One of the things I regret not doing sooner in my internet marketing career is list building.

I’d read about it and always procrastinated on it.

But eventually the penny dropped.

Lists are the way to get traffic and sales almost “on demand”.

The principle of list building is easy:

Entice people to give up at least their email address and then send them emails on a regular basis. Normally using an autoresponder service.

Of course, like most things, the devil is in the detail.

Most people get way too many emails to deal with them all. Which means that they’re not easily persuaded to give up their email address to just anyone.

So that’s the first hurdle of building a list:

Coming up with an offer that is enticing enough to persuade people that they want to allow you to have their email address.

So you need to come up with some kind of offer.

There are (at least!) two schools of thought on this. And there’s no single “correct” answer.

The first – and most common – option is to offer something free. That’s what I generally use to get people onto my lists – for instance, on this site I’m offering a free audio and mindmap here. But it could easily have been a PDF report or a video or a combination of different things.

The other option is to create a low priced product and only put buyers onto your list. I’m experimenting with that personally in other areas but it’s too early to tell whether this type of smaller but more targeted list will be better or not.

Once you’ve got people on your list the next trick is to keep them on it. And ideally reading at least some of the emails you send out.

Which means keeping your emails interesting and providing enough information to make them useful without giving away so much information that you’re not needed.

A fine line indeed!

I’m generally preferring emails where I give a fair amount of information – certainly enough for you to act on – and then putting a link in the P.S. if there’s more information I’d  like to sell.

If you’d like a fantastic audio course on list building then check out this one. It’s stupidly cheap – it was originally sold for almost $200 – and a couple of the figures are out of date (for instance, the minimum number of words allowed by EzineArticles) but the information is rock solid.