List Building – Free and Paid Methods To Building Your List Fast-Part 1

List Building

If you ever want to make a living marketing online, then you need to have people to sell to.  It has often been said by top internet marketers that List Building is your biggest asset.  That is, building a list of potential customers.

But I believe that just having a list isn’t enough.  When List Building, you want to make sure that you build a quality list.  You do not want people on your list not interested in what you have to offer.  The goal is to attract prospective “buyers” that would be interested in your products or services.

The first step of the process is to select a profitable niche market if you have not already done so. It needs to be a niche with hungry buyers. Just because you choose a niche that you love, it may not be one that other people will be in to.  I am going to show you how to do that in a following lesson.

Then I am going to show you how to create a quality free offer to use as an incentive for a prospect to sign up to your list by giving you their email address and possibly their name. You can follow up with them once you have their email. The goal here is to post a free offer on a website or a blog and that is exactly what I am going to show you how to do.

Next, we are going to set up an automated follow up sequence for your affiliate program or for selling your own product. Then I am going to show you how to do broadcasts as well. There will be affiliate offers from other marketers that will come up on a regular basis that you can promote.  You will then be able to send out emails to your list and earn commissions for the affiliate products you decide you want to promote.

The key to making this work is to send all traffic possible to your opt-in page to build your list of subscribers. You can actually run a fully sustainable business, a full time income, if you focus on having one good opt in page. If you focus on sending traffic to your opt-in page, or even better, put your opt-in page where the traffic already is, then you can make money. You can also scale this up and use it across multiple markets to further enhance the amount of subscribers you get.

To put it simply, all it takes is one really good “squeeze page” (opt-in page) and one really good free offer (the bait) for good list building. Then you can generate a nice, sustainable, passive income. It is almost hands free once you have it in place.  You can scale up with paid solutions after you have some income coming in. Those paid solutions can really help you to ramp up the income.

If you want to have more control over the list building process, I would highly recommend spending a little money. The first tool I would recommend is getting a good autoresponder.  Ask any marketer what is their most used tool in their business and they more often than not will say their autoresponder.  Two of the best examples that I recommend would be Aweber and GetResponse.

Both are great options, but Aweber has been around the longest and is probably used by more internet marketers than any of the others for email marketing and list building.  I have used both, but I am currently using GetResponse.  It has a lot of features and is easy to use and is only $15 per month to start.  As of this writing, if you are a new customer, you can get a 30 day Free Trial.  Just Click Here to start your free trial.

Having a paid autoresponder makes list building easier, gives you a layer of protection, automates follow-ups, and keeps you legal with ICANN anti-spam rules.  The other great thing it does is when someone no longer wants to receive your emails, they can automatically remove themselves from your list by clicking the Unsubsribe link at the bottom of your emails.  This removes the worry and chore of doing it yourself.

There are all kinds of directions you can go with this. Creating your audience is key to a long term income. Your audience is through your list. That is the key to this system and making it work.

The goal is to find a niche that has a problem you can solve. You are giving them a free solution to that problem as an incentive for them to give up their name or email to get on your email list. You can follow up with them later for additional products and promotions. Once they join that list, they are yours until they decide to remove themselves from that list.

This is a much better approach than sending them to a landing page (a website with an offer to a product or service) that they go to after they click on an affiliate link. When they land on that page, they may or may not buy, but since you haven’t captured their information, that lead is gone forever.   With your opt-in page, they are now on your list.  Now you can send them an email to that offer.  If they buy great, if not, no big deal.  You still have their contact info that can be used to send them multiple offers in the future.  With a list, you can make money over and over again for each email you get!

Capturing that information is the key to making list building work. It is a mistake that many people make. They don’t do it, they don’t see the importance of it. If you incorporate that method that I am teaching you, then you can avoid that costly mistake.

Step #1. 

Choose a profitable niche that you are interested in. A niche market is a group of people with a common interest or problem that you offer a solution to. Look for a niche market where many people are buying things. Do a quick Google search with your keyword (interest) to see how popular it is.  Don’t spend days or weeks on this. It can become too overwhelming if you spend too much time on it.  You will just get confused and put it off or quit all together.

Don’t worry if you are not an expert in that market.  You don’t have to be an expert to provide to your niche market. You can put together a great opt-in list with a niche market. If you can make someone’s life easier, make them money, or you can save them money, then you have a niche market. Keep that in mind.

Another great way to get ideas on your niche market is to go to www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm. Look for marketplace at the top of the navigation. This is one of the most popular affiliate market places on the web.  Clickbank is a great place to get ideas on creating your own information products as well as selling other people’s products as an affiliate.  Internet Marketing is a very popular niche, but there are many others with sub categories to choose from.

There are tons of possibilities listed and you can see them by dropping down the Internet Marketing niche on Clickbank. In the Health and Fitness category there are also plenty of subcategories. You will be able to find plenty of products on Clickbank related to any topic like this. It is the most obscure niches that sometimes turn into a profitable market due to not a huge amount of competition out there.

Diet and Weight-Loss is always a huge niche. If you can help people lose weight, then you have a winning solution right there in this niche and the subcategories. The same is true with the Fitness and Muscle Building niches. They kind of go hand-in-hand. Muscle building in itself is a great market as people want to get fit and they want to get trim.  This is one of the niches I have been interested in as well.  You can check out my health and fitness blog at RichLeanFit.com.

Men’s and women’s health issue are a big problem that people need assistance with. There are all kinds of things that fall into this category and you can probably find something if you are into this niche market. Here is another one: Relationships and Communication. People need help all the time there. Self-esteem and Self-defense are also lucrative. There are so many products on Clickbank that will give you ideas to help you find your niche.

When there are lots of people selling products within a niche, then you know you found a hot topic. People are interested in that information. Anti-virus Software and similar tools are also in high demand. People want to make sure that their information is safe. You can give away a free report on how to keep your personal information safe.

Job Search and Resume Training is a big market. Especially now with jobs being more scarce due to the economy. Part of the key when selecting your niche market is making sure there are plenty of products in Clickbank that people are looking for.

So, get out there and get started list building within your chosen niche. In summary, the first step is to pick the niche market. Pick something you are passionate about or that you can become passionate about once you see subscribers coming in. It doesn’t have to be the perfect fit. It has to be of interest to you though so that you can get started and stay the course.

In the next post, we will continue the next steps in creating your free offer, getting your opt-in built, and how to get traffic and subscribers to your opt-in page.

Please join me in my next post.  To get notified automatically, please subscribe to my newsletter!

Thanks for reading!

Rich Rose