I thought I’d ‘interrupt’ the ‘List Building‘ series of posts and briefly talk about the mental rather than the mechanical aspects.

With hindsight I probably should have done this post first, although I did touch upon it in the introductory post.

It occurs to me that a lot of people have something of a mental block when it comes to list building. So, what I want to do on this post is help you over that hurdle, or at least open the matter for discussion.

I’ve also got a free video on list building that I’d like you to take a look at.

Thad and I did not start list building until we were 6 month’s into our Internet Marketing journey. Travis (of ‘Bum Marketing’ fame) did not start for more than a year after he started IM.

So, you are not alone, if you are fairly new to IM! What holds people back? I think there are several main areas of resistance and I’ll try to answer each one.

It is an advanced, technically difficult method. This is probably the biggest myth of all. List building, once you know the mechanics is one of the easiest of all the marketing methods. I mean what’s easier? Setting up an adwords campaign and trying to get a good Quality Score, knowing what keywords to bid on and by how much, managing your campaign budget, etc or just sending a mail shot to your list?

Technically, and trust me, I’m no techy, it is also one of the simplest things to do. Provided you use a good autoresponder service, like Aweber or Getresponse nothing could be easier. You set up a list with a message series, create an opt-in form, grab a couple of lines of code and bung ‘em on your site or blog. And that’s it!

It will take ages to build a list. Well, it will if you never start. But even just 1 or 2 opt-ins a day can mean you can have a list of 30 – 60 people in the first month.

It is expensive and takes a lot of effort. Aweber starts at only $19 / month, even cheaper, if you sign up for 3 months or annually and is very easy to use. Sure, it takes a little effort, at first, to set up a message series but once done it runs literally on auto-pilot. And you can do one-off ‘broadcast’ messages to your list whenever you come across something juicy you want to tell them about.

You need a huge list to make it worthwhile. Not so, (as you will see in the video). A smaller list of relevant buyers is all you need.

I have nothing to offer my list – why would anyone sign up? We’ll deal specifically with this point on the upcoming post on incentives. But you may be surprised just how easy it is to come up with an enticing free offer to get people to sign up to your list.

I don’t want customers, I am happy to be an affiliate. Thad and I both understand this mentality entirely. You’ll get bombarded with support calls, etc. Again, this is unlikely to be the case unless you are an actual product owner. Sure, you’ll get some feedback but this all helps you strengthen your campaigns and make them even better.

I have nothing else to sell to my list other than my main product. Believe me this would be unusual, no matter what you are marketing. This question came up recently in the Wealthy Affiliate forum. A lady was marketing ‘The Magic of Making Up‘ relationship guide and had no clue what else she could sell to her list. My answer: Try another better, cheaper product or even create your own; Could this actually be a confidence issue – plenty of guides on that; Could this be a personal issue, such as excess weight or hygene (e.g. sweating) – plenty of guides on that; Could the relationship just be doomed full stop – try promoting them Dating sites!

Oh! Before I forget. I want you to watch this free video. It’s by Tiffany Dow and it’s on list building (handy that). Tiffany’s main emphasis is on using list building with your own product. Don’t worry about that for now. There are some good general tips in the video but what I want you to focus on is the size of Tiffany’s lists. (Yes, she shows you inside her Aweber account!). You’ll note that her lists are not huge at all.

But they are lists of targeted relevant buyers and that is the key!

So, I hope that gives you a (very gentle) kick up the pants with regards to getting started with list building…

Related posts:

  1. List Building Strategies – Why Build A List?
  2. Offering Incentives to Opt-in | List Building Secrets
  3. Your Mail Message Series | List Building Secrets
  4. Using Broadcast Messages | List Building Secrets
  5. Getting Traffic To Your List | List Building Secrets

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •