by Dave Lovelace

One of the hardest things in business is actually drumming up the business. Whether online or off, you need people to DO SOMETHING if you want your business to be a success. For online business, one way to reach the people that will be most interested in your product or service is through list building.

What is List Building?

In the fewest words possible, list building is the process used to create an inventory of people who fit the niche market you are promoting. The assumption usually is that if you cast a wide enough net, you will eventually find who you are looking for. This method is not only backwards but also costly. Instead, start with your business market and go smaller.

There is more than one way to develop a list for your business. Here are just a few of the more popular (and successful might I add) ways:

• Opt-ins
• Free Giveaways
• Contests
• Email Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogging

Whatever methods you use, it is important to know where you are coming from and where you are going before others will follow you.

Getting Your Name Out There

In order for others to follow you they need to know who you are and what you stand for. To that end, you will want to network with others. Your time is better spent building your brand before you build your list.

Do you routinely buy from someone you’ve just heard of? Not normally right?

Neither does anyone else. That is expected in business. Trust is earned over time and you must begin with curiosity in order to build up to trust.

Viral marketing is one of your best assets when it comes to getting noticed and building your list. Ask friends, family members, school chums, business owners, and others to help you out. If they have websites, blogs or are a part of forums, let them pass the word around about you and what you do.

On your end, visit websites and blogs associated with the product or service that you sell. Get involved, ask questions, and show your face. These are the people you will ask to endorse you to lend credibility to your products.

During your promotion, your traffic will increase. People will sniff you out and see what you offer. Now you can use one, two or all of the above bulleted methods to begin building your list. Visitors will lend you their personal information (name and email) if they like what they see. From that point, it is up to you to keep them interested enough to become a loyal customer.

Confused about List Building and Email Marketing? Save time and money. Discover the secret List Marketing profit tactics of the Internet’s top earning marketers. Click here now.. List Building Information

Frankly, I’d never considered it. In fact I’d like to say I understood it all perfectly, but I’m still taking it in.

If you’d like to read this free presentation (no affiliate link just an offsite PDF), it’s here:

How To Present With Twitter and Other BackChannels by Olivia Mitchell

Here’s the Table of Contents:

How Twitter changes presentations …… 4
The benefits of presenting with Twitter …… 6
Audience benefits ….. 7
Presenter benefits….. 9
Presenter control ….. 10
The three stages of presenting with the backchannel …… 11
Stage One – Survive the experience …… 12
Audit your presentation ….. 14
Prepare psychologically ….. 16
Ask for what you need …… 19
Connect with your audience…. 20
Read the Twitterstream…… 21
Stage Two – Respond to the audience’s needs …… 22
Getting started on Twitter ……. 22
Create a hashtag …… 24
Monitor the Twitterstream …… 25
Types of tweets to respond to……. 30
Follow-up …….. 33
Learning from the Twitterstream …… 34
Stage Three – Engage with the backchannel …… 36
Build relationships pre-presentation …… 36
Make your presentation tweetable….. 38
Set-up a home-page for your presentation …… 42
Which backchannel should you use? ……. 43
Introduce the backchannel …….. 45
Displaying the backchannel …….46
Audience participation with the backchannel…. 58

How To Present With Twitter and Other BackChannels by Olivia Mitchell

So much of the advice in applying “online marketing” strategies to brick and mortar business is about “maybe”.

Maybe someone will wander to your website.

Maybe a search engine will not list you on page 10,002 of the search results.

Maybe someone will read what you wrote.

Maybe some philanthropist will send you a check … one day.

Maybe.

This article is about getting as far away from “maybe” and making some money as possible. It’s about people with a real world product or service – not someone hoping for a click on a high dollar Pay Per Click ad.

It’s about how to use a free commodity… an ebook to turn your current subscribers into paying customers and how to use direct response marketing to find new readers for your online offering and, as a result, make some money.

Unlike most online strategies, it assumes you will actually reach out in ways beyond the free download… by calling a prospect.

Read: A Quick-Hitting 3-Step Content Marketing Campaign to get Customers this Month.

Could this work for you? It’s more likely to work than “Maybe”!

List Building 101 – Create Squeeze Pages

by Dave Lovelace

There are dozens of them on the Internet. We read them every day but are they effective? Do they make you want to actually do the thing they are asking you to do – which is normally to sign up for an email list? What are we talking about? Why, squeeze pages, of course.

What is a Squeeze Page?

It sounds like it has something to do with fruit. What you are squeezing is not produce but people. You want their information for your list. Whether you are looking for sales leads or subscribers, a squeeze page is an effective way to get what you seek.

A squeeze page is essentially a landing page. It can be your home page on your site, but if you are running more than one marketing campaign, it can be a separate page, the purpose of which is to get people to opt-in to your list in exchange for something.

What can they opt-in for? It can be newsletters, free reports, free analysis, catalogs and the like. You choose who you are looking for and what media will get the names and email addresses for you.

These pages are important because their sole purpose is to get the reader to perform an act that has been predetermined by you. The “act” does not involve sales directly. You want to gain the trust of your potential customer before you ask them to consider buying something from you.

One benefit you will gain here is a list of subscribers that are within your target market. Someone who is not interested will not sign up. Using a squeeze page as a sales page can draw people who are not within your target market. If you post a page that offers “get rich quick” scenarios, you are guaranteed to get lots of takers but not the ones you want.

Characteristics of a Squeeze Page

People pay a lot of money to have squeeze pages constructed for them. With this page, you want to pull out all of the stops to get noticed by your niche. So, let’s start at the top, the top of the page that is.

1. Headline. People glance over pages when they read on the Internet. Your headline may be the only chance to gain their attention. Sum that up in a few words and use it as your headline: “Researchers Say it takes Two Weeks to Make or Break a Habit.” Don’t forget to use the same keywords you researched for your website.

2. Get personal. Share a story that is relevant to your subject matter. Maybe you had a habit you wanted to create. Give the reader insight into your issue and how you solved it.

3. Get user-friendly. Use bullet points and numbered passages to gain the reader’s attention. Emboldened wording stands out and lets the reader glance to see if you have to say anything that they want to hear.

4. The action. Don’t forget to include what you want them to do. If it is signing up for something, tell them how to do it and what they will gain. Have your opt-in form clearly labeled with a link to your site.

Squeeze pages are one way of creating a targeted list of interested people who will hopefully become customers. They are a great way to not only grow your list, but potentially your profits too.

Confused about List Building and Email Marketing? Save time and money. Discover the secret List Marketing profit tactics of the Internet’s top earning marketers. Click here now.. List Building Information

by Dave Lovelace

Most business owners would agree that without a plan, their enterprise doesn’t stand a chance. It is like firing a shot in the dark hoping to hit a target. Part of that “road map” you build your business upon includes finding people who will become the base on which you will grow.

List building is essential to finding your customer base. Why do you need a list? Without it, there is no way to predict what the outcome will be month to month, let alone year to year.

One school of thought says that if you have a big enough campaign people will come. That may be true, but they will only come once. Even making a million dollars on one promotion won’t sustain your business forever if none of those customers ever comes back again.

Now, we aren’t talking money like that (at least not yet). So, to keep things real, one-time sales are not the stuff of solid business foundations. Building relationships with people is the key to a sound future for your enterprise.

What a List Can Do for You & Your Business

Let’s say that you want to sell a product door-to-door. The first time through the neighborhood, you visit every house on the block because you don’t know who might be interested in what you are selling. After chatting a few moments, you quickly learn which people are interested in your product enough to buy. From those customers, you ask for further contact information.

A month from then, you decide to offer a new product. Instead of canvassing the entire neighborhood again, you visit the people who purchased the first time. In addition to information about the new product, you also bring a flyer offering them a free gift if they can recommend two friends who would be interested in the product. Now, instead of twenty names, you have forty more to add to the list in your hand.

This is roughly how list building works online. Your first efforts will cast a net over a larger group of people. The catch will consist of people interested in your market, but not necessarily the product you want to provide. Through marketing efforts on your website and through other sites, you will weed out those who are really outside of your market. Leaving you with a group of people who ARE interested in what you have to offer.

For subsequent offerings, you can go straight to the most interested parties and make your pitch. Each time, you can find more and more people to add to your list.

List building takes the guess work out of marketing. The money you spend is more effective if you know where to concentrate your efforts. Once you build a substantial list, it can seem like you make the sale every time. Sales will increase, but not because you are lucky – it’s because you were smart. Like a fisherman, you learned the best place to find what you are looking for, so you dropped your line and came up with the catch of the day!

Confused about List Building and Email Marketing? Save time and money. Discover the secret List Marketing profit tactics of the Internet’s top earning marketers. Click here now.. List Building Information

by Dave Lovelace

Everyone has received an email. Everyone has also received unsolicited emails. That makes it all the more important to build a list of subscribers who won’t mind you communicating with them this way.

One of the most common ways that online business owners connect with their potential customers is through email. You can reach people easier that way than you can by ringing them up on the phone. Email can be accessed from laptops in Wi-Fi hotspots, cellular phones and WebTV to name a few. So, you could say that it is pretty important to manage this marketing tool just right.

Email Lists

Here’s how it usually works, you include an opt-in page on your website. It could be for free stuff, discounted merchandise, or additional information on something they read on your site. Readers are asked to become subscribers in some way to your website by providing their name and email address.

Along with that address you also include a disclaimer to put them at ease. Anyone who signs up knows that you won’t sell their information to a third party or send them unwanted spamming emails.

Your initial list will be mixed with those who are in your target market and people who are interested in more general information. If you are trying to reach people who are into dog accessories, you may reach those who are seeking information on pet accessories in general. They will soon be weeded out and hopefully they won’t make up the bulk of your list.

Autoresponders

Now, it’s time to contact those people. You have the list and something has to be done with it. Your subscribers are waiting.

You can use a series of emails that highlight your product offerings as a way to transition subscribers into the realm of customers. The goal of these emails is to provide additional information on the topic of your website business and not to necessarily sell a product directly.

The emails can be set up automatically to go out on a pre-set schedule using autoresponder programs and services. These services give you a way to distribute those emails. You can even add the personal touch of addressing your list by name instead of a blanket greeting with certain autoresponder services.

But, we are getting ahead of ourselves here. You need something to load into the autoresponder program. Create a series of emails that speak directly to each list member as if they were the only one on your list. You can even outsource the autoresponder emails if you need to.

Now that you have a list of subscribers, your next step is keeping them your number one priority. Use autoresponder emails to contact them on a regular basis with the purpose of building a solid relationship for future business.

Confused About List Building and Email Marketing? Save Time and Money. Discover The Secret List Marketing Profit Tactics of The Internet’s Top Earning Marketers. Click Here Now.. List Building Information

by Dave Lovelace

Article marketing is one of the best ways to gain traffic for free. Using your expertise in the niche market, you can attract the kind of readership that would be interested in the product or service that you are marketing. Use it to build a money-making list.

The goal of business is to make money. If you aren’t successful, then you won’t be in business for long. The goal of list building is to create a network of people who will play into that success over and over again. The money will come if you cultivate the relationship first.

Article Marketing

Most people choose niches that appeal to them because they already know something about it. Use this to your advantage with article marketing.

Article marketing involves writing stirring content that can be highlighted on your website as well as other places. If you aren’t great in the writing department you can hire a ghostwriter or a ghostwriting service to handle the hard work for you. All you need to do is provide them with the information you want included in the articles.

Don’t forget to include keywords. They are still important. The fabulous things that you write won’t get read if no one can find it. Using keywords relevant to your niche can assure you a place on the first page of search results (or close to it once you get the hang of it). Then, others will learn that you have something important to say.

You can market your articles in several places. In fact there are quite a few directories that are in search of good articles. Quality is still the name of the game. Once you submit your work to these sites, they are reviewed by their experts before they are accepted. Appearing on popular sites like EzineArticles.com and Buzzle can increase your visibility and credibility.

Growing Your List

What you want to build your list are subscribers – people who will opt-in for newsletters, reports, email marketing campaigns and the like. If you are bent on selling them something at every turn, then your list will remain puny and ineffective. Concentrate on giving the readers what they want before you think about making the sale.

Provide information that is relevant to the target market. For example, for someone who wants to sell fishing equipment, write content that touts the benefits of fishing (relaxation, family activities, etc.) to them. After that, you can build up to how-to articles on different types of equipment or fishing tips.

When you give your readers what they want, they will come back for more. As they become comfortable with you, you can ask for their information and they will give it freely. These readers are now ready to hear more about you and your products.

Need help building a responsive opt-in list? Find out how you can triple your online profits with killer email marketing tactics designed to target the hungriest buyers in your niche! Click here now.. List Building Information

How’d he do that?

He targeted males aged 24-30 in his target marketing area who showed their profile as “engaged”… these are the only people who saw his advertising. And they were the people who were most likely to contact him and do business.

To put it another way, he turned $100 per month of advertising into $6,667 of gross revenues for that same 6 month period. Not too shabby.

But there’s more you could be doing with Facebook. Click through and read!

Get more unique marketing tips here for your business – absolutely free!

If you liked that story, you’re going to LOVE Markus Allen’s Retail Marketing Insider ezine.
It’s free! And he’s already posted a handful of tips you’ll want to grab today!

It’s the story of the $5 Footlong Sub at Subway.

Best of all, despite the discount (a $5 sub is about $1 less than the “normal” price), the profit margins did not go down because of the significantly increased volume.

No marketing program works “forever” … but this one is allowing Subway to move ahead and pass McDonald’s in total number of retail locations – during a recession no less.

This strategy won’t work if your home business is about making hand crafted specialty art.

But if you’re home business is fried pies or something a bit more like a commodity, it just might work.

Interestingly, though franchise owners could see it working in the test stores, many doubted it would work for them. Yet when they tried it, the percentage of profits remained stable and business boomed.