You’ll hear it said many times that the money is in the list. And in most online businesses, that’s absolutely true.

Where Do You Build a List?

The first thing you want to do is to sign up with a good autoresponder service. It doesn’t matter if your main focus will be on sending out a weekly newsletter or having a series of emails sent out to subscribers, you need to have a good autoresponder service.

I suggest AWeber or GetResponse.

Both offer excellent service and work hard to keep their emails delivered. AWeber has perhaps the best reputation, but I’ve found GetResponse to work well too.

The important thing is to start with a service that you can stick with. You might be surprised at how very, very painful it is to change autoresponder services. As a rule you will have to have your subscribers confirm that they want to remain on your list. It’s not uncommon to lose about 90% of your list at that point, although a more responsive list can do much better than that.

The advantage to using a paid service rather than a free script that runs on your own server is that they handle blacklisting issues and keeping track of how users subscribed for you, which is useful in case of spam complaints. Free services may have the price right, but you generally lose out in other ways in the long run.

How Do You Build a List?

Building a list is not easy. Especially if you are using a reputable service such as AWeber or GetResponse, you cannot just buy leads from anywhere. That’s a good way to flat out lose your account. But that helps with your deliverability and cuts way back on spam complaints.

The simplest of the legitimate ways is to use the form your autoresponder company generates for your website. You should do at least some light customization. You should have a subscription form on every page of your site to maximize the chances of getting subscribers.
If you offer something free in return for subscribing, you can increase the rate at which people subscribe. It can be an ecourse that you offer alongside your regular newsletter, an ebook, just something easy to offer electronically that is relevant to your subscribers’ needs.

I like the results I’ve been getting using the forms through Optin Design. It’s a bit more work if you want to customize the images, but they are attention getting and did increase the number of subscribers I’ve been getting. It’s pretty nice.

Running ads on other sites can be helpful too. This is one of those places where having a freebie helps, as well as a dedicated subscription page. This gives you the best chance to sell people on subscribing to your site.

There are several ways to do this. You can do pay per click advertising on Google. You can buy ads on other sites. You can buy ads in other people’s newsletters. You can even trade ads with other sites.

What Do You Do with Your List?

Sell to it, of course! But not to excess!

How much you sell to your list depends on what you teach your subscribers to expect. Your mailings need to provide good value to them; otherwise they’ll be quick to unsubscribe.

If your list is all about products going on sale, people will expect you to be telling them about a lot of products. But if you’re mostly informational, they won’t want to be hearing every week about the latest product. You have to think about how much you push products at them.

You’ll find some subscribers are very touchy about you discussing products with them. If they say they’ll unsubscribe if you don’t ease up on the advertising, think about what you’re doing. If you haven’t been overdoing and haven’t been getting a lot of other unsubscriptions (note: most won’t say a word, they’ll just unsubscribe), you may be just fine and only be dealing with a complainer. It’s your list and you do get to decide how much you advertise.

Basic ad links don’t seem to bother subscribers that much. After all, look at how many ads are in your typical print newspaper or magazine. Many are far worse than even a fairly cluttered website. People aren’t as accepting of ads online in many cases.

But it’s the constant product recommendations that tend to get the reactions I described above. I’ve had people threaten to leave my list after a single product promotion. It was on a list where I very rarely do direct product promotions, so my subscribers weren’t used to it. But I did explain that my opinion was that it was an excellent product, and if I chose to run a promotion I would, but I had no plans to take it to excess. So far as I’m concerned, if that makes a subscriber want to leave, they can go.

The thing to remember here is that it’s not the freebie seekers who make your list valuable. It’s the buyers. Anyone who wants only your free advice that doesn’t concern buying things isn’t going to help you bring in much money, if any at all.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a WordPress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work – Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List (current page)
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together