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One of the most important objectives of any online business should be to start building a list as soon as possible. Building a list of people who are interested in what you have to offer, or are interested in what you WILL have to offer, (after you’ve developed a product for your market), is extremely powerful.

Why Do I Need An Email List

By having a mailing list, you can generate traffic almost on demand to any new offers you have, as well as regularly promoting your own existing product line, or promoting other people’s products as an affiliate. Having a mailing list should also not be limited to information marketers and those selling goods online – anyone with any kind of service business or offline business should be building a list.

You can also use an autoresponder service (more on this later) to automate messages to your prospects and setup a complete marketing funnel which works on autopilot and does the selling for you – so you can set it up once and just drive traffic to your squeeze page (more on this later too). This gives you the ability to make passive income by having your autoresponders do all the selling and automation while you concentrate on developing new products, content and driving traffic.

A Quick Note: For the purposes of this tutorial, the main focus will be on getting the names and email addresses of prospects in your market, however the concepts are the same if you want to collect other details like phone and address, although be aware that people are less willing to part with these kinds of details as they are less “disposable”.

How Do I Start Building A List?

Thanks to some amazingly reasonable tools, it’s now cheaper than ever to start building your own mailing list. There are three main elements to the list building system I use, I will list them below, and then go into more detail later in this tutorial:

• An Autoresponder - I recommend Aweber. This is the service which will handle the storage and automation of your prospect emails and other details. With a service like Aweber, you can also automate a lot of the process, and manage all of your lists in one place. I strongly advise against self-hosted autoresponders as you will suffer with horrible spam complaints and unreliable deliverability
• A Calling Card – This is a piece of content you will develop which you will give away as an incentive or ethical bribe for people to join your list. It should be something which is highly valuable to your target market, and helps solve a burning problem/desire of your niche market.
• A Squeeze Page – This is the page which is designed to get your prospect to opt-in to your email list. On this page you will present the main benefits of your “Calling Card”, usually in bullet point format or via a short video. The page is designed to have minimum friction – so your prospect will have two choices: opt-in or leave. To see the templates I use for my business, check out Easy Squeeze Pro

Ok so I now want to cover each of these in a little bit more detail, and then I’ll show you how everything fits together…

Autoresponder

Autoresponder List Members

Your autoresponder service is critical to your success building an email list and marketing to that list. You need a provider that offers useful features like easily being able to build forms for new websites, being able to automate followup emails, and segment lists where required (this is where you separate lists based on certain criteria).

Reliability and deliverability are two other important factors – you want to be sure that your emails are actually making it to your customers and prospects inboxes. A service that meets all of these criteria is Aweber. I have used them in my business for over 4 years now, and also have used them for many of my clients businesses.

Being so well established, you’ll also find that if you’re using any other scripts or web services in your business, Aweber will usually integrate perfectly with these systems.

Calling Card

You need some content to give away to your niche market in order to incentivize people to join your list. This content should be valuable to your market – and should help them solve a particular pain or problem.

There are a few different formats for your calling card:

• Short Report Ebook (between 5-20 pages)
• Video or Video Series
• Audio Interview or Recording
• Trial Software – perhaps offer a limited trial to your software or web app or offer a limited version

If you’re struggling for ideas on what problems to solve for your calling card content, here are a few ideas:

- Forums – look at forums for your niche. You will find many people asking questions and discussing their problems

- Twitter & Social Media – again, tap into the conversation and look at what people are asking about (look for reoccuring trends)

- Blogs & News – look at hot topics in the blogsphere. What are people blogging about and what are the hot topics in the news for your niche?

- Books – look at what topics books have been written on for your niche, or go deeper and look at the table of contents for books on amazon and pick a topic or chapter to focus on

You should focus on solving a particular problem for your niche. Don’t go too broad, you want to provide a great solution or help with that burning problem, and show people your information is good. By doing this you will build trust in your brand and when you come to make offers for your own products or affiliate products later, you’ll be in a much stronger position.

Squeeze Page

The squeeze page is where you offer your calling card content to the world. The best squeeze pages are focused on getting the visitor to perform one single action – to optin and join your list.

In order to do this, you should minimise the distractions on your squeeze page. There should be no advertising, and no external links aside from things like privacy policy and disclaimers which you should keep down in the footer of the page.

Squeeze Page Design

The main elements of a squeeze page are:

- Headline – this will be high impact and will grab the visitors attention immediately

- Bullets or benefit copy – you need to list the benefits your visitor will get from your calling card content

- Optin box – this is where the visitor will enter their name and email (you can collect more details, or just email)

The main variation on this is when you have a video squeeze page, where the video will replace the headline and bullets. Usually with a video squeeze page the video will be under 2 minutes, and will again focus on getting the visitor to optin.

If you want access to the same squeeze page templates I use in my business, click here

My Overall List Building Formula

So now to give you an overview of my list building formula, I’ve created this infographic/checklist which you can download to your computer if you want to print it out to follow the steps…

Download List Building Infographic PDF

List Building Tips & Handy Pointers

I wanted to end this tutorial with a few handy tips and pointers that I’ve picked up in the time that I’ve been building mailing lists on the Internet.

• Most people dont make a purchase on their first visit to a website - they need a minimum of 7-8 points of contact with a business before they make a purchasing decision. Remember this and ensure you are following up with your prospects!
• Don’t stop testing – Many people become complacent once they have their system setup, but in reality they are leaving money or conversions on the table. You can almost always improve your conversions by trying things like different headlines, subheadlines, calls to action and bullets. You can also try some different squeeze page designs, or even down to things like the colours of your buttons. With your testing make BIG changes first – then narrow down once you have identified what is working best. Use Google Website Optimizer to handle your testing (it’s free)
• Try different offers – Don’t be afraid to try and test different offers or selling approaches for your business. Once you have one list building system setup, you can really dominate by setting up another system with a calling card focusing on a different problem area which still builds into your main business funnel
• Diversify your traffic – It’s important that you don’t become reliant on just one traffic source for your list building efforts. Often traffic sources can go down or something unforseen can happen so it’s always worth having a few different traffic methods in play. On the flipside of this – don’t go trying every method out there and not focusing on getting any traction with one method – just focus on a few that work for you.

I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, and if there’s anything else you want to know about list building or would like me to cover in a future tutorial or post, please leave a comment below!

Tags: build a list, build an email list, build list, how to build a list, List Building, list building tips