The 59p Site

Today, I came across this statement on another site:

List Building is THE key to online business success.

The money is in the website or the call centre or the 'bricks and mortar' business and an email list is simply a way to get people to you through one of these routes. The same is true of the techniques used when people search.

I have yet to get people who extol the magnifence of lists to counter any of the arguments that I use against the phrase.

Follow up:

It is easy to get an email program to simply delete the message without the recipient ever seeing it. I do it with some senders in gmail simply because the list owner has made it so hard to unsubscribe. Others, I simply do not open because I can see that they are of no interest

List Quality

The money is in the quality of the subscribers and not the quantity. Much better to have a list of 1,000 with 50% opening the email and visiting the website with 10% buying and clicking on other profitable links than to have 1% on a 10,000 list who even consider the offer.

So what identifies a good quality list?

• Open Rate - The frequency with which messages actually get opened by the subscriber. It is never accurate because it normally requires html email that contains a unique identifier which is not always used from the browser.
• Purchase rate - Easy to measure for online sales but harder if your business also allows for offline ordering.
• Churn rate - This is a measure of how quickly a subscriber will leave the list. If it is high then the list is not of of interest.

Building the List

The key thing is to build your brand. One way of doing that is to use your name but try an internet search on it beforehand because somebody more famous than you may have the same name. A business name is equally good but, again, check it out to be sure it, or something similar, is not already in use.

Next thing to do is to find content for your subscribers. Free PLR can work but can take more time rewriting than it takes to create your own original content. Participating in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Tobri can be a good way of inspiring ideas for your own content.

Now you have a basis on which to build a list

How do I build the list?

You create a newsletter then tell people about your brand. Using blogger.com or wordpress.com will get the name into their search and increase your chances of being found by the likes of Google or Bing. Just be sure to add your list sign-up link in there.

Now this will not get you thousands of subscribers in a few days but it will be a start. If you have got good content then these things become viral because people who signup for your list will forward your email to their friends who then signup

Summary

It is completely wrong to say that the money is in the list. Yes a list is important but what matters is the quality of it. Brilliant quality = success, Poor quality = failure