What 3 Things I Need to Start a Successful List Building Business?: The first step towards your huge list is going to be signing up to a few essential services and getting a few tools. You can’t build and manage a list all on your lonesome, so read on and we’ll look at some of the things you’ll need to get this ball rolling. Consider this a little bit like the ingredients for the recipe we’re about to make.
1. Autoresponder
The first and most important thing you will need to build and manage your mailing list is an autoresponder. An autoresponder is basically a tool that lets you send e-mails out to large groups of people, that stores your addresses and that lets you easily manage them. Autoresponders also allow you to easily build your own opt-in forms which are the little forms you’ll place on your site for people to join up.
These are necessary for a few different reasons. For starters, a professional looking opt-in form will make your mailing list seem more professional. This in turn will mean that people are more likely to be interested in signing up and it will mean that they’ll expect higher quality. Make the form yourself and you risk making it look a little like an amateurish job – so use a professional tool instead.
Moreover though, it’s simply impossible to manage a huge mailing list without one of these tools. When you run a mailing list, you need to protect yourself against spam, you need to make sure that people confirm their interest in signing up and you need to give people the opportunity to unsubscribe. You’ll also probably want to send out a welcome message to all your new members.
With an autoresponder all this is made much easier. Autoresponders will handle all these different jobs automatically, meaning that you don’t have to manually add and remove people from your list or manually welcome new members. If you were to at some point have a mailing list of hundreds of thousands of members, you’d end up spending all day adding and removing people from your list – and that’s why you need an autoresponder to do it for you.
Choosing Your Autoresponder
When it comes to signing up for an autoresponder, you have a number of different options. The big three names here though are MailChimp, Aweber and GetResponse. Each varies slightly in terms of the number of e-mails you can keep on the list and for what price.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply comparing three prices as the pricing structure for each one gets a little complicated. Instead then, refer to the grid below and you can see which ones offer the best rates under different conditions.
MailChimp http:/mailchimp.com
| Subscribers | Monthly Fee |
| 500 | $10 |
| 1,000 | $15 |
| 10,000 | $75 |
| 20,000 | $150 |
| 30,000 | $215 |
| 40,000 | $240 |
| 50,000 | $240 |
AWeber http://www.aweber.com
| Subscription Plan | Fee |
| Monthly | $19 |
| Quarterly | $49 |
| Yearly | $194 |
This is then on top of the following monthly fee:
| Subscribers | Additional Monthly Fee |
| < 500 | N/A |
| 501-2,500 | $10 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $30 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $50 |
| 10,001-25,000 | $130 |
| 25,001+ | Not Listed |
GetResponse http://www.getresponse.com/
| Subscribers | Monthly Fee |
| 1,000 | $15 |
| 2,500 | $25 |
| 5,000 | $45 |
| 10,000 | $65 |
| 25,000 | $145 |
| 50,000 | $250 |
| 100,000 | $450 |
The key takeaway here though, is that all three of these services are actually very good. Any of them will be perfectly sufficient for helping you to collect e-mails and send out responses. While you might feel a little loathe to pay this money up front, bear in mind that it will more than pay for itself. If you make just a single sale in your first month, then this cost will be mitigated. Remember: you have to spend to accumulate!
2. Domain Names and Web Hosting
Domain names and web hosting aren’t actually necessary. In theory you can get all your new subscribers directly through advertising and social media. That said though, it’s definitely advisable that you get web hosting
and a domain name in order to get more conversions and to make your mailing list seem that much more professional.
Of course the vast majority of people reading this will know precisely what this means and what the usefulness of domain names and web hosting is… but just in case you’re scratching your head: the domain name is the web address you will use (www.subscribetomymailinglistlpease.com), whereas the web hosting means you’ll have space on the web in order to store files. You need web hosting to have a website in other words and then you’ll need a domain name as a means for people to locate and view those files.
Most hosting packages also provide domain names and getting both at the same time will help you to keep things simple and to save money.
There are thousands of different hosting services out there with different strengths and weaknesses in each case. The one that I’m going to recommend for the purposes of this book is BlueHost. BlueHost is a large and well-known hosting provider with reasonable rates and a good quality service. It also comes packed with useful features. WordPress is very easy to install (WordPress is a tool that helps you build and edit websites) while you’ll also get a control panel with easy access to a file manager, e-mail client and more.
Of course if you’d rather shop around that’s fine too. Just make sure to do your research to avoid getting a website that’s plagued with down-time or that isn’t easy to set up and use.
Start a Successful List Building Business
When choosing your domain name, you should try to pick something unique, memorable and descriptive. If you have a company and a brand already then this might be easy, otherwise you will have to come up with something that speaks to what your site is about and that helps you to ‘rank’ on Google.
In other words, don’t call yourself ‘www.oklydokleyaya11782.biz’ because no one will remember it and it won’t come up when people search for the products you’re selling. Companies that call themselves things like ‘Frogo’ will have huge marketing campaigns that they use in order to build recognition for that name. Unless you have millions to pour into marketing to make yourself a household name, then you won’t have the same luxury. Instead then, come up with something that’s more on-the-nose while still being catchy. If you sell ebooks, then ‘Iwantebooksnow’ is more along the right lines. If you have a local business, then try to get the area name in your URL.
When you get your domain name and your webhost account, you’re looking at paying probably $10-$20 a month. On top of your fee for an autoresponder that’s about $40-50. Unless you choose to use advertising (which we’ll get to later, this is going to be your only overhead. If you can sell one or two products then, you will breakeven.
I recommend BlueHost (http://www.bluehost.com) to host your website and NameCheap (http://namecheap.com) for domain names.
3. Mindset!
Finally, you’re going to need to approach this process with the right mind-set. That means you need to be willing to put in the hard-graft and it means you need to be able to work for no rewards for a while. If you’re expecting to get rich overnight then you may as well stop
reading right now.
Start a Successful List Building Business
Getting rich overnight is possible but it’s extremely
rare and it’s almost entirely down to luck. All those big affiliate marketers you see on the web? They likely worked for years before getting to where they are now. This is a learning process and it’s a process of steadily building momentum and followers.
At the same time though, know that it can be done.
The problem that a lot of people have when trying to make money online with any kind of strategy is that they think it can’t be done – or they doubt it can be in their hearts. Thus, they don’t want to spend too much time or effort on it in case they fail. They attack their marketing and their strategy half-heartedly and they hold back from investing hours of their time. This then becomes a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ whereby they of course don’t succeed because they haven’t given it their all.
If you want to make a full-time career from making money online, then you need to treat it like a full-time career. That means investing lots of time and energy and really it means working for at least 8 hours a day. If you can’t do that, then you might as well not try at all.
This is why this ebook is set out the way it is. This strategy is for one month only – so if you can commit to give it your all for that one month only, you’ll get to see with your own eyes the kind of results it can yield. And even if it doesn’t work – you’ve only given up a month of your time.
