Just Blogging

Tyler R. Martin asked:




We all know the benefits owning an email list and how it can drastically improve our business sales and also utilize the life time value of our customers. Since the dawning of the internet, we have seen increasing amounts of people starting to use the internet. They use the internet not only as a platform to socialize; but in recent years, more so as a convenient platform to do their shopping. As such, it has opened up lots of windows of opportunities for businessmen with the opportunity to tap on a customer base of millions around the world.

The basis of gathering emails from your prospects basically starts with a free offer that provides value to your prospects. Based on which industry your business is in, you can structure this differently. It could be access to a free sample of your product, a free e-report or even an informative newsletter. It is always good to start on the right foot and provide our customers with the proper content they inquire off, by setting off a good impression, customers have a higher tendency to return.

With that said, I would like to put this across that buying email lists and leads from online sources where deals such as, “email lists with millions of email available at only 100 dollars” may seem too good to be true. It usually is. Research has proven that the average customer needs at least 7 times of advertising to before they would budge and purchase your item, but how do you do that without them running off in the first place? This is where your own email lists come in handy as you can both provide relevant information that the consumer wants and at the same time promote your product.

Besides this, the problems with ‘purchased’ email lists are aplenty. Firstly, they might be unrelated to the product or service offering that you have. Secondly, you will never know for sure how the seller of these email lists got their emails. These might be emails that were harvested throughout the internet through the use of software. This means that the people on this email list never did opt-in or subscribed into any offer to be sent more emails. When you email these people, you put your business at risk due to the spam laws.

As we often talk about email marketing, what we really want to see is the increase in conversion rates of readers to buyers. The main purpose of having people subscribe into your email list is not to give away freebies for them to be baited into buying your products. Rather, you should be promoting your products via the information you are giving away, thus it is essential that the information provided is done by your company or yourself to be able to link it back to your own product.

Always think in terms of quality rather than quantity. Quality should always be the first aim of any company in gather email leads. By producing more customized and personalized services through these email listings, you are bound to see an increase in your sales and also an expansion in the amount of customers that you are going to have.

Mark A. Abrahams asked:




Let me ask you a significant question. Do you know how to
build a list without a budget? This is a very important
question because if you were like me when I was starting
out I did not have much money to get going. If you are
still battling to build a big list then I am going to go
through some free methods that you can use to build your
list.

You only make serious money by having repeat customers that
you can sell to over and over again. Driving traffic to a
website is a lot of effort. So you meed to maximize your
results so that you can market over and over again to your
list instead of praying that your sales page will convert a
visitor into a sale.

Write articles and submit them to the major article
directories. This is viral in nature and will help you to
get links in to your web site and improve your link
popularity consequently also improving your search engine
rankings. Just make sure that you create a name squeeze
page and send all traffic to it.

Start a blog. Use free blogging software like Blogger and
Wordpress to get your blog going. This is a lot easier than
updating and designing your own website as the software
does nearly everything for you. You can can also include
your blog posts in social media sites like Digg for more
exposure. Initially you can get traffic to your blogs by
submitting to blog carnivals.

Find forums related to your niche market and post
frequently. Answer other people’s questions and build your
credibility up. Just be careful not to blatantly advertise
as this will damage your credibility.

Use classified advert sites to post your advertisements.
Sites like Craigslist are extremely popular and will help
you to get traffic fast. Google especially loves an
authority site like Craigslist so you need to focus on low
competition keywords and piggyback on the good page rank to
get good rankings for your adverts.

Using the free strategies I have outlined here you can
easily build your list by 150 to 300 subscribers a month.

Sean R Mize asked:




List building is an art. Better off you are at this art more be your probability of making achieving your end goals. Let us see what the steps in building a list are:

Step 1: Decide your niche

Decide which people you want on your list i.e. you want students, professionals or house wives etc. The above decision can be easily taken if we can clearly answer a simple question: Why and for what I am building a list?

Step 2: Create set of emails

It is important that your email should be good but more important having them. Set these emails in your a Weber auto responder. On an average have some 5-10 emails ready with you.

Step 3: Tracking

Tracking your open rates, click through rates and conversion rates are also important. Each will give some inference about the quality of email, for example better open rates may signify that your subject line is good. For tracking it is also necessary to have more than ten mails otherwise the data will not be of much significance.

Step 4: Taking Action and continuous improvement

Once you are done with tracking statistics it is important to work on them and improve on your list building techniques. For example you may want to make emails that your customer wants to read so that you can maintain a long term relationship with the customer.

Above are some basic steps to be taken to build your list, but these are not sufficient you need to continuously improve by introducing newer offers and better techniques to build the list.

Tellman Knudson asked:




If you’re been list building a while, you may not be getting many subscribers every day, if you keep up the same old tactics. Here are some new ideas for you:

* Whenever you send out a message to your list, put a short paragraph at the end that asks them to pass the newsletter along to a friend. Or, tell your friends that they can subscribe, and give them the email address to your autoresponder.

* Use list building boxes on all your sites and blogs, at the very top of the page. Then, no one will miss them. When people read your blog and like it, they’ll subscribe to your list.

* Articles are very popular as a traffic tool, too. Use your main keyword at least 2-7% of the time, and use them to send people to your list building page or your blog, where the opt-in box is the first thing they see.

* Write or develop a product to give away and join some of the free giveaways that are always going on. Just be sure that you’re able to have people sign up directly for your autoresponder. Don’t make your getting someone’s name and email address a condition of how many people you recruit. Those ****. Free giveaways where you actually put in your list building opt-in box code or your autoresponder email address, for whichever list you are building, are the only way to go with those.

* Do a joint venture with someone. Say, “I’ll put one message about your product or service into my autresponder series, if you put one message about my product or service into yours.” That way, you’re promote each other’s stuff forever, and as you get better at list building and as your partner’s business grows, so will both of your lists.

* Find a good co-registration program, like List Hero, where your offering is listed with others and people can subscribe to a number of lists at once. These can bring very quick results.

* Have you ever been in direct sales and heard the term ABC, for Always Be Closing? In the Internet Marketing world, you might see, ABT, or Always Be Testing. But here’s what I think before anything else: ABL, Always Be List Building. If you want to succeed online, it’s really all about the list.