Let me tell you a little story about the power email lists. We’ll call this person Harry, just to protect his identity. Harry had spent many months building a website about his favorite subject, gardening. He launched the website hoping that someone would find it useful, and he promoted it as best he knew how in Qatar Email Lists forums, articles, and as many search engines as he could manage. He had even managed to write a short ebook giving advice about how to maintain a working garden through-out the year. All you had to do to get the book was to sign up to his email list, to which he posted additional gardening tips every once in a while. Harry did this for fun, he had a good job and a supportive family. All of that was about to change however.
Harry’s company downsized later that year and all of a sudden he wasn’t bringing home any income. His wife, while she still loved him was pressuring him to find a new job and fast. The bills were starting to pile up and Harry was starting to get really stressed out. Then he remembered his email list, he had never sent them anything that resembled an advertisement, but he thought that it couldn’t hurt. When he went to check on the size of the list it had several thousand people on it. Harry couldn’t believe that he had that many people interested in what he had to say about gardening, this convinced him to put his plan into action.
Harry found a small website that sold gardening tools. They also offered an affiliate program, which paid a 20% commission to anyone who sent them a paying customer. Since Harry didn’t feel comfortable recommending a set of tools that he himself had not tried, he ordered a set – despite his wife’s objection. When he got the tools in the mail a few days later they turned out to be excellent quality and did their job very well, so Harry decided that he would recommend these tools to his email list members, even though he was afraid that some of them might leave once he started sending them advertisements. What happened next changed Harry’s life forever.
About 20% of the people on his email list, nearly 1000 people, actually bought the tools through Harry’s affiliate link. The tools cost $30, and Harry got $6 per sale. In less than a day Harry had made an extra $6000 with almost no work! To make a long story short, Harry never found another job. He now works for himself making about 4-6 thousand dollars every month from home by recommending gardening tool and books.
The End.
Just kidding, it’s not quite the end for us. What I am trying to demonstrate to you with this article is the fact that an email list can be an incredible resource when you are trying to get an online business off the ground. You can’t just use any old email list though, you need to have a target group of people that are interested in what you have to offer.
The best and most honest way to go about building an email list is to gather the email addresses of people that visit your website. I consider it an absolute must if you are going to get anywhere in the internet marketing game. You can place a simple web form on your home page, just like I did for beattherichjerk.com, and you can start collecting the email addresses of people that are interested in what you sell.
There is a catch to all of this, you need to keep in contact with these people on a regular basis. You don’t just want to gather up the emails and keep them for when you want to sell people something. You need to offer them some content of value that is related to the topic of your website. You also need to contact people on a regular basis in order to keep your website and your information fresh in their minds. Having a newsletter is a great way to keep people informed about what you have to offer them.
As demonstrated by the story above, having a list of targeted and interested people can be of great strategic value should you decide to send them offers or advertisements. Once you have built up a strong email list and given people a valuable resource, you will have built up a certain amount of trust between yourself and the members of your list. If done right, your mailing list members will value your opinion very highly. This is good news when you send them an offer on a product or service because they trust your opinion enough that they are willing to pay their hard earned money for the things that you recommend.
As was hinted at in the story, I think that you should only recommend products or services that you have actually tried. Many people will not have a problem with recommending a program that they have not tried, just to get the cash. I think that this is dishonest and can erode the relationship that you have built up with your email list.
So, what kind of things can you offer people to get them to sign up for your email list? One of the best things is free information. This can be free ebooks, articles, or anything else that you can give away for free that will get people to sign up for your list. You can write these ebooks and articles yourself, or you can download other ebooks that people have offered for free and give those out. Just make sure that you contact the author to make sure that you can do this. Most people won’t have any problem with someone else distributing their already free information for them.
Whatever you do, DO NOT abuse the power of the email list. These people are your customers, they need to be treated with respect or you could find yourself without an email list very quickly. People don’t like being spammed or sold on products that don’t solve their problems. Be nice and you will find that everyone will get along just fine.
Also, I highly recommend that you do not sell or rent out the use of your email list to anyone else. This is another way of eroding your relationship with your customers. Once the list starts to get very large, greater than ten thousand, then you can think about renting out advertising space in the list. Until then you would be taking a chance that a vast majority of your customer base would leave. Selling your list to someone else, unless it is part of a deal to sell the website, is a big no-no. You won’t know how the list will be used, so don’t risk the relationship with your customers.
