The basics of building a list – How to build a list
How many times have you heard this – ‘The money is in the list’
I am sure you must have heard pretty much from every single guru, affiliate and successful online entrepreneur that the money is in the list, but what exactly is a list? How can you build one too? How can you convert huge traffic into your opt in subscribers and then later convert those subscribers into your paying customers?
These are the things to remember when building a list, but more importantly building a profitable list so you can really supercharge your ‘make money online‘ dreams:
What you will need in order to start building a list:
1. An Auto Responder: Building a list requires a few tools in order to get started. The first and the most important one is an auto responder. Auto responders are were you will store your list, build campaigns & send messages to your list. Auto responders are the backbone of your list building efforts & it’s important to get a auto responder that has good delivery rates, lots of features, good support and of course is within your budget. The industry leaders currently are Aweber & GetResponse, which are the most preferred auto responders used by internet marketers. However Aweber & GetResponse can be costly if you are just starting out with an average of $200 for 500 subscribers annually. For starters i would recommend Mail Chimp, another good auto responder but most importantly a great tool for building a list without a budget. Mail Chimp has a free for life plan where you can store up to 2000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is good enough for now, so register at MailChimp if you are starting out or consider Aweber and GetResponse if you want more options.
2. A Landing Page or Blog: Now that you got a auto responder ready & fired up its time to start getting those subscribers. But of course where will you send your traffic? You will obviously need a site/blog or else a squeeze page (also known as landing page) to send your traffic to where your optin lead capture forms are (alongside your offers). If you don’t have one already then you will need a web host (i recommend Hostgator – use coupon code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ to get 25% off) along with a domain (get them at Goddady or Namecheap). Once you got everything set up, all you need to do is set up your squeeze pages & plugin your opt-in forms.
3. Traffic: Its all about traffic when it comes to building a list. Once everything is set up you will need to start driving quality & targeted traffic to it. Start getting the word out, promote your page via social media, bookmarking, etc. Once you start building traffic then read my post on how to retain traffic to your site.
List Building Ethics:
Now that everything is set up its time to convert the traffic to subscribers & then the subscribers to paying customers.
1. Know what a mailing list is: A list is basically the collection of all the people [their emails and other optional information] who have opted to receive messages from you, always remember that manually entering a huge list of emails into your auto responder is not actually a list and their is definitely no money in that too, because what you will be doing that way is spamming those emails which could be very bad later on. So never spam your list or create a list without the permission of those people who are added into your list, make sure your list is 100% opt-in. On a site note it will be hard to find a good auto responder that will just simply allow you to add a list and send them mails. Another thing to take care of is that importing a large list can cost you a lot & migrating from one auto responder to another can result in loss of your subscribers.
2. Bribe your visitors: When it comes to building a list, most successful internet marketers actually ‘bribe’ their traffic into submission, they do this by giving attractive free offers which results in the traffic and the people to sign up for the list, those offers must be highly niche related, free and very tempting. If you obey this single rule you will convert more then 90% of your traffic if its highly targeted, so obey this golden rule, bribe them.
3. Write a good landing page copy: The landing page is the most important aspect of a list, its the page where the traffic comes to, this page should be able to convert that traffic into opt-in subscribers. So making your landing page as informative, short, tempting and attractive , the more will be the conversions. Read my post on how to make good landing pages for more help.
4. Don’t be a dictator, Respect Freedom: Give your list members the ability to unsubscribe, make sure they are able to contact you, so maintain a separate email for that activity. Give them valuable information but not all at once, keep them waiting so that they don’t run away, spoon feed them step by step, don’t be Hasty and don’t talk always about a product, i.e don’t always do promotions with your list, send emails that are worth reading and related to your niche, involve them in your work. Don’t annoy them by sending messages every single hour or day for that matter, maintain a gap and monitor your lists.
5. Engage & build a community: Once you have a list which is growing continuously, there are a few things to remember, now that the traffic to your landing page are your subscribers, its time to treat them as ‘humans’ and not ‘bots’ anymore, this is the most important step where everyone else fails. If you read point no.2 i told you to bribe them, but its actually that they are forced to join and after they get what your giving free, they are more likely to unsubscribe to maintain low spam in their in-boxes. This step is very important because once someone joins your list, your ultimate goal is to NOT let them unsubscribe, once you follow this the money will flow automatically, because you must win the trust of your subscribers and not make them feel as yet another group of email list which you keep spamming and try selling your products too.
Bonus Tip for bloggers: If you find some of your list members being inactive then consider deleting them from the list to free up space for other subscribers, this can help you save a lot of money. If you are building a list via your blog or website rather then a squeeze page then consider getting pop up domination, it is a very powerful tool that can help you get up to 300% conversion rates.
This should be enough for now for list building basics. Keep building that list, next time i would get more deep into the topic. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,
SJ
You might also be intrested in reading these:
5 Responses 
Leave a Reply 
I am also a great fan of this subject and I love seeing some new posts in this niche! Thank you
While searching for Blogs about The basics of building a list | Sameer Joad.Com – My Home on the Net I found your site. Thank you for the effort you have put in.
Oh My God, I don’t know how I missed this blog. Really informative, and some articles written here are really good. Hats off..
Hi! Great idea, but might this genuinely do the job?
I just subscribed to your RSS feed, not sure if I did it correctly though? Solid article by the way.
[...] 30+ FREE premium wordpress themes share this The basics of building a list [...]