I was looking at my online sales in my Aweber autoresponder today, and I saw something I really like…I just noticed that one of my two years old subscribers bought one of my products.  I track many metrics in my online business, and for me, knowing what happens in my sales funnel is crucial…

I really love list building, and let me tell you something. If you don’t build your list to increase your online sales yet, you’d better start right now because you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Many marketers say that “the money is in the list”, this is somewhat true, except I’d rather say that “the money is in the RELATIONSHIP with the list”… This is true for both products owners and affiliate marketers. Many beginners think that they don’t need to communicate with their visitors, but my experience shows that building a list and actually make your visitors trust you will increase your affiliate commissions dramatically…

I’ll talk about this in another post, but right now, let me show you why I love list building so much. The reason is because sales happens on autopilot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not into these hyped “Autopilot Commissions” or “Automatic Income” type of products…however, your online sales will ultimately start to pour in in autopilot (yes, this does happens), but before this happens, you really have to work hard (and smart like those who get an Internet marketing Coach?) to get your online business out of the ground. And since this does not happen in one week, many beginners quit before they even start…Anyone?

List building automation is great because sales are closed for you over and over, even if you are not in front of your computer. You might be sleeping, or at the gym, but your autoresponder is making the closing for you. I find that so great, do you?

Here is how list building automation works…

1. A visitor let’s call him John from now) stumble on your site (obviously, you did something right to drive traffic to your site.)

2. John sees your amazing, irresistible, preferably huge – like in my sidebar – optin box with your “give me your email freebie”.

3. John says “wow, I can get this for free?” (You say: “it’s not really free, give that email first!?”.)

4. John gives you his email…

5. John is automatically added on  your list, lands on your thank you page, and receive your confirmation email (or welcome email if you chose to use single optin.)

6. John clicks (or don’t even bother) the confirmation link and receive your first email

Now, the first email is pretty important. If you do this wrong, John may unsubscribe right away, and even if he stays on your list, he may never open your emails again.

Quick tip: This welcome email should be simple and straightforward. You just welcome John and give his a link to download his freebie. You also tell him to whitelist your email address (like this your email will not end up in his trash folder). And if you have your own product, you add a link to your sales page. As an affiliate, you can also add a link to your affiliate program, but it works better with your own products.

Now, a real life example of the power of list building automation with aweber…

I made a sale a couple of minutes ago, and you don’t know this yet, but I like to know what happens in my sales funnel.

When someone buy one of my products, I want to know a couple of metrics:

1. Where did this sale come from? From my home page, or from my list? If it came from my list, from which one (yes, I have many lists)?

2. When did he join my list?

3. What else did he buy? (from my products and other affiliate programs)

4. A couple of other advanced things (that help me to know if he is a hot buyer)

Let me show you how I do this in aweber…

1. I get my customer email and login to aweber

2. I perform a search in my list with my customer email, and see when he subscribed

I want to know where my subscribers come from

3. I click ‘go’, and then, I know exactly where he came from…

This is pretty cool because I don’t need to search manually through all my lists…

John signed up in 2009, and bought my product in 2012 - That's two years later!

 

 

 

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As you can see on the image above, John signed up on my list on the in 2009, then he bought 2 yearslater in January 2012!?

How cool is that?

And here is a weird thing… John also bought another of my product in 2009. The reason it’s not appearing on the image above is that in 2009, I didn’t set up aweber automation rule that adds John to my “buyers autoresponder”. So instead of being added to my “customer list” he stayed on my “freebie – potential buyer list” for two years!?

I know, I know…it’s not a smart move…but this shows you that list building still works, even if you make mistakes down the road.

By the way, if you look at the image above (under ad tracking), you can see that John signed up to my list via the pop up that appears on my home page.  I’m upset at many of these crazy gurus because I was fool enough to believe what they said (a couple of years ago, not now…).

These gurus used to say that pop ups don’t work. But once I decided that I needed to test this for myself, I quickly realized that building your list with pop up still works. And yes, pop ups and other unblockable pop overs will add buyers to your list. There is an art to use pop up, and when you do this well, it works like wonders!

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Franck Silvestre shows you how you can increase your online profits with his proven and tested list building and traffic generation strategies. If you want to build a real profitable Internet business and build a list of thousands of raving fans ready to buy whatever you promote, here is the first step: Click Here to get your Aweber autoresponder.

I managed to build a list of more than two thousands in the Internet marketing niche (it’s now 4000+), and more than 1000+ in my other non IM niche with completely free methods.

How to build a list for free?

First, let me tell you a short story that may inspire you…

When I first started online, I spent some time with safelists and other traffic exchange websites (it didn’t really work for me though. I heard it works for some people, so if you make money from this, make sure to contact me), and I realized that some of them were using these sites to build their mailing lists.

I ultimately decided to create a list, but I didn’t have any money to buy a paid autoresponder. I remember getting started with sendfree autoresponder and getresponse free trial. At my surprise, I quickly start to add subscribers, and I reached 100 subscribers after a couple of weeks. BUT the problem was that now, I had to upgrade (if you remember, I was broke). Get response didn’t let me add more subscribers to the list, and hence, I lost hundreds of subscribers because every visitor who wanted to optin my newsletter would see a message like “You can subscribe”. I was really upset about this…but there was nothing I could do.

So don’t let this happen to you and start with the right autoresponder software right away.

1. The right mindset

It’s really important that you understand that you too CAN build a list and make money from it. I coach many beginners and I know for a fact that many of them don’t have enough confidence to start building their own mailing lists. Don’t let this happen to you. In fact, if you aren’t already collecting email addresses through an optin form on your site, I suggest you to start right after you finished reading this article.

Let me show you my aweber autoresponder below with 3509 susbcribers. I have another autoresponder with 1000+ subscribers, so it’s 4000+:

list size in aweber

2. Create your list  building pages

There are many methods to build a list, but today I’m going to teach you what have worked for me. Today, I also use paid list building methods because they usually work faster, but this blueprint is for those of you who can’t afford any of these more expensive methods…or are still not sure that this really work (don’t worry, I was thinking like you when I started as well)

What are list building pages?

List building pages definition: These are the pages that will bring the more subscribers into your list. The first is your squeeze page, the second is your pop up (or pop over), and the third is your blog sidebar – or the most visited page on your main site. You absolutely need to have these pages if you are serious about creating an income with a mailing list.

When I started, I had all these component in place, although I was a brand newbie. I remember that I read an article saying the following (in my own words, since I didn’t memorize it):

  You should add a optin form to every single page you have on your website because most of your subscribers will never come back. Once they are gone, they are gone forever. By capturing their email address, you will be able to keep in touch with them, and they may ending up buying your product as a results. Even better, a percentage of them will end up buying your high end coaching programs.

Note that in some cases, you don’t want to add an optin form to you site because this will decrease the value of your MWR (most wanted response), but I let this for another lesson.

Let’s take these page one by one:

• Your squeeze page:  this one will be your list siphon page. It’s a ‘separate’ page on your site. The only purpose of this page is to get people in your list. Here is an example of one of my own squeeze pages (made me thousands of dollars by the way, and paid a lot of bills!) As you can see, it’s pretty simple, and you only need a couple of minutes to create it.  You will drive a lot of free traffic (as explained below) to this page, and if you write a powerful marketing message (it’s not difficult and you don’t need to be a copywriting king ever. Just look in forums in your niche to find out what are the hot topics that people are interested in, and you have your headline) test and tweak, 50% of your visitors should end up your list.

• Your Pop Up:  many unscrupulous marketers (or may be ignorant?) want to make you believe that pop ups don’t work anymore because people don’t want to be annoyed with this when they visit your site, but I tested this and I found that this is a totally false statement.  When you add a pop up to your site or blog, in most of the cases, you will increase your optin rate by 50% or more, and in some cases by 100%.

• Your Blog Sidebar:  blog weren’t popular when I first started online, but today it’s different. The very first thing you want to do when creating your online business (any kind of online business) is setting up your wordpress blog. Blog get a lot of traffic via the search engines, and you will drive even more traffic with social media sites like facebook twitter, digg and others. As you can see, on this blog, my optin form appears on every single page, and it’s also in the header just in case my visitor didn’t notice it in the sidebar. By the way, if you are not already subscribed, I suggest you do so if you want more killer list building tips and advice. I’ll show how to grow your list to 1000+ fast.

The combination of these three will add thousands of subscribers to your list for free with the techniques I will show you below if you take massive action.

3. Drive targeted traffic to your pages

This is where subscribers will start to pour in. I’ll develop each of the point below more in depth in other posts, but this is enough to get you started. You only want to pick one of these traffic strategies anyway. The right way to do it is to pick one, become very good at it, and then, go to the next. I started with article marketing, got thousands of articles on the Internet, and I only started to try new techniques to drive traffic to my list building pages when I became an expert at driving traffic with free articles.

Here are the traffic getting strategies I used when I got started online:

• Article Marketing: I made thousands of dollars with article marketing with list building. While every marketer was driving direct traffic to their affiliate offers following the bum marketing system, I wasn’t. All I was doing was writing quality articles and adding links to my squeeze page in the author box. Article marketing is a powerful way to build your list. Today, it is tougher to get a lot of traffic with this method because after the Google Panda update earlier this year, article directory sites lost a lot of their traffic. However, you can still make it with long tail keywords in less competitive niches.

• Search engine optimization: This will also add a lot of subscribers to your list. Whether you have a blog or a static html site, working on your onpage and offpage optimization will increase you traffic. And if you add your optin form on all your pages, you will get a decent amount of optins every day. Just 10 optins per day will make you 300 subscribers per month, and 3600 new subscribers per year.

• Forum marketing: Now, this will not work in every niche, but if you provide good content in various forums in your niche, people will recognize you as an expert, and adding your signature file will not be seen as a problem. If you are an ethical marketer, you shouldn’t have any problem with this method. It works.

• Ad swaps:  This is a super fast way to get results. All you need to do is to find other marketers in your list, and ask them to change your squeeze page to their list. You will then reciprocate by sending their squeeze page to your own list. There is an art to do it though, and I see many marketers doing it all wrong.

• Blogging:  When I say blogging, I don’t only mean posting to your blog…I also think about all the other related activities like guest blogging (this one is powerful and I will write another article about it soon), , blog carnival and blog commenting on other blogs within your niche (blogs with comment luv, do follow, and also without these two.)

• Free ebook givaway:  This is another excellent technique. You distribute your own free ebook with links that drive back to your blog/site inside. This will add subscribers to your list slowly, but steadily. And the more free ebook you put out there, the more subscribers you will get.
  

That’s it.

Here is how to build your list for free like the pros. And don’t underestimate these method or think that they don’t work because they do. Sure it will be slower than using other paid technique, but I still use these in my business and recommend my subscribers to do so.

You need the right mindset, then you create your list building pages, and start driving traffic to these pages like crazy. Soon, we will learn how you can make $0.50 to $1 per subscriber with a proper sales funnel.

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Franck helps Internet new and advanced online marketers to build a list for free with aweber autoresponder. He can show you how to make money with your tiny list with his proven and tested system.

Today, I decided to revise all my follow up autoresponder messages. I have multiple lists, so this will take more than one day. I think that if I do this for one hour everyday, at the end of the week, all my follow up emails and links will be updated.

While only a few online marketers take the time to do this, it’s really important because if you already have a list, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table without even knowing it.

During the last two days, I’ve updated one of my old affiliate marketing email series, and I must say that I was not happy with what I’ve seen. This email series had many dead links, and also pointed to websites that are not live anymore.

No need to say that it’s really frustrating for your subscribers. They are waiting for an email from you, they click, and find a dead link. No surprise if you find that a lot of them decide to unsubscribe from your list… so you need to be serious about “cleaning your dead links” so to speak.

If you have a list, do yourself a favor, and “clean it” from your dead links, remove all your products (or affiliate products) that are not up to date, and make sure that your messages in your series are not outdated as well.

It’s important for you because your will make more money as a result. It’s obvious that having more money links working for you will make you more.

Plus while you are reviewing your email, you may get new ideas and improve your marketing plans.

Also, your subscribers will see you as professional… and they will know that when they click on one on your link, they’ll see something interesting!

When was the last time you’ve cleaned your email series?

Talk soon,
Franck

I know that while you are reading this, the first think that comes in your mind is: “let me start this list and make money”.

Most beginners start to realize (a couple of days later…) that it’s not so easy to build a list, and they give up.

Even worst than that, many people don’t start building a list at all.

Let me tell you: you really need a list of loyal subscribers if you want to make a full income online. Please note the word (loyal). This is important because building a list of cold subscribers will never make you any money.

So you want to create and grow your very own online business?

If you are serious about this, then continue reading.

Do this exercise: Whenever you visit a website this week (I mean any website, not only Internet marketing sites), look around, and find out if they are trying to get your email address.

Do you know why they want your email?

The answer is: They want to be able to communicate with you

This is really important if you want to make a full time income in this business.

Communicate with your subscribers.

The first thing you need is finding your niche. I wrote an article about this here: niche marketing

On the article above, you have everything you need to find a profitable niche.

Right now, I’m active two niche markets: list building and learn French.

I really like my list building niche because it’s something very lucrative, I love getting more subscribers, and I also enjoy teaching others how to do it.

List building works in any market, however, I will give you example of my own business here.

In my next post, I’ll talk about creating your squeeze page, so stay tuned.

In the mean time, here is what I use for list building: click here to learn more about the best autoresponder service on the web
…

My name is Franck Silvestre, and I’m making a living online since 2007.

I’ve used various methods to promote my online business, and today, many of these traffic generation method have evolved, and doing things like in the old days is not working anymore, BUT there is one thing that I always used in my online business (and it’s the most profitable): list building and email marketing.

In fact, everything I do in my Internet business has only one main purpose: adding more subscribers to my optin  list.

Today, I teach others how to create their own business online, and the first thing I show my students is to build a list.

If you are here, I guess it’s for one of these two reasons:

• 1. You are new to online business, and you’ve heard that… The money is in the list.

• 2. You already have an Internet business, and you want to take it to the next level with list building and email marketing.

Now, here is how I can help…

I show beginners how to create an email list from scratch.

Building a list is not really complicated when you know how, however, you need to know what really works. The Internet world change so fast that it’s difficult to keep up with all these new methods of list building.

What to do next?

If you don’t know me yet, I like step by step, so just follow these two:

Step 1: Simple, just sign up to my list building training via the optin form in the sidebar, and you’ll learn everything you need to build your own list step by step.

Step 2: And if you need an autoresponder software, I use and recommend you get the one below.

Click HERE to start building your list with Aweber autoresponder

Franck – Internet Marketing Coach