3 Newbie List Building Mistakes You Should Avoid

In most online niches, building an email marketing list is the single most profitable thing that you can do. Here are three mistakes to watch out for when you’re ready to make that jump.

1. Failure to offer a freebie. At one time in the history of internet marketing, you could really make yourself stand out if you offered your prospect a bonus in exchange for the right to send them your email. For better or worse, this is no longer the case.

These days, a freebie is standard practice. Instead of standing above the line by offering one, you’ll sink below the line by not offering one! Why? Because every smart online marketer (and even most of the ones who aren’t that bright) offer a bonus these days.

Never fear–you can easily overcome this obstacle. The most common bonus in most niches is a PDF report focusing on niche problems.

If you don’t feel confident writing your own, you can buy one of several PLR (private label rights) reports available, or else hire a ghostwriter to produce one for you. Reports don’t need to be long, so this shouldn’t break your bank account. Your return on investment will prove to be worth it!

2. Sending out follow-ups too often. Your list will get smaller instead of larger if you hit them up too often. But how often is too often?

Like many affiliate marketing listbuilding tactics, this all depends on your niche, and/or your specific sub-niche within it. Before you ever start a niche list, you should be a member of several existing ones. You’ll probably notice a pattern.

The safest way to start is to follow that pattern, then test variations. If everybody else in your niche is mailing three times a week, see what happens when you go for four. You might also want to see if your conversions perk up if you only mail twice a week. Track, test, rinse and repeat!

Just keep in mind that few if any niches want to receive mail from you more than once a day, unless it is a special occasion (niche in the news, relevant holiday, or, in a few niches, a big product launch). You should usually mail no less than once a week.

3. Too much advertising. You want people to join your list so that you can make money. But they don’t join so that they can give you money–they join so that you can help them with whatever it is that they want.

Combine this with the fact that people love to buy but hate to be sold to, and you’ll understand why every mail shouldn’t be an advertisement. Give people information they can use.

Depending on your niche, you may or may not want to provide an affiliate link with a small sales pitch with every email. On the rare occasion where the entire body of your email is basically a sales pitch, you should still remember to focus entirely on your prospects–and you should still provide them with value that they wouldn’t have had, had they not opened your mail.