List Building | Not for Monkeys

List building is the most important thing you can do for your business. You might think it’s smart to advertise your homepage first. Or, you might think that it’s important to put your money into the pockets of web designers, who will charge you a fortune for a single site. Or, you might be wasting your time and money, chasing from one scheme to another.

Stop! Right now.

The very first thing you should do, if you’re serious about starting an online business is build a list.

• You might think that your site is more important.
• You might think that your product is more important.
• You might think that reading and learning about conversions is more important.

None of that is! Nothing is more important than list building, and I want you to understand that simple thing right now.

You can start list building before your site is up. You can collect names and email addresses as pre-orders for a product you haven’t even created yet. You can learn about conversions down the road a little piece, after the other stuff is in motion. But here’s the point: You can spend your whole life preparing and never accomplish a thing.

List building is very easy to get going. All you need is a simple squeeze page that you can drive traffic to, and you’re list building.

Just don’t let other people make you think that it’s too simple.

Many services are out there, and they call them “list building systems.” You can build a list with them, no doubt about it. But are those people really YOUR list? Be careful that you’re not just subscribing to a service that you’ll have to keep paying month, after month, in order to be able to send out mail to people that joined your list from the system’s squeeze page. Those people don’t even know you, and you certainly don’t know them. Here’s the thing—you can’t really sell much to strangers.

You need to build your own list, with your own site, and sell your own products to people that know you and enjoy your style. You want people who will trust you. Those sites are more like safelists, and safelists are usually pretty hard to make any profits with. Instead of spending money on one of those sites, put it into advertising your own squeeze page or into paying your own autoresponder.

Put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes. Who do you respond to better, a person who comes to you as an individual or someone who sends you something from a system?

My emails have a phenomenal response rate. Do you know why that is? It’s because I’ve established a reputation. I might write some crazy headlines that people open just to see what the heck I’m getting at. But when they do, they read my emails. And they know me because I’ve built a relationship with the people on my list. They know what to expect from me. And they buy from me because I offer only products I’ve tested myself, products that work well. They know that. And I help them when I can. They know me.

How many people will know you, if you get them through a system? At least at first?

Not many.

Forget systems. Do it yourself. It’s the only way.

No List Building Monkeys Here

Tagged as: advertising, autoresponders, testing, traffic