List building is the most important skill you need to learn to make money online because it takes care of the most important aspect of any business – the customers.
Why List Building? Let me paint you a picture.
You walk into an electronics store to buy a digital camera and you start to browse through the different brands and models available to choose a camera you like and will give you value for money.
A sales rep in the store walks up to you and asks if you need any help and starts to sell to you to try and get you to buy one. In this scenario the average person will get defensive and though you may be polite and listen to the sales rep you will probably not buy anything or even worse not come back to that store again.
Why? Because people like to buy but they absolutely hate to be sold to. Let’s look at this scenario again but suppose instead of the sales rep. you ran into one of your close friends or family members and they showed you a camera in the store that they already owned and recommended that you buy it.
Chances are you will buy this camera and you will buy it with confidence because someone you trusted recommended it to you.
This same principle applies online except it’s more pronounced as people’s attention span are shorter and they don’t have to be polite, they simply leave your website.
Therefore instead of selling to people directly on your website which they hate, you offer a free gift to earn some trust and then when you get their email you can build and nourish that relationship and then sell to them.
Also because you have their email address you can keep in touch with them even if they never come back to your website. Email is also less intrusive than other sales methods such as a rep pushing a product in a store or a random call from a telesales representative when you’re having dinner with your family.
You can open email when you feel like it and that makes potential buyers feel a lot more comfortable. Of course there is a wrong way to do this, certainly if you spam people with too many offers and don’t offer anything of value then they won’t open your emails any more or even worse unsubscribe.
To build your List you need a simple one page website (squeeze page) and an auto responder to accept emails and automate the whole process of building this relationship.
Check out this free gift to get a more detailed approach to setup both of these tools.