List Building – Your Internet Marketing Golden Goose

Posted by admin

March 10, 2007

One of the most important thing in internet marketing is your list.

Successful internet marketers such as John Reese, Ewen Chia, Mike Filsaime, in fact, all of them will tell you that you can lose everything, but not your list! The list is the reason why you hear people can make thousands each time they send their email out.

But first, in order to have a list, you need to do 2 things : an opt-in form and an autoresponder.

Opt-in Form

This is the simple form where you ask the reader to part with their name and their email. Sometimes, this is also called the “squeeze” page. How do you create this page? well, it depends on the autoresponder that you are using.

autoresponder

This is the application that helps collect the emails and then send out pre-defined email messages to the list at pre-defined times. You just have to queue the email messages in the application and set the time to send out the messages.

There 2 major types of autoresponders.

1. A script that you can buy or get someone to program for you and you install on your server.

You have full control over this type of autoresponder and basically you can send out as many emails as you want. However, there is a few drawbacks using this type of in-house autoresponder.

One, if you send out too many emails from your servers all at one time, your server resources may not be able to take it and it may slow down or even crash. More seriously, if you massively send out emails from your server, the major email providers like Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo are very likely to ban your emails! Once they banned your emails, it is often very difficult to get them to “unban” you again. Deliverability rate is questionable.

You can customise opt-in form to capture subscribers directly without having them to confirm the subscription. And you can even add in a list of emails to your mailing list. This holds the danger that the people in that list does not want to be in your list and if you keep sending them emails is as good as spamming them.

2. Third party autoresponder like GetResponse.

You have to live by their rules and learn how to use their system. Reputable autoresponder like GetResponse, comply strictly to the CAN-SPAM Act, which means that the delivery rate for them is very high.

In many cases while doing testing on my sites, the emails are delivered almost instantaneously to my email accounts. This is especially so for GetResponse as the owner does liase with the major email providers, ISPs and to work with them to prevent spam. When you use GetResponse opt-in form or subscriber capture form, the subscribers are required to double opt-in. This means that your subscribers need to fill in the form, submit and they have to confirm again in the email that they will get in their mailbox in order to subscribe to your list.

This means that your list is kept clean and likely to be profitable as those in your list opted twice to get in!

Furthermore, GetResponse have tools that help you with your email messages. For example, a tool that tells you how spammy the content of your email is by rating it, a tracking mechanism to see how many click on the links in your email.

This is one of the must invest component of your internet marketing business!

If you already have a website but have not gotten an opt-in form up, please do so today and start building a list. Of course, this is only the basic part of building a list.

The next question is… “How To Get Visitors To Subscribe?”

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