When Should You Start Building a List?
For some odd reason, the thought of building a list is something that many newbies feel should only be done by experienced marketers. They may have a lack of self-confidence, which makes them think, “Why would anyone want to listen to me?”
You may not even be aware that you are limiting yourself this way, because you have plans to build a list once you succeed. But whether you are sending an email to someone or publishing a blog post, your subscribers will be interested in what you have to say.
You should start building a list the very day your website is up and running. The same day you register a domain and pay for hosting, you should choose a good email autoresponder tool.
Don’t rely on the customer to bookmark your website as a way to return to it later. Many will fail to do that, and those who do usually have a file of bookmarks so large it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The process of building a list is more than one or two steps. After you register your domain and have a hosting account, you will want to install WordPress so that you can launch your blog.
You will need to go through the technical steps in the very beginning. After you install WordPress along with whatever themes and plugins you want to use on your blog, you will want to head over to your email autoresponder tool and set up your sign up form.
You can design your signup form so that it matches the color and theme of your blog and website. This process only takes a few minutes and it will provide the code you need to copy and paste into your blog.
You want to have the ability to capture names and email addresses from the very first day your blog goes live. That means having multiple places for people to sign up. First, you want to have your sign up form in the sidebar of your blog.
You can also post the code below each blog post so that whenever your reader scrolls down past the signup form in your sidebar, they will still see the option to subscribe and download your free lead magnet.
Another thing you may want to do is create a specific landing page to send people to. When you send people to your blog, there is a chance that they will get distracted by other things on your site, such as articles or pages.
You want the focus to be on your sign up form, and that’s exactly what a landing page can do for you. A landing page is like a miniature sales page whose only goal is to get people on your list.
You might see a headline or two, a few bullet points, and a call to action encouraging people to sign up for the free gift. Some people take this process slow and do a little bit at a time, while others can accomplish all of these technical tasks and set it up in a single day.
It’s okay to go through the process slowly and carefully, but just make sure you are continually making progress and not abandoning the list building step until a later date when you think it’s necessary.
If you wait, you will be continually losing contact with future buyers who would invest in your products and those that you recommend. Over time, every one of those small losses can add up to a lot of lost income.