Start Your Own List

Most websites now use a simple email address capture form for interested readers to subscribe to some form of newsletter or site update. Whether you send that Newsletter daily/ weekly or monthly or whatever frequency is up to you.

But I just wanted to make you understand how important it is for you to capture your reader's email adresses. I am not talking spamming, but legitimate means to reach your readers outside your blog or website.

Think about it, your readers read your blogs or articles and once they are off, you have no way of connecting to them again! Unless they come to your site again. What if you have some new products that is related to your overall theme and could prove very useful to your readers.

Welcome to the world of online list building. People also call it as Cash Registers, because having a focused interested list of people following you is an relatively easy target for selling more products (then approaching totally new customers). This is because of two reasons- the reader liked your articles/ content and trust that your opinion/ views presented on the site are honest. So whatever product you will suggest, readers will ofcourse trust them as well. That's the power of list.

Let me take an example. Let's say your site gives information on Online Money Making tips (something like this blog). You also promote some products (may be an ebook / course) that are relevant to your overall money making opportunities.

It receives unique visitors- 100 per month and out of them, 5 people buy some product of 20$ each (your profit 5*20 = 100$). If you didn't have a list that's your max profit.

You don't know who visited your website and you don't have a contact to followup. If you had asked your readers to subscribe, you would have easily followed up with them to understand their queries, and answered all their doubts regarding products. See, this means extra profit!

Now comes the question of how do I implement this...a web form that can capture your readers' email adress and may be a name. You should perhaps not really try to capture any more detail than this. Why? Because people feel offensive to be asked their email addresses. Online world is begot with spammers and it's a risk for anyone to just give theitr email address to someone. How would you feel about it? So forget something like phone no.

You could coax people to give their phone numbers as well, if you could promise them some free report and something significant for them to let go their phone no. Otherwise, don't even try.

Second point, be sure you always have a privacy policy...or may be even a simple statement like 'We respect your privacy and will in no way share/ sell email ids'.

Now comes the form that will capture your reader's email ids.

There are many services that allow you to capture this, both free and paid. I suggest to start with, start with a free account at GetResponse.com (you can watch a free tour)

Just follow their instructions on how to create a web form, it generates a html/ javascript code which you merely needs to inject somewhere in your website html code. Overall it takes approx 10 minutes to set up your form and see your list growing.