List Building for Beginners - Step 1 Laying the Foundation

If you're new to internet maybe you haven't come across the phrase "the money is in the list" yet. You will soon enough but what does it mean? Well quite simply it is estimated that for every subscriber you get to your list. If you market to them correctly, you can generate $1.00 per month. If you have 10,000 subscribers that's $10,000 per month.

Let's not pretend that this is a cake walk though. List building doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen without a lot of hard work.

It has been said that internet marketing is easy and by one definition it is. Get someone to your site or blog, tell them about a product they'll like. They buy it and you get paid.

However, making that happen requires a high degree of knowledge, understanding, skill, focus, hard work and a solid foundation on which to build your online business.

List Building for Beginners - Staying Power

Where does that foundation start - with list building? No, before you can think about building a list you need to identify a niche. That part of the market that you intend to serve. So we start with market research (yawn - my least favorite thing to do). Under no circumstances can it be ignored though.

The market must have potential and ideally that potential should deliver short term as well as long term benefits. By this I mean people want to buy things now (not necessarily from you) and they will buy more of the same or similar things in the future. You just need to get your share. You do not want to build a list of one time purchasers.

List Building for Beginners - Spending Power

You want to target a market where money is being spent. As I write this article I notice that Coach handbags and purses are incredibly popular. I learned this by visiting eBay Pulse. Another great resource is shopping.com which has a top searches page. You can also check out places like internet forums.

List Building for Beginners - Pulling Power

Pulling Power refers to the messages you will send to your list subscribers. I know we haven't got to the list yet but it is an essential part of the market research process. It's all well and good getting people on your list but if you've got nothing to follow through with you'll be losing a lot of sales. There is a hot selling product right in the tattoo market. I was initially quite excited about this as it was very innovative. I didn't pursue because I couldn't think of, or identify, any back end promotions from which to generate additional sales.

Once you have identified a niche that you like and established that it has staying power and spending power you need to work out how to communicate effectively. The best way to do this is to find a forum about your niche and check out the questions being asked. If there is an FAQ section even better. Identify say 10 questions and you can use these to form the basis of your follow up marketing messages.

With this work done you are now well positioned to move our list building project forward to the next stage.

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