admin August 6th, 2008
What’s A List?
Let’s talk about "listbuilding" first. This means "Building a List". But which list are we talking about? Your laundry list? Your to-do list? Your grocery list? None of the above. We’re talking about the list of email addresses of people who want to receive an email newsletter from you. And why on earth is this list important?
Why is a List Important??
Well, first of all, it only might be important. If you’re trying to sell something (goods, services, ideas) on the Internet, it’s important, otherwise nyet, nada, not important.
If you are selling something, i.e. you are an Internet Marketer ("IM"), whoever is on your list is more likely to buy something from you than whoever isn’t. That’s because they have said they are interested in hearing what you have to say (that’s why they joined your list!), whereas others haven’t.
As an IM, your list is one of your most prized possessions, and your expertise as an IM is often measured by the size of your list. My friend Willie Crawford, a renowned, prolific IM, has a list of 600,000 people and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month selling things to them. It has taken him around 11 years to build that list, but what the heck, it was darn well worth it, wasn’t it?
How Do You Build a List??
- If you have a site with a lot of valuable content, you can get visitors to visit your site, show them a sample of your newsletter and ask them to sign up.
- You can offer people something free in return for joining your list. It could be a free e-book, report, software, graphics package, mind-map, site membership or usually anything else that’s downloadable. Much discussion has taken place whether these subscribers will stay on your list or unsubscribe as soon as they download your free gift, and the evidence says that many will indeed stay on and become long-term customers.
- You can buy a list (although this is not advisable) from a list broker.
So What’s a Giveaway??
This is a mechanism that implements method 2 above, i.e., offering people something free in return for joining your list. An explanation of the mechanism follows:
- The Giveaway Organizer ("GO") sets up a website just for the Giveaway.
- The GO invites IMs to upload free gifts to the Giveaway website. Visitors will be allowed to download these gifts only if they subscribe to the GO’s list and the list of the IM who uploaded the gift.
- The GO promotes the Giveaway extensively and expects all the contributing IMs to follow suit. If an IM brings many visitors to the Giveaway, that IM’s gift will be positioned at the top of the Giveaway site and in that way be more visible to visitors; consequently visitors will be more likely to join that IM’s list to download his gift.
So Why am I Writing About This?
Because one of our webmasters (at http://WomensLearningPlace.com) has created a gift and uploaded it to a giveaway site that opened today. It’s run by Willie Crawford and two friends of his, and is called the "Viral Rebrandable Giveaway". The special feature of the giveaway is that all the gifts have to be "rebrandable"… which means, for example, if the gift is an e-book with affiliate links to a product, you have permission to replace those affiliate links with your own affiliate links. People who contribute the gifts are obliged to supply a tool along with their gifts to facilitate this link-changing.
We used a software called "Viral Document Toolkit" to create the rebrandable document. This software includes the tool for changing links mentioned above, and we supply that tool to all people who download our gift. It’s very easy to use, and I would recommend it if you are planning on creating a rebrandable document.
Cheers,
Lucky
As of the time of this post, Twitter has around a million members.
Dr. Mani, pediatric heart surgeon and Infopreneur. Dr Mani’s Website
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