List Building - the Two Key Elements you Must Have

Copyright (c) 2008 Titus Hoskins

One of the most important factors to online success is list building. No matter what goals you're pursuing with your online activities, building a good healthy contact list is vital for a successful outcome.

List building plays a major role in developing good relationships with your site's customers, clients and visitors. It can be used to get more traffic, leads and sales for your site or business.

For these reasons contact building should be high on your list of priorities when you're marketing or promoting on the web. Fortunately, list building is an easy process that any site or webmaster can quickly set-up as long as you understand two simple, yet well-proven principles of list building.

To be really successful, your list building must incorporate these two key elements. Without these two main ingredients you will probably find building your contact list difficult and slow going. So it is worth your while to fully understand and utilize these two factors in your list building.

Any list should have these two key elements:

1. Value -

Your list should have value. It should offer something valuable to the one subscribing. It should offer important information, quality content, special deals/discounts, and more importantly, it should offer a valuable relationship or connection to an expert in the subject area of the list.

Subscribers join a list for the benefits it will bring them, whether it be valuable content, special deals or a connection to an expert in their area of interest; your list must have value for the subscribers. They must benefit from joining your list.

If you're building a list, just write down all the benefits someone would receive from joining your site or list.

- receive important information

- get special valuable content

- receive special deals/discounts

- get training videos/workshops

- get timely announcements or news

Make these benefits your main selling points when you're building your list. Don't forget there may also be a psychological reason for joining your list - many people like being part of a group or membership site. It's human nature, we all want to be emotionally involved with certain topics or causes, so don't ignore this aspect when building your list. Everybody likes to feel included - lists can fulfil this emotional need.

Simply give your subscribers something of value and you will build your list quickly and easily.

2. Free

Whatever you offer - make sure it is Free. The quickest way to build any list is to give away free valuable content, information, videos, reports, ebooks, discounts, prizes... everybody loves a free gift. Just make them an offer they can't refuse.

Some marketers argue that giving away free items will attract the "wrong kind" of customer or subscriber - people that will never buy anything because they will expect it to be free. But this has more to do with the nature of your gift and the kind of contacts you're building - giving away free buying guides on how to purchase real estate, fast cars, LCD TVs, laptops... will definitely attract the right "buying customer". If you're into selling, you just have to adjust your marketing to incorporate the free element correctly.

Besides, giving away something free is the first step in starting an ongoing relationship with your subscribers. It gets the ball rolling. It is one of the most effective ways to build your list quickly and easily. Just make sure you're giving away something of value to the person receiving it and they will turn to you, time and time again, to find what they're looking for on the web.

So the next time you're building a contact list make these two key elements the center of your activities. Just remember "give them value and make it free" and you should have no problems with list building.