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You’ve probably read in many places online, and have come to the conclusion that, the easiest way to make a living online is to have a list of subscribers.

A list of people who are chomping at the bit to whip out their credit card and buy your next product.

But here’s one of the questions you have to ask: HOW do you go about doing that?

You can have a huge list of 100,000 people BUT if they aren’t ‘buyers’, you ARE NOT going to be having any cash funneled in to your paypal account.

On the flip side, you can have a list of just a couple of hundred people that are very responsive and they can lead you down the path of prosperity.

You CAN have that type of a list by following the strategies that I will outline as I add to this series and also in List Building From Scratch.

First and foremost, as I mentioned, you MUST have a list that is going to be responsive to your messages.

So…

Again… HOW are you going to get that list?

Well, the ‘gooroos’ out there are going to tell you it boils down to three ways, of which you can only use two:

The Fast way, The Cheap way, or obtaining High Quality subscribers

You can do it fast and cheap but the results will be low quality. MYTH #1!

You can do it the expensive route and have very high quality subscribers but it’s not typically going to happen fast. MYTH #2!

The third strategy is the most effective they tell you to do it, inexpensively – generating high quality subscribers, but it’s going to take patience. MYTH #3!

In List Building From Scratch, I dispell those myths and spell out a strategy that you can use to build your list fast, build it with very little cash coming out of your pocket, AND generate high quality prospects.

While there is definitely more than one way to generate an income online, the most effective way to do it for long term results is this: you drive highly targeted traffic to a site (or several sites), have an optin form to capture name and email address, and you present relevant offers on the backend.

Get that process right and you have the makings of a very successful online business.

Get it wrong and you’re a statistic. Someone that sees ‘easy button’ stamped all over things, lays out bucket loads of cash, has nothing to show for it and claims that Internet Marketing is a farce.

In the next post I am going to go into some of the ways you ‘encourage’ visitors to fill out that opt in form and be added to your list.

One of those ways is the ability to write copy that will convince the visitor to fill in their name and email address and click submit.

If you think that you don’t have that ability, check out this resource from a fellow marketer that I have learned a lot from; Robert Plank.

In his Fast Food Copywriting, Robert reveals a quick and painless formula for writing compelling sales copy that will have your emails written, your products launched and your web sites up and running in less than an hour!

It’s a formula that I follow and it will definitely help you out.

Thanks for stopping by…I am interrupting my List Building series very briefly to give you a glimpse of the future of video marketing.

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Just click the play button to watch the video below

Although it took me about 4 ‘takes’ to get the video the way I wanted it, to get it from my flip cam to the blog was a matter of doing a quick edit of the start and finish of the video in camtasia, taking the one file from there and uploading it to my dashboard and then ONE click to generate the code, clicked in the box to copy the code and then paste it here…

Easy Peasy.

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Thanks for visiting and watching…

Ron

Ask any experienced online marketer, and they will tell you that the most important thing you can ever do when you are building an online business is to create lists that you are able to send out content to. It doesn’t matter what niche you are targeting, you need to have a list of people that content to.

Build a list, build a list…the money is in the list…you need to have a list of hungry buyers.

But WHY?

Today I am starting a series of posts on list building. In the coming posts I will be covering topics such as WHY you need to build a list, a few of the different methods HOW you can go about this and then into some of the various techniques you can use to be successful in your list building efforts.

So, let’s dig in:

In the beginning, every name on any list you build will be a potential customer. Once you know how to ‘work’ that mailing list properly, you will quickly start to turn some of those potentials into customers.

No matter what kind of online business you are running, it is important to understand that there is a huge difference between making money online and building your business.

For example, there are thousands of people who decide that they want to make some money online. They begin their ‘Internet Marketing’ journey without a product, without software, or without some sort of service of their own to offer to potential customers.

Consequently, they start their business doing something like promoting products as an affiliate marketer or by featuring paid advertising on a webpage.

In both of these situations, this person might be making some money but they are not building their business. At the very heart of the business building concept is the ability to coerce information from the people who visit your website.

In this case, the specific action that you need to ask them to take is to provide their email address and their name. You in turn need to provide something of value to them in exchange for this, whether it be an ebook or a piece of software or a collection of graphics. Whatever that ‘ethical bribe’ is, having them take this action and confirming their email address will add them to that particular mailing list.

Doing this gives you permission to send them additional information in the future.

When people chose to subscribe to your list, they make a small commitment to your business. However, at this point, they have not made the most important commitment, spending money with you.

By using the tactics and strategies that you’ll read in ‘List Building From Scratch’ and by coming back here and reading the content that I provide in these posts, you will be able to convince some of your prospects to spend money with you, and when they do so, they become your customer.

Isn’t that what we all really want?

The commitment that they have now shown to your business is far greater and more important, for several reasons.

Firstly, they have demonstrated that they trust you and are happy to do business with you. This is important because every business person (whether operating online or offline) wants to build a list of loyal customers to whom they can sell products and services on a regular basis.

By becoming a customer, that person has indicated that they are willing to pay you for more valuable content. That content is either offered through your messages that are loaded into your autoresponder and trickled to them at specific intervals or through blog posts like this.

Alright, so we have some basics of ‘why’ you need to not only have a list of people that you can mail out to, next time  I will ‘how’ you are going to start getting these people on to your list.

Til then, check out ‘List Building From Scratch’, you’ll have a better handle on what I will be covering…