List Building

What is your list and why you need it!

List building is not difficult provided you follow a few simple rules.

Whatever your program says, many online programs say that all you need to do is advertise the free page that they supply you with and that will build your list for you.

That may work on the short term but to remain in internet marketing on the long term you need to build an effective list of your own. To do that you need a few basic tools.

The first thing you need is your own domain name, this can be either related to the product you are selling or your own name, this should also be as short as possible, a lot of the easiest and most memorable names have already been used, so you may need to be a little more imaginative about the name you choose.

The best ones to have would be .com but .net, .org, .info etc. can be used.
If you look for a name and find the .com has already been taken, if you decide you use .net after that name people who have seen your site may remember the name and automatically add .com after it, without thinking, taking them to someone else’s site.

The exception to this would be if you signed up with GDI (Global Domains International) you would get a .ws domain name, these are well known in internet marketing circles, but not widely recognised outside, so from that perspective they are more memorable.
There are a lot of companies out there that you can purchase domain names from, one of the biggest is www.GoDaddy.com

Hosting
Once you have purchased your domain name you will then need a hosting account, there are several companies advertising free hosting accounts, but they are not always the best.

You need a company that has a good uptime (their servers don’t keep going off line) and the free ones usually make their money by running ads on the sites they host, so your site will be displaying ads that you have no control over and may well detract from your own advertising.

If you get your domain name from GDI (Global Domains International)
they can also host your account, there are many others that provide a good reliable hosting service.

If you are new to internet marketing and want help with everything a good company to look at is Site Build IT they are the only site I would trust that helps you with everything from selecting and registering your domain name, hosting your account and everything else you need to get your site up and running in as short a time as possible.

Starting the List

Once you have got your domain registered and hosted you need to get some quality information on that site, if you have any knowledge of writing HTML that will be useful. If not there are a range of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors available.

These display what you put onto the page without you needing to know any coding, they then put the code in for you in the background so that the page is formatted correctly and will display on your domain when they are uploaded.

If you have Microsoft Office on your system you may well have ‘Frontpage’, this is the Microsoft editor, if you need a free version, by far the best is ‘NVU’ , there are several resources available on the internet to learn how to use it.
Probably the most well known editor, that has a wide range of excellent facilities is ‘Dreamweaver’, but that is quite expensive, but well worth having if you can afford it.

However if you have signed up with ‘Site BulidIT’ they will be able to help you with getting your site built and designed.

Using an Autoreponder

An autoresponder is an essential tool that you will need to be able to market efficiently, what it does is sends out pre-written emails at desiganted intervals.
When somebody signs up to your list they fill out a form on your squeeze page, your autoresponder then sends them a message asking them to confirm their details, when they confirm they then receive another message sending them to the download page or the sales page.

There are many autoresponders out there that you can join, there are free ones but the problem with most of them is that they insert ads into your emails and also restrict the number of members you can sign up to your account. They may also restrict facilities you are able to use within their program.

The most well known autoresponder programs are Aweber and get response, also if you sign up for Site BulidIT they have one that you can use within their program

After joining you will need to load a series of emails into the system, they will then be sent out at intervals you set within the program. The first one, normally the download or sales page, is sent out immediately some joins, the others then follow at intervals of normally 2/3 days, but you can set them to whenever you wish.

It is normally recognised that it takes 4 to 7 messages before the client will buy from you, so you need to add quality content in the messages to build trust with the client.