List building is a really important element of internet marketing. As a matter of fact it is the one and only element that separates common affiliate marketers by real online marketers.

In this article I will show you the main pro and the main con of list building.

PRO

The biggest advantage of building a list is that you collect a database of prospects and customers who agree to be contacted by you. This way, you can followup with them in order to close the sale and you can contact them for further promotions and offers.

Beware, this is the only way you can scale your sales process to a real business.

In fact, once you test your sales process and make it work, if you send your prospects through it you get a defined conversion, meaning for instance 2 visitors out of 100 will buy your product.

If the people in your prospects list are 1000 instead of 100, you’ll get 20 sales. Once it works, you can scale it indefinitely by growing your list.

CON

The main con of list building is the work you need to put in it.

You need to set up a squeeze page, to test and tweak it, to manage your prospects, answer their questions, track your results. You need to track how many people subscribe to your list, how many of them read your mails, how many sales you can make in the follow up process rather than on the front end product.

All of this requires a lot of work, which most of the wannabe internet marketers are not willing to do. That’s why you can step up from the mass if you apply yourself onto it.

Aside from your will and consistence to succeed in this list building process, you’ll need a very important tool: an email autoresponder.

You can find lots of autoresponders online, most of them offering a free trial.

If you haven’t got an autoresponder yet, I invite you to visit our website and check out our free autoresponder.

By: Giovanni Farotto

About the Author:

Your niche sites made easy

Want to build a huge list? A really quick way to do that is by participating in giveaway events as a contributor. Giveaways are the ultimate form of leverage in pure list building, but only a few top marketers have taken advantage of it. Now this advantage is available for the little guy to grow a bigger list.

Here is the 3-step process I use to build ever-larger lists with giveaways:

Step 1 – Get/Create A Free Product
Step 2 – Sign Up As A Contributor
Step 3 – Promote The Giveaway

Those are the 3 steps you need to take to start building profitable mailing lists using this strategy. Now let’s discuss and dissect this process:

Step 1 – Get/Create A Free Product

The first step that is required is to get or create your free product to use in the event. You can get a free information product that has giveaway rights and use that or create your own free report to use. Don’t forget to set up an opt-in page too to gather the subscribers.

Step 2 – Sign Up As A Contributor

Sign up as a participating contributor to the giveaway. Many events hide their contributor link, so in this way, you need to be on the inside. Do a search for Facebook groups that feature giveaway alerts or do a search on Google for the Contributor link.

Step 3 – Promote The Event

When the event goes live, promote it to your list or just do an all-out assault to get referrals. This is important as it will catapult your gift’s ranking and give it a higher position, from which you can get more traffic and more leads.

By: Fabian Tan

About the Author:

Membership Site Script

When potential clients land on your squeeze page and they opt in, it shows that they have some level of expectation from your offer. They may want more information before they can commit, or are interested in buying but want to make sure that they are dealing with a product provider who knows what they are talking about.

What you want to do as an internet marketer is to make sure that you keep growing this list by increasing the flow of targeted traffic to your squeeze page or site. It’s a probability game, a sure science.

The more opt-ins you have, the more likely you are to generate higher sales. So how do you go about building a list that serves you? Here are some tips to guide you along:

List Building Tip # 1: Include Long Tail Keywords.

As you set about creating your squeeze page, include long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are more specific and generate targeted quality traffic, but on a lesser scale than ordinary keywords.

Let’s say you are promoting bathtubs. “Bathtubs” will obviously be a keyword, but “corner bathtubs” would make it more descriptive and specific; because if someone is looking for corner bathtubs, the search engines would return fewer search results and you’ll be among them.

Then think of it this way: most people who are looking for bathtubs are looking for a certain quality: what is the key quality of your tubs? What would someone looking for a corner bathtub look for exactly? In one or two words that is. Include that in your keyword phrase. You’ll probably end up with something like “quality marble corner bathtubs.”

But to eliminate any guesses and know the exact keywords that people are actually searching for online, use a keyword research tool such as the Google AdWords keyword tool.

Using this tool, you’ll know how many people are searching for keywords related to your niche as well as the quantity of competitors who are paying for those keywords. The more the hits, the more you should work to refine your keywords to be more specific.

That’s just an example, but the point here is that you must examine your product as critically as possible and come up with keywords that are completely descriptive of them. That gives you more chances of targeted hits and quality opt-ins, because people will find precisely what they are looking for.

List Building Tip # 2: Consider a Press Release.

They are not very common, but some people swear by them, and it’s because they work.

There are ways to do press releases that make them more readable and less like obvious advertising. The secret is to make them sound like news. It will probably come from someone who has already purchased your product.

Let’s say you are selling a work-from-home product. It has worked well for one of your clients. Get an interview with her – and that’s your press release. Title it cleverly so that it gets attention. A good title could be “62-year old mom discovers automatic way to make 6 figures monthly.”

With your link at the bottom, you’ll have already arrested the attention of interested people who are highly likely to click on your link to find out more about this feature in the news. You can have several press releases targeted at different sections of the population.

Most important to remember is to make it sound like news and not an advertisement. The space won’t cost you that much and the number of contacts you are likely to get will be worth it.

List Building Tip # 3: Give Free Value.

Building a list is about developing relationships. Somewhere along the way, someone figured that giving freebies is a great way to get people to opt in.

There are many resale rights products on the internet that have become so saturated they have lost their bonus value. So it is highly recommended that the creator of the product take the time out to create a “tantalizer.”

Tantalize your clients to buy by offering them snippets of what they’ll get on purchase. If you are selling treadmills, how about you put together a video of exercises that you can do on the specific treadmill, showing its benefits and how the treadmill works; and let customers get that for free? Before they even buy, that is.

Make it easy for them. “If you want to see how this treadmill would be great for you, download a free video here of exercises that you can do on it.”

In the video, do exactly as you had promised: show the exercises, go one better and tell them the benefits of each exercise. It will build muscle, improve cardiovascular health, and keep you fit and lean.

Be creative about how you go about in pre-selling the actual product. You could put the ad right at the end, or put a buy link that they can click on while the video is running.

List Building Tip # 4: Give An Option To Forward To Friends.

This one works great. If you have an attractive squeeze page, a quality freebie, and an autoresponder sequence full of useful information, your subscribers are more likely to forward them to others who would benefit from the same information.

Make it easy for them to forward your message by putting a forward link or simply by asking them to forward to people they know. Allow them to forward to multiple people, and make it even more enticing by giving them something for free if they forward to a certain minimum.

Make sure that whatever you give is informational and subtly encourages them to get your product. Remember, everyone wants to feel like they are getting value – so give it before they ask for it.

There are more things you can do to build a killer list. Investigate and understand your options, and choose the ones that will make people want to opt-in willingly.

By: Jeremy A Gislason

About the Author:

Membership Site Script

Building a list is an important way to ensure that a small business owner has customers anytime that they are needed.

A business owner’s customer list doesn’t have to be made up of past customers, often it’s made up entirely of potential customers; at least, that is quite common in the beginning. The goal of list building is to generate a steady flow of list members becoming customers.

To ensure that the members of a list are people who will potentially buy from the list owner, it’s important to target the right demographics. Search for people who have an interest in the items that you are selling, look for individuals who already express an interest in your product. Some of those people may have bought something similar from you before, but to build a larger list, it’s important to set up a way to target people who may be interested in buying from you in the future.

Online List Building Services

There are a number of ways to encourage people to sign up on your customer list.? Of course, you want to avoid being obvious about the process.? The list members will know that they are signing up to receive correspondence from you, but they may not realize that your goal in creating the list is to allow for marketing messages to be sent along with the other information.? This seemingly innocuous method provides you with a steady flow of potential clients without appearing aggressive.

Blogging on your Own

Website owners who use a blog to market themselves or their business have an ideal place to create an opt-in area. By offering email updates on their blog or a newsletter that offers the same type of information that the blog publishes, the blogger can quickly building a list of people who are already interested in their product.

Creating a newsletter to send to both past and future customers is a simple way to expose potential buyers to the marketing messages. A newsletter can be sent out weekly or monthly with information that will be of interest to the people who visit the blog or website. A newsletter can contain coupons for the product, in-depth information or updates that will be of interest to those who sign up. Each newsletter can also contain some language that markets the products being sold. Including a useful article about the use of the product also helps generate interest.

By: Matt Bacak

About the Author:

Do you know what the hottest marketing technique is today? Blogging. And you may wonder what blogging has to do with list building.

Blogs are great for list building!

Here’s what happens: the search engine spider comes to your blog and it’s all text. Oh, you may have a picture or two or a video now and then, but pretty much, a blog is text. Spiders love that! Plus, you are constantly providing fresh content in your blog. Write every day!

Search engines are all about that. They love information. That’s what they want to present to searchers is information, not sales. Write about your niche in an informational style and use just one anchor text hyperlink in the body of your article and one at the very end.

And this helps you with list building because…?

Let’s say you update your blog every day, and you’ve used a pertinent keyword in every post you’ve made. Guess what? Your blog winds up on the first page at Google for that word!

Your blog, which you’ve updated daily remember, winds up at the top of the search engines for a keyword you’ve used in every post you’ve made. That’s great because what gets clicked when someone searches? Usually the links on the first three pages, if that. If you’re on the first page, the possibility of someone visiting your site is very, very good.

A ton of traffic comes from Google, if you’ve picked the right keyword to rank for. So, you tell readers something interesting or important in every post. And in every post you put a link to your list building squeeze page. Plus, you’ve put a list building opt-in box at the top of your blog. You’re getting subscribers that way, too.

You may not be that techno-savvy, but if not, hire a freelance programmer to do it for you. It won’t cost much. Don’t let anything stop you! Getting a blog set up with your list building box at the top is a great way to get traffic, and a great way to be list building.

By: Tellman Knudson

About the Author:

One of the most important skills that you need to learn with internet marketing is how to build a list. I am sure that if you listen to any of the top marketers they will regurgitate how important this skill is.

Let us look at the reasons why. The best way to earn a solid income is to have a list of loyal customers that will buy over and over again from you. The way that you will achieve this is by having a very responsive opt in list.

There are many ways that you can go about building your opt in list. In this article I would like to go over a method that you can use that very few people are using that will build a highly responsive list of customers that will trust you and buy from you.

Let us say for example that you are selling golf equipment. The way that this method of list building would work is that you would partner with people that are in the same niche market and not competing directly with you.

So for example if you were to find two other partners the one could be selling a book on how to improve your golf swing and the other could be selling golf clothes. Now the way that you would implement this in your business is that you would form a co-op.

When somebody buys from you you would include a product from the two other partners as a bonus. This bonus will also increase your sales conversion rate. When the customer has completed the sale you can send them an email with instructions on how to collect the bonus.

This would be a subscription form they can use to opt-in to your partners list and receive the bonus. Your partners will be getting a customer’s email address which is five times more valuable than just a lead. Similarly, when somebody buys from your partners you will be receiving email addresses of customers added to your autoresponder.

Finally, if you have a good backend in place you will significantly increase your profits from the increase of email addresses of paying customers that have been added on to your list.

By: Mark A. Abrahams

About the Author:

More about Affiliate Marketing

You do not need a huge list in order to make money on the internet. It is always important to build your list, but it is not absolutely necessary to have a list of ten thousand or more names and emails to make six figures a year or more.

The most important thing is to have a responsive list, meaning that the people who are on your list are engaged with you and your niche topic. The idea is to keep them as interested over time as they were on the day they opted into your list.

The two best ways I have found to do this is to give them as much information as possible on your topic and to ask them to take action every time you contact them. The action can be to reply to your email, to click on a link to one of your articles, to comment on your blog, or some other action. This does not mean to sell them something in every email. Instead, get them into the habit of clicking on your links to receive more information.

Over time, your list will come to know, like, and trust you because of the information you have been providing them. When you offer them something to buy, whether it is your own product or an affiliate product you are recommending.

By remembering why these people came to you in the first place and continuing to give them more of what they want, you will be able to maximize your profit potential in just a short period of time.

By: Connie Ragen Green

About the Author:

Membership Site Script

List building is one of the most important skills that you need to learn to succeed online. The reason for this is that the lead generation business is the only thing that you should focus on.

When I first started online I was making a lot of money from Google Adsense. Unfortunately, at one stage I lost all my rankings in the search engines and nearly lost my business. It was at this stage that I realized that it was very important to build a list. Every time I send out emails to my list I make money.

In this article I would like to go over the fundamentals to build a list.

1) Drive all your traffic to a squeeze page

This is one of the most important things that you need to do. Send all your traffic to a high converting squeeze page. Offer a free report for download. You need to test different headlines with different sales copy. Subsequently use the ones that convert the best. You also need to insert html opt in code to add your emails to your subscribers.

2) Build trust with your subscribers

To actually make money from your subscribers you need to get them to trust you first. As the sales trainer Jeoffrey Gitomer once said people only buy from other people that they like, know and trust. You can do this by sending very informative emails.

3) Keep your subscribers on their toes

I always try to keep my subscribers on their toes. The reason for this is that most people will unsubscribe from a boring newsletter. Always keep them guessing as to what will be coming next.

By: Mark A. Abrahams

About the Author:

When building a list you’re not going to be able to bank on someone else doing it for you. You must do everything you possible can to create your own success, if you expect to succeed.

Earning the trust and loyalty of subscribers is the best way to build a list and to ensure your personal success and satisfaction. While you are building your subscriber list, you can use the information you have previously gathered to start building your own mailing list. Quite often you will find that some new business owners are afraid to ask their customers for their personal information to include on their email mailing list. What many business owners don’t understand is that a mailing list can make or break their business.

A mailing list is a definite must have, especially if your goal is to create a huge amount of sales and bring in substantial profits through the internet. One of the main reasons why a mailing list is so important is because of the habits of the typical average customer. Typically it can take the average customer who visits a website seven or more times before they decide to purchase your products. Make sure you give your customers a reason to come back to your site and they will.

When you have your email mailing list you can mail a newsletter to your list to encourage your prospects to visit your website and look at new articles, updates or products. The fact that customers repeatedly buy from email advertisements, has been confirmed through several statistics and anyone with a huge list. The truth of the matter is, building a list can only increase your profits.

By: Hans Kristian Anderson

About the Author:

IM Success Formula

Hey how are you doing today?

What do I really mean by that? Do I mean how are you feeling or how is your Marketing progress coming along? And do I really want to hear your response? Do I really care?

Do you ever notice we ask people how they are doing and then just kind of walk on expecting them to say, “It is going great!”

I had someone ask me that question today. When I begin to tell them just how it was going they did everything that they could to get out of the conversation.

So why do we ask if we don’t want to take the time to actually listen to the response?

Why do we say it is going great when it isn’t? Maybe we don’t figure the person we are talking to really cares like they are trying to come across as, or we really don’t want to get into the discussion ourselves

It would require some kind of relationship, some kind of Investment if we take the time to really share or to actually listen to the response from the one that is sharing the answer to the question you just asked them.

I have found that building relationships with others takes time and it takes a special skill. Some relationships seem to come natural, and some relationships seem to take a lot of work and effort.

I want you to think of the amount of lists you are currently subscribed to right now.

Out of all of them why do you open some emails and others you delete before you know what was inside?

It is because some email lists owners have built a relationship with you, others have not.

So how do you build a relationship with your subscribers?

When you have an email list of subscribers who have Chosen to be on your list, or as we call it, have “OPTED IN” and have agreed to you sending emails to them, you have an asset that can be leveraged over and over again. This is why you must cherish your list like your best friend. The better you treat your list, the better the return will be when you want it.

If you are to have a profitable list, you simply must build a relationship with your subscribers. You want them to “LIKE” you,”KNOW” you and “TRUST” you, feel comfortable buying from you and most importantly you want them to look forward to and enjoy reading your emails. If you can, not if you can but “you must” build a strong relationship with your subscribers, then you have more chances of getting them to purchase your products and services.

Know that building a relationship with your subscribers occurs over time, it will not happen overnight. It will begin with the very first contact. That might be an article you submit that takes them to your squeeze page, or it could be your sales Page of your product. Whatever kind of contact that you had with your subscriber that ended them up on your opt-in list is just the start.

By building a relationship with your subscribers, you are wanting to show them that you are a good source of information, that you are their friend and not just another salesman.

Think about the stores and restaurants you visit. The employees that take time to build relationships with the customers are usually the ones that you want to have take care of you. You will stand in a line at a checkout for your favorite clerk to check you out, just because you know they will take the time to care about you. If you are like me I will try and sit in the section that my favorite waitress is working in. I know I will have a good dining experience. The relationship we have actually makes the food taste better than it really does.

So how can you go about this relationship building? You could possibly offer a free course to your subscribers that contains valuable information on a subject that you know something about and that could help them solve a problem. Make sure it is something that you would want someone to send you. If your subscribers come to know you as someone that always gives worthless content you will never gain their trust. You need to get to the point where your subscribers just know that what you give will be good. This will allow them to trust the products you promote and create.

I had a valuable lesson today on this that came in a way of God. We had the most beautiful sunset tonight. I found myself thanking God for giving me the sunset just for me to enjoy. He provided the sunset in a way that made it feel like it was just for me and I found myself responding back to his gift. He sure knows how to do it right when it comes to relationships.

Another thing you will want to do is, always supply contact information in your e-mails so that they can contact you with questions. If you are providing content make sure that you are open to providing the best customer support you possibly can. If they have a question do your best to provide the answers.

Your contact information also needs to include a unsubscribe link. This promotes trust that if you do not deliver what you promise or your customer is unhappy and unable to find a resolution to their problem that they can opt-off of your list just as easy as they subscribed.

Make your emails feel like you are writing only to the person that is reading. Use their first name in the subject line. Start out your email like you would to your best friend or family member. I would stay away from “Dear” {firstname} But something like “Hey” {firstname} I just thought I would check in and see how things are going. Start your first few lines telling them something about how your day is going or something personal you can share. Talk about your family. They don’t need to see pictures, but make them feel like they are part of your life.

Now I know that there is so much more to relationship building than what I have provided. I will be adding more post on this subject. We will eventually get to the importance of building relationships with JV partners and How to do this, and where I feel is the best place to meet them and begin your relationship building.

By: Jeff Wellman

About the Author: