Buildine A Massive E-mail List
by Craig Perrine
Craig
Perrine is known as the List Profit Coach for his track record of
helping clients huge, highly responsive lists – totaling over
7 million subscribers to date. Craig speaks at exclusive seminars
about his List Profit Secrets and email copywriting. He offers a
free e-course on how to quickly and easily build a list.
How
to Build your list…quickly and easily.
When I say build a list, I mean gathering people who are high quality
prospects for what you are selling and getting their permission
to email them. Why would they give you permission to email them?
If you followed the earlier steps by carefully identifying your
target market and what they want, here is where that effort pays
off.
Now that you can offer them a credible solution that eliminates
the obstacles in their way and helps them get what they want, you
will have no problem getting people on your list. Your solution
to their problems is your bait that will attract subscribers like
bees to honey.
That said, if you have what they want…you’re in good
shape to select ways to reach out and start getting the word out
about your bait. There are basically two different ways to do this,
you can build your list on your own by directly adding subscribers
or you can find other people who already have lists and finding
ways to get access to them in what are called Joint Ventures.
Let’s talk about how you can build your list first.
1) Write
articles. Even if you are not a writer, you can use informative
articles to attract very positive attention to yourself and get
subscribers to your list. Whatever niche you re in, you will take
the information on what is keeping your prospects from getting what
they want and write articles about solutions to their problems.
You’ll have no problem finding ezines and websites that will
publish your articles because you are addressing issues that are
truly important to your target market. All you have to do to find
ezines in your niche is type in your niche and the word ezines into
google. For example, type in “nutrition” and “ezines” and you should get a lot of ideas for where to publish your articles.
Once published, your article should paint a favorable picture of
you and your company, even if indirectly, so that your readers will
want more information. The beauty of this is that you can offer
more information at your website at the end of your article and
that is a very natural way to get people to visit your site, which
of course will ask them for their name and email address in exchange
for the additional information. Presto, you have a new subscriber.
If you are not comfortable writing articles, you can simply list
out the number of problems facing your target market and how your
products solve those problems. Then hire writers on www.elance.com
or locally to write your articles for you. You can also record yourself
talking about your product and how it solves these problems as if
you were talking to a prospect and have that recording transcribed
at www.idictate.com and get articles that way.
2) Write an ebook. Once you have enough articles, you’ll probably
find you can put them together to create an ebook or a report that
you can either sell, or even better, offer to your niche market
for free to get publicity. Ebooks have perceived value and establish
you as an author. If your ebook is all about solving the problems
that keep your prospects from getting what they want, they will
want to get a copy and will likely share copies with their friends.
Your ebook of course should offer reasons throughout to visit your
websites or talk about products that you offer and what their benefits
are. In reality, your ebook will act as a long sales letter for
your business while it is informing your readers about how to solve
their problems.
In a minute we’ll get into an even more powerful way to use
your ebook to build your list.
3) Write an ecourse. Instead of combining your articles into an
ebook, you can break them up into email ‘lessons’ that
you can send new subscribers who visit your website. If you were
interested in how to get more subscribers and build a list and I
told you there was a FREE ecourse available at http://www.listprofitsecrets.com/ecourse.htm
, you’d want to go subscribe.
I would then send you a 5-7 part ecourse that you would get every
few days in your Inbox and it would deliver on my promise to tell
you how to build a list.
Once you had completed the ecourse, I would stay in touch as long
as you are a subscriber with the latest information on list building
and how to make money with email marketing.
Those are all strategies you can use to go out and build up a list
of subscribers. Once you have an ebook or some articles or an ecourse
to offer your target market, you can use some even more powerful
ways to Joint Venture (JV) with people who have lists to reach a
large number of prospects very quickly.
Other people who
have lists, even competitors, are always looking for more information
to offer their lists. Let’s say you have an ebook or ecourse
on a powerful new technique for list building.
If you were to contact me there are several ways that we could work
together that would help me give something of value to my list and
at the same time add targeted subscribers to your list.
Of course, you have to lay the groundwork for doing JV’s by
creating the ebook or ecourse, but in exchange you have access to
other people’s lists and can grow your list very quickly.
With a little bit of capital, you can use paid advertising to buy
subscribers. Through a method called ‘coregistration’
you can buy subscribers who request information from you in ads
you place on websites that already have traffic. Typically you would
offer a free subscription to your ezine or newsletter which would
be offered to visitors on the websites you advertise on and you’d
pay anywhere from .05 to 1.00 or more per subscriber.
The advantage there is that you can determine how many subscribers
you will get and how much it will cost you. It is important to make
sure that the subscribers you are buying are targeted to what you
offer and that you get proof that they ‘opted in’ to
receive your newsletter. Typically, the time and date they requested
your ezine and their computer’s IP address are included with
the name and email data that you get with each subscriber.
You can literally get hundreds or thousands of subscribers for a
relatively small cost. Even more important, because you pay for
each subscriber you are not renting a coregistration list, which
means you can mail to them on an ongoing basis to build a relationship.
Another advanced strategy that allows you to leverage vast resources
is to use the power of the offline and online media to spread the
word about what you have to offer. If your ebook has news value
and you take the time to learn how to do a press release, the radio,
magazine, and TV media can get you more subscribers than you could
possibly pay for in a short period of time. This strategy alone
could occupy an entire chapter, but I want to open your mind to
the possibility.
And of course, you should also consider the vast world of offline
marketing to drive targeted traffic to your list. You can offer
the same ebooks and ecourses through ads in magazines, direct mail
to rented lists and articles in targeted publications and get new
subscribers when they give their name and email address at your
website. Don’t overlook the offline market because it is a
lot bigger and has a vast array of choices for all budgets. The
main objective is to build your list so you can follow up with them
by email and that is what we are going to talk about next…profiting
from the follow up.
