So, you’ve got an opt-in page in place. You’re driving traffic to it. And folks are joining your list.

Congratulations!

Now what?

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How do you keep these people ON your list?

You need to do several things, but there are four CRITICAL things you must do:

Let me briefly introduce them, and then I’m going to change the way you look at your list and give you an incredible advantage over most other list owners in “making money” from your list.

Really, there are only four basic “kinds” of mailings you might send to your list members.

1: INFORMATION

Content. Stuff that your list members can use and benefit from reading … directly related to the “theme” of your list. And, I might add, information is the REASON they joined in the first place.

2: PROMOTION:

Secondly, there are promotional pieces. Advertisements. In other words… offers. These include things like solo mailings, new product announcements and paid advertisements. This is where you are going to make your money, whether through your own products or through that of others.

3: A COMBO PLATTER: There is a type of mailing that might best be described as “combination”. It’s a mixture of both promotion and information. A newsletter is a perfect example. It has both advertisements and useful (it better be!) content.

4: PARTICIPATION: Last, there is what I call “participation”. This type of mailing is rarely used because most ‘marketers’ (and use that term very loosely!) don’t recognize the incredible opportunity in using it. A “participation” mailing is any message to your list that gets them “involved” some way in building your business.

So, those are the “kinds” of mailings that you probably send to your subscribers… information, promotion, combination, participation.

It’s all about “offering a proposal”.

Now, it doesn’t take a real rocket scientist to figure out the first three.

While there are a variety of different ways to share information with your list (articles, special reports, mini-courses, interviews, videos, for example), and I think you get the idea. It’s all about content.

There are a variety of different ways to send promotional mailings (solo mailings for your products, affiliate products, reprint rights products, services, subscription sites, and such) you get the idea here as well. It’s all about selling something.

There are several different ways to interweave content with offers (an article that promotes a product, a video tutorial that shows how to use a paid tool), once again, you get the idea. It’s about blending content with an offer.

The problem comes in on that fourth one: “participation”.

Most people don’t see the value in it.

Most people don’t use it.

Most people don’t know HOW to use it.

At least not effectively.

In my next post, I am going to go over the ways you can get your readers to interact with you…believe me, you won’t want to miss that one. I’ll share some of the responses I’ve received from some of my readers….(don’t worry, names will be changed to protect the guilty…)

Hey, if you liked this post, leave me a comment and let me know (it’s that participation thing, ya know;))

Til then…

Hey, welcome back!

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In the last post I was covering some of the ‘Howze’ of building a list and I went over briefly doing it quickly, spending a lot of money, or just plain getting quality leads…

Well, today I want to cover ‘encouraging’ your readers or website visitors to sign up to your list.

If you are using any traffic generating methods at all (and you should be), you are driving people to either a blog, a squeeze page or a sales page that SHOULD have some sort of an opt in form.

Now, I am saying SHOULD because I have seen my share of pages that DON’T have this component.

Let me ask you – If you don’t have that component built in to your site, HOW do you expect to build a list?

Maybe your content is good enough that people are going to bookmark and keep coming back again and again…

I kind of doubt it…but even so, if you don’t update your blog with new content on a regular basis, HOW the heck are they going to know that you have posted?

Hmmmm…maybe encourage them to sign up to your list to get an update email everytime you post new content.

What a concept!

BUT, I (or you) don’t ‘just’ want to sign up and clutter up my inbox with emails from every Tom, Dick & Harry everytime they post something…I NEED some incentive.

How about you?

THAT is where the ‘encouragement’ or the ‘ethical bribe’ comes in.

You NEED to provide something valuable for them to type in their email address and their name.

‘What’ is that going to be?

Have you written a report about a topic in your particular niche?

Give it away…

Do you have access to some ebooks (that have giveaway rights) that you can provide for your visitors?

Give them away as a package deal…

Have you developed some software that is going to help people do something faster, easier, better?

Give it away…

Getting the idea?

Good…

If you are looking for more information about building your list, check out List Building From Scratch – The Report where I go into more details, tactics and strategies on building a list from nothing.

Next message I am going to cover the concept of building your list with a squeeze page and the process you MUST use.

til then

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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.