List Building – The Most Important Step is The First

Everyone talks about the importance of list building online and how critical having a list is for generating sales (aka, money!) However, what many people fail to address is the role planning plays to your list building efforts.

Every successful endeavor begins with a plan. This is especially true when it comes to your opt-in list building efforts. Simply placing an opt-in form at your site without a clear-cut objective will only lead to frustration.

Your list building plan has several stages. The first stage is simple… decide what you want to accomplish.

What are your opt-in list goals?

Your goals may include several factors, such as:

• How many opt-ins do you want? (5000 names in 90 days)
• What do you want to accomplish? (increase sales 18% in 3 months)

DO NOT Skip This Step!

It is very important that you not skip this step above, as these goals are what you’ll use to create your list marketing strategy; not to mention your content marketing strategy, and so on.

Let’s take the addition of 5,000 names to your list in 90 days, for example. If you are going to accomplish this lofty (but achievable) goal, than you’ll want to focus all of your marketing efforts to promote your list. You will also want to create a damn good product give-away to entice sign ups.

However, what if your goal isn’t growing your list but rather increasing conversions and sales. What would your marketing strategy be then?

Well for starters, you would want to focus your energies on creating email messages that were written and structured to promote and encourage sales.

So, now you can see how critical your goals are to your list building success.

The next important factor to creating your opt-in list strategy is a in-depth analysis of your target market, or audience. Which we will cover in our next post: List Building – Target Market Analysis

- James

0704000
Don't be shellfish... ;-)