Small Internet Business

Building An Email List – Maybe It Isn’t So Hard After All

The money’s in the list.

The money’s in the list.

We heard that over and over again from the big internet marketers when we first started. It makes sense to me now why everyone says having an email opt-in list is so important. That list of repeat customers and prospective customers represents a long-term asset, making your business less dependent on search engine rankings, advertising costs, etc. Of course, after you have a list, it’s free (or very, very cheap) to market to those people too.

Great. We don’t have an email list but I want one (it’s one of our goals for 2008). So how do I build one?

How We Started Our Opt-In List

Brian Clark at CopyBlogger wrote how he valued gaining subscribers more than any other metric for his blog. He put his subscription information in prime real estate to do that.

Okay, I thought. Maybe we should begin by sticking a subscription form in a hot spot on one of our niche sites, then I’ll read more about list building, think of some incentives to offer, and maybe a few people will sign up. Well, it took a lot less than that.

After putting the form in one of the best advertising locations, people just starting joining. It happened almost as soon as we added it (2 out of the 124 visitors that day) and more people keep joining. Crazy, man, crazy. We weren’t quite ready for this. I hadn’t even signed up to test the stupid thing yet (my email address is #3 in the list). Suddenly email list building doesn’t seem quite so scary anymore (although we’re still noobs).

How Do You Email Market Anyway?

Our opt-in list for that niche site is teeny tiny but it’s time to start learning how to do email marketing. It wouldn’t surprise me if everyone opts out once we started sending them stuff based on what we know right now 🙂

I started paying a lot more attention to newsletters I receive. Yaro Starak’s internet marketing newsletter is, in my opinion, one of the best. My first list isn’t in the internet marketing niche but I’m probably going to take a lot of lessons from him. He does a great job of connecting with his readers and providing valuable information. That’s definitely something I want to duplicate.

Back To The Basics

All of this sort of takes us back to the roots of a good website. People want more when you provide a useful service or good content. You’ll almost naturally gain subscribers if you make it easy for them. Hmm, it’s all about content and traffic again. I guess there really aren’t many secrets.

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