I had a few people ask about list building in my last post, so a dedicated blog post would be good for a follow up.
List building is the act of getting someones email address from your squeeze page, usually in exchange for something. Whether you are just sending them off to the offer afterwards, or giving them a free info product in a download is up to you. This post won’t be to cover the hows of list building, but the whys.
Why should you build a list? It’s hard, costs a lot of money to test properly, and most likely, you’ll see a loss on any new lists you create. List building is not very noob friendly because the amount of work and effort to put into them is high, and initial returns can seem low rather than just simply direct linking or a quick jump through a landing page. Let’s look at everything you’ll need to test when building a new campaign, and then what you need to test to build a list:
- Traffic source
- targeting
- ad headlines and bodies
- images
- Landing Page if you are using one
- offers
And with a squeeze page to build a list:
- landing page design
- landing page copy
- follow up email copy
- headline copy
- calls to action on all emails and landing page
- offers/whatever you are giving away
So you can see an email list ads a ton of extra steps to any campaign you are building. That couples with the fact that you might not see an instant positive return means you’ll be spending money and not making it back instantly. This can be hard for anyone new to affiliate marketing to accept.
The problem for many is that they see affiliate marketing as a get rich quick scheme, which is wrong to assume. Like any business, you must treat anything you do as such. How do you establish a long-term physical business? Repeat and long-term customers that come back to you time and time again. With standard affiliate practices, you get them to click your link and that may be the last you see of any such target. They may never click one of your links again. I hope you can already see where I am going with this.
When you get someones email, that automatically gets you a line with that customer over and over again. So long as you can keep shooting them products and offers that they will enjoy and can benefit from, you’ll be able to find use in the list time and time again. And this means long term business, conversions and money over a long period of time. Just what any physical business wants. Rather than just having that $3.50 conversion, you might find the lifetime value of any new subscriber to your list is in the 10s or 100s or even thousands (I have lists in the later stages, already, and it was fully worth it to test, test, test again to get there!)
So, for anyone considering affiliate marketing, I can full-heartedly recommend getting into building lists for any major campaigns you launch. Test it. If you are profitable on a linked campaign, send 20% of the traffic to a list LP and start sending off emails to test the waters and get your feet wet.
