List Building Tips - Personal Blogs

In this installment of List Building Tips, I want to discuss how to use your own personal blog to build your list. I'll go over what to do as well as what NOT to do. I think you'll find this interesting reading.

If you've been following this series for a while now, you know that I went over how to build a list using forum blogs. The process is somewhat similar except there are some big differences.

With a forum blog, the forum owner has complete control over the blog itself. They can refuse to allow certain content to be published. Also, the format of the blog itself is out of your control. With your own blog, these things aren't an issue.

When a prospect comes to your blog, the first thing you need to be concerned with is the first impression that your blog makes. What exactly do you want them to see? What kind of layout will they be expecting?

One thing I've discovered, mostly from my own experience with going to other marketers' blogs, is that people don't want to be aimlessly searching for things. They want a navigation system that is easy to follow. That's why, on my own blog, I make sure that there is a clear menu across the top of the blog right below the header.

Once the prospect sees that navigating around the blog is going to be easy, they're more likely to browse the contents. This is where you need to make sure that one of FIRST things they see, preferably on the right hand side just below the header or navigation system, is your opt in box with a brief description of what they're opting in for.

Make it attractive enough, both through design and through your offer, for them to want to be on your list. A simple "Enter your name and email below to be informed of future blog updates" may or may not be enough incentive for them to join. A lot will depend on the actual content of your blog.

Ah... but they won't know how good the content is until they actually READ it. This is where you place your second line of attack. At the end of each article, subtly inform the reader that he can join your list to be informed of any future blog posts or whatever it is you want them to know.

For example, my blog posts are mostly about how to market online. My article closings usually involve telling the reader that if they want more info on how to market online that I have a newsletter that they can subscribe to and then I give them the link. Between this link and the opt in box on the side bar of your blog, you have multiple chances to get the reader onto your list. This is something that you may not be able to do with a forum blog.

If you have multiple blog pages, you want the reader to be able to access the list opt in from any of those pages if the platform allows it. Some blog platforms don't have this capability. So you want to check before you set something up.

You'd be surprised how many people WILL opt into your list IF they like what they see on your blog. But if you don't give them a way to do this, how can they?

Take advantage of every opportunity to build your list.

Your personal blog is just one of those ways.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

List Building Tips - Using Your Affiliates To The Fullest

In this first in a series of list building tips, I want to start off with one of the sneakiest ways to not only build your list but possibly make affiliate sales in the process.

List building, while not the only way, is one of the best ways of generating a full time income. The reason is simple. By building a responsive list (and responsive is the key) you give yourself the chance to have a number of prospects and/or potential customers that will buy products from you on a regular basis.

Granted, if you only have one product to sell, then building a list for this purpose is probably sub optimal. Still, you're going to want to build it for no other reason than to be able to follow up with those who haven't yet purchased that one product.

Not everybody purchases on first sight of a sales page. Some people need to think it over. By getting them onto your list, you give them something to think about with each follow up. A very simple way is by making each follow up an issue that outlines or details certain features and benefits of the product. The more benefits you give them, the more likely they are to purchase.

Okay, but what does any of this have to do with your affiliates? Well, if you have affiliates, you certainly want them to promote your product, right? What's one way of getting them to do this? Well, what if you were to run some sort of random script that sent a prospect to a particular affiliate's page rather than directly to your sales page?

This gives them more of an opportunity to make a sale without them having to do any additional work on their own. What affiliate wouldn't like that?

Great, but how does this build your list? What you do is you offer the person going to the affiliate site a special bonus IF they sign up for your newsletter.

Here is where this gets interesting.

Let's say you had an affiliate who was promoting one product of yours but you wanted to build a list for another product that was related. By offering this incentive, you have the possibility of making the sale from the one product that you're directly sending the prospect to (the affiliate page) while giving yourself the opportunity to make a sale off of the related product.

And even if you only have the one product, by getting them to sign up to your list through your ethical bribe, you give yourself the chance to follow up with the prospect in case they haven't purchased yet. This gives you more opportunity to close the sale AND the affiliate still gets credit.

Think your affiliates won't love you for that?

This is just one of many ways to drive traffic to your opt in page, build your list and make more sales.

Want more great list building tips? Check my signature.

See you soon with more.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Fine Dining Technique - How to Utilize Your Ethical Bribe for Maximum Conversion in List Building

Every marketer knows that you need to give free offers in exchange for emails. However, it is fatal to think that any free offer will work like charm in converting your visitors to subscribers. Your free offer must be so good that your visitors cannot even resist their desire to grab it! So, the question is how to utilize this ethical bribe to maximize your conversion rate and ultimately making loads of sales? By the way, what does list building has got to do with fine dining? Enjoy the article to find out.

Starter

Create your ethical bribe with the end in mind. The happy ending that all marketers crave for is making sales. Therefore, your free offer must be the introduction of solutions to your visitors' problems which is the first stage of your product funnel. In other words, it is the starter. Well, just like a starter helps to fill part of your stomach, your free offer must also be able to solve at least one of the common problems that your visitors might encounter.

Do not ever think that giving them solutions for free is going to reduce your sales potential. Think from the subscribers' point of view. I opt-in to your squeeze page, I got your free offer and one of my problems is solved! By now your subscribers must be thinking, "Gosh, this person is amazing! What else this person has got to offer?!"? Bravo! You've just positioned yourself as a very dependable expert in your niche, even if you just started.

Appetizer and Main Course

Now is the time to go for the kill. Nonetheless, you must be wary that this is not the step for you to hard sell whatever products you have in mind. Just like a fine dining meal, after starter we will have appetizer followed by main course and lastly dessert. Pushing for sales is also a delicate and well-structured process. Your subsequent product should serves to help them with some of the problems they might be facing next. For instance, after the squeeze page has been set up together with an ethical bribe, the next big obstacle is most probably driving traffic.

Therefore, every step taken to introduce your products must be carefully planned so that it fits to your subscribers' needs. This is undoubtedly a win-win-win situation as it not only helps your subscribers in an orderly manner, it also shows them your expertise in the subject matter and more importantly, it sells.

Dessert

Last but not least, show them your gratitude by giving them another freebie which can help them to achieve better results in your area of expertise. At this point, most of the hard work had been completed and it is time for you to enjoy your dessert too.

List Building, and What Is Required to Build a List

The point of List building is to connect with a specific audience by giving top quality products or services in exchange for them joining your list.

When someone joins your list, you must build a professional relationship with them by providing a series of follow-up emails designed for the niche that your subscriber is interested in.

List building enthusiasts (like me and you) gain subscribers by applying marketing tactics in the form of squeeze pages and opt-in forms.

These opt-in forms are created by an auto-responder service and are easily implemented into the HTML code in your squeeze template using an HTML editor.

When a visitor is interested in your newsletter or product, the will put their details into the HTML generated squeeze page and subscribe to your list.

To begin growing a profitable list building campaign however, you will need to make sure that you have all of the necessary equipment that is needed, including:

An Auto-responder

With an auto-responder, you can create an unlimited number of email lists, and by categorising your lists you can make follow-up emails that are relevant to the audience on that particular list.

Landing Page/Squeeze Page

A landing page or squeeze page is the first thing a new subscriber will see before joining your list and this is where the opt-in form is placed and whatever product or service you are offering.

You need to plainly encourage your new visitors to enter in their details but to also encourage them to confirm their subscription to keep you free from SPAM complaints

A Product/Giveaway or Service

Your giveaway is quite possibly, the most essential element on your landing page. If your offer doesn't make the visitor jump up and take action then your lead will be lost.

This means that your offer needs to be relevant to Having a QUALITY product can make or break convincing someone to give up their email address

Offering something like

Free newsletter designed around your niche Free ebooks Free software Free video tutorials Products with Private label and Giveaway Rights Interviews Graphics, templates or even Squeeze pages themselves

You want to be certain that your audience is wanting what you offer and if you can do that then building your list becomes very easy and almost automated., but more importantly your subscribers are happy because you have provided them with quality rather than just another get rich quick scheme.

5 Reasons to Use Solo Ads - Your Bullet Train Ride to Explosive List Building

I notice a similarity in all the successful internet marketers I've met. Of course, they made millions and millions of dollars entirely online and the money just keep pouring in. What do they have in common? Each one of them has a list, and it's not just any list but a targeted list. That is the point! You need to have a list to build a successful internet business that generates money for you over and over again.

As all of you should have known, you need an attractive squeeze page plus freebies to capture the names and emails of your visitors. That may be easily done by paying someone to do it for you, no fuss about it. The most important task now is to drive traffic. While there are a lot of free and paid methods out there to drive traffic, I would like to specifically discuss about solo ads.

What is a solo ad?

Basically, you pay someone who has a list to promote your squeeze page. On your side, you will have to make the payment and draft your own email to be sent to your new prospects. On your partner's side, he will carry out his duty to send your emails to his lists as agreed.

Why uses solo ads?

It builds your list extremely fast. From as low as $30 you can send thousands of unique visitors to your website almost immediately! With a high conversion squeeze page, you are literally exploding your list with a lot of new leads. It is suitable for beginners. Buying solo ads is by far the easiest, fastest and most cost effective way to build a huge list from scratch. Unless you are patient enough to wait for your articles and videos to start sending you some visitors, you will definitely want to learn more about solo ads. It can be budgeted according to your available resources. You can start by investing $30 first and gradually increase your investment to drive more traffic. It increases sales. By including a special offer immediately after they sign up, you can possibly increase your sales and compensate your advertising costs. Then, a good follow up session can easily boost your sales and generate profit in the long run. It can be experimented. Purchase solo ads from different sellers and keep track on their performance; quality of the list and number of clicks. After a few trials you will be able to figure out which seller performs better and you can then increase your investment with the seller to explode your list again.

List Building Tips - Drive By Linking

In this installment of list building tips, I want to discuss what I call "Drive By Linking" and how you can use it to actual build your links. If you write any kind of content at all that is published online, you might want to pay attention to this one.

I'm convinced that if you gave an Internet marketer a sledgehammer to do a job that could be done by a wooden mallet, he's still use the sledgehammer. Why? Because Internet marketers really like to drive the point home. Don't get me wrong. Driving the point home can work very well in many cases. But sometimes you really want to use a more subtle approach.

A lot of content writers are fixated with one idea. Give the content as quickly as possible and then when you're all done with it, drive that sales pitch home... just like a sledgehammer doing the job of that small wooden mallet.

The problem with that approach is twofold.

For one thing, sometimes it's just overkill. You've hit them over the head with that sledgehammer so hard that you've figuratively left your prospect dead by the roadside. They're "hyped" to the point of a marketing seizure.

I hope you have lots of smelling salts and possibly a crash cart ready.

The other problem with that approach is sometimes, because you're using the wrong approach, you simply miss the target altogether. You've slanted the pitch in a way that doesn't quite correspond with the message of your content. The disconnect causes your prospect to zone out and you've lost them.

They're not dead. They're just no interested because you started off with point A and ended with point B and the gap between the two is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

However, if in the process of writing your article, within the context of the article itself, you happen to drop a drive by link, as long as it's relevant, you're quite likely to get your reader to click on it and check out what's on the other side.

Probably the best way to illustrate this is with an example. What follows is a fictional excerpt from a fictional article on Magic the Gathering, a card game. I'm sure you'll get the idea.

"Jace, the Mind Sculptor is the latest powerhouse to hit the standard scene. It's a blue 4 drop planes walker that has not one, but FOUR relevant abilities from drawing a card to literally removing the opponent's library from the game. If you're playing standard, you really want to pick up a play set of this guy. By the way, if you want to be informed of the latest new cards in standard, check out Joe's Magic Card Newsletter at (insert link here) and sign up so you can be kept up to date on the latest."

Notice how subtly I drop that in there? It doesn't come off like a sales pitch but more like a "Oh, by the way, you might find this interesting" kind of thing.

Does it work? If you use it within the context of the content itself and it fits, it can work very well. Somebody who is interested in getting news on the latest standard Magic cards and wants to know what the good cards are, WILL sign up for that newsletter.

Could this have worked within the confines of a signature? Sure, but in that context, it comes off as more sales oriented because it's outside the confines of the article itself. It's not as natural. That doesn't mean it can't work. But it also doesn't mean that drive by linking should be ignored, because it can be VERY effective.

Try it sometime. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim