Fantastic News, Imagine That One Day You Get Massive Traffic to your website, and then what? All those people come and go and you never see them again.
But WHAT IF…Â In the magical imaginary land of “you becoming super wealthy”, what if you could get all those people on a mailing list and start emailing them offers with your affiliate links, then you make massive cash?
Well, you can and should do this! And yes, it does help you towards a REAL, attainable goal of becoming wealthy with internet marketing.
ANNOUNCING:Â Internet Marketing In The Modern World – Email List Building
Building an email list is something that you MUST do if you want to cash in on your hard work of building traffic to a website.
What did you say? You’re ready to venture into building an email list? AWESOME, so here are some insider secrets and golden keys that will lock in your success for years to come.
I want to share with you the good and the bad. List building is a massive part of my business, but it hasn’t always been a “walk in the park.”
My Experience with List Building…
There are actually many decent companies out there who provide the service called “autoresponder email list building services” – AKA what you need to start building your list. I’ve used most of them. I highly recommend you go with Aweber. Aweber is the “Daddy” of them all. They are not only the biggest, in my opinion they have the best customer support. More importantly, just about every WordPress plugin on the Internet today integrates with Aweber. This is very important for a lot of reasons, one of them being that you will start wanting to use some list building tools and you need your autoresponder to integrate smoothly, which Aweber will do.
Try Aweber for yourself, they have a promotion where you can get started for about $1.00!
I’m just going to assume your going to take my advice and choose Aweber. However, before you build your first list let me give you some valuable advice. You need a foundation before you get ready with your list building.
What do I mean by that?
Look at this list below. Now I have blurred out the number, because if certain people see the size of those lists then they will bug me to start blasting my list with their promotions. I won’t send crap to my lists, so if that is your intentions, don’t ask 🙂
Chad’s List Building Stats
Now, here’s the crazy thing. That list goes on and on and on. As you can see, I’m involved in a variety of niches. Everything from IM to weightloss. If you take care of your subscribers you can be very successful with list building.
When I got into list building I made one mistake!
Actually that is a lie! I made several mistakes. When I found out how easy it was to make money with list building I went “HOG WILD.” I really feel for my first few subscribers years ago, because I was clueless.
I remember seeing emails from “Frank Kern”, “Michael Filsaime”, “Tellman Knudson.” They had my name on their lists and were sending me offers in my email, and I was reading their autoresponder emails every day!
One day as I sat reading an email and realizing that I could write emails just like that, I said to myself, “I can do this”.
And you should say the same thing because it is true:Â SAY IT NOW…Â “IIII CCAAAANNNN DDOOOO TTTHHHIISSSSS.”
Awesome, and it is true. That felt good, didn’t it?
Easy as pie. All you need to do is sign up for an affiliate offer, and blast your list. Well guess what? My first effort out of the door and it did not go so well! So I want to tell you why so you can be successful out the door.
Here is an absolutely golden secret of winner list building
Here is what to avoid, my friends: my very first list building effort got No Sales, and a whole bunch of unsubscribers. Yup that sucked. I slowed down my second time around. I knew that the internet marketing gurus like Frank Kern had upwards of 300,000 or more in their list, and they were counting on 1% buying.
Don’t blast your first mailing list
Because the big IM gurus have so many people, they can get away with blasting their autoresponder mailing lists all the time. This is called “list abuse”, by the way. But as a newbie list builder you must not abuse your email list, you have to treat it with respect and be a little conservative in how hard you blast your email list with offers.
Be personal with your mailing list
Make sure the majority of the email content that you send out is helpful, such as useful free resources. Then, once you build a trust with the people, then you can try to sell to your list.
Now on to that original list building mistake!
Having said all that, I still haven’t talked about my original reason for writing this post. I made a mistake years ago, and I still don’t have it corrected. You see I’ve got close to 50 lists. I can promote IM, weight loss, acne, traffic generation, whatever the niche may be. Although, to be honest my primary focus is Internet Marketing.
List Building Nightmare
Take another look at that list. You can see that how I have them organized is a mess! If I want to create a broadcast message regarding Internet Marketing, I’ve got to deselect 1/4 of the list. Well when you’re going through 50 lists, this can take quite some time.
Aweber is already very time-consuming. Why? Well when your blasting tens of thousands of people, you need to make sure your spelling is correct, your links work, your personalization text is right, then you test it just to make sure. It’s not like logging into WordPress and fixing your posts. I bet it takes me at least 15 minutes to blast a message to my subscribers.
Then there’s a part of me that says, “how long would I take to prepare if I was speaking to a room full of people”. Well, if I had to speak to a room full of people it would take me at least 15 minutes to prepare beforehand, maybe longer.
Here is how my life could be a lot easier if I would have known this at the start of my email list building, so TAKE NOTE, this is a golden secret for you today. I got smart later on in life. Look at that list again. See how I placed a “1” in front of a lot of those lists? Well this told me this list came from a specific optin form. Great Idea right! Wrong! It really hasn’t helped me at all. Here is what you do!
When you’re ready to get into list building this will save your hours!
Identify all the niches you are going to promote and assign them a number
1. Internet Marketing
2. Traffic Generation
3. Health
4. Trading
5. Green
You get the idea right? Now memorize or those number, or make a cheat sheet somewhere on your computer. If you decide to create a list for Solar panels, then make you list something like 5-solar panels, or 1-seotactics.
Now, why are we doing this? There are three reasons!
#1 Your list will be nice and organized, and easy to maintain
#2 When you place an identifying symbol in front of your list, you will have a better chance of that list name being available
#3 This is the Biggest of them all! If I am going to send out a broadcast regarding some Internet Marketing course, guess what – all I need to do is choose all the courses that start with #1. I’m done within seconds. If I got a book on curing acne that I’m promoting I just go hit all my lists that start with #5.
Now I know what your thinking. I got a ton of lists to rename! This makes perfect sense. Well sure it does, but it would have been nice if somebody had told us before we create 50 or 60 lists. So why not rename them? Well here’s the thing with that. You can go and rename your lists, it’s very easy to do. However, when you do each one of those lists are tied to an optin form. Which means the list name needs to be changed in the optin form.
If you run your business like I do then you have got several forms for each list. I’ve got one for widgets, popups, squeeze pages, etc. You get the idea right. We’ve got our work cut out for us if we want to make those changes. However, if you’re just getting started, well you were just given a wealth of information. Use it wisely while you are list building!
If you have been helped by this post, or if you have a brilliant comment to add to it, please leave a comment in the comment form below and join the conversation. Cheers! Enjoy your email list building!
This guest post was written by Chad Nicely, and his blog is chadnicely.com. My site focuses on Making Money Online, along with SEO, internet marketing, and traffic generation. I’m also the affiliate manager for Sean Donahoe. I’ve been involved in Internet Marketing for the last 10 years. I’ve been working behind the scenes on numerous IM projects and product launches. I encourage you to read my blog to learn more about me.
