Listbuilding Is the Heart of Drawing Traffic to Your Site

Much emphasis has been made of the importance of listbuilding among Internet marketers. It’s no small wonder, really. It’s the means of getting repeat customers, and it can take some of the pressure off of making “the best sales page evar!”

Listbuilding is the virtual workhorse of Internet marketing. As such, it is something to be built and cultivated over the long term. In fact, you need to keep up with your list throughout your career.

There are good practices and bad practices in listbuilding. Remember, this isn’t just some fly by night venture we’re talking about here. You want to keep adding people to your list, but more importantly, you want to keep them on it.

First of all, never never EVER buy a list. While it may have some immediate results in your listbuilding, most people on the list are probably already tired of being solicited by this business, that one, or the other. Your emails will probably land directly in their Bulk folder, if they haven’t already unsubscribed from the list before you get it.

Another mostly ineffective method of listbuilding is buying certain mass mailing programs. Some of these programs will browse email membership lists and solicit your product to the email addresses they find. This puts you directly in the same category as telemarketers in most people’s minds. It’s a quick way to get ignored.

Probably the most elegant way of listbuilding is having an opt-in form on your website. This allows the users to voluntarily accept your solicitations. Now that you have their attention, you’d better know how to handle them.

You should first have an email response ready in the event that they don’t buy your product. The point of listbuilding, after all, is to get people to buy your stuff. While you can certainly persist in trying to get them to buy the product, don’t spam them with your solicitations. That’s a quick way to lose your list.

You should also have update emails about the product for the people who decided to buy it. Again, with the interest of retention in listbuilding, you should keep them interested in your product. Send them their login info this way, announce live events, maybe give little bits of advice on how to use the product.

Of course, a great part of listbuilding is that once you have a list started, you can promote other products. Chances are, if you want to live for very long as a marketer, you will want to promote other products. If you’ve done your job in winning your list members’ trust, you will have people already disposed to buy your new product! Much of the loyalty you gain from your list will be won by other elements of your product, but it’s no less important to use your mailings this way as well.

If you do your listbuilding right, you will notice something over time. Your future products will sell out quicker, or they will have at least an increased conversion rate. Naturally, there will be some who don’t follow you from product to product, and some may opt out. But if you’re good at it, you will only see an increasingly larger list.