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While it is true that the the money is in the list, it is not as simple as all that. You first need to project an honest and trustworthy persona, then ask them to subscribe, and then ensure their happiness before trying to sell them anything.

People can be fickle creatures, simply signing them up and pushing sales pages at them day after day will have them unsubscribing in droves. You need to establish the foundations of a relationship with them, before you will have any chance of successfully promoting an offer. The 3 basic principles you need to follow are:-

1. Get your customers to trust you. This can be done in a number of ways, but providing free information, of exceptional quality, is by far the best. Whether you use a blog, articles, free ebooks, or any of the other numerous methods, you first need to prove that you know what you are talking about. If you can project yourself as an expert in the field, you will have people wanting to follow you. When they trust you, and want to follow your recommendations, the sales will come naturally.

2. Be sure that the product or service that you then promote to your list is of benefit to them. It needs to address a problem they are having. To simply promote a book on training a horse, for example , will not achieve the same success as addressing a particular issue such as ‘how to stop your horse from destroying its teeth by chewing on the bit’. You need to solve problems for your list, not simply promote products that fit that general niche. Horses do have issues, to solve those problems for your list will have them eating out of your hand. The next time you promote a product to them, they will be far more likely to actually open your email and act on your recommendations.

3. Join opt-in lists on your competitors sites. This may seem counter-productive on the outside but think for a moment about the benefits of actually seeing what your competitors are doing. These benefits are numerous but here are just a few:-

• You will see how they market to you, and you will immediately be seeing how you can improve your own campaigns.
• You will open the gate for a joint venture, perhaps promoting their product to your list while they return the favor.
• Your jv partner may be more experienced than you and actually have some input into what changes you could make to improve your open rate, click through rate, etc. There is no shame in learning from experienced marketers.
• You will be able to pick up on any mistakes they make. It is easier to see holes in a marketing campaign that is sent to you than actually picking them from a campaign that you have labored over for hours. I know from experience that, after pouring all my energy into a campaign, it is only after sending it to myself and opening it as a potential customer that I see the mistakes I have made. Try it. After you create your next email campaign, send it to yourself. View it as a client on your list would, have a good hard look at everything. Does the subject line compel you to open it, or would you throw it in the trash unopened if somebody sent it to you? If the subject line genuinely makes you want to read on, open it and imagine yourself reading it for the first time. Is it informative? Does it make you want to read every word? Does it have a clear call to action at the end? By following this formula, I have reworked some of my campaigns over and over until I am satisfied that my subscribers will not only open my email, a high percentage of them will act on my recommendations.

These are but a few of the benefits to be gained by befriending your opposition, don’t be scared of competition. Learn from them. You don’t have to go out clubbing with them, simply use their experience to improve yourself. Use their list to increase your sales and then move on. If you are marketing correctly, you will build your own list at the same time by grabbing email addresses as you go. Place your opt-in form in between your sales page and your payment processor. This way you will only be adding interested buyers to your list, and your jv partners will be totally unaware that you are actually ‘stealing’ customers from them.

Many marketers take this a step further, instead of potentially scaring customers away, they place their squeeze page in between the payment processor and their thank you page. This way, the client has already paid and they are forced to hand over their email address in order to access their purchase.

I, myself, find that a little unscrupulous and prefer to place my squeeze page between the sales page and the payment processor with a link at the bottom to by-pass the opt-in and go straight to the payment processor if they so wish. This will work for an affiliate product, if you use a simple ‘presell’ page, or your own product/service. With careful tracking, you will see that the customers who choose to bypass the opt-in the first time around will generally sign up the second or third time through, simply out of respect for not forcing them to do so.

Keep your website clean and current. An out of date website will turn customers into unsubscribers quicker than anything else. Provide high quality content on a regular basis. Don’t be scared to edit an old post, but try not to delete posts unless they are seriously wrong.

Keep your list up to date also. Using a good tracking program ( Aweber has one integrated into its system ) to remove email addresses that bounce. Contact subscribers that never click on links in your emails and give them a questionnaire to fill out, with a view to helping you better understand their needs. Ask them how you could better improve your service to cater for them. Questions along those lines will help them to understand that you are genuinely interested in their views.

Don’t be like a list building ogre. I once had a chap contact me and demand to know why he was sending me emails that I never followed up on. This type of arrogant behaviour will quickly lose the respect of your subscribers and have them unsubscribing from your service. These customers will remember you and never give you the opportunity to promote to them again. They can also spread negative comments about you, costing you more subscribers. Your aim is to always keep your list happy, whether you agree with their views or not – “the customer is always right” has been a sentiment to live by since the dawn of time.

Above all, respect your customers privacy. Never sell out your customers by making your list public. In fact, I even email my list and inform them of an upcoming joint venture. I inform them that, rather than give away their email addresses to another marketer, I will be promoting that marketers product directly to my list on their behalf. It pays to keep them informed, builds their confidence in you and projects you as someone they can feel secure with.

Your list will be your most treasured possession, and you should treat it as such.

List building can be a tough caper, or it can be a simple step-by-step process that provides you with a steady stream of income for years to come. Which one of these applies to you?