What Is Your List? How Do You Get One?

If you've been in the Online Marketing business for even a short amount of time you have heard of the importance of your "list" in building your business.

So what exactly is this list that everyone keeps talking about?

It's that very critical list of names and emails of potential clients who have indicated an interest in what you are offering.

Today the use of emails is the most powerful tool available to online marketers. Your job is to build a list of subscribers to your newsletter and send them information that will be useful to them. If they are interested in what you show them, some of them will respond to one of your offers and possibly make a purchase or enroll in one of your affiliate programs or one of your networking ventures.

Once you have this list, it is my belief that you should treat them with respect and "pay them" for the privilege of accepting your emails. You achieve this by sending them interesting and educational information that is useful to them with some interesting offers sprinkled in from time to time.

I find myself on way too many lists where the list owner sends me only offers that will make them money. This leads me to feel abused and I send them to my "junk folder".

So how do you build the list?

There are many ways to do this...some more expensive than others...some more labor intensive.

Let's look at the most popular techniques in use by online marketers today.

Email Marketing to purchased lists

Email marketing can be very effective but with the advent of "spam" and it's incredibly intrusive nature we are finding this alternative to be less and less attractive.

It requires a significant amount of editing to create an email that doesn't trigger the spam filters of most of the major email service providers. Words like "free" etc. raise serious red flags and usually cause your email to be diverted to the Junk or Spam folder.

Lists of "auto responder" leads can be purchased from leads brokers, often "on sale" for 2 cents per lead or less. These are leads from people who have responded to an online or TV etc ad from the leads company in the area you are interested. Home Business Opportunity leads seem the most popular.

If you purchase "co-reg leads" (Google this term if you don't know what it means) you can end up in serious trouble with your ISP and possibly even have your email account closed down and black-balled. Serious offenders can face fines of $10,000 or more so be very careful.

But still, some marketers are very enthusiastic about this category of leads and work with them extensively. I find it too much hassle to bother.

The way you attract clients via email is to compose a series of emails on your autoresponder and broadcast them to you purchased list.

Making a Free Offer is a very powerful incentive for recipients to respond to your email.

When the visitors activate your link and fill in your information box they receive their free gift and are added to your 'Newsletter List" and are now available to receive more focused offers from you.

Pay-per-click

The most popular Pay-per-click program is Google Adwords:

https://adwords.google.com/

When internet users are looking for information on the net they usually go first to their favorite Search Engine. Google and yahoo dominate this territory. The searcher will type in a word or a short phrase that briefly describes what they are seeking. We call these "keywords".

As a pay per click advertiser your job is to create a brief ad that will catch the searchers attention and enter a list of "keywords" that are appropriate to what you are advertising and are most likely to be words or phrases that the searcher may in fact enter.

Your ad will appear in the right hand column of the searches returned. If you visit a Google search page you will see what I mean.

Your job is to be willing to pay enough for your key word so your ad displays on the first three search pages. Keyword bids range from 1 cent per click up to $40 and above for highly competitive words.

You only pay if someone "clicks" on your ad.

For more information go here:

http://www.homebasedbusinessontheweb.com/cap3surefire/

Article Writing and Blogging

It is worth taking the time and effort to get proficient at writing. There are many free courses on this available on the internet.

How this works is that you write articles, preferably on an ongoing basis, and you post them on article directories and on your blog.

Just Google "Article Directories" for a list of relevant sites.

There are lots of eZine and Newsletter publishers out there who have run out of time or ideas for a new article for their publication and do a search of the article directories to find relevant content they can use. If they like your article they will use it and some of their subscribers will click on your link and subscribe to your list. They might email your article to a friend or associate or other newsletter writer who also uses it. As a result your original article is broadcast far and wide.

The great advantage of this strategy is it's virtually free!

I know of article writers who have written several hundred articles and find themselves with 80,000 and up returns on a search for their name on Google.

I will be writing more in depth articles on these techniques in the near future, so click my link below and subscribe to my Newsletter so I can keep you in the loop.