One thing that should always be a focus of you marketing campaign is developing long term visitors and customers by creating an email marketing campaign.
I have been absent from this blog for about a bit because I have been working on a project that I have kept secret until the day it was finished. I didn’t want anybody to see a half finished product, so this will be the first time that I associate my new site with myself. I am giving out a free ebook called the “Fast Cash Blueprint” which I am using as my lure to feed a double opt-in mailing list. By doing so I can accomplish multiple goals:
- Create a long term relationship
- Legally send out highly targeted emails to a responsive market.
- Allow myself more flexibility as I can always test my emails to find the most effective use of affiliate links.
- Give myself a great advertising venue for premium advertisers as well as to help me launch my book next January.
- Share information with others on how to make money, I wouldn’t create a product that doesn’t help my readers.
The process is really quite simple to start a mailing list, you will need 3 basic ingredients: Traffic, a Landing Page, and an Autoresponder. Once you have these three, you just need to figure out what emails will suit your list the best. Unfortunately, this is a bit of an over simplification because as you know, getting targeted traffic is not a simple process. Here’s how to accomplish each of the parts of making a mailing list.
Traffic, this is the most important part of any web property. Everyone has their own ways to drive traffic to their websites so I am not going to list all of the options, but I will say that I do all of mine via article marketing. You will need some kind of incentive to make people want to join your mailing list. My hook is a 23 page ebook that not only teaches people how to make money, but it also has a “giveaway” license so that they can give it to their readers as well. If you would like, you could start out by using my book as a hook, you just can’t modify any of the content (including my name/links).
A landing page is probably the second easiest step in the process, but at the same time it is incredibly important. Unless your landing page makes people want to sign up for your mailing list, your efforts will be for nothing. I would suggest hiring a graphic designer for this to achieve a maximum effect. Take a peek at my new landing page: Work From Home Methods, it took me 1 hour to add the content into the template and use free graphics to spice it up a little bit. As for the price of the graphics and the template, I paid $60 total. I think for an hour of work and $60 that is a pretty nice looking site.
The last thing you will need is an autoresponder, for which I could not recommend more Aweber. Their support is absolutely stellar, I have talked to them about various aspects of my mailing list for the past two weeks and they are true professionals. The autoresponder allows you to create opt-in forms easily while allowing you to send emails without getting blocked by ISPs, and therefore providing extra legitimacy and legal protection. This is the easiest of the three steps in my opinion, the setup for my mailing list was effortless. I would highly suggest using Aweber, they are the best autoresponder company I have worked with to date.
To check out my newest website, visit Work From Home Methods.
Best of luck in setting up your own mailing list. This is one of the most important ways to turn your internet marketing efforts into a full time income, a targeted double opt-in list with a few thousand subscribers can sell advertisements at $1,000+ per email blast. If you are looking for an affiliate network that has a lot of good email campaigns I am near exclusively using NeverBlue for my mailing list.
Great article, highly informative and well written. I think the most important thing to remember when developing a mailing list to make sure you are building relationships with serious and long term clients. I also think that developing a campaign that is of high quality and very well designed and geared for customer retention is greatly important.