List Building - 5 Breakthrough List Building Tips for Newbies

One of the biggest problems anyone getting started online as an Internet Marketer is building their first list.

If you've never heard of list building before it's simply a list of names and email addresses of people who have specifically requested information from you.

It's this list of names and email addresses that is the foundation of your online business because it gives you the ability to drive traffic to any website at any time.

Think about that for a second... any website at any time. That website could be a sales letter to your product, an affiliate product recommendation, or even just your blog.

Hopefully by now you can see just how critical it is to get started building a list of subscribers to help you grow your online business.

Here are 5 breakthrough list building tips that'll help you get started...

Tip 1: At the very least you need to have a website. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a landing page with a headline, some bullet points and an opt-in box. It's the opt-in box people enter their names and email addresses into to get the information you promise them on your website.

Tip 2: You must have a professional autoresponder account (and I don't mean an auto-reply email address either). This has got to be a professionally hosted autoresponder system that sends out sequential emails and helps you manage your list.

Tip 3: The emails you send people after they join your list (through your autoresponder) must be informative and useful to keep people reading them. If you don't provide anything of value your emails will not get opened, your list will become unresponsive and your business will surely fail.

Tip 4: Another must is to use what's called "double opt-in subscriptions". Here's how it works... People enter their details into your opt-in form. They then get an instant email from you (your autoresponder system sends this to them) that asks them to click on a link. By clicking on this link they're confirming their request to receive information from you by email. Depending on how you've set up your follow-up emails they'll then automatically get their first email from you.

Double opt-in subscription is an essential part of list building because it protects you from spam complaints, "Joe jobs" and all other kind of problems and abuse.

Tip 5: Don't ever, ever, ever buy lists of email addresses until you know exactly what you're doing. It's when you mail out to these lists that the real problems can begin, so my best advice is to stay well away from buying lists of email addresses.

Instead start build your list yourself using the tips I've given you above. The key to successful email marketing, list building and ultimately successful business building is it's all about quality and not quantity.