Internet Marketing Coach
List Building - You Seriously Need a List!
January 22nd, 2008 | 15 comments
“The Money’s in the List” If you haven’t heard that at least 500 times then you’re a dreaded “newbie.” 
For the past few years I’ve been slowly building a list. Although I was marketing online long before I started blogging, my list is nowhere close to being “large.” The primary reason is because I’ve never really put a great deal of effort into it. As a matter of fact, most of my subscribers were collected from organic traffic and product sales.
While everyone else has been building their massive lists, I’ve been fighting with SE’s and creating products, which has been profitable, but not nearly as profitable as a responsive list of 50,000+, which I would probably at least have by now if I would have been serious about it from the start.
Today I came across a post over at Yaro Starak’s Internet Business Blog (great guy who is honestly out to help people) that really got me thinking. The post was titled “How to Build a Profitable Email List - Frank Kern Style” and it really opened my eyes to what I’ve been missing out on.
I’m not new to the concept of list-building. I’m actually very confident in my list-building abilities and I’m pretty happy with how my current list is converting; but it’s just too small!
What I realized though, is that I know how powerful lists are because I’ve had my own products promoted to many of them and made loads of money. Why the HELL have I been ignoring that! I’ve been doing the hard work by creating the products and these guys are getting half the money (usually) just by sending a promo out to their list.
So, when the new theme is up, which will hopefully be sometime this week, you’ll be seeing “The Easy SEO Report,” which will be offered for Free with opt-in. That’s going to be the beginning of a major push to increase my newsletter subscriber count! My goal is 20,000 double opt-ins by the end of the year, which will obviously be carried out outside of the blog as well.
So start building a serious list now instead of waiting 4 years like I did! I know for a fact they are extremely profitable and all you need to get started is a report with a short squeeze page and an auto responder. If you want to get lazy you could even rewrite a PLR report.
The auto responder I’ve been using for several years is GetResponse. That and aWeber are the industry leaders for good reason, but if you can’t afford, or don’t care to afford the monthly fee you could go with one of the options that Mo lays out in this list of auto-responders over at the Cayman Host.
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22nd January, 2008 at 4:15 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Aaron Wakling
22nd January, 2008 at 5:18 am
Spot on Josh!
Question. I been using Aweber for a long time now. They recently switched to all email is double optin. Has Getresponse made this switch or have always been double optin as well?
22nd January, 2008 at 5:28 am
@ Aaron - Glad to have you and thanks for the support. Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future!
@ Ruck - As far as I know it’s always been double opt-in. I’ve been using them for a couple years now and all of my campaigns have been. It’s definitely a good thing though!
22nd January, 2008 at 6:31 am
Great post. I should start building my list ASAP.
22nd January, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I wonder, though, how effective a list is in anything other than Internet marketing. I built a small list once geared around writing a book, and those people were the stingiest folks I ever ran across. You couldn’t pull a dime out of their wallets with a 10 ton pickup truck. Having said that, is there any resources out there, that you know of, that would help to identify which niches would be worthwhile to build a list on?
22nd January, 2008 at 3:41 pm
@ Allen - It’s definitely important to build a list of buyers and not freebie seekers. However, I do know many people who do well with non-IM niches. Here’s a good video created by Frank Kern that I think you’ll like: http://www.masscontrolsite.com/get-a-list/list.php?take
22nd January, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Josh - totally agree, I think we all need to get our behinds in gear with email lists. It’s a new year and a new opportunity to improve our blog profiles and get a little bit more money coming in.
22nd January, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Josh,
That last link isn’t working for me. Can ya take a look at it?
Great post, by the way. Going to build my list this year and make a go of it.
22nd January, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Damn straight Nick
Chris - Thanks for pointing that out. That’s very odd! The markup is correct, but it’s not working. Wish I were a programmer!
Maybe someone who nows what may be causing that could put in their 2 cents?
23rd January, 2008 at 12:52 am
Hi Josh,
I also just finished writing a free report for this very purpose. Although I worry about building a list of freebie seekers I’m hoping once people see the quality of my information they’ll be more inclined to pay for content later on.
I was planning on doing some article marketing to promote the report (my blog is new and gets zero to little traffic now). You mentioned setting up a squeeze page. In the article bio box would you recommend sending people to the squeeze page instead of the home page of my blog (which also contains information about the report)? I’d like to get more traffic to my blog but at the same time I can’t do much without a list either.
Just curious what your thoughts were. Maybe I need to go read that post you mentioned. Thanks
23rd January, 2008 at 1:00 am
Hey Amanda,
Congrats on finishing the report! It’s all about the market. If the market you’re targeting is a paying market you should be OK.
Article marketing is a great way to do it, I’ll be doing the same. I would personally write articles for both.
Those article readers need to know exactly what to do next and that is to either visit your blog or get their free report, not both.
Write on article to promote your blog and another to get opt-ins. Try to kick out 2 articles everyday and if your articles are quality and the sig is written correctly you’ll start to see some great results.
30th January, 2008 at 1:23 am
Good post - I wouldn’t say that my lists are the MOST profitable thing I do, but they’re definitely the easiest. Some of the lists I’ve built are small but so responsive that my advertisers start filling holiday slots in June and July. I’ve also had great luck building relationships with ad agencies that deal with online marketing. It’s much easier to maintain a relationship with a company that buys slots on behalf of its clients vs. maintaining relationships with 10+ separate advertisers.
30th January, 2008 at 10:23 pm
[...] few days back I wrote a post on the importance of building a list and how profitable it can be if done correctly. Not long after I wrote that post I was reminded [...]
1st February, 2008 at 7:31 pm
[...] the past week I’ve been working hard on new projects and reforming my current business model. As I stated a few times in the past few days I’ll be concentrating alot of effort on the foundation I’ll be using to build [...]
13th February, 2008 at 12:28 am
Good advice Josh and it’s not easy building a list of buyers as one of your previous respondents has already said.
There’s no doubt it’s important though - I get a good response from previous buyers whose names get collected through SmartDD. Hopefully that’s because once they’ve spent something on a product I promote and are happy with it they are less wary - the age old trust thing.
Anyhow, thank you for the mention, sorry I only just picked up on it.
I’ve since edited the post to reflect the more useful options in among the ones that really don’t work too well
There are some reasonable free ideas going around at the moment and I’ve even made sales to some folks on some of the lists which was a pleasant surprise!