List building is the process of converting the traffic that comes to your website into subscribers and followers by capturing their emails. The capture of emails is done ethically and with the permission of the visitor. To help make it easier to get the visitor’s permission to capture their email and contact them again, you should offer something of perceived value to the visitor in exchange for their email address.

List building should be a process of building a relationship with your website visitors rather than trying to “sell” them something all the time. These are already people who are interested in your product or services. These visitors may be interested in what you have to offer, but probably not yet willing to buy your products or services for a fee.

The potential customer who is interested in your product or service will usually need more time to think about buying your product or service. In a competitive market, customers have many choices, and the customer who is interested in your product may buy your competitor’s product. From a business point of view, this means that you are losing your sales to your competitor.

The best thing to do in such a situation (and especially if you are new to the internet marketing business) is to start building a list by offering quality information for FREE! Remember that you are spending a lot of money on SEO and advertising to attract customers to your website. You don’t want them to just visit and leave your website, do you?

List building is not about quantity, it’s about QUALITY

You need to build a list of quality prospects, as well as loyal customers, who are interested in your business. Every time a customer lands on your website through organic searches, you need to offer something to provide temporary relief to a problem they are facing. For example, if you are selling weight loss exercise videos, then you should offer your visitors a simple exercise video for free. You can request the visitor’s email address so that you can send them a link to the video. The video must be of high quality and useful to the client. It is very easy to host the video on YouTube (more information on how to do this in a later article).

You should also give the customer a summary of the things they would learn from watching the video to entice them into giving you their email address. Once the customer fills out their contact information, a “Thank you” should be sent to them from your autoresponder with a link to the included video. Within a day or two, you should have your autoresponder sending information about a related product. For example, maybe a video exercise course. Be sure to describe the benefits the customer will receive by purchasing the course from you. Include a bonus or two that will also help the customer. If they don’t buy right away, in a few days, ask your answering machine to send them another free short video. Then offer them the opportunity to purchase the video course again.

You should always provide a money-back guarantee to increase the potential customer’s interest in trying your product. Once the customer is satisfied with the quality of the product, move them to another listing related to the first product. In our exercise video example, perhaps a related product would be “weight loss” information. You should sell your back-end products through this and other lists, using the initial free video as the “hook” to capture your email address at the beginning.

List building is actually more powerful than SEO

The customers on your list are the lifeblood of your business. If you treat these customers carefully and don’t try to sell to them four or five times a month, they will become LOYAL customers. Then, every time you produce another useful product, all you have to do to sell the product is mention it in your email updates. Again, I want to stress that you should NOT try to sell your list multiple times a month. But you need to contact them three to four times a week with FREE, QUALITY information that they can use. The client will realize that if you are “giving away” this type of information, then the information contained in your courses must be GREAT!

It is very difficult to get your website to rank for highly specific keywords using paid traffic. I do not recommend using paid traffic at all. I like to use “Giveaway” lists to build my mailing list. It is possible to add more than 1,000 new subscribers in about a week. Add them to your autoresponder, then delete them after about 60 days of emailing them. Some will buy your product and you can add them to your “buyers list”. Then delete the others. Using this method also helps your email analysis. By offering your lists quality information for FREE, you will increase their level of trust in your information and they will be eager to buy your paid information products. Using these list building tips will help you make sales and retain potential customers interested in your business or services.

The money is in the list.

Customers who buy products or services from you are more likely to buy again IF you treat them well and don’t continually harass them for more money through repeated sales attempts. Keep them interested in your business by giving them FREE, quality information they can use. You can give them gifts and things that they would normally pay for elsewhere (your competitors). Then, every time you make a major launch of a new product or service (perhaps a membership program), all you have to do is “mention” it to your loyal customers on your list and sales will increase.

Smart business owners will also ask their customers to recommend others to their business. You can offer them a discount on a product for doing so. This will help your name and product reach other people who never knew your website existed.

I once saw a statistic that went something like: “A satisfied customer will tell 3-4 other people about your business…but an unhappy customer will tell 10-20 other people…” So, in summary, take care of your email list and it will take care of you!