List Building Advice

In this post I will be focusing on list building advice. The first question is, should you be collecting emails from people in your niche or not?
Does it work for all niches, if so what ones? In this post I’ll be discussing my opinion on that matter and sharing what has worked for me.
Depending on who you have been influenced by in your internet marketing career, you’ll have different views on whether to collect email addresses or not.
I for one collect emails in some niche markets and in others I don’t bother. The internet marketing niche is obviously one of the ones I have the largest email list in,  and this niche is a classic example of one that it is a good idea to do so.

What Niches Work Best for Emails?

A niche market who’s customers have a keen interest in a subject where this interest will be ongoing and which potentially has a large number of quality products available. Anything that is hobby related can work well, because people in this niche will usually be interested in their hobby for some time and have some degree of passion towards it, which means they will most likely spend money on products .
Other classic niches are ones where people require ongoing education, whether it be a hobby or more of a business focus where they welcome information from other people involved in the niche itself, of course the IM niche is a good example of this (although I despise they way so many people do it in this niche).

What Niches Should You Avoid Using Emails For?

I have quite a few niche markets I’m in that make me great money and I don’t ever collect a single email and I never will. The reason is that these niches usually solve  a specific problem for people and the problem is not something they are interested in long term, in fact they couldn’t get rid of the problem fast enough, so they hardly want to be reminded of it via emails again and again.
Therefore it would be a waste of time for me to collect emails and write all the auto-responder sequences and manage the list, because it would simply not bring me in a good return on time invested.
The other thing to note is that in order to really monetize an email list properly you have to be collecting a decent number of leads everyday, as you can’t just rely on the same contacts and leave it at that, you always need new people coming along. So if you’re in a niche and you are not able to collect regular leads, then again I personally wouldn’t bother with it.

How to Collect Emails?

I assume the next logical question is, how do I get people onto my email list in the first place?
Well before I answer that, I think a more important question is, once people are on my email list what will I be offering them? What will I be able to do to help them. Far too often people want emails so they can make money off people, but I don’t like that approach, of course it’s ok to sell stuff, I mean your email list is not a charity list, but you have to think about quality first.
So with that said, in order to encourage people to get on your email list, you need some form of quality incentive. For example, I recently created a free wordpress theme for people to use. However you can create anything, but again make sure it’s quality. Videos go well, free reports, just make sure they are actually useful. You see, first impressions count, and if people sign up to your list and you promise them something amazing and you deliver something terrible, you have immediately given a bad impression of yourself.
So once you have good stuff ready, you now need to get people opting in. There are a few ways to do this, you can have a flying pop over on your site, which I am about to put on this blog, and then drive SEO traffic to the sites pages, and collect the leads this way.
You can also leave a link in your forum signatures and link it to a squeeze page. Another idea is to create Youtube videos and link off to your squeeze page from these. Yet another idea is to create a product in the niche you are in, this is more for info product markets, and then you can get affiliate marketing JV’s to drive traffic to your product and collect leads this way.
It’s also not a bad idea to have an exit grabber on certain sites to entice people to opt in before they leave. I have one niche where I get about 30 people a day from this alone. Some list building advice is to use paid traffic methods for gaining leads, but you have to track everything carefully. I don’t collect leads from paid traffic much anymore these days, although I have done so in the past.

Creating an Opt In Gift

I thought I might just add a little on some practical tips for creating an opt in gift. I find video works well, but not for every niche,  so if you want to do video, then you can always use the free screen capture software called Jing. Another option is to create a PDF free report and again one free tool that can easily make PDF’s for you is Open Office, a free tool that is pretty much the same as Microsoft office, but it has a PDF creator built in.
I don’t use private label rights stuff very often, as I find the quality is usually absolutely terrible and I don’t want to hurt my reputation by giving out garbage, but if you can find some decent PLR content, then this can also work.
At the end of the day, remember that email marketing is about building relationship with your list. Not everyone will like you, some will down right be rude, but that’s ok, just keep providing as much good content as you know how and monetize your list in an appropriate manner.
One final thing I want to reinforce is, if you do your best to provide as much free, and quality content to your subscribers, you will get them opening more emails that you send out. More opening emails is a good thing for obvious reasons. I have spoken to people in the IM niche, who’s names I will not mention, who tell me they get a 5% open rate on their emails, and that they were happy with that!!! Can you believe that, 5%!! I almost feel off my chair, that is appalling if you ask me.
It was after that conversation in particular, that it dawned on me, this guy didn’t focus on providing quality and did nothing but sell, sell and more selling to his list. My open rates are 6 times higher than this guys, and although he has more people on his list, I get more people reading my emails. I tell you this to explain the power of quality.
That’s all the list building advice from me,
Thanks

Matt Carter
http://mattsmarketingblog.com/