One thing that really annoys me about Internet Marketing is the people who try to create a huge mystique about the simplest things in order to line their own pockets.
Building a list is probably the one most important task you need to learn but it really isn’t that complicated. You will then use that list to send out information about what you are promoting to get people to buy or to sign up to be affiliates. There are some basic tools that you need to start listbuilding and yes, there are costs but you certainly do not need to spend hundreds of dollars up front as some self-styled gurus would have you believe.
Basically you have to find a way to create curiosity and attract people to giving their name and email address in order to find out more about something you are offering.
It might be the business you are promoting or maybe a giveaway report or software, or a lead-in to something that the enquirer is going to have to pay for.
Remember this one principle. People come into internet marketing because they want to MAKE money. Beginners will be put off if they find that they have to dig deep into their pockets to get started. I agree that you have to invest SOMETHING in any business you want to start. Even if the opportunity you are promoting allows you to be an affiliate for free, you have to find a way of attracting people to sign up as affiliates themselves AND potentially spend money in the future.
The way that listbuilders collect data on the people who fill in their online forms is via an autoresponder. You could, if you were clever, build your own, but it really is easier to join one of the autoresponder providers. It has the advantage that you can also automatically reply to your subscribers 24/7 even if you are working another regular job or you are on holiday or asleep. You can set timed messages to remind your subscriber that they haven’t yet taken up your offer, or even send them an offer for something completely different.
So, that is your number 1 essential. There are plenty out there but personally I use GVO as it gives you a lot for just $9.97 a month. You can run up to 5 campaigns and you get free web hosting on the side. So there is another cost sorted – hosting for a blog if you want to do that. I’ll come back to blogs later.
Next, you need something simple that will create a page with somewhere for subscribers to add their details. I used Adkreator for several years and I still have an account with them but they are under new management and things are still settling down over there.
Also for the non-techie there is an easier solution and that is Splash Wizard. The pages it makes are more up to date in style than Adkreator and you have an amazing choice of backgrounds without the bother of having to hunt for images online. You can try both for free – Adkreator will allow you to have one active lead page, SplashWizard will let you create multiple test pages but they expire in 7 days. Pro membership costs just $9.95 a month.
Whichever lead page creator you choose, you will generate some code back in the autoresponder – all automated, non-techies do not panic here! You will paste this code into the back end of your lead page. Again, very simple, there is plenty of help in both Adkreator and Splash Wizard to show you how. This feeds back the name and email data entered by the subscriber to the autoresponder.
You will want to know which of your ads is the most successful in getting people signed up AND where are the best places to advertise. For that you need an ad tracker and for my money there is only one real contender. That is Trck.me. It’s easy to create a tracker URL and the stats are very simple to understand. You will then use the tracker URL instead of the full one and it will re-direct, adding the visitor data to the tracking record. This is what a tracker URL looks like.
The monthly cost is $9 and you get a 30 day free trial.
I’m not going into the intricacies of where you advertise in this post, I’ve talked about it in the past and if you contact me, I will be more than happy to give you some pointers. Just one thing. If you are not going to spend MONEY advertising, you will have to spend some TIME instead and click for your advertising credits. So set aside an hour or so a day doing just that.
I said I would come back to blogs and here it is. On a WordPress blog, it is very easy to set up a contact form that feeds data back to your autoresponder. You will see one here in the sidebar. Code comes from the autoresponder and is the same as you put into your lead page. You add that code to a ‘sidebar widget’ in your WordPress blog dashboard.
You can set up a blog on the public site WordPress.com for free. You can do more with a hosted WordPress blog and you have free hosting with GVO. Blogger is free and there are others but a proper domain based around your name like this blog, looks more professional than something like yourname.wordpress.com – more professional = more credible and trustworthy. I set up sites and blogs for other people so ask me for a quote, you will be surprised how little it can cost.
Best of all, if you teach YOUR list members to build THEIR lists in the same way that you did, you will also be building referrals in your autoresponder, your splash page builder and your tracker.
So there you have it. Basic, stripped down listbuilding – expenditure just under $30 a month. And of course you can promote your chosen listbuilding software on your blog and in your advertising. With only a couple of referrals, your expenditure could be wiped out and then, you can start looking at some of the more sophisticated listbuilding software and marketing training sites to continue your path as an internet marketer.
