Module 4 – How do you build a mailing list?

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Give them what they want, not what YOU
want to give them!

In order to start building your mailing list, you need to convince people to subscribe to that list. To do this, you have to have a place on the net from where they can subscribe.

In short, you need your own website to which you can attract targeted visitors who you can convince to subscribe to your mailing list.

However, before starting to build your website, it is extremely important to grasp the underlying concept of doing so from the specific point of view of list building. This is something that many marketers (even people with a good degree of experience) often get tragically wrong, but you cannot afford to do so.

From what you have read so far, you already understand that the plan for any online business is to sell ‘stuff’ that is related to a niche market as a way of generating an income.

You might therefore imagine that the next step is to create an information product – an e-book or special report for example – which you can sell from your website. Whilst this might be one option, it is certainly NOT the one that you should be focusing on if your primary objective is to build a mailing list.

What you should be focusing on is giving people exactly what they want as a way of convincing them to subscribe to your mailing list. Only after you have achieved this should you turn your attention to selling products or services to make money.

For instance, we have already established that the vast majority of net users are looking for information and that they want that information for free if at all possible. So, why not keep them happy by giving them exactly what they want? If you keep them happy, it is far easier to convince them to sign up for your mailing list, which is after all the primary objective of your present activities. Here’s the step by step mailing list building process laid out in very simple terms:

They want free information about photographic equipment (in our example).

• Hence, you build a website that gives targeted visitors a ton of free information about exactly what they want.
• At the same time, you make it abundantly clear that there is a plethora of extra free information available to anyone who subscribes to your mailing list. You also offer ‘incentives’ to further encourage visitors to subscribe.
• It is only after a visitor has become a list subscriber that you start to try to make money out of them. Prior to that, the only thing that you are doing is communicating with your visitor and giving them exactly what they want.

So, when building your list building website, you need to focus on providing niche targeted information. In particular, you need to provide the information that your research has already highlighted as representing what people in your niche are really looking for.

For instance, you should already have a list of the most commonly asked questions in your market sector.  Thus, your site should be constructed to answer as many of these questions as possible. You already know what kind of things people are looking for in your market, so feature information about where they can find these things as well.

Understand that the focus of your website should never be on making money. Instead, your website is nothing more than the ‘open door’ to your business, a place where visitors can interact with what you are doing whilst learning what they need to know.

Building a site of this nature is critically important for another reason too. By doing so, you establish your authority and expertise in your market niche. By giving your targeted visitors the information that they most want or need, you immediately impress upon them your connection with and knowledge of your market. It naturally follows that if you establish itself as a recognized authority and expert, it becomes far easier to convince people to subscribe to your mailing list. After all, if an expert about any topic in which you have a great deal of interest offered to send valuable information to you by e-mail two or three times a week for free, you can be pretty certain that you would snatch their hand off.

By establishing your expertise with an information packed site that is focused on providing exactly what people need, you very quickly put yourself in this favored position. Thus, by focusing your site building efforts on providing information, you actually accelerate the rate at which you build your mailing list.

As long as you never forget that, in order to be an effective mailing list builder, you have to give people what they want rather than what you want to give them, you will never fail to build targeted mailing lists.

Setting your site up…

The first thing that you need to be a successful list builder is the right image. Part of this can be accomplished by establishing your expertise but well before this, you have to create an image that shouts ‘professional’ at anyone who might be considering doing business with you or of subscribing to your list.

In order to do this, the first step is to have your own DOMAIN NAME and WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT because whilst you can build a website using FREE resources, nothing is likely to give potential clients and subscribers a worse impression. Given that the total cost of registering a domain name and paying the first month hosting fees is less than $18 in total, it really is not worth taking this chance. It is a fact that potential subscribers will have a negative impression of your business if you use free resources (such as free web hosting). You should never even consider doing so if you are genuinely serious about building a successful and profitable list.

Tags: domain, editor, godaddy, google, hosting, HTML, lunarpages, mailing list, marketers, Name Servers, Niche, products, search engine, traffic exchange, WordPress