List Building

For the online marketer, there is perhaps no asset more valuable than a responsive opt-in list.

In fact, internet marketing pioneer once said, “if you have a subscriber list, you can work out any financial crisis.”

So let’s talk about list building.

Your Following

While in the traditional sense, list building refers to building a list of names and email addresses, these days there are a lot more ways to build a list.

For example, if you have a Youtube account, people can subscribe to your videos.  On Facebook, their called friends.  On Twitter, you build followers.  In a sense, those are all lists, but for the purposes our purposes, we’re going to focus on building a list of email addresses since it’s still the easiest to actually make money from.

Is This Spam?

This is a question that comes up quite a bit.  “Isn’t this spam?”

Quite simply, no, it isn’t.

Now if you go and buy one of those lists of millions of names and start emailing them, then yes, that is spamming.  However, I’m going to teach you how to build your list from scratch so that you’re only emailing people who have given you express permission to email them.

That isn’t spam.

Autoresponders

The first thing you’re going to need to build a list is an autoresponder.  Essentially, an autoresponder is a service that helps you collect, store, and contact the list you’re building.

And the cool thing is that you can setup an autoresponder so that it works automatically without you needing to constantly use it.

For example, you can set an autoresponder to automatically send a certain email right after they sign up to be on your list and you can have it keep sending them emails to that person periodically all without you needing to do anything once you’ve got it setup.

Picking A Good Autoresponder Service

This isn’t something you want to try to do on your own.  Don’t think that you’ll collect email addresses and then just email them from your own computer.  Your emails are going to end up getting filtered and in the spam folders of your recipients.

Fortunately, a good autoresponder can be had even if you’re on a budget.  Some of the big names in the world of email marketing are Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, and 1ShoppingCart.  My recommendation is to go with Aweber as they tend to have the best deliverability rate (i.e. – more of your emails get to the people you’re trying to contact vs in their spam or bulk mail folders).

Getting the opt-in

Once you have an account setup, it’s time to start working on getting people to opt-in to your list.  This isn’t terribly difficult, but it does take a little bit of thought and effort.

For example, just having an opt-in box on your website that says, “sign up for my free newsletter” is better than nothing, but if that’s all you do, you’re going to find that number of people who actually opt-in is abysmal.  Most people are a little protective about giving out their email address so you’re going to need to bribe them to give it to you.

How do your bribe them?

Offer them something that is going to be of value to them.  For example, give them a free report that they can only get if they opt-in to your list.  Make a video.  Bribe them with a podcast.  Offer to send them a 5 day ecourse (and ecourse is a short series of emails that cover one topic usually ranging from 3 to 10 days in length).

Basically, think about what kind of information that person is looking for and offer to give it to them in exchange for their first name and email address.

Building relationship

So once you’ve got them on your list, you have free reign to start sending off advertisements to them at will, right?

Wrong!

I’ve certainly seen some people do that, and if you keep making offers, some people will in fact buy.  However, there’s a far better way to build a list that is going to make you money.

When people say “the money is in the list,” what they’re really saying is that “the money is in the relationship with the list.”  If you have a list of 100,000 people, but they don’t really know who you are and aren’t even sure how they got on your list, then you’re not going to get very good results when you send and offer to that list.

However, if you have spent time sending valuable information to your subscribers, then those people are going to start to know you, like you, and trust you.

If you take the time to build a relationship with your list, they’re going to be far more responsive next time you email them an offer.
A list of 10,000 people who know you, like you, and trust you will almost certainly outperform a list of 100,000 people who don’t.  It’s quality over quantity.

Pro Tip: When writing an email, write it like you’re writing a letter to a friend.  Even if you’re emailing thousands of people, it’s only going to be read by one person at a time so write your emails like you’re writing to only one person, not thousands of tens of thousands.

Value of a list

How much, exactly, is an optin list worth?  Well, it varies wildly.  However, let me give you the rule of thumb so you can estimate what getting each subscriber is going to be worth to you.  Typically, you’ll find that each subscriber on your list is worth about $.50-$1/month per subscriber.

As long as you’re contacting them frequently giving them good information and sending several offers each month, you’ll likely find the value of your list to fall within those guidelines.

That means that if you have 1000 people on your list, then you should be making between $500 and $1000 /month from that list.

There are no guarantees in the value of each list and some lists are worth more than others (I know of a couple people who make more than $12/month from each subscriber) – you may do better or worse, but there is almost always value in building a list.

In many ways, it’s like being able to print money whenever you want to – legally!