If You Don’t Have A List, You Don’t Have A Business

If you have been marketing online for a while, I am sure you have heard of this mantra “the money is in the list” You’ve probably wondered what this means. It’s referring to your email list building and how it affects the amount of money and success you have online. Everybody always gets caught up in how many people are joining their online business and how much money they are making at that exact moment in time.

What are lists?

Lists are nothing but contacts and emails of potential customers, who have bought products and services by visiting links that are given, for example, on your blog. Apart from existing clients, these lists also have names and numbers of clients who have shown interest in your blog writings but may not have made any purchases of products due to varied reasons.

Many marketers, often fail to look to the future and understand how important list building is. There are many online secrets that the gurus don’t like to share and this is one of the most important. Building your list should be your number one goal. As you’re growing your list you should be emailing them on a weekly basis with useful information. This will open up a line of communication between your leads and you, which will lead to them getting to know you and trusting your knowledge of how to build a successful online business. After you have built a relationship with them, you then share your primary network marketing business with them.

Here are some tools to spearhead your online business.

Why are lists noteworthy?

List building may sound time-consuming and unyielding initially, but as a matter of fact, lists are vital for money generation. Suppose, you promote your blog on various sites and generate a hundred views on a particular day. Out of these hundred readers, only fifty would visit the links that would be mentioned on your blogs. Furthermore, only two to three people would buy the product from the company. This clearly indicates that although you had a satisfactory response from your marketing campaign, the money generated is extremely less as compared to the efforts.

While traffic generation may seem to be very important, the income generated from it goes much beyond that. You need to have visitors who can generate business for you or your company. Having such a list of customers is highly beneficial for any blogger. You can contact the people you think are potential customers so that you can have better chances of selling your products.

Building trust with your list is paramount here: If you wish to have a growing affiliate marketing business, you must aim toward building trust with your readers. With the internet at the forefront, customers, in this technical age, cannot be fooled. People only buy products and services from places or from people who they can trust for quality.

The reasons below explained why list building is so important:

a. If you don’t have a list, you don’t have a business

You can take a look at all the big businesses you can think of. They collect the details of their customers and build a database, Google, Amazon, Groupon, Apple, banks, insurance companies, etc. So, if you want to build a real business that churns out real money, start building a list.

b. Most of your visitors who visit your website usually don’t come back

Let’s say you are selling a product online and the conversion rate is 5%. This means that for every 100 visitors, you get 5 customers. This is already a very good conversion rate by any standard but what about the other 95% of the visitors who came and did nothing? They leave and most of the time, don’t return.

There are many reasons why most of them are not compelled to buy, let alone do anything on your site — perhaps they don’t know who you are. Maybe they are skeptical. Or it could be that they don’t see the value in your offer or they simply just don’t need what you have to offer, for now. So it makes sense to get their names and email addresses First so …..

c. You can follow up

When you get visitors to subscribe to your mailing list, they have given you permission to email them, hence permission marketing. This is unlike spam where it’s unsolicited and you send emails to recipients who don’t know who you are, let alone gave you permission to email them.

Your visitor may, at this time, may not be willing to part with his or her money yet, but he or she has given you details so you can follow up via your autoresponder and increase your chance of closing the sale.

d. Position yourself as an expert or voice of authority

Here, you’ve got an opening chance. You get to share your story and above all, what you have to offer that can help your subscribers. With an autoresponder for your email messages, I would think this is the best relationship-building tool on autopilot.

e. You can make money fast

This is precisely how top online marketers are able to make thousands of dollars within hours or within a day. When you have a new product to sell, you are just one email away from clicking the send button, and whoosh….your subscribers receive it almost instantly.

f. You can promote other offers too

You don’t have to stop at just selling your own products. You can promote other people’s products for a commission when you’re not creating or selling your own offers. With your own list, you can basically generate your own cash flow anytime, any day, with every email you send out.

Here are some tools to spearhead your online business.

g. You can sell away the database later

While I’ve not done this, the value of a business is determined largely by the customer and prospect database. If you think about exiting your business someday, your mailing list can be sold for a large sum and you can cash in on the big payday.

Now you can see how important list building is to your long-term income. It is one of the single greatest online secrets that the gurus don’t teach you. If you want to be able to work from home full time or grow your online business, you need to start building your list!

That’s all for now, my friends. See you all in my next article.