. 

The good news, of course, is that once you have the system in place it can largely run on autopilot. 

Finally, if/once you have your own product to promote you can spread your traffic generation out into an affiliate base which can really ramp up both your list building and revenues.  

This system and methods of producing your own in-demand information products to insert into this process are all covered within Information Marketer’sZone – training, tools, templates and ongoing support all for less than one trip to MacDonald’s each month!

Leave us a Comment with any questions or comments you have about this system by clicking on the comment bubble in the top right of this post – let’s get list building.