List Building

A responsive list is the best thing since sliced bread. Apart from a magic money button, which clearly doesn’t exist, you should build a list and start right NOW!

Why? Well if you are promoting product XYZ then its just the same cost in time and cash to get a visitor and send them to an optin page as it is to send them to a product.  But, if they don’t buy first time, once you have the email you can try again and again and…..  Plus, once they DO buy you can put them on your main list and send them offers  every  week or so, mix it in with plenty of free stuff too so they don’t just switch off.

A good friend of mine showed me what is the nearest thing to the magic money button ever, simply by writing an email. 

Broadcast Email :  one that is not in your schedule (or ‘automation’) eg. say a brand new high value promotion of a really good SEO tool, out of a list of 1000 previous customers , he got 52 sales, which at $47 a pop was 47X52 $2444 !!! not a bad payday.

One of my favorite money-generating methods is this: Pinterest pins linking to my Blog Posts with Affiliate promotions plus email signup to generate an email list. In the background, if your blog is suitable, apply to Google Adsense and there will be some income building up slowly, in line with your traffic.

If like me you chose to go with Pinterest to promote your posts, as it fits the demographic of my ideal audience, then you can go first to Pinterest to start our Brainstorming and Keyword Research.

Pinterest is a search engine, where general, simple two and three-word keywords will find your stuff. Unlike Google’s long-tail keywords, where even 5 or 6-word keywords can fail to find what you want. This makes it highly suited for beginners to get started with traffic. ( If the niche fits the Pinterest demographic – US-based, mainly female).

Using Pinterest to start traffic to my blog
Pinterest can be used to get traffic to my blog post where there is an optin page

How to build a List

Signup for one of the online autoresponders

I have a list of the ones I’ve had dealings with recently and my thoughts.  I’ve passed on  my results and recommendations , so you don’t have to do so much research. 

Just get this done. Don’t think too much about it. You’ll be on your way to that magic money button in just a minute…

MailChimp

MC has a free option to start, up to 2000 subscribers. However limited to 1 ‘audience’  , with the free version. With the different plans you can use segmentation, which is applicable with up to 5 criteria,  so you can divide your list into say ‘from optin form’ and ‘from shopping form’ OR ‘ left trolley unfinished’ and ‘sale completed’ .  I did find the navigation a bit difficult around the MC site. Easy integration of your forms, with MC several third party WordPress plugins were available to provide forms which are fully compatible.

Some weird behaviour  appeared during my first 6 months with MC though, many signups seem to come from bots, In forums I found other marketers online with same problem – I don’t know if it was just my site that was targeted with these ‘malbots’ . Although I  didn’t find any solution, I did manage to build a list quite quickly and sorted the obvious bot-created emails out manually sorting them.   

MC has a good & generous free plan, free until you reach 2000 subscribers. This is more than adequate to get some automations going and get those emails  flowing in. After 2000 and up to 50ooo its £10/month and up then to 100000 the price is: £15/month, which compared to many other autoresponder services is ridiculously cheap. Highly recommended 

GoodNews – Own Hosted Autoresponder – why doesn’t everyone opt to do this? Well unless you’re very careful , spam reports could cost you your site! So in most cases it pays to have a separate and professional company deal with your autoresponder. If you want to have a go, maybe just to start with then use Goodnews!

 SendinBlue

– This is highly recommended and the one I now use. Their helpline and staff are second to none and have your best interests in mind with their advice. You will be prompted to load up your existing list when signing up, if you don’t have one, you can just sign up 20 or so emails manually

Deliverability is Key with SIB, you’ll get an email from them, if they think your level of sending is going to cause your subscribers spam filters to become active.

Site navigation could be better and I found the names of the sections within SIB – under Automation and transaction a bit confusing eg the term “template” were a little misleading or at least poorly explained. But once you get the hang of   the interface its straightforward and I now find it easy to navigate . As was the integration between the forms and the lists on the SIB site. You can build your forms with  independent form builders WP plugins apps or SIBs own plugins or do it on SIBs own site. Highly Recommended.       

Active Campaign – Top site Loads of features

GetResponse – As with Aweber, simple and straightforward

Drip – recommended by Andre Chaperon, the main man when it comes to email automation, so you have to go see if it has what you need at least.

Convert-Kit – This was built up by word-of-mouth by its founder Nathan Barry, in other words solely by recommendation. He actually listened to his customers and added the features they wanted! Highly recommended for advanced Marketers. Although they have a free plan for beginners, which is free up to 1000 people on your contacts  list, I don’t recommend it as the price rises steeply  after 1000.

Aweber – Simple, straightforward, cheap though there is no free option to start with.

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