On Building A Mailing List...

All the pros and the internet millionaires know that the money is "In The List." It doesn't matter what your primary product or service is that you are trying to sell. Even if your business is offline such as a flea market, kiosk or gift store, you still should be building an opt-in email list of customers and prospects. If you are not, then you are losing money... maybe a LOT of money. You need to be building your own opt-in email mailing list. I'm not talking about "Spam" or Unsolicited bulk email. This is a list of people who have willingly given you their name and email address and requested that you send them information from time to time about your products or services. What if you had 10,000 people on your list? Or even 20,000 that were interested in your products - you could send out a sales email offering something you know they are already interested in - Wow - do you see the potential power here? I know people who have well over 100,000 people on their opt-in lists. And they can punch one button and the email goes out to everybody. Sounds great right? But how do you go about getting that list in the first place? I'll show you the tools we use to build our list in a minute, but first I want you to understand the power that this can give you - a list like this can be extrememly lucrative. Let me give you an example: Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you sell dolls online. Ok? Bear with me here. So you have targeted all the doll buyers and collectors that you can find and you are marketing to them. You've done your research and you know what your target market is looking for and you've created an offer that appeals to them. And when they come to your website they see a box that says: "Free Report Reveals how to tell if your doll collection is worth a fortune. Enter your name and email address and the report will be sent instantly to you!" So if you have properly targeted your market, many of those people at your website will be very interested in this. They want to know if they are sitting on a fortune, right? So they are going to give you their name and email address and another person is added to your list. (Your autoresponder will automatically send them the free report right to their email and add them to your list) More on autoresponders in a minute. How fast your list grows depends on how attractive your offer is, how targeted the traffic is that is visitng your website and how many people you can get to your website. If your primary business is offline, you should ask all your customers at the time of check out what their email address is and if they would like to receive special offers and/or discounts via email. Also, you could do a drawing and have them enter the drawing simply by giving you their email and requesting to be added to your list! You could also create a sales flier and have it placed throughout the store that tells them how to get a free report about doll collecting sent to their email. They take it home, go to your website online and BAM! they are added to your list. Does this get your brain thinking? I hope so! A NOTE ABOUT TARGETING YOUR MARKET: If the people that are at your website are interested in fishing poles and you are selling dolls - don't be upset when they leave without buying - they're not interested! Find people that are already interested in what you have to offer. If people are not interested in the product or service you are offering, FIND SOMETHING THEY ARE INTERESTED IN AND SELL THAT TO THEM! Getting tons of traffic doesn't do you a bit of good if those people are not interested in what you have. Give me a little bit of highly targeted traffic over tons of generic traffic any day! Power Tip: Don't pick out your product first. Don't make your mind up that "you are going to sell a specific product." Find a group of people that need a particular product, or information or whatever. Then find the product they need - the product they are looking for, and sell that to them. Ok, imagine if you sell weight loss products and you have worked really hard and you now have a list of 15,000 subscribers to your opt-in email list. Now, lets say you just got your hands on the latest greatest weight loss product - What do you do with it? Well, if you haven't been building your own list, you have to try to market the product somehow... But you've been building your list of people interested in diet products so you know exactly what to do - you send out a sales email with this special offer and then sit back and watch the sales roll in. That's the dream right? Well it happens all the time. In fact that is the model for online success. This is not something I came up with - this is the secret that the people making big money online use. And if done right, it works - BIG TIME. List Management Now, however you decide to manage your list is up to you. There are a lot of programs and software you can use. But I am going to show you what I use to manage my list. First of all, this can all be automated for you. Can you imagine if you had to send out 1000 emails? 5,000? 15,000? everytime you wanted to mail your list? This would take you forever. Of course you don't do it manually - you use a list management system. You simply create ONE email - then hit the send button and that email is sent to everyone on you list at the same time! Plus, you don't have to manually sign them up either, that's automated too.. you just get them to enter their name and email address in a form on your website and they are automatically added to your list! There are several programs that will do this for you - I have listed some free ones in the resource section - If you have to start out with a free one than so be it- that's better than not doing it at all - but the free ones have ads attached to your email and you will lose sales as a result - I don't recommend them. I've tried a few different list managers and one stands out above the rest. It's economical and it's the best one I am aware of. It's called Aweber and it makes managing your email list easy. I suggest you get your mailing list started right away because I can pretty much guarantee that your competitors are already trying to get your customers on THEIR mailing list. Aweber also has lots of tutorials and helpful hints that make getting your list up and going a snap. ONE LAST THOUGHT: I highly recommend that you offer a free report or some free information that relates directly to what your customers are looking for. That will give you the highest chance of adding new people to your list. For example, if you sell security equipment and everyone coming to your site is looking for security equipment - offering a free ebook on how to collect beanie babies is NOT going to work! Make sure what you offer is targeted and relevant.