The money is in the list.

Building a mailing list is vital to any online business, everyone is doing it! You can email all your readers at any given time about anything you like.

Every time I do a new article on my blog, I email my list about it, sending thousands of people instantly to the page. Getting traffic to your website is important, what’s just as important is making sure they keep coming back, time after time. That is why I build a list!

Another bonus of building a mailing list is that you can do affiliate marketing. Say your using a great product like Popup Domination, you want to make some extra money, you email your mailing list subscribers about Popup Domination using an affiliate link. Anyone who clicks that link and buys, you will receive a commission. I do this every month and it’s probably the closest thing to money growing on trees. Here’s why:

Sending an email to your list about a product takes literally minutes. The reward is always thousands of dollars for me. If I did it 4 times in a month which isn’t much at all, that’s likely to be at least an additional $10,000 in revenue that month! Hopefully by now your excited about the idea of building a list.

Before We Start

Those who already do email marketing probably don’t need to read this bit.

Before you can start collecting emails, you need to firstly decide on how your going to collect them. There are a lot of options out there and it’s hard to decide whats the best. I’ve used a lot of different company’s and still currently use Aweber, iContact and ConstantContact.

When it comes to building your list I recommend you grab yourself an Aweber account. Aweber is an autoresponder service which allows you to collect emails, email those said people and a whole load of other options including:

• Automatically follow up with emails in a sequence. For example, day1, they receive a free ebook. Day2, they receive a email about who you are and why they should listen to you, and so on…
• Those people you email that don’t open your email, you can email those people a second time to increase the chances of getting people to click your website URL and visit your site.
• You can build as many lists as you like, for as many different websites as you like. There is no reason to have one big list.

Here are my favorite 5 ways of building a mailing list online.

1. Javascript Lightbox – Using Popup Domination

A year ago I launched a product calling Popup Domination. It works with any website and has 8 really great designs. What it does is add a little box in front of your website when someone visits your page. It looks just like the image below. You give your readers the option to sign up for your free gift and/or newsletter. This is by far the highest converting method for bloggers to build their list. Test it out and if it doesn’t do exactly that, you have 60 days to ask for a refund.

Tip: I suggest showing it 2 seconds after page load, on the second page they visit. This way if they are coming from your mailing list to check out a recent post, they won’t be hit by it every time.

2. Squeeze Pages – Created With OptimizePress

Squeeze pages are vitally important to anyone who wants to build a list! The majority of people give away something to entice people into signing up for their email list. Often that free gift is an eBook and because it’s free, a lot of people will read it. Those who love it, will want to mention it to their friends, on their Twitter/Facebook and even on their website. The problem with all other traditional email marketing tactics such as a sidebar optin or a popup, is that their is no specific place to send people to sign up for your newsletter. You would have to say, “Go to this website and look on the sidebar somewhere for somewhere to sign up for something”. It’s not very convenient. That’s when a squeeze page becomes very handy.

Using Optimizepress, you can build a page in WordPress that will be all about your free gift and it will have an optin box. This page is designed to convert because of the great designs that come with Optimizepress. I often link to this page in articles and say, “Loved this post? Then your love this free eBook I wrote”. Definitely worth doing!

3. Sidebar Optin Box

Although this tactic isn’t anywhere near as powerful as the above two, it’s still important. Sometimes people will see your popup but at the time they may not know what your site is about and if they really want to subscribe. They decide to say no to your free gift and later decide, “oh no, I really wanted to sign up for that”. This is why you have a box on your website sidebar, to offer your newsletter to those who didn’t take it the first time.

4. Refer a Friend – Using List Eruption

For those who offer a free eBook for those who sign up to your list, I recommend you also use this tool. What it does is once a reader subscribes to your mailing list, it will take you to a new page. On that page, you will get a special website URL which will work as an affiliate link. Subscribers use that link to promote to their friends and readers and get them to sign up for your course. It tracks how many subscribe and once they get 5 friends to subscribe, it automatically gives that person access to a new free gift. This is a great way to get your email list to go viral! Click here to check out List Eruption!

5. Launch Your Own Product

One of the best ways to build a list is to sell a product online. When I started Popup Domination, I had perhaps 20,000 subscribing to my list and things were going very well. But a year on, I have a much better list, a customer list. A customer list is a list of your customers email address. This type of list is worth a lot more money than a normal list because subscribers have proven they are prepared to make a purchase on the internet. Now when you email a promotion to a list like this, it’s going to make you a lot more money, in some cases I’ve seen it convert over ten times higher!

This is so powerful that I have friends who actually make products just so that they can sell them cheap and use it as a way to build a list!

Now That You Have a List

When I first started blogging, I built a list.. for what it seemed, no reason what so ever.

I didn’t email my list for months, I simply did it because I saw other bloggers doing it and it looked “professional”. I was also 16 at the time. The first time I emailed my list, I saw quite a noticeable increase in traffic for that day! The more I emailed them, the more traffic my site got and in result, the more money my site made.

Make sure your regularly emailing your list, a minimum of once a week, if you don’t update your subscribers often, they will look else where for content!

Good luck! If you have any email marketing related questions, leave them in the comments below!