Too many people start out online with the impression that Internet marketingis about joining an affiliate program with pre-designed pages that youdrive traffic to and make a gazillion dollars. They hang onto thesedreams and often avoid hearing the old saw “The money’s in the list.”But it’s true! Without a list, you’re nowhere in the Internet marketingworld. Without a subscriber base of loyal customers who trust yourrecommendations, your Internet marketing business will be pretty wellsunk, no matter what niche you’re in.
List building is a simple operation. You need a few basic things–a webhost, a squeeze page, an autoresponder service, something to give away,and traffic. These are the five elements of list building success.Let’s discuss each aspect of the process…
Web hosting can be very reasonable these days. With places like HostGator charging $7.95 a month for 600G of storage and 6,000G ofbandwidth, it’s hard to beat the deal. There are many services tochoose from, however you shouldn’t be paying more than about $15 amonth, tops. Just be sure that you have access to MySQL databasesbecause you will want to set up a blog. cPanel hosting with Fantasticomaking this very easy to do. But be sure to pay for hosting. Don’t usefree hosting services. They’ll make you look unprofessional, and in Internet marketing, that’s the kiss of death.
Building a squeeze page is simple, if you use a WYSIWYG (”What you seeis what you get”) editor. You can download a free WYSIWYG HTML editorat http://nvu.com and just type into it as you would any wordprocessor. For the squeeze page, you need a killer headline. If youaren’t good at writing copy, then get headline creator software to helpyou, like Headline Creator Pro. Then, add some kind of image, either ofyourself, your product, or your free gift, three to five bullet points,showing the benefits of your offer, and an opt-in box, which you getfrom the autoresponder service that you choose.
An autoresponder stores the names and email addresses of the people whosign up from your squeeze page and become part of your list. Theautoresponder service will also send these people a confirmationmessage, to ensure that the people actually signed up and want to bepart of your list. This complies with the CAN-SPAM laws in the UnitedStates. Autoresponders also allow you to add messages to the systemthat will be periodically sent to your list. For example, if you’reoffering a newsletter as your sign-up offer, the autoresponder willthen send it out at whatever interval you choose.
But none of this will make any difference, if you don’t have trafficcoming to your squeeze page, right? There are 17 different ways to gettraffic. Some of the least expensive and easy to set up are blogging,writing articles, and linking from forum posts, blog comments, anddirectories. As I mentioned above, setting up a WordPress blog is verysimple, if you have cPanel hosting with Fantastico and takes only aboutfive minutes time. You can make posts in your blog, which has an RSSfeed that search engines love because they’re all text and easy tospider, so your blog should be indexed in the search engines quickly.You can also write articles about your niche that link back to yoursqueeze page, and put them into article directories. You can link backto your squeeze page from forum postings, too, but be sure they’reforums in your Internet marketing niche. You can also comment on blogsin your Internet marketing niche,and you can put your link into respected online site directories, suchas DMOZ.org, Yahoo, and JoeAnt.com. All of these ways will help you toget traffic to your squeeze page, especially if you religiously do someof these things for your Internet marketing business every day.
List building is still the most important thing you can do if you’re inInternet marketing or even in offline direct marketing. Having your ownproprietary list of customers and people who like your information oryour products and who trust you will come to be the most valuable assetyour business has. Don’t lose sight of this! List building isn’tsomething you can do on the side. It should be the number one priorityfor your Internet marketing business, and you should work at it everyday.
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