Pumping Out Your First Email List

Introduction
Almost one of the first ‘rules of the game’ that anyone new to online business or internet marketing ever hears about is the notion that you have to build a mailing list if you expect to have a successful business. After all, as every expert who is worth listening to will tell you, ‘the money is in the list’.
This is essentially true because although it is possible to run a successful business without building a list at the same time, it is an awful lot harder to do so. And why would you make life any more difficult than it already is, right?
Hence, the objective of this book is to show you how to start building your first mailing list from scratch in the most effective and ultimately profitable way. It will also demonstrate why creating a list is so important and why doing so in the right way is of even more relevance.
This is not some hypothetical ‘if you do A, then B might happen’ theoretical guide. It is an exact replica of the plan I used to build a list of 2500 new subscribers from scratch in one month, a plan that has been tested in the heat of the online marketing battle and shown to be a winner.
And here is the final thing to understand before we move on.
There is nothing difficult or complex about building a mailing list. Once you understand why you are doing things a certain way and you have

put in place what you need to make sure that things happen the way they should do, list building is actually pretty easy.
However, there is some work involved because it is a fact that in every aspect of online business, work is an integral part of the deal. In online marketing as with everything else in life, what you get out is always in direct proportion to what you are willing to put in. Without work, your list building efforts are consequently almost certainly doomed to failure.
With that proviso in place and understood, let’s get started.

The basics of list building
Before beginning to consider the specifics of building a mailing list, it is important to understand some of the basics that relate to building any online business. Without grasping these central concepts, the idea of building a mailing list makes little sense. This is therefore a natural starting point.
If you are planning to launch any kind of online business, it stands to reason that net users represent your target market. In other words, people who go online every day are your potential customers. It is therefore essential to have some understanding of how people use the internet and what they are looking for from it.
Although the net is becoming an increasingly important centre of business and commerce, it is still a fact that the overwhelming majority of net users do not get online each day to purchase goods or services. Instead, they come online because they need information of one form or another, and they therefore turn to the World Wide Web as the biggest source of information mankind has ever known.
Each and every day, there are millions of people all over the world who have problems that need solving or questions that need answers that they have not previously been able to find elsewhere.
If you have ever used the net to search for information yourself, you probably already know that this is true. You are also probably aware of something else that is critically important (in online marketing terms) too.

The majority of people who are searching for information on the net want that information without paying for it if at all possible.
From these two simple facts about how people use the net, there are a couple of conclusions that you can arrive at.
Firstly, in order to have a successful online business, you need to establish a way or have a system for making contact with net users who could be potential customers for your business. Secondly, you need to ensure that these people are both capable of and willing to spend money, because if they are not, it makes it far more difficult for you to generate the online income that you want to generate.
Hence, the first thing that you need to do is some market research.
As suggested in the introduction, there is some work involved in building a mailing list, and this is where it starts.

The targeting and niche concepts…
Why targeting is essential
Although the vast majority of people who get online every day do so to find information, they are not all looking for exactly the same type of information. If they were, it would be very easy indeed to connect with them because you would know exactly what they were looking for without any research whatsoever. However, because this is clearly not the case, you need to dig a little deeper.
Most people do not seek information from the net on a completely untargeted, general level. On the contrary, they usually have a specific questions need answering or a distinct pr