When you’ve finished creating your home business website and decided which products you’re going to promote your next focus, for the long term, should be building your list. As we’ve all heard from every Internet marketer we’ve met on the web “the money is in the list”, and the reason they keep saying it is because it’s so true.
Without a targeted email list to send your promotions to you’re fighting a losing battle and it will only be a matter of time until you get frustrated and throw in the towel. For this reason, and a few others I won’t go into at this stage, I can’t stress enough the importance of building your list right from the beginning of your online career.
Here are 5 list building strategies you can employ right from the start to get the foundation of your home business established:
1. Enroll in some of the top forums and directories which are directly related to your home business theme. contribute quality content to these forums on a regular basis without directly promoting your products and once you have gained the other member’s confidence they will begin to check out your merchandise and your home business website.
Always remember building trust with your potential customers and maintaining your relationships with your current clients is the corner stone of any successful enterprise. The best way to create this trust and confidence is to deliver quality content by going out of your way to help people while expecting nothing in return. By the way, don’t forget to include your home page link in your signature file for all your forum posts.
2. Another very effective list building strategy is to constantly add quality content to your home business website. Another old Internet marketing adage which still rings true to this day is “content drives traffic”, and this is another statement in which I firmly believe. This content can take many forms including articles, videos, audios, and PDF reports.
After adding this information to your website be sure to distribute it around the web via the many different free directories online. This is a great way to create back links to your website which will make the rounds on the Internet for a long time to come thereby continually bringing free targeted traffic and subscribers to your home page.
3. Participating in joint venture giveaways is another very effective list building technique. Partner with other home business owners or Internet marketers on the web and create an Internet marketing merchandise giveaway. This is a great way to collect targeted contact information as long as your remember to give your subscribers high quality products. People online are very discriminating and they can distinguish quality from crap. They won’t give up their email addresses for nothing less than the best merchandise.
4. A paid method for attracting list members which will also increase your subscribers is emailing solo ads. Internet marketers, with sizeable lists, will allow you to send an email advertisement to their members for a fee. However you should research carefully before accepting an offer to send an ad to make sure it’s a high profile Internet marketer with a quality list.
5. Because continually adding quality content is so important you can take some of the pressure off by reinventing some of your current information. For example, you can take your articles and convert them to video or audio format and add these files to your website and then distribute them throughout the Internet via the many free directories we spoke about earlier.
You could also compile your finished editorials and turn them into an e-book. You can then offer your book for sale or give it away to people who subscribe to your list as an enticement to sign up.
By consistently using these different list building techniques you will slowly but surely begin to build a very responsive email list which you can eventually depend on for a very lucrative income from your home based online business.