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Links & Traffic | Article #23: LIST BUILDING

List building is actually a rather round about way of promoting. The reason is that you actually have to do some promoting FIRST to get people to join your list. But once you’ve done that part, advertising to people in your list is one of the most POWERFUL forms of promotion that there is.

Because list building is so complex, there is no way I can possibly go into every aspect of list building in this book but I will at least give you the basics so that you can get started.

Ultimately, this is what you want to happen. You want to offer something to somebody absolutely FREE for joining your list. You have to make the offer so enticing that they’d be a fool to pass it up. After you have done this, the rest is simply gaining their trust.

How do you do that?

Simple. You earn it.

How?

By NOT selling to them.

No, that’s NOT a typo. When you get somebody into your list the only thing you want to do for a long time is give them information. It doesn’t matter what your product or service is. You’re the expert on it. So send them articles they can read. Don’t inundate them with emails everyday but send them maybe 1 or 2 a week. Keep in contact with them. Keep providing them with info. Eventually they will have a lot of trust in your word.

Once you’ve gotten their trust, you can slowly begin to offer them things. Make sure you point out how these things can help them. Always show the people in your list that you’re looking out for THEIR wellbeing.

Does it take time to build this kind of trust? Yes. Today, most people on the Internet are very skeptical about everything and everyone. So you have to work very hard to gain their trust.

Getting them into your list is the first step.

So, just how do you go about doing this?

Well, it will help if you have your own site. If you do, and you get somebody to visit it through the other forms of advertising mentioned in this book, what you want to do is have a lead capture page where people can sign up for your list.

You’re probably thinking, why? If they’re already at my site, why do I need them to join my list?

The answer is this. Most people need to see a site 7 times before they buy. But if you offer them something at your site for FREE simply just for joining your list, they’re quite likely to do this, even if they’re not ready to buy. This way, you have plenty of time to convert them into a buyer by offering them freebies and a lot of information.

Okay, now we get to the logistics of actually KEEPING a list.

At first, this isn’t hard when you only have a few people to email. Removal requests are pretty easy to handle. But what happens when you’ve got a few hundred people in your list? I have 2 lists at the moment. One has 367 people and the other has 223 people. Think I want to handle emailing these people myself?

Not a chance in heck.

The auto responder to the rescue.

Auto responders are another one of those things that I could give you a whole course on, but we’ll just keep this very basic.
An auto responder is an email service that will opt people into your list and handle unsubscribe requests when they ask for them.

That is the simple explanation to what an auto responder is and what it does.

Having said that, there are a ton of autoresponder services out there.  On of the most popular, and for good reason, is this one.

GET RESPONSE

If you get it for a whole year, which I recommend, you get 70% off the price which is just insane. Comes out to about $12 a month. It’s probably one of the best values on the Internet. You don’t have to worry about spam complaints and you don’t have to worry about your emails NOT being delivered. Get Response takes care of everything. All you do is put in your message, set it for when you want it to go out and they mail it for you.

Like it or not, you can’t effectively build your list without an auto responder.

Having said that, because list building is really an indirect way of promoting your products and services, it’s hard to give it a rating that’s fair. You’re relying on other methods to even GET a list built. Then you have to hope that the people on your list are receptive to your offers after they’ve gotten all the free stuff.

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