What’s Your Ex­cuse For Still Not Hav­ing A List?

From Willie Craw­ford.

One of the ex­cuses we hear most of­ten from strug­gling on­line mar­keters is that they don’t make more sales be­cause they don’t have a list. We even hear that ex­cuse from mar­keters who have been on­line three, or even five years.

My ques­tion to them is al­ways, „What are you wait­ing for?” „Why not start a mas­sive list-build­ing ef­fort today?”

When I look at how I built my data­base, I used only a few pri­mary meth­ods. Here are the most ef­fec­tive ones that I used:

1) On many of my con­tent web­sites, in many niches, I sim­ply have an opt-in form in a promi­nent lo­ca­tion on prac­ti­cally every page. That opt-in form is usu­ally in the up­per right cor­ner of the page. I typ­i­cally of­fer the po­ten­tial sub­scribers a gift as an en­tice­ment to join my list -- per­haps a PDF spe­cial re­port or an au­dio recording.

I also as­sure the po­ten­tial sub­scriber that I will pro­tect their data and only send them ap­pro­pri­ate email. I also tell them that there is a handy one-click link in every email that I send that makes it su­per easy for them to re­move them­selves from my list if they ever get tired of my communications. 

This has worked beau­ti­fully for me for more than a dozen year, and steadily grows my lists. 

2) I have nu­mer­ous af­fil­i­ate pro­grams. Many of these af­fil­i­ate pro­grams sell in­ex­pen­sive prod­ucts and pay the af­fil­i­ates 100% com­mis­sion on the front end prod­uct. The real pur­pose of those af­fil­i­ate pro­grams is to build a list of proven buy­ers in­ter­ested in a spe­cific topic. The com­mis­sions in­cen­tivize oth­ers to go out and send me traf­fic AND build my lists. 

I most of­ten use a script called Rapid Ac­tion Prof­its, which al­lows me to pay af­fil­i­ate in­stantly, de­posit­ing the pay­ments di­rectly into their Pay­Pal ac­counts. This is so pow­er­ful be­cause af­fil­i­ates of­ten need the funds TODAY, and don’t want to wait 30 - 60 days for their com­mis­sions. When they can sell one of my in­ex­pen­sive prod­ucts, that are al­most im­pulse buys for their cus­tomers, and get those funds in­stantly, they trip over them­selves send­ing me cus­tomer… and build­ing my lists.

3) I of­ten par­tic­i­pate in qual­ity list-build­ing give­aways. In these events, nu­mer­ous mar­keters ban to­gether to drive traf­fic to a cen­tral­ize web­site where gifts from each of the mar­keters are listed. In or­der to down­load a spe­cific gift, the web­site vis­i­tor must typ­i­cally visit the site of the mar­keter of­fer­ing the gift and join his list.

If you of­fer truly use­ful gifts, thou­sands of new sub­scribers can some­times be gained from just one of these free give­aways. I usu­ally of­fer PDF ebooks (tran­scripts from in­ter­views that I con­duct), MP3’s or in­ex­pen­sive but use­ful software.

I of­ten an­nounce free give­aways that are look­ing for con­trib­u­tors on my blog, and to my Twit­ter followers.

4) Soft­ware that dis­plays your sub­scribe box on oth­er’s site, and au­to­mat­i­cally builds your list for you. There is soft­ware that al­lows you to par­tic­i­pate in a co­op­er­a­tive ef­fort, where part­ners dis­play the boxes on each oth­ers’ web­pages. This is a good way to share the wealth since your web­site vis­i­tors are join­ing oth­ers’ lists any­way. You may as well send your traf­fic to some­one who is reciprocating.

There is also newer soft­ware that al­lows you to dis­play your sub­scribe box su­per­im­posed on af­fil­i­ate web­sites, so­cial net­work­ing sites, etc. You still tell your vis­i­tors to go to sites such as YouTube, Click­bank, Ama­zon or Ebay, but the soft­ware shows them a sub­scribe box and asks them to join your list BEFORE do­ing any­thing else. This is very pow­er­ful, and is largely hands free.

For ex­am­ple, I can men­tion af­fil­i­ate sites, or per­haps my pro­file page on one of the so­cial net­work­ing sites, and build a list in the process of just spread­ing the word.

With so many easy ways to grow your list, there re­ally is no ex­cuse for any­one who’s been on­line for more than a few months not to be ag­gres­sively build­ing a list. You do need that list to in­ex­pen­sively spread the word about your business.

Now that you see how REALLY sim­ple and easy it is, get started build­ing your list today! 

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.