List Building

As a local business looking to take advantage of being found by local customers list building can become a profitable part of your business.

This list will contain people who have signed up to hear from you on a regular basis and they will often sign up because you have offered them an incentive like a free download, free course or some other gift.

Your business can also take advantage it by encouraging your offline customers to go online and sign up to receive information from you - as long as you make your offer attractive enough many of them will be happy to do that, plus you have the added benefit of attracting new customers searching online.

The process of list building is fairly easy and the first thing you will need is a reliable autoresponder service. I recommend Aweber as one of the better solutions online. http://bestautoresponse.aweber.com

This service automates the whole process of people signing up and receiving your messages. You create your signup box and from that moment everything is left to the autoresponder sequence to send out.

You can sometimes get a free service with your hosting but it is never worth using that service because if you leave your hosting company you lose your subscriber list or you have to go through the trouble of getting them to sign up before you leave.

An independent autoresponder service has other advantages including protecting you from spam complaints.

Sometimes people sign up for information and then forget a few months later so when they receive your email they think you are spamming them. Spam complaints are now taken very seriously but a professional autoresponder service will look into the complaint rather than shut you down and ask questions later. They will have a record of your list building activities including when the person signed up, the date, time, day and their IP address so they will know whether this was a genuine spam complaint or not.

The only other thing you need once you have your autoresponder is information to place in your autoresponder.

You may decide to give away a free report, ebook ,audio or video. Some people like to include several weeks worth of information that is sent out every three or four days to their subscribers. Other people send out information daily, some weekly and some once a month.

There has been a lot of debate in the list building community about how often you should send out emails to your subscribers and the one thing everyone agrees on is it is better to send it too often than not often enough because people forget.

At least once a week is the minimum, three times a week is a good general number and more than that should be monitored to see what response you get. If you find people unsubscribe soon after joining you may want to cut back on the daily emails.

Of course this article is assuming you already have some kind of web presence – either a website or blog that people will be visiting and invited to sign up – because without that it will be difficult to make your offer to them.

When making your offer to sign up and hear from you make sure you include the benefits of signing up, anything in particular that is relevant to people who join, what they will receive and how often they will receive it.

The best way to get your offline customers to sign up is to hand out flyers of your online incentive. Let them know that when they join they have an opportunity to receive subscriber only discounts and you share information only available to subscribers.

Offline businesses can really do a lot to take advantage of the internet and it is important to begin looking at how your local business might benefit from online activities such as list building. I can think of no easier way than to build a list of past and present customers that you regularly send out emails too.

Summary:

List building is a great way to ensure you have two sources of income – one offline from your local business and the other online.  Site Build It offer a built in autoresponder with their local business website – but even though that is available I still recommend you think about having your subscriber list with an independent service if you can afford to do that.

You will be able to log in at any time and send an email out to your subscribers promoting one of your own products or a product as an affiliate marketer – the more they know, like and trust you the more chances you have of someone buying something you recommend.

Developing the “know like and trust” factor is what we cover next. We move on to focusing on how you are going to help your local customers find you and once they have found you how to help them learn to know, like and trust you. To do that you need to improve your online visibility and build your credibility.

Action:

What will it take for your local business to take part in list building? If you are not doing it yet think about how you can find a way to begin building your list so that you can build yourself a passive income using the internet.

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If you need help with getting your local business online call Diane on 0208 242 4339 and she will help you identify what will work for your local business.

If you are a small/medium sized local business looking to take on local business marketing services this may be something you decide to outsource rather than spend time on yourself. 

Creating a high ranking profitable internet business that will get your local business found on the internet by your local customers is essential for business success but if building it yourself is not something that excites you then you need to find a company that provides local business marketing services and most importantly you need to find one you can trust to deliver the results you want.