All the online marketing “gurus” will tell you “the money is in the list.” They mean your email list.
Don’t have one? If you are trying to sell a product, it is far more effective to sell to people who have bought from you before or people who have expressed an interest in your product (but might need a little nudging to buy). When I was in corporate sales, all the trainers would say it takes AT LEAST SEVEN exposures to your offer before a prospect buys. You can’t just sit around and hope a potential buyer looks at your affiliate banners and clicks on them seven times. Granted, some will impulse buy (we’ve all done it), but most will take that wait and see attitude.
Another advantage to building a list is when you promote a different product, you can send your offer to your list. People who have bought from you before will most likely do it again.
You need to expose your prospect to your offer a few times and the best way to do it is via email. In order to build a list, you need a service that will organize everything for you. Doing it manually would be a logistical nightmare. As you could probably guess, there are a multitude of providers of this kind of service- most of them cost money. Since I like doing things for free, I sought out a service that would allow me to start for free and I found a good one: Mailchimp.
Mailchimp allows me to use their services for free until my list has over 1,000 2000 subscribers. After that, I have to pay. Of course once you have 1,000 2000 subscribers to your email list, YOU WILL BE MAKING MONEY. Mailchimp has what is effectively an “email marketing school” on their site. They walk you through everything. It’s fairly intuitive and easy to set up. I highly recommend Mailchimp for the beginner. Free is always good too!
Stay tuned for part two of this post where I’ll give some ideas that worked for me and point you to some tutorials to help get you started.