List Building – Make this You’re Number 1 priority, TODAY!
If You haven’t started your List Building yet, You really need to, now.
Quite some time ago I posted about, what I call “My Number One Online Mistake” in which I wrote about how I kept putting off starting my List Building. If you read that post, you now realise that List Building should be your absolute priority from Day 1.
There is a huge amount of info out there on the web, promising ‘expert advice’ on how you do this, and
the latest apps and training courses to make list building easy and faster than ever.
My purpose in this post is to cover the basics required to start building a profitable list. How to start using methods that are proven over years, not a new passing fad.
This post will give you an insight into what tools you need, and clarify the basics so that you can plan and decide what particular tools to use and then, what course or training you need to actually get it started.
So… a really brief overview of the how List Building works, is:
You offer something of “high value” to your website visitors, in exchange for their first name and email address.
You collect their details into your list via an auto-responder service, and then you can send them emails as you see fit.
Whatever your gift or bribe to get people to optin, it must be conceived to be High Value.
Always give them more than they are expecting.
Some Important steps that will help you to understand the process and to get started professionally and successfully are:
1. Your Target Niche – Topic of this list:
Every list (and yes, you will need more than 1, but start with one first) should be specifically related to a particular topic, within your niche. The more targeted your list is, the higher rate of clicks you will get, on your email links.
This means, when you start promoting targeted products to that list, you will get higher sales conversions.
So, before you do anything else, choose your specific topic, and decide what your end goal is.
If you start out aiming at a particular goal or goals, it will be easier to make decisions on everything going forward.
2. Your Domain Name:
When you are first starting online, you can have webpages on a free platform such as WordPress.com. However, using this type of platform has huge disadvantages, and generally, they are not considered professional by the people you hope to have as customers.
Your webpages should be on your own domain name, on your own hosting account.
This means you need to have your own hosting, and register a domain name, but it is “yours” and it gives you full control and many more options.
So, go ahead and choose a domain name that suits you and/or your business, and find out if it’s available. If it is, go ahead and buy it.
A domain can be your name .com, your business name.com, etc. The cost is only about $20 per year.
The domain that this blog is on ‘peterbentzen.com’ is obviously my ‘firstname lastname.com’ and for sole operator home businesses, this is a very popular choice, these days.
3. A web hosting account:
For hosting, you are best to choose a package which includes c-Panel, this will allow you more options and also make it easy for you to navigate around, while you learn everything in there.
Initially choose a small package with a low monthly fee. Some popular low cost hosts, that you can check out, are:
- Jaguarpc Pro Cloud – (Note: Highly Recommended, I have been hosting with Jaguarpc for over 15 years).
- Dreamhost – www.dreamhost.com
- Bluehost – www.bluehost.com
- A2Hosting – www.a2hosting.com
- GoDaddy – godaddy.com/hosting/web-hosting
- HostGator – www.hostgator.com/shared
There are so many out there, that it can be really hard to choose, so pick say 3 of above and check them out for cost and the features that you need.
4. Get a Reliable Auto-Responder Service:
Your Auto-Responder service is where you will store your subscribers, and then email out to them.
You will be able to create webforms to collect names and email addresses, and validate the email addresses.
This gives you a fully automated system, that you use to:
- Persuade people to optin
- Confirm the email addresses
- Send out Welcome Emails immediately
- Direct them to any webpage as soon as they have confirmed
- Automatically give them the promised gift
- Automatically add an ‘unsubscribe’ link to every email, so you comply with laws
The best part is that apart from your specific ‘broadcast’ emails for a particular promotion, you can set up automatic sequences of emails, that will warm up your leads, and build trust with them. This is very important.
Your Auto-responder service should be a well known professional service, such as , GetResponse, Aweber, CleverReach (used to be iContact) or MailChimp. There are many to choose from, but Don’t go with a free service, you will regret it down the road.
Aweber and Get-Response are renown for being ‘The Best’ services available, for new marketers and for affiliate marketers.
MailChimp are extremely good and offer a great free level. But… Choose wisely, this only allows one ‘List’ and limit of 2000 subscribers, once you pass this they can get expensive. Also MailChimp are dead against Affiliate Marketing, so think about your planned business Model(s)
5. Create your Capture page (also known as a Landing or Optin page):
You will need to have a Capture Page. This will house the webform you create in your Auto-responder so people can sign up.
You then send targeted traffic to this page, in the hope that they will join your list (List Building).
Your Capture Page should be a small page (very fast loading), with most of it’s contents above the fold, meaning people need to see what it’s about and what you are offering, without having to scroll down.
Your capture page must be ‘mobile responsive’, most people are browsing the web on mobile devices and if your page does’t display properly on phones and tablets, you will miss a lot of potential customers.
Like everything else I’ve mentioned above, there are many options to create landing pages. It mostly depends on your skill level and your budget. Some options are:
- Your Auto-responder service should have options for doing this
- Your web hosting package might include a page builder
- WordPress site on your hosting, use WordPress to build pages, or build a Blog and include an optin form in the sidebar (see mine on the right of this page)
- A specific landing page service, such as Landing Page Monkey, Leadpages or Instapage.
- Use a HTML page builder such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Komposer and upload the pages and images to your hosting.
There are various “2-step” optin page set-ups available, these are proven to get more subscribers. I honestly don’t know why these make such a difference, but the proof is out there. If possible, consider using one!
You can see one of mine at: https://peterbentzen.com/listb/sqlb1.html
When the page opens, click the orange button at the bottom and you will see the optin form.
This page was created with Landing Page Monkey, which is one I am happy to recommend.
If you would like my free report, with more List Building Tips, go ahead and optin while you are there! You will get more helpful info in the report, and in the emails following.
6. Drive traffic to your Capture page:
Once you have these things set up and you have the grounding to start building your list, and on your way to a consistent online income.
There’s no point in all above if no-one sees your give-away offer and signs up, or if the people who do visit are not at all interested in your particular offer.
So, you need to get eyes of interested people onto your capture page. This means driving Targeted Traffic.
There are a huge number of ways to drive traffic, some of the best ways for newbie marketers to get started are:
- Frequent good quality Blog posts, including a reason that people need your gift, and a link to your capture page
- Posting on your social media profiles (always follow the sites rules)
- Pinning related images on Pinterest, with the link to your page
- Giving helpful advice on your topic, on Quora and Yahoo Answers.
- Paid PPC traffic, such as Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
Concluding Comments:
Above… I have covered the tools and some steps you need to commence your List Building, but you will need to learn the processes involved with each step.
If you are new to all this, and you don’t know how to do it all, it’s often difficult to know where to begin…
Have you tried to learn too many times, but given up because you wish you could just watch over the shoulders of an expert email marketer show it to you?
If you need help with this, you owe it to yourself to take a look at our Easy List Building Success. This is a 9 Video step-by-step course, showing you in HD, how to put it all together and actually do it!
Please go ahead and give us your feedback in the comments area below, we love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading, I hope above is helpful to you.
All the Best!
Pete Bentzen
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