It’s All In the List, So Where Does The List Come From?
For many of you homeworkers, you’re wanting to start your own online business. Perhaps you’ve already started and finding it a bit slow going or perhaps you’re going to start today. Whatever stage you’re at, you’ll no doubt find yourself sitting there all excited about the hundreds or thousands of people that will be flooding to your site, eager to see what you’ve got for them.
Whatever you’ve got for people, you need to encourage them to come back to your site in the future, you need to build your list! And that can be the difference between succeeding and failing.
From my first site I built a list of over 12,000 people who visited my site in the first year. Now, I’ll admit I was slack and have not contacted them yet, but the point is, that when I am ready, I’ve instantly got a free list of 12,000 people I know are interested in what is on my site who I can email when I want. Because at some point you will be ready to move on to doing something with your list - and if you haven’t got a list at all you’ll have missed that opportunity.
Every day hundreds of marketeteers are a step closer to becoming millionaires because they’re creating their list. So how do you create yours?
How Do I Build a List?
To get the best results, you need to be rthless with this. But you don’t need to start off ruthless, if you want you can build up to the most efficient way to build a list. The most laid back way to build your list is to ask your website visitors to join your list. A smoother way is to provide them with a sign up form - possibly with a free offer or special benefit for signing up.
So I have the List, So What?
Once you have the your list building, you need to stay in touch with the people on your list - and make sure you have something interesting for them. Give them a good reason to visit your site again. If you sell a product, perhaps you can offer a special discount to them if they visit your website today. Some people will produce a Newsletter weekly or monthly and send it out to their list, some people will simply let them know what’s new and what’s coming up soon. A greetings card website, for example, might email their list a month before Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day or any one of the many hotspots in their selling calendar. A local events website might send out a monthly list of What’s On, including any paid adverts from local shops even!
Joint Ventures Made Simple
There’s a lot of (often confusing) hype online about Joint Ventures, or JVs. You can use your list to increase the number of people that come to your website by doing a joint venture with a similar website. For example, if your site has collected a list of 5,000 people who are interested in growing fresh herbs, you might find a website who has a list of people deliver organic food boxes. It’s quite likely that people who buy organic food boxes are also interested in growing their own herbs and between the two of you you’d not be losing your own customers by each of you letting your list know about the other’s website! You could each increase your list size and potential customers in this way - and it’s free to do. You don’t have to buy lists.
Make Money From Your List
Once you have your list, THAT is where you can generate yourself an income. You could sell advertising space in your newsletter for example, you could launch a new product and instantly tell your existing customers about it. They say “The Money’s in the List” and they’re not wrong!
Always build a list.
Is Emailing a List Hard to Do?
Emailing your list can be the easiest thing in the world. But, like anything, there are several ways to do it, from higher effort and zero cost, through to lesser effort and a small cost. In its simplest form you can simply use your usual email software to send out your emails. However, the problem with this might be that if you have a large list, your ISP might start refusing to send them out. They might block you from doing it. However, it is straight forward and fine for very small lists, or in your first couple of days.
The first thing you will notice when you email your list is that you send out your email, walk away from the PC thinking the job’s done, then come back 10 minutes later with a coffee only to find that for the next day or so you’re inundated with email bounces that need dealing with! More hours of work just when you thought you’d finished the task. If you send out an email to 200 people, they won’t all get it, some of them will have server problems and the emails will bounce back to you asking you to try again later; some email Inboxes will be full and they’ll bounce back to you; some email addresses will just have died (for a variety of reasons). So now your list needs cleaning up. You find you have to manage the bounces.
I had a job last year where I had to send out 6,000 emails, that sounds easy, simply write an email and send it to this list. But how do you manage such a large volume? I certainly couldn’t copy/paste the whole list into Microsoft Outlook. Then the bounces would come back and I’d have to strip those out of the list manually so the next week those ones wouldn’t bounce back. Instead of being a simple 10 minute job, it used to take me the whole day… and I’d still get bounces back from that list up to three days later!
So, make sure you have the right tools for the job.
What Tools Do I Need to Build a List? And What to Email My List?
One of the world’s leading Opt In Box and Emarketing Software comapnies is Aweber. They’ve been in business for years, helping people easily collect email addresses and email their list automatically. With Aweber you can send out Newsletters, create great autoresponders that automatically send out emails at fixed intervals… all helping you build your list automatically. Find out for yourself how easy it is now by taking a Free Test Drive: Aweber
What if They Don’t Sign Up? Have I Lost Them Forever?
Oooh, well there’s only really one tool for this that does the job. If people don’t sign up, they’re coming to your site and leaving, so you need to stop them when they leave to remind them you have a Newsletter and want them to keep in touch! And there’s none better than Opt In Automator. With the Opt In Automator you can start building your list straight away, without delay. This is THE quickest and most advanced way to get your visitors’ details when they try to leave your site, it actually grabs their name and address from their email programme and fills in the form when they leave your site, all they have to do is press OK. How cool is that??
It also offers you more traditional pop ups. Opt In Automator was written by the company who originally invented pop-ups … and who then wrote pop up blockers! So they really know their stuff when it comes to writing GOOD pop up adverts that won’t be blocked.
Well I hope that’s given you a few ideas, but really, if you don’t have a list you don’t have an income. You’re literally throwing money down the drain if you’re not gathering addresses - and anything you invest in these few simple tools will more than pay for itself within a couple of weeks with your increased sales potential!
Make This Into a Part-Time Homeworker Job
How about starting your own business locally by offering list building services to local businesses! Using the two tools mentioned above, get to know how to use them and you can offer your skills to small local businesses that have a website and possibly a list, but aren’t using them to full effect. You could build their list from scratch for them as a one-off project, say collect 1,000 people’s details from their website, or get them 1,000 Newsletter opt-ins, by placing an opt in box on their website and just gathering the data for them. Or using the Opt In Automator to collect details of 1,000 people who left their site. Think it through, then go get ‘em!
Good luck!
