Most people have heard about such terms as list building, email marketing, auto responder and news letter to name a few. Each one of these terms is closely related if not exactly the same. There are lead building companies out there to outsource the email marketing services or you can do it yourself.
To begin to understand what those terms mean, let’s find out what the meaning of ‘the list’ is.
Basically, the list is a highly targeted collection of contact information from visitors that have ‘opted-in’ by signing up for a news letter, a free report or any other product or service. These individuals are now called subscribers. This type of list can be used repeatedly to add value to the subscribers by providing quality information on regular basis via emails as well as to promote various offers in turn profiting from the list.
Why would anyone give out their name and email address (subscribe) to any list? The answer is simple as in order to lure a website visitor to sign up to the list, a particular web page offers some free information. This could be in the way of a free report, e-book or other free content such is video training series and alike.
Now that the person has essentially added their email address to your mailing list and received their free gift, the website owner is able to email the list members with targeted information mixed in with the related promotional offers from the webpage owner or other vendors. Promoting other vendors products is called affiliate marketing. Although it is a subject of a different article, let’s just mention that affiliate marketing allows the promoter (the affiliate) to earn commissions of up to 75% of the amount of the sale.
Why build a list?
A targeted list allows you to communicate to your subscribers on ongoing basis. Since these individuals opted into your list, they are more likely to trust you as a valuable advisor on the particular subject matter. Needless to say, the communication is done via email and may include pure information, soft selling or hard selling.
The power of auto responders
As the list building owner, you may ask yourself: every time someone signs up for the list, am I going to have to email them a welcome letter and the link to the free content they signed up for? The answer is in auto responders.
You are able to set up an automated email series using auto responder service by preloading messages after the person opts-in. These are then spread out to be sent at whatever time interval you deep appropriate. There are many services out there and at the time of writing this article, AWeber was the most reliable service that your author is also using.
How do I get visitors to my website?
This is an age old question, how to drive internet traffic to you page. The subject is so broad and extensive, however we will just mention traffic building techniques and they are:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – series of methods and steps are needed to achieve the SEO goal of ranking on the first page of Google and other search engines.
- Pay-per-click – this is a way of paying Google, Bing or Yahoo! to send traffic to your website by sponsored adds.
- Creating videos – utilise websites such as YouTube to create videos and encourage viewers to visit your website and opt-in to your list.
- Writing blogs, create articles, to mention a few.
Whether you do email marketing services yourself or outsource it to one of many lead generation companies the money making formula is the same: traffic + subscribers + email series marketing = repeated profits.
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