I sent an email out to my list recently that said it was about time that someone came up with a workable solution to quickly and reliably building a list outside the internet marketing niche.

To an extent, this page will be in “thinking out loud” mode.

We’re all told “the money is in the list” and to an extent that’s true.

But there are lists and there are lists…

And different lists need to be treated in different ways.

Let’s start with the basics:

The best list to have is a buyers list

People who’ve bought your product and (hopefully) used it and therefore trust you and remember your name.

The price of the initial product will affect that relationship.

You’re more likely to remember the name of the person you spent $500 with than the one you spent $7 with. Especially if you buy $7 products on a regular basis whereas you only buy $500 products once or twice a year at most.

But let’s go along with the premise that there’s a link between the two of you.

The next thing you need to do is build up more trust with your list.

You can do that by regularly giving them information, maybe mixed in with sales pitches. That’s roughly what I do and, for me at least, the proportion between the two varies considerably depending on a large number of factors.

The frequency that you send out emails is a matter of personal preference – of the lists that I’m on and actually read on a regular basis (a handful of the total number I’m subscribed to), that varies from twice daily, daily, most days, a few times a week, a few times a month.

Some of them are almost pure sales pitches, others are information based with the occasional product mentioned, others vary between pure content and pure pitch. There’s no single formula for all of them.

So when you decide on a formula for sending out emails, choose your own path.

Go with what’s best for you.

And monitor results – unless your product lasts for years, someone who bought a few days ago is a much “hotter” prospect than someone who bought months or years ago.

Lots of people suggest building a freebie seeker list

OK.

They don’t quite put it that way but that’s what they mean.

The standard idea is that you create a squeeze page and giveaway product and then build trust with your freebie seekers.

Or you might use a reverse squeeze page method where the first few parts of the information are free and then the rest is free but only after someone has signed up to your list.

Either way, most of the people who sign up are in it for the free stuff.

And most “build your list” products work along these lines:

• Buy solo ads
• Send them to a squeeze page for a compelling free offer
• Test and tweak until you get the squeeze page profitable
• Monetise the thankyou page – because in reality that’s probably the only time they’ll pay attention to anything you send
• Add links to the thankyou page and welcome email that build up (clickbanking) so that you can get your email sent to other people’s lists
• Keep sending them offers at least once a day, maybe more often
• Scale up, always assuming you’ve got an offer that converts and a reliable source of lists

They don’t focus on building a squeeze page and driving traffic to it because that takes time. And they know that by the time even the first person lands on your squeeze page you’ll have moved on to a dozen new projects and will have forgotten all about it.

What they neglect to tell you:

• You’re all recycling the same leads
• Your “list” is getting bombarded with the same offers and often the same email swipes
• Your “list” is constantly being asked to join other lists – often several when they reach the thankyou page
• Your “list” has probably forgotten who you are within a few minutes or hours of joining. Always assuming they know your name in the first place – most squeeze pages don’t major on that and there’s a very high chance that your “list” won’t have a clue who you are
• You need to be constantly monitoring what you’re sending – yesterday’s offer may no longer exist. That’s often true in the heavily pushed CPA markets but can often happen in other markets as well. If you write your autoresponder series in advance then you could be sending people to links that no longer work. Been there, done that. No-one tells you – either because they’re not clicking the links in the first place or because they have more important things to do
• It can seem like you’re on a treadmill – constantly having to find new leads to replace the ones that have gone stale

What does this mean for list building?

It doesn’t mean that the sky is falling and that you shouldn’t build a list.

But it does mean that you have to stand out from the crowd.

And you have to monetise your list sooner rather than later.

Sean Mize suggests that if someone hasn’t bought anything for the last 30 days, they’re probably not going to buy for quite some time, if at all.

He monitors his list closely so that’s likely to be accurate.

My guess is that the time window for most sales is even shorter – maybe a week.

What you need to do is figure out what’s likely to be valuable for people.

That will largely depend on your market but my best guess (I’m aiming to be testing this soon) is that it should be something that they can use on a regular basis or can implement right now.

Our attention spans are short and getting shorter.

People want instant results – that applies to internet marketing, weight loss, meditation, near enough anything.

So if you’re going to create a giveaway product (and I still think that’s a reasonably good idea) then I think it should fall into one of those two categories:

• Something your list can use instantly and get results almost immediately
• Something valuable they can use on a daily basis

That rules out the general waffle and fluff that is in most ebooks.

And personally I think that shorter products work better.

For a squeeze page report, a short PDF – single digit page count to make it look less daunting – or a short video – maybe 5 to 10 minutes, long enough to make it useful, not so long that it gets boring or your subscribers haven’t got time to watch it.

That’s just my personal view and I may well be wrong and there will definitely be cases that “disprove” it.

It’s bound to happen as there are exceptions to every rule.

But there’s one more elephant in this increasingly crowded room.

Emails don’t always get through

Some emails end up in spam folders.

They’ve done that since the early days of the internet but it used to be that they were individual to you.

Then they moved to often draconian levels at services like AOL.

More recently, services like Gmail have been using a mixture of your own preferences and wisdom of the crowds.

So if enough people forget who you are and mark your messages as spam, that will apply to everyone who hasn’t explicitly whitelisted your emails. So basically everyone because when was the last time you (or any sane person you know) whitelisted an email address?

Only the really big company emails are almost guaranteed to get through.

So it could be that you’re better off building your list using YouTube or Facebook or LinkedIn or Google+ or Twitter.

Personally I don’t like the idea of my list being totally out of my control.

But I’m happy to mix-and-match so that people have the option.

And I’m happy that notifications from sites like YouTube are as close as guaranteed to make it to people’s inboxes and that even if they don’t there’s a red icon somewhere near the top of the screen that tells them something has happened. Not perfect but computers (and humans) aren’t perfect so it will have to do.

Where next?

I think it’s time for an experiment.

I’m going to pick a non-internet marketing niche – most likely self help – and do what I can to get subscribers for free.

• No solo ads – because they are like hen’s teeth outside the IM industry
• No clickbanking (I’ll send a click to your list and you send one to me)
• No likes or other ways to kind-of get subscribers
• No paid for options – partly because I’m a cheapskate in that respect, partly because I suspect the cost per click let alone the cost per new subscriber would be high. It’s rare to see an ad in Google that is just aiming to get a click unless it’s from a very large company with money to burn. So my guess is that it doesn’t much pay anyway

I’m going to do my best to document it without giving too many of the details away otherwise that will skew the figures. I’ve got plenty of people on some of my lists who only signed up to find out what I send out as a result of joining a case study.

I’m not sure how I’ll document it believably yet – forged figures are far too easy to produce and whilst I’m not aiming on cheating there’s always the chance of people claiming that’s happened.

A bit of a conundrum but it should be fun.

And despite my worries about skewing the results, I should be able to filter out at least signups from the relatively small group of people in my weekly tutor group so they’ll be ahead of the curve whether or not I release details to a bigger audience.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you doing your own version of this experiment.

That’s always a good idea anyway rather than sitting on the side lines and thinking “I wish I’d done that”.

Leave a comment or drop me a message if you’d like to know a bit more.