Email Marketing List Building – Are You Building A List?
Last week we talked a good bit about blogging to build your affiliate niche business. Over the next few days we’ll address the next important step – building a list.
Let’s start with the basics today. Then over the coming days we’ll talk more about how to get more subscribers, split testing optin pages, increasing open rates and more. If none of those terms make any sense, don’t worry. It will in a few days. For now I just want to get you familiar with what email marketing and list building are and how you can get started.
What Is A List?
A list is simply a database of email addresses that you can email too all at once. It’s a little bit like sending one email to everyone in your outlook address book, but the software to do it is a little more sophisticated. I use Aweber to manage my lists. They make it easy to manage my lists by automating anything from signup and unsubscribing to automatic follow up emails and scheduling future emails.
If you have signed up for updates to this blog via email, you are on one of my lists. This allows me to send an email each time a new blog post goes up.
Why Do You Need A List?
I’m sure your next question is why you should bother building a list. After all there are RSS feeds and readers and people can simply bookmark your site and come back to it later.
The problem is that we all get busy and we forget. By building a list and capturing the email addresses of your readers, you’ll be able to get back in touch with them and tell them about great new content you have added to your site or to tell them more about a product you are an affiliate for. As long as the information you share with your readers is good, they will continue to stay on your list.
How To Build A List?
Your next step is to start building a list. A great place to start is a signup box on each page of your website like the one you see in the right-hand sidebar here. Invite your readers to sign up and let them know what you will be emailing them about.
If you’d like, you can also offer them an additional bonus as a thank you for signing up. This could be a short report, an email or video course, an audio interview or a coupon code to name a few.
Sending Content To Your List
As soon as you start getting the first few names on your list, it’s time to start sharing some great content with them. The idea is to build a relationship and eventually trust with your subscribers. My content here on this blog is the blog posts I write throughout the week. On some of my other niche sites, I publish a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter where I share articles, tips and recipes. Yet other lists have a series of autoresponder messages that go out regularly. The content there is often a tip or the answer to a question from a reader along with an offer for an affiliate product. Which brings us to our last point for today…
Monetizing Your List
Building and maintaining your list will cost you a little money. With Aweber for example, you’ll pay around $20 per month (more once your lists become pretty large). How can you start recouping your cost as soon as possible? By monetizing your list. Once you covered your cost for your autoresponder service, it’s a great way to increase your business’s bottom line.
I monetize my lists in 3 different ways:
- Include offers to affiliate products as part of the emails you send out.
- Occasionally send a solo email that only talks about a particular product or offer.
- Sending them back to my blog or website which has affiliate offers or ads on it.
That’s it for today. If you don’t already have a list building service, take a look at Aweber. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to set up your list, get your signup box on your site and get started emailing your list.
P.S. How about you? Leave a comment and let me know if you’re currently building a list or not. Of course you are also welcome to add any questions about list building and I’ll do my best to address them in upcoming blog posts.
You may also like to read:
- Email List Building Top Tips
- Marketing By Email – How Often Should I Mail My List
- Advanced List Building Techniques
- Optin List Building Basics
- How To Keep Your Email List Engaged
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For my cross stitch site I used to just let people subscribe to the feed by email via Feedburner and I thought that was “good enough” and I didn’t need to create a separate list in Aweber…. then I realized I had no control over it all and that was kind of a mistake.
So, in December I set up a mailing list on that website through Aweber and I’ve had much more subscriptions coming in – four or five per day right now – and I can see which parts of the mailings people are enjoying so I know what to give them more of. The insight you get in that regard is wonderful to have.
Now I just need to working on some monetization and getting those people involved for a more community feeling and I think it will be a great investment — and it only took all of 15 minutes to set it up in Aweber!
Great point Loretta and you can do everything the Feedburner subscription does but without them mentioning their site all over the feeds and emails.
One great option is setting up an Aweber Blog Broadcast. It’ll work just like the email feed, but gives you more control over when and how often your users get feed emails. And you can also send other email messages as well.
That’s what I use here on ATC and here’s how I set it up:
http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/128/aweber-blog-broadcast-tutorial/