I don’t care if we’re setting up a membership site or a one-off product, you need a list, it’s just given. If you’re not building a list, then anytime you need traffic, you’re starting from scratch. But when you do have a list, then you can slowly add to it by getting this extra traffic and anytime you want to pull clicks and opt-ins and sales out of from there, simply send a message to your autoresponder opt-in list.
So, there are many ways you can build that list, by paying for pay-per-click traffic, by joining JV giveaway events, by joining SafeList – so the question is, are free methods of list building really worth it? And it’s not a simple yes or no answer but I do have a few pieces of advice for you. First of all, you need not just subscribers but responsive subscribers, you do need to weed people out of your list and you need to focus on high quality sources of traffic, not just the ones that give you lots of numbers.
So, subscribers are great, and you do need to be always building your list because if you’re not building your list, it’s still slowly dying and your monthly income is slowly dropping. I don’t care what your offer is or who you are, you always need to be building your list at least by a little bit. So, you need not just fresh subscribers but also responsive subscribers. I would rather have a list of 100 buyers at any price, even $10. I’d rather have a list of 100 buyers than a list of 10,000 people who have never bought from me – because, at least some one who’s bought from me can prove they have a credit card and they trust me enough to type in those details.
So, you need people on your list who read your emails, who click on your links, who respond to your emails, and most importantly, actually buy from you and buy from you over and over again. So, starting off by building your list using some of those free methods is fine to start, but you need a list of responsive subscribers, and it’s better for you to have a small responsive list than a large unresponsive list because you can mail it a little faster, you get less spam complaints, and overall, it’s just easier for you.
So, how do you turn a non-responsive list into a responsive list? Email them. See who buys. Mail on a regular basis. Mail consistently. Mail often. And if people complain, who cares? They have not bought from you. They probably would not buy from you anyway. So, don’t be afraid to remove none-buyers from your list who have never bought if you can replace, if you have new leads coming to your site over and over.
So, when you’re replacing those bad subscribers, where do you get the new ones from? Get them from forums. Post on forums. Have a signature link. Write articles. Post them to your blog. Post them to article sites. And most importantly, sell stuff and capture the opt-ins after they buy. Your buyers are going to be way more valuable than your freebie opt-ins. So, ad swaps and giveaways are good to start but don’t live in ad swap and giveaway (03:33) for the rest of your life because you’re not going to get people to buy into your membership site and you’re not going to get people to stay in your membership site if they can afford it or if they don’t care enough to actually purchase.
So, are free methods of list building really worth it? Sort of. It’s a good place to start but move towards better sources of traffic. Because, you do need to be always building a list, always getting new subscribes, but you also need to be weeding out the bad subscribers and replacing them with new ones from better sources such as forums, articles, article directories, and from people who have bought from you.
Now that we have that issue out of the way, let’s get you starting your first or next membership site.