Build a list - Just do it

As this is my first “real” post on the blog, I thought we’d discuss something that’ll get you started the right way (Sorry for the cheeky title by the way).

Uh, So Lists are awesome. They really are. They’re your license to print money (um – maybe not really). You control traffic at your will. With just a simple email, you can rake in thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions or sales of your own products. Okay, enough of praising lists. Let’s get into some real work. How to send your list subscribers count through the roof?

Before we start, I’d like to alert you for one very important thing. We’re not concentrating on collecting e-mails of tire kickers, dreamers and freebie seekers (sorry folks!). What we are trying to do is build a high quality list of buyers who are willing to spend money in exchange of quality information.

Let’s break down the whole process into simpler parts. Here ya’ go:

• Setting up your autoresponder.
• Setting up a squeeze page.
• Driving traffic.

First two are the easier parts, and we’re not discussing those in details. For an autoresponder, you’ve got many options. Aweber is a good choice, so is Getresponse. Once you get them, you setup a list, grab the form, setup a squeeze page, put that form there and drive traffic. Everything is very easy until it comes to driving quality traffic. I emphasize quality traffic, because I can get 1,000 uniques a day – but it won’t matter a bit if they’re targeted to the dating niche, when I’m targeting the IM niche. So yeah, What’s most important? Traffic.

Driving Quality Traffic

Driving quality traffic won’t cost you an arm and a leg. It’s a combination of the conventional methods & getting a little creative. Conventional methods such as blog commenting, forum posting, backlinking etc can give you quality leads and if you get a little creative, the numbers can increase drastically. Let’s take a look at some of the methods that can sky rocket your list building efforts.

But before that, I’d like to give you a tip on filtering your lists.

Cheap Reports – If you’ve seen $1 reports, you might have wondered What profits they make to the seller. I mean, even if they sell 5,000 copies, it’s still just $5,000.

Well, the money ain’t a factor here, it’s the quality of leads we’re getting.There’s a mindset of people who’re out there to grab each and every freebie they can put their hands on. They won’t spend any money be it just a cent. We don’t want those people. They add numbers but clutter the list. We’re filtering our list and building a half decent quality list. They say each subscriber on your list can give you $3 a month or something. If you’ve build your list using freebie giveaway methods, then it’s a very hard job to accomplish.

So yeah, we give away cheap reports – filter low quality leads – and thus the end results are much better. Now, let’s see how we can drive some traffic.

• Ad Swapping: Kind of a mutual agreement between two list owners in the same niche. Say you have a list of 3,000 and some other person has a list of 10,000 in the IM niche. Both of you agree to broadcast an email to your respective lists (the second person sends the email to 3,000 in his list to match up your size).

  I’ve personally had decent success with this. You can add a good number of subscribers to your list fairly quickly through this.

• Viral methods: Now, if you come up with an idea that can go viral – you’ll get a number of leads. Say for example, you put up something where one has to refer 3 people to get an eBook to download. If you’ve had conveyed great information to those people in past, they’ll think it’s worth the hassle because on the back of their minds, it’s a great product they’re going to get for free. And you build your list.

Both of the above assumed you’ve a decent number of subscribers already – say 500 – but what if you don’t? Well, then we’ll be using some conventional methods to drive some traffic, and convert them first before moving onto anything else as such.

• Article Marketing: This is probably the most cost effective method to get started. I started with this as well. I’m not good at writing niche articles, so I outsource most part. Do your keyword research right, and you’ll be able to generate thousands of visitors in a relatively less amount of time.

  I’ll be writing a post on Keyword Research that’ll compliment this tip in the upcoming days (so stay tuned ). Then, you write like 5-6 articles a day, submit them to article directories (use article submitters for saving time), use a resource box with strong call to action to drive a good amount of traffic to your websites. Writing 5-6 articles may seem like a tough job, but once you’re in the flow, it won’t take more than 1 hour to crank out 5 articles.

• Video Marketing: It’s easy. Grab a few pictures related to your niche from sxc.hu & read out your article aloud. Submit it to video sites such as Youtube, Metacafe etc. Or even better, outsource this. I know a guy from the Warrior forum who does a video for $35, and considering the amount of exposure you can get from a professionally done video – it’s worth every cent.
  
• Social Media Marketing: With the evolution of sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc, you have a wide audience to target. You can leverage the power of these types of sites to build your list even further. I’ve not been involved with Social media much, but it definitely has made many people thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Combine all these with other conventional methods such as blog commenting, yahoo answers etc (all of which you can outsource to pro’s) and you have a winner right there. Let me know what you have to say on this.