A good part of internet marketing involves building a list – and to really ramp up your business, you want to build a list fast, not slow so long as that list is high quality and buys from you.

Why do you need a list if you are marketing on the internet?

You don’t – but still, you better do it and here’s why.

1. The average conversion (visitors who take an action on your website such as signing up for a list or buying something from you) on a first-time visit to your website is less than 2% – less than 2 in 100 visitors will actually take an action.  Yet, when you convert them into a subscriber – which can often be done at between 10-50% conversion, you have a much better chance of selling them something down the road.  How much of a better chance?

In my experience you can at least double your conversions with a warm list over a cold visitor – I have seen this go up as much as 10X.  Lists convert better than cold traffic – simple as that.

We review the results and systems we use to setup our list collection efforts within InfoMarketer’sZone

2. When you have someone on your list, you can sell multiple products and services to them – the lifetime value of that customer to your internet marketing business is much higher than any single one-time visitor

3. Lists give you leverage.  When you build a list of niche target prospects online you (as the list owner) become attractive to others who want to reach that market – advertisers, and those with affiliate programs.  This lets you make some very nice deals with product owners who want to reach your customer base.  Negotiate higher commissions, get free review products, do ad swaps which gets you more exposure, increase your ad rates, etc…  These all mean more money in your pocket.

So, the question becomes, how do you build a list fast?

When most internet marketing advisors discuss building a list, they talk about traffic or the size of the list without talking about what is really important – that you focus on building a list-building SYSTEM that can run on autopilot and continually bring you a consistent conversion from your traffic generation effort.

Here’s the system we use for all of our internet marketing businesses:

1. Having a landing page that converts to at least 2% (sales) or 15% opt-in – this is not always possible, but it is the goal.  I know I can ramp up traffic dramatically if I can achieve these conversion rates

2. Understand the keywords that attract traffic with the highest ROI – once I have these, then I can target them in any number of places from social networks, articles, blogs, to paid and affiliate traffic

3. JV, JV and then  more JV’s – once you have #1 and #2 in place, and assuming you have your own product, then you can confidently go out and attract affiliates and jv partners to help promote your products which can take you to a 10X increase in traffic and opt-in’s within just a few days of promotion.

Make sense?

By focusing on this system we ensure that each business we have has a strong list building foundation that runs largely on autopilot with a predictable conversion rate – over time the value keeps increasing exponentially.