4. Question 2: How do I build my list?

Another of the most frequently asked questions, in the online marketing scene, that comes especially from people who haven't created their own products yet is how do I build my list. Everyone has grasped the concept of building your own media outlet, that you can promote to again and again without having to pay a penny, that usually consists of the most targeted people, and those who are going to buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous work.
And that right there is the key to it all. By the time you have your own list that stretches over the five thousand mark, you should at least have one product, and the majority of people should have come from the promotion of that product. Avoid anything that asks you for cash to put subscribers on your list, because, if you haven't tried them already, let me assure you that compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer although not necessarily it's size. As we talked about above however, it's the quality that matters for both your current promotion and your future promotion.
Size is definitely not everything here. The ways in which we're building your list don't involve direct methods. Something that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to. Agreed you might end up with a massive list but they'll be far from responsive. Concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your sites, make sure that they end up on one of your lists. If we look at things this way, all it takes is for them to either buy something, signup for something, jump into some follow-up, join your affiliate program and so on. Never create anything that allows customers to go through the sales process on your site, or any process at all for that matter, and then lose contact with them. This is not the way to do things. Of course, speed is also an issue for many people out there. I'm sure you don't want to be hanging around only to find a few years later that your list has only reached two or three thousand subscribers. You want a lot, you want a big list and you want it quickly. I understand how it is and I hate waiting for things to build up over time too. This is exactly why we make sure that everything you do, related to your site, involves collecting names and email addresses for your list at some point or another. Let’s look at some numbers starting off with the simple joint ventures. Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. Now with standard e-zines I can understand how you might not see this as being much, as the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit,
can indeed be lower than you expect. But through joint ventures, with these quality lists, I've seen subscription rates top one in three, and it's not unusual for at least 25% of your visitors to subscribe to something if your sales copy is doing it's job. That may not seem like a lot right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5k, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem if the quality of your JV's is nice and high and you get a good number of visits. A 5k list is all great, and you'll also be making money through sales on those joint ventures. Although when you start to couple in your affiliate commissions that you make sure are real high, in fact, so high that you may not even be making a direct profit, the resources will sail in. This is your profit. Not the money from the sales, but the resources that you're building. This is why you gave up $50 per sale, and it's your affiliates coupled with joint ventures that are going to, if you'll excuse the cliché, set your list building on fire, not just numbers wise, but speed wise. Every single time you release a new product, you're going to be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you. It's another snowball effect, which is great because this means that you know the more you put in, the more you're going to get out, and every single product that you release will increase your resources, your list size included, and will add to your promotion power for future products. Thus you'll make a whole load more cash than you would have done by other means and methods.
Before we move on I want to make one hundred percent sure that you understand how this works. People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists. This is great, it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, it kind of makes me a little bit angry sometimes, for the simple reason that they're not giving you the whole story by far. It's ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, along with building affiliates, customers, long term customers and joint venture prospects, but for it to be successful, you have to integrate it into your other marketing methods, and this is what most fail to tell you. Once you've mastered this and understand, again, how each of these resources tie into each other, and cannot be seen as separate entities, you'll start to see bigger and better results, and they will come more quickly too. Now if you think about what I've just told you, and step back, you should be able to see immediately how this isn't a case of go out and get as bigger list as possible, as quickly as possible, on your own. This is what many guides teach, but as with the success of the whole system it's tying resources in together through the launch of your own products.