On-line marketing FAQ: Building your lists

One of the most frequently asked questions for online marketers, is how to build a list?  Since the key to on-line riches is to create your very own media outlet which you can promote to over and over that consists of highly targeted people who will buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous offerings.  Building a list becomes one of the single most important things you must do for your on-line business to prosper.

Once your list stretches over the five thousand mark, you should have at least one product for sale, with the majority of contacts on your list coming from the promotion of that initial product.  Avoid any program or plan that asks you for cash to add subscribers to your list because without a track record of success, compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer.   

There is no comparison to a “home grown” list in terms of quality. Which means it is important to recognize that the ways in which you will build your list do not involve direct methods or magic programs that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning, and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to.   

Instead concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your site(s), make sure they end up on one of your lists.

If we look at building your list(s) this way, all it takes is for them to buy something, signup for something, request a follow-up, join your affiliate program, and so on...to become added to your list.

A very important point is to never create anything that allows customers to complete the sales process, only to lose contact with them.  This is exactly why you need to ensure that everything related your site, involves collecting names and email addresses. It should become “standard operating procedure”. But be careful, over do it and your prospects are going to leave your site before you have a chance to know who they are.

Now let’s look at some numbers starting off with simple joint ventures. 

Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. With standard e-zines this may not seem like much because the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit, can and will typically be lower than expected.

But through joint ventures, subscription rates can top one in three, and it's not unusual for at least 25% (one in four) of your visitors to subscribe to something, if your sales copy is doing its job.

That may not seem like a high percentage right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5,000 subscribers, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem (if the quality of your joint ventures is high), you will begin earning significantly through the sales of your joint ventures.  This is the ultimate in leveraging someone else's hard work.  But the truth is they are leveraging your hard work in producing your product.  So in reality we have here a classic "win-win". 

But this gets most interesting when you couple in affiliate commissions which you will pay out at a very high rate, so high that you may not make a direct profit, but thats not the point at this stage.  The resources that you are building is your profit, not the money from product sales, but the resources (subscriber list) that is being expanded.

This is why you gave up $50 per sale perhaps, and it's your affiliates and joint ventures that money is going to. At this stage, it should not be concerning to you that upwards of 90% (or more) of your total sales revenue is going to building your list. Your sole focus needs to be set on your list size and not just numbers wise, but speed wise.  Time is what you are racing here as it's important to get a quality list of suitable size built as quickly as  possible so you can begin marketing to it and profiting from it.

Every single time you release a new product, you will be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you.  It's the classic snowball effect, which is great because this means the more you put in, the more you're going to get out.  And every single product you release will increase your resources and your list size, adding to your promotion power for future products.

I want to make 100% sure that you understand how this works. 

People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists.  This is great and it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, I'm afraid they are incomplete.

It's ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, but so should building affiliates, new long term customers and joint venture prospects.

To be successful, you must integrate list building into all your marketing methods, which is what most fail to do.  Once you understand and have mastered how these resources work together, you will start to see bigger and better results, and they will come quickly.

It is my hope that you now see how building a list isn't a case of buying as big a list as you can afford. Those promoting this method are simply in the list sales business. But rather the success of list building is tying resources together through the launch of your own products till you are able to earn the big rewards that come when you have a highly qualified list of people who trust you and are willing to buy most everything you put in front of them.

This is the straddling entrepreneur’s dream.  To earn money while you are working, playing and sleeping.  A virtual cash machine in your very own home.  But wait, if it were that easy you'd already be a millionaire right?  So stay tuned for more On-line marketing FAQ's were I am going to debunk myths and hopefully get you started down the path of becoming an on-line marketing entrepreneur.