I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it said “Build a list!” “Build a list!” “Build a list!”

Just as frequently you’ll hear the phrase “the money is in the list.”

In my experience, these phrases are thrown around like candy at a pinata party, yet it seems like hardly anyone actually knows how to build a list, or better yet – what to do with it! Hopefully this post will dispel any silver-lined clouds of confusion you may have floating around your cranium on this issue. Let’s start at the beginning.

Why Build a List

Before I show you HOW to build a list, I really need to first make sure you understand the importance of WHY. I’d heard and read all about how if I didn’t have a list, I didn’t have a business, and I understood the concept. But it wasn’t until (somewhat) recently that I finally started drinking the Kool Aid and began to actually build a list as if my life depended on it.

Dave on the other hand, has been building lists since Fred Flintstone st

first rode on a dinosaur, but I’ll let him tell you about that some other time.

If you truly believe something, then your actions will change as a result. If your actions don’t change, then although you may say you agree, you don’t truly believe what you’re saying.

Belief produces action.

Why Build a List Reason #1: Insulation

To give you an example, a while ago I was promoting a personal loans offer using pay per click. It was making me a lot of money, but I was direct linking. I never built a list with the hordes of traffic I was moving, and one day a small thing we now call the ‘financial meltdown of 2009′ happened, and the particular offer I was promoting was killed in the United States. Finito. So, I re-focused my efforts on just my home and native land, Canada, and went happily along at a tenth of my previous volume, until one day someone at Google decided to play whack-a-mole and I got hit.

Boom – no traffic, no money.

If I had been building a list all that time, when the first problem came along (offer dies) I could have simply sent a new offer to that list. Now, forget the fact that I was in a finance market for the moment, and think about your market. Is there more than one offer in your market? I should hope so. Let’s look at the weight loss market. So you’re promoting some flavor of the month acai berry product, but then six months later everyone has figured out the thing is garbage… well if you’ve been smart, and built a weight loss list (as opposed to an acai berry list), then now you still have something to go on. You can shift gears, and send those people a new flavor of the month offer. If you never built a list, then I hope you’re well stocked with Mac & Cheese.

Ok, so offers die, offers change. Perhaps the affiliate manager thinks you’re on crack and bans you. Perhaps the affiliate network sees you’re moving some serious gravy and cuts you out of the loop. Bad stuff happens, but the point here is that when you build a list, you’re insulated from those things. You still have a connection with all those people on the list, and at the end of the day, you’re able to send them to new places.

Ok, so what about the second scenario I mentioned? Google’s whack-a-mole strategy of internet ‘cleanup’ has thrown thousands of businesses around like the balls in a lotto machine – you never know who gets canned and who comes out the lucky winner.

Once again, when you build a list, you become insulated from market shifts… in the first problem, the offer changed. With Google, the traffic changes. With a list, you still have access to those people (ie traffic) and you can send them to new offers.

Why Build a List Reason #2: Increased Conversion

When you build a list, you gain the opportunity to build a relationship.

Think about it. Have you ever gone to a party, met someone who seemed interesting, and then never saw them again in your life? I’m sure we all have.

Do you think in that moment, when you met the person, if they’d asked you for a favor, let’s just say a $100 loan, would you have given it to them? Possibly, I suppose, but probably not. (maybe you’re a bit more generous with your greenbacks than I am, I don’t know).

Now change the situation, you end up seeing this person multiple times over the next few weeks and months, and build a good relationship. At some point in there, they ask you if you could loan them $100 to help them out of a jam. Now, you’re more likely to at least consider it, right? That’s because you know something about the person you’d be dealing with, you’ve got some history together, you happen to like them, and in the end, you don’t mind helping them out.

In this scenario, “you” are the customer, and the “friend” is the merchant (ie he’s asking for money). At the end of the day, the transaction floats or fails based on the level of trust and relationship – and that is very hard to develop that in a chance meeting.

Now, backup for a moment, there are of course other factors at play in a purchase decision, but relationship is a biggie.

Fact is, if you get a prospect onto your list, you now have the ability to followup and build a relationship with that prospect. You can build trust, credibility, empathy, you have the ability to hit them with deadline based offers, and most importantly of all, they’ve given you permission to contact them with information about the product or market they’re interested in.

Having these followup options greatly increases conversion. There’s this theory out there that a prospect needs seven points of contact with your business before they’re going to buy something. Sure, some people buy right off the bat. But I think what is meant here is that you need at least seven points of contact in order to get the maximum number of people to buy. If you only ever have a single point of contact, you’re throwing away sales. Plain and simple.

It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Some people simply aren’t ready to buy when they’re doing the research. I do that all the time. I’ll get it into my head that I’d like to buy a new camera or something, jump online and research for an hour, then decide I’ll wait until the next model comes out. Well, if any of those retailers that I looked at were trying to build a list, and had followed up with me over the next few months, chances are far better that I would ultimately have bought from them.

Why? Because they’re the ones near the top of the pile in my brain that contains information on camera retailers, and they’re there purely because of repetition.

How much more so in a non-commodity market?

I’ll give you an example. I teach guitar online, and of the many ways I could have chosen to go about doing this, I chose to build a list. I give people free guitar tips, but I encourage them to get onto my list. I also have lessons that I charge money for, and I promote those to my free content lists. Many times, I’ve seen people that originally signed up for my free content end up actually buying something months later. 4 months, 6 months… Do you think that person would have every bought something from me if I hadn’t been following up with them every week, or at least consistently? Nope – I would have been as forgotten as yesterday’s lunch. Plain and simple – if I did not have that person on a list, I would have never, ever have gotten that sale. Sometimes it takes dozens of ‘points of contact’ to finally close a sale, and if you build a list, you gain the ability to do that.

Now, let’s pick a more direct example. On all my product sites, I send people first and foremost to a squeeze page. Please note, you can’t build a list without asking them to signup! You’re going to have to get past the fact that a good number of people aren’t going to want to give out their email address, and resign yourself to dealing with the rest. Face it, if they’re not willing to give you their email address, do you honestly think they’re going to whip out their VISA in the next 30 seconds?

So before I ever send them to a sales message of any type, I’m making sure I build a list. Now, we can talk all day about the mechanics of what happens next, but this is the relevant part for now: the more followup emails I add into that ‘prospect’ sequence, the more sales I get as a result.

It truly is fascinating. On several occasions (I need to do this more often!) I’ve gone back to those lead lists, and taken the time to sit down and write yet another followup email. Sure as shootin’ I’ll see a few sales come through in the next day or so, just from that email (which is now forever part of the sequence). Over the next few weeks, as other people reach that stage, I’ll see more sales. That’s something I haven’t even touched on yet – the sheer power of automating this much followup is simply staggering, when you consider it. Last I checked my account, I’d sent more than half a million emails in the past 30 days alone…

Takeaway: If I had not written that one extra email, I would have completely missed out on those additional sales.

This means that when you build a list, you build the opportunity to greatly increase the conversion rate of your initial batch of leads.

Why Build a List Reason #3: Understand Your Prospect

There is no better way that I can think of to properly understand your prospect: their challenges, their wants, and their desires than to… get ready for this: ASK THEM!

When you build a list you get the opportunity to ask your subscribers all sorts of things. When I first started to build a list for my guitar tips, I scheduled an email in the sequence that asked them how things were going, where they were at as a player, what they wanted to learn, etc etc. Over that first month or two I gained an incredible amount of valuable insight into my market that I never could have gained just by observing from outside. (I’ve since removed it due to overwhelming amounts of email!)

In addition, you might be surprised at this, but the very act of asking actually builds tremendous relationship with your list. Often times I’ve had people shocked that I actually responded to their questions or comments. Strange, I guess they thought that my dog wrote all those emails…

One other thing you can do to take this a step further is to actually send a survey to your list. When you build a list, it will (in time) become your business’s most prized asset. So why not learn as much as you can about that list? Send them a survey every now and then! You’ll likely be surprised what you find out, and this can really help direct your product development strategy.

Alright, I’ve probably beaten the ‘why’ part of this to death, let’s move on to…

How To Build A List

There are many different ways to build a list, but with much testing, I’ve developed a fool-proof method that will allow you to build a list every single time. Are you ready for it? Here it is:

1. Send traffic to an opt in page.

Hmm, strange, but I think that pretty much sums up most of the $997 list building info-products I’ve seen out there.

Sure, you can talk about different types of traffic all day long: PPC, CPV, CPA, affiliates, JVs, organic search, viral, Facebook, YouTube, articles… the list goes on, and if you follow this blog, you’ll see us talking about ways you can use those traffic sources to build a list. But at the end of the day, all you need is a single traffic source (hey, you could even post fliers on bulletin boards around your town) and then send that traffic to an opt in page.

You don’t need content (at least initially). You don’t even need an offer. You don’t need a product, you don’t need to be an expert.

Traffic to Opt in Page. Want a bigger list? Send more traffic. Improve your opt in page.

Now, of course you need someplace to keep and manage your list. I use and recommend Aweber. They give you a month for $1 while you get started. There are others out there too of course, but personally Dave and I both use Aweber for all our lists. MailChimp, iContact and Constant Contact are among the other more popular list managers.

So let’s deal with the top 3 excuses that people use to avoid having to build a list.

1. I don’t have any content.

Who cares? Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive, famously started off without any content. In fact, she started out with nothing more than I’m recommending here: traffic and an opt in page. After they’d opted onto the list, she went about finding out what they wanted to hear about, and THEN she went about getting some content.

Speaking of getting content…

2. I’m not an expert in anything.

Actually you’d be surprised what other people might consider you to be an expert at (topic for a different day), and besides, that’s beside the point. You don’t have to BE the expert, you simply have to find the content. Anyone can spend a few hours researching online to come up with a decent amount of content that true experts have created. By summarizing or passing on that same content, you’re providing value. I remember reading about one guy whose real ‘expertise’ was in researching stuff; he wasn’t personally the expert, but by finding the best information he was able to build a list that appreciated what he sent.

Plus, you can always hire an expert, which is remarkably easy these days.

3. I don’t have a product.

So? When I started building my guitar list, I didn’t have a product either. I started with free content, interspersed with affiliate offers (which didn’t do that well), until I figured out what my list wanted and needed. Then, I went about finding a way to give it to them. Surprise! They actually bought from me, because I’d already invested into that relationship. You DON’T need a product before you start begin to build a list.

Present Them An Offer

Ok, so perhaps my 1 step plan is a teensy tiny bit abbreviated, but I still stand by it. However, you seem like a nice person, so I’ll elaborate a little on that. To get prospects onto your list, you’re going to need to offer them something in exchange for their name and email address. That does NOT have to be an offer to buy something, and in fact should not be. I’m talking about something like joining your newsletter, perhaps you have a free report you can give them, perhaps you’ve got a useful list of something you can give, or a free video, or a something. Maybe its a three-email plan to solve world hunger. Whatever it is (and again – puh-lease don’t over complicate this!) you just need to give them a reason to subscribe.

But Can’t I Just Buy a List?

No. I have never heard of anyone having a good experience buying an email list. If you’re thinking of it, please lie down until the feeling passes. Do you honestly believe that you’re going to get one hundred thousand *targeted* prospects for $100? Then, keep in mind that you’re not the only one buying that list either…

Seriously though, buying a list can work with offline marketing; this is done all the time through big list brokers, and can be very profitable if done correctly.

However, we’re talking about online marketing here, and yes, you need to build a list of your own. I’m talking about building a relationship with your list, and how can you do that when they don’t even know where, when or how they met you, or who you are?

Speaking of – I would be remiss here if I did not practice what I preach (build a list), and take the opportunity to ask you to join our own list here, at TrafficOfferConvert.com. Our members get access to our best money-making strategies, demonstrated by live, current case studies. All you have to do is enter your name and email in the following form…

Well, this has been going on for long enough, so I’d like to summarize all of the 2800+ words in this ridiculously long post in three short words.

Please take them to heart and ponder them as deeply as you’re able.

Build A List

Tagged as: Aweber, build a list, Email Marketing, List Building