Building and making money on an Email list

There are many different list building methods, but using a squeeze/splash page or having a subscription form on your website or blog are the basics of many of them.

There are several important details that will affect how your squeeze page performs.

--- Traffic
- How targeted it is.
- Amount of traffic.

--- Design
- How well designed does it look.
- How does the theme of it fit the topic.

--- Content
- How sellable the content is.
- How many possible customers there are.

Although Content is important, it is not that hard to get the content of a squeeze page done, as it should just contain a few lines of it.

First of all the headline, your headline needs to catch peoples eyes, something that makes them curious, something that surprises them or something unique. All three if possible :P

A few tips on writing the headline is to, read it out loud to yourself and hear if it sounds good, ask people you know in a forum or your friends if it sounds good, track the results (which in a way is the same as asking the total amount of visitors their opinion.)
The key lies in finding several that you think sound good and then ask your friends and visitors which one they like better, if they like any. If you're hopeless with headlines try telling a friend what the newsletter/ezine/ecourse is about and ask them for suggestions. Follow the same procedure with the sub headline, if there is to be one.

The bullet points should be short, to the point, honest and let the visitors know the benefits. A common mistake when making a list of bullet points is that they only list the features and not the benefits. "- Discover how to build your list fast and free!" and then we have "- Discover how to build your list and start building a huge list of your own completely free!" What they will "discover" is the feature, what that will do for them is the benefit, a simple way of determining what the benefit is, is to ask "so what?" to the feature, also you should keep bullet points to 3 or 5.

Video
Be yourself, don' try to imitate others, and keep the quality good enough but not overly good so that the visitors will never be able to load the video.

Audio
Be yourself and keep it short, if it sounds good to you and your friends it usually is.

There are a few squeeze page designs that are rather effective, the traditional bullet point squeeze page, the bullet point squeeze page with audio, and a video squeeze page, a simple page with little other than a headline a video and an option form.

For a simple generator that helps you make a squeeze page for free visit: Instant Squeeze Page Generator If you want a more unique one unless you have a rather good html knowledge or skills with an html editor, and some skills when it comes to general design like header graphics etc. A good idea is to pay someone else to do it, someone you know makes good designs for squeeze pages.

If you want to do it yourself you need to have a basic knowledge of html to even make an ugly one, and for a decent looking squeeze page you need a decent knowledge of it or decent skills with a html editor program. For an excellent one you need to improve it all the time, and although your opinion is important the visitor's opinion is more important, so you should track the results you get, you can try to set this up in google analytics or search for "tracking" in google for a few tracking services, and by dividing the visitors with the number of subscribers find out if it's an acceptable conversion rate to you or not, if not then make some small changes and test it to see if it works better.

Getting targeted traffic, there are a few ways to get targeted traffic, and I will show you how you can use them.

Forum traffic

You can use the Signature at forums that are about the same niche as your Ezine/Newsletter/Ecourse.
Join the forums, write a short add with a link that looks like this in your signature:
[url="http://www.terescue.com"]Free Traffic and List building tips[/url] instead of [url="http://www.terescue.com"]click here[/url] or[url="http://www.terescue.com"]TE Rescue[/url]. After that just be yourself and be active, focus on helping new and old members with things you have or do not have knowledge about, it can pay off to take some time to research to give a really helpful post.

Blog Traffic

Ever wondered why internet marketers tend to have at least one blog ?
They blog because search engines love blogs. Making it easier to rank high in search results. Another advantage with having a blog is that you can have the subscription form directly on it.
You do not need to set up your blog on a domain of your own but doing so has several advantages.

To get visitors to your blog, you should post regularly, and also only post high quality content, ping it with for example pingomatic.com and then use social bookmarking services to try to get the word out there.

If you continue to do this for a few months you should be able to receiive several thousand visitors monthly.

Article marketing.

Submit high quality articles to article directories. (There are some that would argue that articles are simply a tool for getting backlinks to your blog or website but I think it never hurts to exceed people's expectations and overdeliver with an article that will actually help the readers.) If you blog you can modify your posts slightly and submit them as articles. Again, continue to do this over a period of a few months and you will end up receiving a large increase in the current traffic you are receiving.

Ad exchanges

Banner or text ad exchanges can be effective if you know how to use them, but there are a few important things you need to know about them. If it is a program where you pay per click on the banner, your goal should not be getting as many people as possible to your squeeze page, but rather, achieving the best possible conversion rate Visiitor -> Subscriber. Which means you should not make your banner more interesting than your actual squeeze page is. Even if you use a free one it is very important that the banner is on topic. The same with text ad exchnges.

Traffic Exchanges

Despite what some "gurus" say, TEs are not useless. When it comes to buildig an online business or internet marketing related ezine/newsletter or ecourse Traffic Exchanges are not only effective, it is easy and fast to get started, however if you want to build your list effectively with Traffic Exchanges it is required that your squeeze page is extremely good at capturing the visitor's attention. Once you're getting a conversion rate of 1% and your subscribers make you over 1$ you can make the entire process really simple by buying credits, which will mean a few clicks get you subscribers and make you money(over a few days).

Once you have a splash page and content for a specific niche, find a few products that seem good in that niche if you don't already have them. Then buy the products, and do the things you are advised to in those products, and then if you like it, give your subscribers your honest opinion of the product. Also try out a few free programs that have OTOs that convert well, if you like them recommend them, if not...

Having a link that looks something like http://yourpage.com/recommends/ebook or http://yourpage.com/likes/ebook is recommended simply because it looks lot more appealing than the standard clickbank and other affiliate urls.

You can achieve this by creating a folder called likes or recommends or something else on your website, and then create the folder with the name of the ebook, product, membership site or service, and lastly create a html page called index.html that has this code in between the "Having a link that looks something like http://yourpage.com/recommends/ebook or http://yourpage.com/likes/ebook is recommended and you can achieve this by creating a folder called likes or recommends or something else on your website, and then create the folder with the name of the ebook, product, membership site or service.

Lastly create a html page called index.html that has this code in between the add < before meta and > after the last " 'meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.reccomendedebookormembershipsite.com"'

One of the good ways to make money with your list is to send the subscribers to a one time offer, it is very important that the products relate to your newsletter/ecourse/ezine if they don't you have little chance of making one sale. Another tip is to add mostly top quality products, this ensures their satisfaction(in almost all cases) and will get less requests for money back. As well as make the offer a lot more appealing. Make sure you also make the total price ridiculously cheap as well.

My friend Justin gives away a few completely awesome OTO templates at: Shark Frenzy Graphics

You can put ads in every email and either sell them or use them to recommend some of the products or membership sites that you really do recommend.
A key is to include your own opinion and keep it short.