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

The Dos and Don'ts for a Successful Ad Swap

Ad swap or advertisement swap can be considered as the most powerful free method of driving massive amount of traffic within a short period of time. Basically, an ad swap means you promote your partners' websites to your list while your partners promote your website to their lists.

What makes an ad swap great is not only it does not cost a dime to perform but also because it can be repeated as many times as you like. This article will give you a thorough understanding on how to perform a profitable ad swap.

Dos

The first thing that you need to do is build a list of at least 200 subscribers. You can even do an ad swap with less though but a list of 200 - 500 subscribers works best.

Prepare a high quality free product to attract the subscribers from the other list to opt-in. Your free product must be valuable to build your credibility among your partners' list.

Carefully compose your swipe emails to maximize the click through rate from your partners' list. At the same time, make sure that your website is working well in terms of graphics, contents and opt-in box as you would not want others to leech off from your list.

Compare the number of clicks before closing a deal. Matching the number of clicks is a complicated procedure and may result in either one party sending emails to more subscribers than the other.

Confirm the date and time for an ad swap and set the broadcast using your autoresponder so that you won't forget. Then, send a screen capture to your partners and encourage them to do the same.

Don'ts

Do not conclude an ad swap deal if you find the partners too suspicious. For example, someone with a list of 10000 subscribers wouldn't make a swap with you who have only 400 subscribers. You may end up getting tricked for not being rational when making decisions.

Do not forget to check on their squeeze page, sales page and/or free offer to ensure that they are legit and ethical. You wouldn't want to risk promoting a bad experience to your list that will severely affect your relationship.

Most importantly, do not get too upset if you come across one or two scammers who do not deliver their promises. It is near to impossible for any internet marketers to avoid conmen. Therefore, if you happen to bump into one, do not waste time making a fuss about it. Rather, spend your time wisely in other tasks like list building and traffic generation.

3 Tips to Increase Your Opening Rates

When it comes to list building, one of the most important aspects you need to take into account are opening rates. They are key because if, for example, you are sending emails to 10000 subscribers, but only 500 open it you are wasting your time and money.

When it happens that, you probably think:

OMG, what I'm doing wrong? And normally the answer is that not only you're doing one thing wrong, but more than one.

Some of the point you may need to check are the following:

- Does your email have a compelling title? The title is probably the most important part of the email because if the subscriber doesn't feel attracted it will be deleted without even having been opened. Some of the best article titles are: "How to... " "3 ways... " "Don't miss this opportunity if... ". Just test some of them and see which ones have the best opening rate. Remember, every list is different because every person is different to another.

- How often do you send emails to your subscribers? I know some Internet Marketers who send more than one or two emails per day. Of course, if you do so don't expect your opening rate be higher than 10%. Your list will eventually become burnt out and will unsubscribe. Ideally you should be sending no more than 2 or 3 emails per week providing excellent tricks or information to your list. By doing so, you generate an expectation that will increase the opening rates because your subscribers will be looking forward to the next time you send them an email. And when it comes with the follow-up don't email them every single day if you haven't told them you wouldn't be doing so. What I normally do is email them days number 1, 3, 6, 10 and 15. Do you see? The interval increases every email. That is used to generate an expectation.

- How often do you send affiliate links? Subscribers are not stupid, especially when it comes to the Internet Marketing niche, and they know what an affiliate link is. So if you keep sending them every day they will notice it and unsubscribe because they will think: Oh this guy is just trying to make money out of me. You have to be wise. Explain them a problem which they may or may not have had. Offer them different solutions, one of which includes you affiliate link and you'll see that you conversions increase dramatically.

I hope this helps you and remember, if you want further information about how to build your list on autopilot do not hesitate and visit my webpage which is posted below.

If you want further information visit: Free list building report

Internet Marketers - Want To Build An Email List And Don't Know How?

To be a successful internet marketer you need to make money, and to make money online you need a list of prospective buyers. If you have a website and no list then your traffic is dependent upon the whims of the search engines or you take up paid advertising. A secure way is to build a database of all the customers who bought from you in the past. This database is pure gold because these people are the ones who are likely to respond to your offers in the future.

The basics of creating a list are quite simple; you need a website, an autoresponder service and something to offer, usually free. An autoresponder will store all your email leads and be able to send out scheduled messages, newsletters or latest offers to all or just some of your subscribers. When you think that a marketing list can contain 10,000 subscribers or more, then you see that an efficient autoresponder service is essential and one called Aweber is probably the best.

You will want a targeted list of subscribers to market your offers to. For example, you will get a poor response offering beauty products to a list of subscribers in the soccer niche! Each niche will need a separate list and some internet marketers may have 20 or so different lists! Don't worry though, you'll only be starting off with 1 or 2 lists as a beginner and the autopresponder service can take care of 1 or 20+ lists just as efficiently.

If you are a total newbie when it comes to internet marketing, then you are going to have to learn how to get a webpage or blog up and running so you can offer something of value to your visitors. Try a free blog at Blogspot.com (owned by Google) which is pretty straightforward to setup and has a user friendly backend where you carry out admin tasks. The other more involved option is to buy a domain name with hosting where you can set up your webpage. GoDaddy.com is quite good at hand-holding the beginner and walking you through the various steps, but beware they will try and sell you different 'bells and whistles' options at each step so do some research first about basic things you'll need for a simple website.

Now you have a hosted webpage or free blog at Blogspot with your offer on a 'squeeze page' [designed to let the visitor access your free offer or product only after they entered their email address first]. Your squeeze page must include a web form with a link back to your autoresponder service to put your subscribers onto a list. There are paid email marketing solutions provided by the likes of Aweber and Getresponse but there are also free solutions like MailChimp.com. If you are serious about internet marketing to develop it into a full time income, which is certainly possible, start off with a good paid service like Aweber.

To be honest, speaking from experience, it can be a bit tricky getting these things set up if you are a complete beginner when it comes to list building, and mistakes are bound to be made. As you progress along the learning curve your skills will increase but in the initial stages it's possible to make a big error that can be difficult to recover from and may try your patience to the point of wanting to give up. That would be a shame because, as I mentioned before, the potential to make good income is there and it's oft been said by internet marketers 'the money is in the list'

There is another way for those without technical skills to begin building a marketing list without the need of a blog, webpage, squeeze page, domain name or hosting. 5iphon.com (I think they refer to themselves as 'Siphon') who will provide you with a totally free hosted webpage that will virally build you a list on autopilot. Another service is Instant Cash Machine that also provide a ready made hosted squeeze page for a one off payment, they also provide you with an in house autoresponder service although you may opt to use Aweber. You will still need a separate autoresponder service for either Aweber or Getresponse if you use 5iphon.com, but Aweber in particular has some very good video tutorials for beginners to help set up your first list. May I wish you every success in your email marketing career!

How to Create Content to Build Your List

Today's topic is about how to create great, free content in order to build your list.We talked about how you can have all of the best products and services in the world, but if you have no one to offer them to or no one to sell them to they won't sell very quickly. When you have an email list (also called an ezine list) of several hundred and preferably, several thousands of people who are eager to hear from you, you now have people who will buy your products and services immediately and over time.

Now, that you've figure out which irresistible, free offer you will use to build your ezine list quickly and consistently it's time to create great content for your IFO, your irresistible free offer. Remember, you must offer massive value if you want to build trust, but you also don't want to give away the entire farm.

Here's a tip. The difference between giving away good value and not giving away too much is to give them the steps or give them good information, but to obviously not tell them exactly how to do everything. Don't give the exactly how. Give them the what. Give them the why it's important, but not the exactly how.

I recommend three different types of content for your irresistible offer.

1. Walk them through all of the steps of your proprietary system.It's a series of steps that you use to get your clients results.

2. Give them your compelling story, which means tell them about how you got to do what you're doing.Then give them some tips as to how you got from your 'before' to your 'after', in your before and after story. People find that very, very compelling, especially if you supplement with lots of tips.

3. Do an interview. You can actually give someone a set of questions that they ask you and that you respond to and you can record those.

Whichever you choose of the three, the idea is that the topic must be something that your ideal client would love to get their hands on.

Your Client Attraction Assignment.

Your assignment for this week is to come up with a topic that your ideal clients would say yes to. Remember, the topic is one of the most important things. They don't know what your content will be yet, but they will want to sign up for that topic.

Then, once you've selected your topic that they would say yes to, choose from talking about your proprietary system, telling your story and giving some tips, or content based on a Q&A style interview. The key is at the end of any type of IFO that you have give them an offer for deeper learning or give them a call to action to work with you. If you do this, just like I've shared with you, you will quickly build your list, get more clients and make more money. Enjoy!

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