Your First List

Craig Childs — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:31:05 +0000

Your First List – How do you start?

First determine what the goal of the list is. Are you collecting names interested in one of you products or all of your products? Are you collecting names of people interested in the topic of your blog? The goal can be anything you want but be sure it is a smart goal.

How Do You Get People To Sign Up?

You must offer them something that is important enough to them that they will give you their personal information (name and email address commonly). It is not about you but them. So the reason to sign up must be compelling.

Frequently people offer some free gift or low costing product to get people to sign up for their list. No matter what it is remember it must be important to the reader.

Setting Up Your New List

Setting up your first list is easy if you use Aweber. They will help you with each step. Just follow their directions and it is easy.

You must set up at least one follow up response so the new list member will receive something from you right away. Then the frequency of emails is up to you. But I would suggest that you at least have one follow up each month.

Once you have your list set up you must add the sign up form to your blog. Aweber will give you the code and you can just add it to a page or widget. Then test it by signing up yourself and seeing if it works.

Now all you need to do is market your list so people will find it and sign up.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

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List Building – Email Marketing

Craig Childs — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:36:12 +0000

Email Marketing

Why would you want to do email marketing?

There are many reasons an online business would want to start an email marketing campaign:

It's inexpensive
It can be very successful
It's automatic
It's easy – set it a forget it

But you need to do it correctly or you can run into problems including legal ones. So be sure to use a double optin method from a stable autoresponder company.

I would strongly recommend Aweber as your autoresponder. They require a double optin method and will defend you if accused of spamming using Aweber. That alone is worth the cost.

So sign up for an account with Aweber. They have great support, video help and resources to answer any question you might have.

I will go over what email marketing is in the next post. So for now just know that if you have or plan to have product(s) for sale, you will want to use Aweber and email marketing.