Why Begin List Building and How Do I Start?

When people are new to Internet marketing, they often get started in the wrong direction. Sometimes, it’s the promises made of untold wealth and freedom that catches them and they wind up in a dead-end program where only the founders make any real cash. Or, they get caught up in the hours of clicking it takes to advertise on traffic exchanges which for the most part, aren’t very effective. But it’s hard to break away from the excitement and from what you’ve been told. So, if you’re one of those Internet marketing people, it’s time you realized the most important part of any Internet marketing business. If you want to succeed, build an email opt-in list.

Building a list is the most important job any Internet marketing person has. Without a list, you’re just another random person out there trying to sell something. People are sure you’re out to cheat them, and it’s hard to sell anything at all. People don’t know you, and if they can’t trust you, you won’t make much money.

You can’t ignore list building, and it should have been your first priority when you moved into the Internet marketing world. But many of us put it off and don’t give it the attention we should. We are short sighted and want immediate profits by selling, when all along an email address is a commodity more valuable than one sale, because with it you can make multiple sales to the same person.

Now that you realize the importance of having a list, the first step after deciding your niche is to buy a domain name. It should be a name that’s easy to remember and that fits your niche. For example, if you’re selling natural perfumes, your domain should have “natural perfumes” in the domain title if possible.

Then, you need a web hosting account. If you’re serious about your Internet marketing business, it’s going to grow and you’re going to need to add more than one domain to your account. So, get an account that has mySQL database availability. That will be important when it’s time to start a blog or add an affiliate program. Look into the future when choosing your hosting account, and also look for reliability. You need your website to be up 99.9% of the time.

Your next step is to get an autoresponder service. The main concern here is deliverability. Will your email arrive at its destination? With spam filters in effect today, if you don’t have a great autoresponder, your email marketing efforts won’t be very effective.

After all of this is in place, you’ll need to build your first squeeze page. But don’t worry. It’s nothing more than a few bullet points, which provide the benefits of your offer, and and opt-in form, which you get from your autoresponder service. Images of yourself or of something you’re giving away in exchange for getting people’s names and email addresses work well, too. When you’re done with this step, you upload the squeeze page, and you’re ready to build your list.

Significant Internet marketing success rests on the size and responsiveness of your list. You need to gather a group of people who know and trust you, and who are grateful for the knowledge you can give them about your niche. When they get a recommendation from you, they’re more likely to follow it. If you follow through with the steps above, you’ll have your list growing in no time. All you have to do is concentrate on sending some traffic to your page. Then, get ready for your Internet marketing to start growing by leaps and bounds.

Email Copy: Four Tips for Compelling Writing

Learning to write effective email copy is essential to your list building success. While you want to provide your list subscribers with valuable information and resources, at the end of the day, the purpose of a list is to profit from it. And if you can’t write email copy effectively, you won’t be selling anything.

Here are four key tips to make your email copy more compelling.

Keep it Short

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Make some paragraphs as short as one sentence, and make some sentences as short as one word. Also, each paragraph shouldn’t be more than about 4 or 5 lines. The key is to make your email easy to read with plenty of white space. Long word blocks are intimidating and make a person less likely to read. Also, forget what you learned in English class back in the day, you don’t need to make paragraph breaks based on content.

Don’t be Wordy

Simple enough. Keep things clear and simple. Make sure your message is clear and concise. If your messages are long, just be sure to tighten up your message and make it flow. If you want to be eloquent and wordy, become an English professor. This is marketing, so act accordingly.

Use Action Verbs

Make your sentences more powerful with the liberal use of actions verbs. You want your email to be clear enough for a 7 year old to understand. People get frustrated if they have to spend too much time figuring out what you have to say, so make it easy for them.

Use Compelling Subheadings

Your subheadings should be like mini-headlines. Use them to break up large bodies of text and to bring people back into the body of the letter. Many people will only scan your email, so make the subheads communicate a clear message.

Once you get a subscriber to your list, knowing how to maximize your profit over the long term should be your next concern. Writing effective email copy will enable you to get sales almost on demand, thereby increasing your ability to profit from your list significantly.

Joint Ventures: One of the Most Powerful Methods of Traffic and Profit Generation

A joint venture is among the most powerful traffic and POWERFUL profit generation tool available anywhere. Let’s get into some reasons why that is the case.

Free Advertising

You gotta love joint ventures already for this reason alone. In the majority of cases (at least the ones we’ll be talking about) you receive 100% free advertising. You gain targeted traffic at ZERO cost to yourself. With the right joint venture you can *literally* get thousands of dollars in free advertising by just making a few phone calls or sending a few quick emails.

Quick Setup

Most joint venture offers very quick and easy to set up. They do take a bit of preparation, but overall, they don’t take a lot of time at all. You can have a profitable joint venture in the works in just a few short HOURS. Later, as we explore 11 joint ventures you can launch, you’ll see that they can be setup in just a short amount of time, with a small amount of work, but with…

Amazing Results

How would you like to make thousands of dollars in profits for less than an hour’s work? Sounds nice, right? This is common for joint ventures. You can get some absolutely tremendous results from JV partnerships. The results are not only in terms of profits, but also through: new mailing list subscribers, new affiliates in your affiliate program, name recognition and branding, and future JV partners. The results can be truly spectacular if set up properly.

Future Profits

With these kinds of partnerships you can earn more profits through automated follow-ups with your contacts (customers and leads generated from the JV), list building (new subscribers to your ezine), strategically placed backend offers (there’s always an additional offer you can make!) and from future joint ventures with your partners (if your initial JV was profitable for them, then they will definitely be open to future JVs).

So joint ventures are a great way to supercharge your traffic and profits.

Your Favorite Guru is a Liar…Yeah, That One

A lot of the big name Internet marketers out there produce high quality products that do a good job of teaching people how to make money online. The big question is: at what price? I’ve had the unfortunate experience of buying certain products from big name marketers and seeing the sort of tactics that they promote.

One product by an Australian marketer states that you need to give products you review on your affiliate sites a high rating. Hmmm…what if the product sucks? I guess that doesn’t matter. Admittedly, the product is good. But stuff like that still rubs me the wrong way.

Another product, and this one rhymes with Commission Blueprint, teaches people to create a story around a character for a more persuasive sales tactic. These character based stories have become very popular in the past few years, taking the form of fake testimonials and fake blogs.

These fake blogs are very common in the health niche, especially in the weight loss market. A storyline is created around what is often a female who lost a considerable amount of weight using a weight loss product, like one of the Acai weight loss products, or the Rachael Ray Diet.

The problem is that oftentimes a man wrote the blog, and the picture of the women who allegedly lost 40 or so pounds was bought from a photo site. So basically, some guy searched the Internet for a before and after picture of a lady who lost weight, then the guy makes a blog posing as that lady and telling everyone a completely made up weight loss story designed only to sell an affiliate product without any regard for whether the product really works or not. There is one picture featuring a German model that is especially popular, being that at least 80 different fake blogs have used. Of course, the woman in the picture has a different name depending on which blog she is on. Scandalous behavior in my book. The marketer just plays on the vulnerability and the desperation of people to get fatter pockets.

The FTC has kept up with things as best as it can, and it is cracking down on these fake blogs. There are new rules that have really shaken up the affiliate industry. People now have to *gasp* actually be honest when promoting products. Wow, picture that. You can see an overview of some of the laws the FTC enforces here. Pay close attention to the section on testimonials and endorsements.

Anyway, there are certainly plenty of ethical marketers out there. I just wish there were more. The marketers that are less than ethical should be warned that the government is cracking down, and the chickens might just be coming home to roost sooner than they like if they don’t straighten up their acts.

Email Marketing: Building Rapport through an ASK Campaign

Before you even start list building and email marketing, one great tip is to set up an ASK campaign to find out what the list wants. Focus on asking and getting answers to 100 questions about whatever your interest is.

If you do this, you will be way ahead of the game and in a far better position than most marketers because you will know exactly what your market wants. When you are in that position, it makes it easy to write emails, write copy, and provide content for your list, because you know exactly what it wants.

It might seem odd, but it might be a good idea to hold off on collecting people’s names and email address in order to focus on getting as many answers to as many questions as you can within a shorter period of time. In the long run, the amount of insight that you gain into the mind of your market will more than make up for the few names that you didn’t get on your list while getting your 100 answers.

Use the answers you get from your questions to write bullet points on sales copy, headlines, and other things on your squeeze page. You now have a true window into the mind of your prospect, because with an ASK campaign, you don’t have to rely on guess work and assumptions.

If you want to use paid advertising for your ASK campaign, start by asking what they want. Then on your thank-you page you can then offer the opportunity to join your list.

Another technique is to offer a free e-course or free report on the squeeze page to get the prospect to opt-in. Then, the Thank you page say something along the lines of: “Thanks for subscribing. You’ll be getting your first lesson soon. In the meantime, what is you single biggest question about ____ topic.”

This process will help you to begin building a relationship with your niche. Then, while you are developing content based on the answers to the questions in the ASK campaign, you can also recommend products that are worthwhile to your list.

If you want to skyrocket your Internet success and income, you should take seriously the job of building a bond and rapport with your list. That is done by having personality, offering valuable content, and being trustworthy in your product recommendation. If you do those things, you will be able to make much more money in the long run, and your list will benefit much more from your email marketing as well.

At the end of the day, the ASK campaign all about selling your list what they want, as opposed to selling them what you want to sell them – which is what most people do. Don’t be like most people. Set yourself apart from the crowd.

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