List Building Tips

List building is an activity you must engage in on a regular basis in order to build your online business, so you might as well do it in an effective way. I’ll be sharing several of my best list building tips with you here.

There are many ways to go about building a responsive list, and I would like to focus on the importance of building your list with your blog, a separate opt in page, and a teleseminar page. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these marketing strategies.

It is my strong belief that you absolutely must have a blog to get started online. By this I do not mean a free blog on one of the free blogging platforms, but a blog that you own and control on WordPress. You’ll need to get hosting first, and a good c-panel hosting account will allow you to set up as many sites as you would like to without any additional fees or cost. My preference is BlueHost or Hostgator for this purpose. You will then be able to install WordPress on your new blog in about five minutes and without any other expense. If you get stuck while doing this, Google for help or go to YouTube to search for videos showing you how to do it.

The next step is to add an optin box to this blog site where people can type in their name and email address in return for a report or something else you will be giving away for free. It must be enticing for your prospects to be willing to exchange their name and email address in order to receive it. Take a look at other sites where you have opted in and see what they offered that compelled you to join their list. You’ll need an autoresponder service for this, and I highly recommend that you get started with Aweber for only one dollar and then nineteen dollars a month after that.

Now that you have a WordPress blog site where you can post about your niche topic and have people opt in to join your list, you have done the very minimum to start your online business. It’s time to take it a step further by giving people more opportunities to find you and join your online community via your list.

This is accomplished by setting up a page that is devoted to only one thing – offering a different free giveaway when someone joins your list. This is known as a  squeeze page or optin page and it is a stand alone page on its own domain. I recommend doing this to attract different segments of people within your niche by age, gender, specific interests, and so forth. For example, in my business I have stand alone opt in pages that are directed at women, moms, men under thirty-five, and so on. The idea is to relate to the people who may benefit from what you have to offer.

The next way to build your list is to offer free teleseminars where you will discuss a topic and answer questions. This can also be on its own page, allowing visitors to sign up for your call and then access it right away. i did this for eighteen months straight, offering a free teleseminar every single week back in 2007 and 2008. I now do it twice a month and repurpose the call into a podcast (take a look here). This continues to build my list, but that’s an altogether different strategy.

Set up a dedicated page where you will be able to make the changes yourself. Describe in some detail what you call will be about, and ask people to opt in to receive the call details. Use some bullet points to explain what you will be sharing and why it will be a benefit for your prospects to sign up. When they opt in and join your list, take them to a page where you give the details of how they can join the live teleseminar you are hosting.

These strategies work extremely well in building your list while you are serving others by sharing your knowledge and expertise in your niche.