The Truth About List Building

One of the most fatal mistakes that new marketers and entrepreneurs make when building their online business is in NOT growing a mailing list.

For many, it takes years before they even begin to understand the importance of building and growing a targeted list of prospects, however, once they experience the dramatic impact that having a pre-made customer base at their fingertips, they never, ever look back.

Your Incentive Offer

You want and need to build a mailing list of targeted prospects.

You don’t want a list busting at the seams with subscribers who are unresponsive or uninterested in what you have to offer.

Those kinds of subscribers are dead weight, and you will never be able to generate any income from inflated email lists.

Instead, you want to always focus on building lists that include targeted prospects.  People who not only have been proven to have interest in your market, but you have been proven to BUY products and services from within your market.

This where the majority of new email marketers go wrong.

Instead of setting up list building campaigns that generate leads that are targeted and relevant, they bustle in thousands of subscribers from free giveaway sites, or worse, paid email programs where the person subscribing to their lists are given incentive to do so!

The ONLY incentive you ever want to offer your subscribers is with a product or offer that is extremely targeted towards the products or services you eventually plan to promote.

In order to build mailing lists, you need a handful of tools that include:

v Squeeze page

v Autoresponder Account

v Incentive Offer

v Content

The squeeze page is where you direct potential subscribers, so that they can enter in their name and email address and subscribe to your newsletter.

The autoresponder account is what powers your mailing list, confirming requests to subscribe, delivering content automatically and handling basic maintenance of your entire list.

The incentive offer however, is one of the most important components of a successful list building campaign.

It’s the giveaway featured on your squeeze page that motivates visitors into taking action and subscribing to your mailing list so that they can receive instant access to the promised offer. 

This is so important to the successful of your list building in fact, that just by offering the WRONG incentive, you could cause the entire campaign to struggle, yet by offering a unique, relevant incentive offer, you could easily build a list of thousands in less than a week’s time.

So, how can you evaluate the type of incentive offers that are likely to appeal to your market?

You begin by researching existing competition from all angles. You want to determine what products are being offered as incentives on other marketers squeeze pages AND you want to evaluate the kind of products that are successfully selling in the marketplace.

When you do that, you can easily pinpoint exactly what people are already looking for, ensuring that your own incentive offer is a success.

Think about this for a moment; if you offered a high quality eBook on your chosen topic, and competitors are selling the same quality eBook, how easy do you think it would be to generate a massive list of targeted prospects in a very short amount of time?

If people could get a useful, quality and exclusive eBook from you for FREE, they would gladly give up their name and email address to gain access to that kind of giveaway.

I also want to make something very clear.  While you can use existing content, including private label material to build a list, if you are just starting out in your market, I strongly suggest hiring a freelancer to create an exclusive report that you can offer subscribers.

You want to begin building brand awareness as a credible source for information, and by offering an incentive that is strictly available to your subscribers; you will be able to generate exposure faster and easier than by simply offering revamped content or existing private label material.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t use private label to power up your actual mailing list; you can (and should).  You could rewrite existing content, articles and material and use it as subsequent email broadcasts, on websites and blogs. You could also revamp PLR content and offer it as additional resources in the form of reports, guides, and even video training modules.

However, your initial offer should be unique so that you can position yourself within your market and stand out by offering something of distinct value.

Outsourcing your incentive offer doesn’t have to be a time consuming, costly process either. You can quickly hire a freelance writer from online forums, saving the time and money from not having to post a listing in the traditional freelance marketplaces.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com and http://www.WarriorForum.com are two of the top resources for finding quality freelance writers who would be willing to write a high quality report for you for less than $100.

Just make sure that you draft out a spec sheet that indicates what you are looking for, the style of writing you prefer (conversational, etc), and the length of the report itself.

Since it’s an incentive offer that you are giving away to your list, the report could be as short as 10 pages in length. Of course, since “length” is often equated to value, the longer the report and the higher quality content, the better response you will receive.

You want your incentive offer to reflect your overall brand in a positive way, so that people are impressed, motivated and energized to explore everything else that you have to offer.

You want people to be motivated to seek out more information about you and other products you are offering, and if you are planning to build a list primarily to promote an existing product or service that you are offering, then you want to make sure that the giveaway offer ties in directly with your back-end system, so that the moment they download the report, your system begins to work its magic, in motivating subscribers into becoming active customers.

We will discuss your backend strategy in a later chapter, for now; here are a few ideas for different incentive offers that you could give away on your squeeze page (depending on your niche market):

Free Report
Free Ebook
Free eCourse
Free Newsletter
Free Graphics/Templates
Free Video Training
Free Audio Transcripts/Interviews
Free Article Content

There are an unlimited number of targeted incentive offers that you could provide to potential subscribers, and depending on your niche market, you could also offer tailor-made products.

For example, if you were catering to new bloggers, offering an exclusive Wordpress plug-in that helps them save time or money would likely be very successful.

Just the same, if you were focused on the job market, you could offer a “cheat sheet” of job interview questions, helping people prepare for upcoming interviews so that they are able to land the job.

You need to identify an existing need within your market and create an incentive offer around that demand.

By doing that, you will be able to generate a massive list of highly relevant leads that are far more likely to be responsive than “generic” offers that appeal to a broader audience, but are unhelpful with actually identifying or segmenting your subscribers into individual groups (more on the importance of this later).

The key is in offering whatever you decide to give away, for free.  You want to focus on building a list of targeted prospects, and you’ll have plenty of time to upsell them later on.

For now, the objective is to entice them into subscribing by offering them something of value, at absolutely no cost.

Once you have determined what you are going to offer potential subscribers, you need to set up your autoresponder account so that it can automatically deliver the material to everyone that signs up and confirms their request to receive information from you.

When it comes to choosing an autoresponder service provider, there are many professional services to choose from including http://www.Aweber.com and http://www.GetResponse.com
Both of these services offer a full-featured account with unlimited autoresponder campaigns, adequate tracking/stats, high delivery rates, and even customizable email based templates.

You will want to set up your first autoresponder campaign so that the incentive offer is sent out instantly. You never want to make subscribers wait for the information that they signed up to receive.

Once you have set up your autoresponder account, assign a title to your campaign that helps you to easily identify it later on when you have created multiple autoresponder.  Then, create an “initial email”, which is a single broadcast that goes out to every subscriber once they have confirmed their request to join your list.

Thank them for subscribing to your newsletter and include the download link to your incentive offer, or if you are simply offering a newsletter or eCourse, set up your autoresponder campaign so that it sends out the first edition of your newsletter or module in your eCourse. 

Don’t try to push out products within the initial email.  This is the time where you begin to establish a relationship with each subscriber, and your only focus should be on providing exceptional value and free content so that you begin to build trust and credibility with each person.

With both an incentive offer and a professional autoresponder ready to go, your next step is to develop your squeeze page so that you can begin to collect leads from every visitor you receive.

We’ll tackle the anatomy of a successful squeeze page in the next chapter, and I’ll show you exactly how to set up a compelling lead generation page that will flood your new autoresponder account with fresh, targeted prospects.

Table Of Contents(64 Pages eBook)

The Truth About List Building 4
Your Incentive Offer 8
Building A High Converting Squeeze Page 18
Creating A Killer Backend System 30
Building Your Mailing List 36
Feeder Sites 43
Social Marketing 51
Monetizing Your Email Lists 55
Creating Winning Email Campaigns 58

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