List Building is one of the most important aspects of any online business. No matter which business model you follow, your top priority should be to build Lists of prospects to send information to on a regular basis.
There is a popular saying among those in Internet marketing circles and goes, "the money is in the list". Quite cliche, but certainly true.
By building a list you can keep in touch with your prospects and develop a relationship between you that will eventually lead to profit. If nurtured correctly the profits from a well-groomed list will expand over time and can become a long-term income stream.
Several marketing studies show that the average consumer needs to be contacted at least seven times before he or she will make a commitment to buy. If you, as a business owner, are not giving your future customers an opportunity to leave their name and email address in your autoresponder then you are surely leaving untold profits on the table.
The great thing about List Building is that it can be done in any niche. Whether you are into Internet marketing, home improvement, crochet, home entertainment systems, vacations or whatever else, there is information out there that you can package and make available for your visitors as a giveaway to convince them to leave their info and bring them back for more.
The key to profiting from your lists is to do the old soft sell. Don't bombard your list with a flood of sales pitches or a blatant advertising. This will lead to massive defections and all the hard work you put into building your list will be for nothing.
Send lots of helpful information at a reasonable rate for the first two weeks. A good delivery rate would be every two to three days. This information should be in the form of articles and reviews of relevant products.
Only after delivering this useful information should you start to send sales pitches to your list. As a general rule of thumb you should only send a sales letter every third mailing. This way you trust trust with your readers, as they are not expecting a sales pitch every time they get an email from you.
Treat your list members well. Give them free reports once per month or every other week as an enticement to stay on your list. This will give them a good reason to open your email when they see it in their inbox because they never know when you may send them another useful piece of information.
By giving them these Free Reports many will also feel obliged to make a purchase when you do recommend a product or service to them.
By Building Mailing Lists in every niche you are marketing to you will soon see profitable returns that go way beyond the effort needed to keep your lists active.