Making Money Online: 3 Top List Building Mistakes

When it comes to making money online, developing a targeted subscriber list of repeat customers is an essential ingredient in the recipe to success.

Having a list is an essential part of marketing if you want to make it easier to make money with less work involved.

With a mailing list you can create email broadcasts that go out to your entire subscriber base that include a mix of high quality information and content as well as promotional offers.

You can include affiliate promotions for products and services that you are interested in advertising, as well as gaining valuable feedback from your subscribers on the different types of products that they are interested in.

This information will help you develop your own high quality, in demand products with a ready-made customer base waiting to purchase them.

It’s really quite easy to build a list, even if you are a complete newcomer to the world of making money online. The problem comes when people approach list building in such as a way that they hinder their chances of actually being able to fully monetize their mailing list.

Here are 3 of the top list building mistakes made by email marketers.

Mistake #1: Failing To Deliver Good Content

This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes that most new email marketers make when broadcasting to their lists.

While the main objective of building email lists for most marketers is to make money you need to first build a relationship with your subscribers by offering high quality content. This can include free tools, resources and other useful information.

Once you have worked towards connecting with your subscribers you need to maintain that relationship by focusing on a good balance of solid, high quality content with any promotional emails you send out.

In fact, one way of maximizing response from your subscribers is to over-deliver on quality content.

People tend to notice habits, and if they discover that the only time you seem interested in contacting them is when you have something to sell or promote, you will quickly lose any trust and credibility that you may have earned from your previous communication.

Consider whether your email truly offers value and is written so that it genuinely benefits your subscribers.  If you build a solid relationship and brand with your subscribers, you’ll subsequently build a very responsive and loyal customer base.

Mistake #2: Promoting Irrelevant Products

It’s much easier to convert subscribers into buyers if they trust you. To build this trust it’s important to build your brand awareness and develop a relationship with them.

Every email you send to your list should directly work towards strengthening your brand recognition for giving value.  This means that you must be extremely careful with the kinds of products you promote as well as the quality of the products you endorse.

It pays to always review each product or offer you are planning to promote so that you can not only stand behind it, but can directly answer any questions that your subscribers may have about the offer.

You also need to make sure that the products and services you are advertising are relevant to your topic.  If your subscriber originally signed up in order to receive information on “Warcraft”, they aren’t likely going to be responsive if you begin to send out content relating to “Blogging”.

If you become interested in other niches you should work towards creating a new list for each market.

Mistake #3 Letting Your List Go Cold

It’s vital to stay in frequent contact with your subscribers

This doesn’t mean that you have to email them every day, but you want to create some sort of posting schedule so that you can get into the habit of connecting with your subscribers regularly.

If you are sending out good and valuable content your subscribers will begin to expect your emails on certain days and by doing this you will begin to see a dramatic increase in your open rates.

The more consistent you are with your broadcasts, the easier it will be to condition your subscribers to accept promotional based emails and advertisements in between mailings containing free content and resources.

Now we all probably know of certain internet marketers whom we only hear from once in a blue moon but they probably have many lists and don’t need to communicate frequently with some of them.

What mistakes have you made in list building?

One thought on “Making Money Online: 3 Top List Building Mistakes”

  1. Hi Sandy

    You neatly summarise the entire challenge of writing emails.

    I have just re-written my entire sets of training emails for each list and in the first of these I spell out when I am going to deliver the messages, this matches my long term email delivery.

    In each list the first set of emails helps them to develop whatever skill that list is focussed on and then they progress on to a more general niche focussed type of messaging

    This has the advantage of them getting used to expect a message on a specific day, people are not very good at remembering that it was 2 days since your last message but they will remember that it is Tuesday.

    I have adjusted the template to have recommendations listed at the end and use the body to discuss a topic and perhaps a new recommendation, but with so much to do and so little time often the time to review a new product is not there and thus the body becomes a general discussion.

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