List Building - Beginner Friendly Tips To Kick Start Your List

"The money is in the list", this is often heard in the Internet Marketing Indsutry but a lot of people do not know exactly what list building is and how important it is to your home/online business.

A list is a collection of people's details (normally email addresses) who are interested in your product/niche. These people have opted in to become part of your list because you can provide them with useful products/information. A list of 100,000 people whom you know nothing about is not likely to be as profitable to you as a list of 5-10,000 people whom you know are interested in your product/niche.

Straight away let people who visit your site know exactly what type of product/business you are involved with. This is crucial because otherwise your list will become full of untargeted people, this is a poor form of list building. You want to make it clear to viewers what you are selling/promoting by having keywords in your domain name. For example I am an Internet Marketing Mentor so I have the keywords "Marketing" and "Mentor" in my domain name.

After you have made it clear what product you are promoting/selling with a keword loaded domain name make sure you give detail on exactly what niche within your industry you are involved with. This is done by creating a squeeze page; this is where you give the viewer an offer to receive something beneficial relating to your niche (eg free internet marketing report) in return for their details (email address and first name are the best; anymore and the viewer might be reluctant to part with that information).

Bullet point out the offer to make it stand out to the viewer; people don't want to have to read a long chunk of text to find out what the offers/benefits are so make it clear for them. Also I recommend shooting a video where you explain the benefits; this is good for two reasons. Reason one is because you come across as a leader and reason two is people will relate to you and know you're not a spamming robot.

So far you have a keyword loaded domain name and a good squeeze page; now you need to drive traffic to your site. There are many Internet Marketing techniques to do this but for now I am going to talk about effective free marketing techniques as not everybody can afford paid advertising when they start out (I know I couldn't).

I recommend starting with Social Networking as you can position yourself as a leader and build your own brand (YOU) within your industry. The two social networking sites I would use are Facebook and Twitter as they are the most commonly used. After you set up an account you want to add targeted people.

I'm involved within the Internet Marketing Industry this is commonly popular with people who leave their corporate job to become an Internet Marketer or people who want to better their lifestyle; recently I have started adding people in real estate jobs as the economic recession has hit that Industry hard and more people are looking for an alternative way to make money and escape their Real Estate jobs.

To do this I simply search "real estate" or "estate agents" on Facebook and Twitter, this brings me a list of estate agents, I then add them as a friend on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. On your social networking account you want to have a brief description about your product/business opportunity and a little bit about yourself, this way a person can decide if they want to hear more from you or not. The ones who do follow you will be likely to be interested in your product. Now you want to have links to your squeeze page on your social networking sites, this makes it easier for you to convert targeted traffic into a valuable list. I recommend including them on your profile and status updates.

Now you should get the picture of how List Building works; mainly let people know exactly what niche you're involved with to filter out the people who will be interested in your product and get rid of the people that will not. Then get their details (through a squeeze page) and market to them whilst building a relationsship. Building relationships with people will result in profitable list building.