With the growth of mobile marketing some Internet marketers have started to drift away from Internet marketing. In particular they are moving away from list building and email marketing.
I think this is a big mistake. As long as people use their desktop and laptop computers, or their tablets, to search for things email marketing will survive. It might even thrive in the coming years.
Here on our blog we focus on a target market of people who are looking for ways to make money, how to start an online business, and Internet marketing in general.
In this article I want to focus specifically on list building and how important it is to use the opt in method. This means that you’re not purchasing leads, getting co-registration leads, or anything of the sort.
What you are focusing on is providing a way for somebody to subscribe to your email list because they want to. There’s no trickery involved when you do list building this way.
Opt in list building is permission based. A subscriber types in their name and email address and knows you are going to send them emails.
Before I talk a little bit more about that consider why you still want to build your own opt in list. If you’re in the niche that I am in list building gives you an opportunity to sell Internet marketing products, sell affiliate marketing products, enroll new members in your network marketing opportunity, and so on.
The bottom line here is you want a list of people that are giving you permission to contact them. When you have this permission to a certain extent this is a license to print money. I’m not the first person to make this phrase up, as many successful Internet marketers have already stated this.
As your list grows you can begin to track results and know exactly what the value of each subscriber is. It’s a great feeling to know before hand approximate how much money you’re going to make before you even sent an email out.
So let’s go back to talking about list building and opting in!
One of the key factors in successful list building is a landing page. This is a webpage that you’re going to promote in place of your blog, or website home page.
What you want to do is spend a little bit of time searching around the Internet to see what makes up a really great landing page. Landing pages create the perception that you’re going to solve a problem for somebody, and you’re going to reward them if they give you their contact information.
This is a key point!
They are willing to give you their name and email address because they want the information you are offering. And when you add in the fact that you’re willing to throw in something of value for free, you increase the odds of somebody opting in to your list.
Another way that you can do list building with opt in subscribers is to add a sign-up form above the fold on the right-hand side of your blog. This means that this form is populated on every blog post you make which will help increase your subscriber rate as well.
One final method that does work is to have a exit pop-up version of your landing page. This gives people one last chance to opt in as they are exiting your website or blog.
Your goal should be to build as large an opt in e-mail list as you possibly can. Again keep in mind how valuable a subscriber can be to you.
The more subscribers you have, the more potential income they can bring to you. Email subscribers can also create viral marketing for you and refer new subscribers, and this begins to create a snowball effect.
Beyond income another great reason to build an opt in list is the ability to drive traffic back to your blog from emails you send out. This is simply done by publishing a mini version of a blog post in an email sent out to your list.
You’ve probably seen this done on an email list that you subscribe to. You include the first couple of paragraphs, or sentences of your blog post, with a link that people can click on to read the rest of the post.
If your traffic numbers are down, or if you’ve added some really valuable content, it’s nice to be able to increase exposure for that by sending a link to your email list.
One other thing that you’re starting to see Internet marketers come back to is ezine publishing. Ezine is short for electronic magazine and was very popular years ago.
Publishing an eNewsletter was a great way to deliver valuable information and sell at the same time. You can really take advantage of that when you have a large list of opt in subscribers who look forward to reading what you are sending out to them.
In summary all of the great reasons to do list building and email marketing starts with getting as many opt in subscribers as you possible can. This is a great place to focus your Internet marketing efforts.