You should be aware that building a list is an essential to any business. Whether it’s a list of leads, prospects, clients, customers…they are part of the equation. If you haven’t started building a list, get going! Give your list tender loving care and you’ll be rewarded.

Tip 1:  Offer Free VALUABLE content, constantly. There’s a difference between offering a free eBook download and continually giving free advice, tips and ideas.

Tip 2:  Create capture or squeeze pages. One of the easiest ways to get someone’s information (name and email) is by offering something free if they just submit their information. The capture page should be related to what you’re giving away. If you’re page targets people who are looking for a work-at-home business then your free offer should be content about work-at-home subject matter.

Tip 3:  Use MANY different advertising channels. There are a vast number of ways to advertise directly and indirectly that you could do it 24/7, no joke. Some ideas are PPC, Website banner ads, Traffic Exchanges, List Builders, Forums, Classifieds, Article Submission sites and social networks.

Tip 4:  Purchase qualified leads. Of course this is an easy way but if you have a budget to spend on QUALITY leads, this may be a way to go. And, don’t just buy any leads. You could get 100 leads a day for $10 but I will bet you those leads will be garbage.

Tip 5:  Share your story. People want to follow genuine, experienced individuals. If you’ve been in internet or network marketing for 6 months, you absolutely have a story. It could be as simple as “When I started ____ and now ____.” …of course with some depth. You have to give people a reason to listen to you, and a story is a necessity to being a marketer.
I’ve kept these tips pretty generic. Have no fear, I DO plan to go into detail on these tips in coming posts so stay tuned. Better yet, subscribe via RSS or join my newsletter so you’ll find out when I make an update.

Have a wonderful day!

Previously I wrote about the importance in building an email list so this post is about the ‘how’ part of the equation. I’d like to first mention that there are dozens of ways to effectively build an email list of your own that I simply will not cover in this post since there are so many possibilities.

There are thousands of people on the Internet every day who are searching for an answer. Generally that answer will solve some kind of problem they are facing or resolve an issue. sorry, but you need to read between the lines a little bit in order to understand what I mean. The answers people search for aren’t necessarily based on factual questions but rather on ‘how to’ or some kind of help to make their lives better. It can be in the form of a book, a product to help in the kitchen, cooking instructions, medical “cures” for a sickness…the list goes on.

What does this have to do with “how” to build a list? Something that you may or may not know already is that you can build a list in virtually any market/niche that you desire. Marketers already have wide variety of email lists from bowling to cooking to musical instrument instructions to the most obvious, how to make money on the Internet. One of the strategies to list building is targeting a niche of some kind. You want to focus your attention to a specific market in order to appeal to a audience you know would be interested in your product/service. In most cases the people in markets outside the “how to make money online” niche are going to be easier to sell as they have not been hammered or saturated with product offerings around their interests. By targeting these less saturated niches you open plenty of opportunity to grow your business and get plenty of untouched leads.

In order to build a list the easiest way is providing content for free. This content needs to be valuable, interesting, and unique/different than the average content you would find on almost any related website. By providing valuable, free content, people will want to come back for more. If you offer a bunch of stuff for free (and it’s valuable with good info) the visitor/prospect will be more willing to buy from you – that’s simply how it is.

You can offer free content such as videos and eBooks via an auto-responder. The visitor goes to your website, they read some copy for the freebie (and the copy shouldn’t be long by the way because you’re giving something away), the visitor fills out a short form which automatically subscribes them to your auto-responder system, and then they get the freebie emailed to them automatically. Now you have that visitors information and they have the freebie you promised. it’s really that simple, honestly.

Have questions? leave a comment or contact me though my form. I’ll usually respond within a business day. If I don’t, try write a comment instead.

This post is brief and for a good reason. Darren Olander and I invested our time and money into an advertising site called ListDomino. The idea is simple, your email list can grow even if you do nothing…and it’s true.

As a member of ListDomino.com, you can have the ability to email thousands of people who join after you without the requirement of referring members. We had a pre-launch to get the ball rolling and the site has been a success so far. Now we’ve opened it to everyone so I strongly suggest taking a look for yourself.

Heck, you can hear my Voice Recording on the home page too- I thought that was pretty cool.

www.listdomino.com

~Matt