Building A List

Building a list gives you the power of a major publisher and frees you from the control of any one traffic source. Many of us have had the experience of receiving a reasonable number of visitors from SEO or PPC and then suddenly the algorithm changes and our traffic goes through the floor.

If those were your only traffic sources then you'd be in serious trouble if you experienced such a thing. But the smart marketer knows that traffic can come and go and so they insulate themselves by building up a list of prospects. These are typically the names and email addresses (possibly even postal addresses too though) of people who have willingly given them to you. All these people have shown that they are interested in what you are selling, and in just a few minutes an email can be sent out to the lot of them.

When you can personally contact 10,000+ people at the drop of a hat - and for zero cost - you can literally create money on demand. Any time you need some extra cash, you just fire out an email and wait for the sales.

The basic concept of building a list is actually quite simple. You will need an autoresponder, a signup form and some traffic. Obviously I'm making this sound a bit simpler than it is but essentially all you need to do is to link up your autoresponder to your signup form and then drive traffic to the form.

As I'm sure you can imagine there are numerous ways to both increase traffic to your form and increase the percentage of people who sign up and it is those two elements that really are key to understand if you want the fastest possible list building.

An autoresponder is a piece of software that not only stores the names and email addresses of your mailing list safely but it will also send out emails that you specify. You can arrange to send out any email you write today, any day in the future or even just a certain number of days after someone signs up to your list.

The nice thing is that the basic use of an autoresponder is very similar between the various pieces of software meaning that it is incredibly simple to learn how to use them.

Examples of popular autoresponders at present include Aweber.com, GetResponse.com and 1ShoppingCart.com. It is 1ShoppingCart that I personally use and swear by though it is expensive in comparison to the other options outlined.