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.

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.

Giving away an ebook works great for three main reasons, the most important of which is that it can be used to gain opt-in subscribers.  The next most important is that it can also be used as a tool to gain a few affiliate sales, when I write an ebook I typically inject in a few affiliate links so I can make a couple bucks off it.  Lastly, I use ebooks as a way to show others that I am an authority within my own niche, which happens to be internet marketing (probably the best niche to write ebooks for).  Due to this combination of factors, writing ebooks is extremely profitable especially when done correctly.

So why exactly do I need to give away an ebook in order to see these benefits?  Well, you don’t necessarily, I have my own ClickBank ebook (you can see the advertisement for “The Seven Day Millionaire” to your right), but that doesn’t stop me from writing less in-depth ebooks to give out as well.  The main reason for giving it away is quite simply because you will make more money as a result of people reading your content then you would if you were to sell your product.  When I write a 10 page ebook, I am mostly trying to get people to join an automated follow-up series of emails with an occassional broadcast tossed in.

If you read my recent post about how “the money is in the list” you would be aware that there is a great deal

of money to be made by gaining opt-in subscribers through an autoresponder such as Aweber.  I have done it in the past with other websites, and the reason why I have decided to write this post is that I am at it again.  This time I have started writing an ebook on creating a blog, from the web hosting aspects to gaining traffic and links and monetizing it correctly.  The tentative title is “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”, for which I spent a couple minutes throwing together a quick image in Photoshop (I’m not an artist, but it works well enough for me).  I am hoping to finish writing it within 2 weeks and make it easily accessible from this website.

Actually creating an ebook is quite easy (excluding the content), I would recommend downloading Open Office and simply writing out your content in their equivalent to Microsoft Word.  In my opinion, Open Office Writer is a superior product to Word, and another great thing about it is that it allows you to convert your documents into a .PDF format with a click of a button, rather than paying a couple hundred dollars to do so with Adobe Professional.  Another Adobe product, Photoshop, is more or less essential for creating the graphics unless you want to pay out a good deal of money to a designer or for over priced software.  A little graphics skills will allow you to make a decent looking ebook relatively quickly.

As for the format of the ebook, I typically follow the format below:

• Title
• License (in which I allow people to redistribute my book, but not to modify it)
• Table of Contents
• Content
• Resource Section (important as this is how you make money off affiliate links)

Once you take these steps, simply stick your new ebook up on a couple forums in your signatures, threads, etc. as well as putting it prominently on your blog and you are all set to make money while increasing your reputation.  Go get them you esteemed author, you!