Build your list with the end result in mind. With a little planning your list can do much more for you.

Before I get to that, let’s just go over the accepted way to get a list in the first place. You will have an on line website that includes an offer which your visitor can take up by providing their email address. The offer can be a report, an e-book, an e-course, a newsletter, whatever.

Now if you are going to get a large list, you are going to need a lot of people to visit your site and see your offer. You will know that people searching the web will use one of the six search engines, primarily Google, so you will need to have included some search engine optimisation. After inserting their search term the visitor sees the first page for that search term.

That is 10 sites to view right there. Ten sites that in the opinion of Google are the most relevant to that search term. If you ask Google how they determine this, you get “search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results”. Seems fair, but what are these factors?

Google says, amongst others, “Give visitors the information for which they’re searching. Make sure that other sites link to yours. The key to getting links to your site is to create unique, compelling content to which other people want to link. Ensure that the internal pages link to one another”.

OK, so now you have a lot of visitors and you can start that e mail list, always bearing in mind that the list of prospects needs to become a list of quality prospects. It’s the quality prospect that becomes the customer. Just like Google says about your site the offer also has to have compelling content.

Now here is the mistake that so many marketers make, I know that I did in my early days. The holes in the net are too big. You have spent all this time building a good site, you have attracted a lot of visitors and now you are about to let most of them slip through the net.

Let us suppose that you have made an offer of a report and have a substantial number of replies. Of course these will receive the report at once, but here is the missed opportunity. The subject has attracted them and together with the report must come the rest of the armoury, the e-book, the e-course, the newsletter and top of the shop the membership. The membership customer will hold you in some esteem and will respect your future opinions. Remember this all came about through that all important “relevant compelling content”.