Introduction
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 e-mail mailing lists.
In the beginning, every name on any list you build will be that of a prospect, but once you know how to work that prospect mailing list properly, you will quickly start to turn some of those prospects into customers.
No matter what kind of online business you are running, it is important to understand that there is a vast difference between making money online and building your business.
For example, many people who decide that they want to earn an income from the internet begin their moneymaking journey without a product or 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, the marketer concerned might be making? money but they are not building their business, because at the very heart of the business building concept is the ability to collect information from internet users who take a specific action to give you permission to send them additional information in the future. In this case, the specific action that you need to ask them to take is to subscribe to your prospect mailing list.
When people have chosen to subscribe to your prospect mailing list, they have made a small commitment to your business. However, at this juncture, they have not made a commitment in the most important way, which is by spending money with you.
By using the tactics and strategies that you?ll read of in this manual, you will be able to convince some of your prospects to spend money with you, and when they do so, they become your customer.
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 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, the individual concerned has indicated that they are willing to spend money on the internet. Through their purchase, they have given you an initial indication of how much money they are willing to spend, although as you will discover, you should not? be satisfied with this initial purchase as representing their ?price ceiling?.
The bottom line is, building a customer mailing list is building your business, and if you do not want to spend the rest of your life chasing new prospects every day, building your business is critically important.
This book is titled ?1 month to 1000 list members? for the reason that you are going to learn how to have a prospect mailing list of at least 1000 names in a month or less starting from scratch.
Let us therefore begin to consider how you would do this by looking at the essential ?nuts and bolts? of building your own mailing list.
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If you are going to invite commitment
The 5 essential steps
As suggested in the introduction, when people sign up for your prospect mailing list, they are making an initial commitment to your business.
In order for them to do this, there has to be a way for them to make this commitment by subscribing to your list. There need to be several essential resources in place before you begin with your list building efforts. You need to know what these resources are and more importantly, what their purpose is.
The first thing that you must have is a place where you can collect information from net users who visit. In other words, you need a webpage that people can visit and sign up for your prospect list.
You need more than a single webpage dedicated to collecting subscriber information. What you really need is a complete website that is focused on list building activities.
If you are planning to recruit 1000 list members in a month, then it should be clear that this objective must be the only focus you have for now. Consequently, your website should be similarly focused. In other words, you should not be offering products or services for sale from your website, nor should you be trying to earn a few cents here and there by featuring paid advertising such as Google AdSense.
Next, you need to add content materials (e.g. articles, videos, audio links etc) that provide a visitor who comes to your site with the kind of information that will convince them to subscribe to your list. You do this by adding content materials you know will be of interest to that visitor already, and in order to do this effectively, you have to target the visitors that you bring to your site.
For example, if you decide that you want to build a website that focuses on dog training, then everything about the site should be constructed with people who are interested in dog training in mind. You have to bring dog training people to your site, and you would do this by publishing dog training related advertising and promotional materials.
Consequently, anyone who comes to your site has already indicated their interest in dog training by visiting you. The content materials that you add to your pages must give your visitors the information that they need, that is, dog training information.
Next, you need to have something on that page that the visitor can use in order to make their commitment to you. So, the third essential is a mailing list subscription form.
The fourth thing that is required is a ?back office? system that is set up to deal with new list subscribers. Ideally, this system should be fully automated, so that every new subscriber is dealt with in the same way.
The fifth and final thing that you need is visitors to the page or pages of your site from where they will be able to sign up for your mailing list.
While it is not directly related to list building, you should never underestimate the crucial importance of driving visitors or website traffic to your mailing list subscription page.
In fact, most experienced marketers would tell you that knowing how to generate web site traffic is probably the most important skill any would ? be online entrepreneur can ever learn, because without visitors, your site is dead in the water from the very beginning.
You could have a site giving away free Ferraris, and no one would ever take advantage of your offer if you have done nothing to make sure that your offer is put in front of them.
We will now begin to analyze each of these steps in more detail.? For the best automated way to build your list, we use this software:
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Step 1 ? You need a web page to subscribe visitors from
When you initially decide to build a website, the first choice that you have to make is whether you want to spend a little money on creating your site, because it is possible to build a site without spending anything at all if that is your choice. As you might expect, there are pros and cons attached to both approaches.
If you use a free website building resource (like hubpages.com), it is not going to cost you any money. Moreover, it is generally possible to build a free site quickly and easily, meaning that you can be in business in the minimum amount of time.
However, there are a significant number of powerful downsides to using a free site building resource.
Firstly, many of the free site building resources like hubpages.com subsidize their free service by placing advertising materials on your site.
Consequently, every time a visitor comes to your web pages, you will be advertising somebody else?s products or services to them, and this will detract from the effectiveness of your list building efforts.
The second negative factor associated with using a free web hosting and site building service is the impression that doing so will give to your site visitor. Most of your visitors will immediately recognize that you are using a free resource, and this doesn?t present a professional approach to anyone who realizes that your business site is free.
Most sites built using free site builders are of very poor quality and visually unappealing as well (okay, this is a ?spoof?, but the creator believes the same thing!).
The bottom line is, the majority of free site building and hosting resources are going to give your site visitors completely the wrong impression of your business, and consequently, using them to save money is a false economy.
Perhaps the only free service that is worth giving serious consideration to is Google?s blogger.com. While anyone who is used to working online will recognize a blogger.com URL as being that of a free site building resource, sites created at blogger do have a certain degree of credibility.
You can put this credibility down to two different factors.
Firstly, the service is owned by Google and that gives it a high degree of respectability. Secondly, if you create a mini-site using blogger, there are no third-party advertising materials on your page and the page itself looks a lot more neat and tidy and more professional if you like than the one you looked at a moment ago:
It is nothing particularly exciting or dramatic, but it does the one essential thing that your website must do in order to attract visitors.
In order to get people to visit your site, you must be giving them the information that they want because the vast majority of people who use the net do so to gain access to the information that they need. Hence, unlike the free site that we were looking at a little earlier, you do not need flashing lights, irritating music and the world?s biggest collection of bells and whistles.
All you need is a site that features free information on every page, plus the promise of a great deal more information of the same type if a visitor subscribes to your mailing list.
While using blogger to build your website is probably the best free option, it is still far more professional to have a website published under your own domain name and hosted on your own web hosting account.
Creating a framework for such a site (i.e. registering a domain name, setting up web hosting and finally tying the two together) is less than 30 minutes work, and the total initial outlay will be less than $20 (although you will have to pay a hosting fee every month).
The first thing that you need to do to register your domain name is to visit a domain name registration site like The Internet Company. Type the domain name that you are interested in registering into the appropriate box on the homepage, and then hit the ?Search? button.
If the domain that you have searched is available, go ahead and register it.
But given that every domain name is unique, it may be unavailable, in which case you need to come up with an alternative before running the same check again. You may have to do this several times, but when you eventually find a domain name that suits your business, go ahead and register it.
Next, head on over to Hostgator.com to register for a cheap Baby? shared hosting account. This account offers everything you could ever need in the early days, and it is therefore perfectly adequate for the time being (but do remember, hosting fees are a regular commitment).
Finally, you need to ?point? anyone who types your new domain name into their web browser at your newly established hosting account. You will find complete instructions for this operation (look for the Flash ?Change the DNS? videos) about two thirds of the way down this Hostgator support page.
While you will not find specific instructions related to The Internet Company listed, check out any of the Flash videos listed as the DNS change over process is fairly standard.
You now have the framework of your own site in place, so the final step is to set your site up so that you start adding content materials (i.e. information) and appropriate list subscription forms to it. You are going to start building your site, and there are different ways you can do this.
However, given that there is no sense in making things more complicated than necessary and that the sole objective of your site is the provision of information and collection of e-mail details, you do not need a fancy website building program or in-depth knowledge of HTML.
What you do need to do is to go into your hosting account to open the cpanel, which is the site control panel used by Hostgator and many other leading web hosting companies. Scroll to the bottom of the cpanel page, and you should see the icon for ?Fantastico De Luxe? near the bottom of the page under the ?Software / Services? section.
Click on ?Fantastico? and you will be taken to a list of preinstalled software programs that can be activated in less than five minutes. Near the top of the list, you will find WordPress listed under ?Blogs?.
Click the link, look for ?New Installation? on the next page and complete the information on the page after that to finish the installation.
After you have done so, you will have a brand new website the homepage of which looks like this.
Okay, once again, this is clearly not very exciting or informative and the site?s appearance has little or nothing to do with the topic or subject matter around which you are going to build your site.
However, there are literally hundreds of free WordPress themes (i.e. site templates) available on dozens of sites that you can download and install on your site completely free, so the first thing you should do is search for a suitable theme to match your site topic. Try searching Google for ?free WP themes? or something similar and you will quickly see that there is no shortage of free materials available:
It may be that a free theme you download will come with installation instructions, but if not, there are generic installation instructions on the WordPress site itself (click this link). In order to add the new theme to your site, you will need to upload it your web hosts server, and in order to do this, you need an FTP client software program. If you do not have one, you can download a free version of Core FTP, and install it on your computer so that you can finalize the upload.
With the theme changed (and continuing to use the dog training thing mentioned earlier), the ?Testing? site now looks far more appropriate (and remember, this is using a completely free theme).
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Step 2 ? Adding content
The next step is to start adding content materials to your site, the kind of information that people who visit will want to read or watch. The objective of this content is to convince your site visitor that what you have to offer has enough value to persuade them to allow you to send more of the same via e-mail.
Consequently, the content you add to your site has to have quality and value, otherwise it is not going to serve the purpose required.
In an ideal situation, you would therefore write all of your articles and create videos yourself because it is unique content that is most appreciated by both your visitors and by the search engines.
In reality, populating the whole of your site with unique materials is going to take some time, and you only have one month to build your mailing list. As a result, you?re going to have to get a little ?creative?.
Nevertheless, the first thing you should do is to write some articles of your own for your site. However, although you cannot copy other people?s work and claim it as your own (that is plagiarism and illegal),
there is no copyright on ideas or information. There is therefore nothing wrong with reading other people?s materials and then rewriting them in your own words before adding them to your site as original content.
One thing that you should ensure when you are adding new content to your recently created site is that every article you post should be added to a new page.
In WordPress, you would do this after logging into your dashboard by using the wp-admin URL (i.e. YourDomain.com/wp-admin), clicking on the ?Write? and ?Page? links at the top left hand side of the page.
The importance of doing this lies within the fact that if you do not do this and follow the ?Write?, then ?Post? links as most people do, you end up publishing every article on the same page, which is not a great idea.
With Blogger, the default setting is to add each article to a new page, but you may want to check from the ?Settings? and ?Archiving? tabs.
Having every article that you publish appear on the same page is not the best way of going about building your site. For example, if you only have one page, then you can have no internal link network, whereas if every article is published on a separate page, you will have such an internal network. This makes your site appear stronger and better structured as far as the search engines are concerned, and enables you to send visitors to many pages on your site, instead of just one.
In order to continue populating your site, no matter what your subject or topic is, you will be able to find lots of appropriate articles which you can rewrite on the major article directory sites like EzineArticles.
In order to populate your site is quickly as possible, there is another thing you can do while visiting. Find other articles in your niche by using the search box at the top of the EzineArticles home page.
Click on the title of any article that you think might be appropriate to your site, and then click on the ?Ezine Publisher? link on the far right next to the article title.
Download the article of your choice and then paste it onto your own site page. As long as you leave the original author information intact, this is an acceptable tactic for populating your site in double quick time.
You can also find appropriate videos from a site like YouTube by searching the site using your primary search term (?dog training?), locating the ?Embed? code before copying it, and pasting it on to your webpage.
In this way, you can quickly populate your site with valuable contents, the kind of materials that your visitors will want to read and watch.
You might think that this is all a waste of time, as your main objective is to get visitors to sign up for your mailing list, but you could not be more wrong.
If there is nothing on your site worth staying for, visitors will take a very quick glance and then close your page, never to return. You have to give them a reason to think about signing up for your mailing list, and part of that reason is the quality of the content on your pages.
It is not the full reason why they would subscribe to your list, but this is something we will investigate further in the next section.
Before moving on to the next step, there is one final thing you need to do. That is, you need to add a separate page to your site that features no content whatsoever, and has only one objective.
Remember, instead of building a list the hard way, we use this and get hundreds of subscribers a day:
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