One of the best ways to make money online as an internet
marketer, blogger or webmaster is to build an email list from scratch in your
target niche market and monetize it in the best ways that suit you. Starting an
email marketing campaign is not complicated at all and anybody can do it with the
right online marketing tools which I’ll discuss shortly.
First and foremost, you’ve to understand that consistent
list building confer a lot of responsibilities on you as an email marketer because
you’ve to be on top of the game with your subscribers in order to be in their
good books.
You may not know that generating a lead and/or closing a
sale is not as easy as it sounds. It takes as many as seven times to expose a product
or service to a potential prospect before he may decides to buy. So,
understanding the buyer’s journey is important if you want to succeed big time.
To this end, you’ve to find a way to consistently reach out
to your target audience in order to have the opportunity to constantly promote products
and services that they need to them. Beyond this, the onus is also on you to
intersperse your promotions with high quality content, industry news, emerging
trends, etc which will be of benefit to your subscribers so as to get the best
results from your email marketing campaigns.
To do this effectively, you’ve to subscribe to reliable ESP
(email service provider) who will be saddled with the collection and management
of subscribers on your behalf using email marketing software specifically
designed for this purpose.
List building is an integral part of digital marketing channels
and it’s important you learn and master it inside out if you want to go far and
make profits in your online business for the long term.
As it were, statistics have it that for every $1 you spend
on email marketing campaigns, you should expect circa $36 ROI (return on
investment) or even more. ROI from email marketing is the highest of all the
digital marketing strategies used by internet marketers to reach out to their
target markets.
Now, let’s quickly discuss the basic online tools and
resources which you absolutely need to succeed with your email marketing
strategy.
Email Marketing Tools and Resources
The following tools and resources are what you need to start
email marketing business successfully and on a sound footing.
- Domain name
- Web hosting services
- Blog website preferably WordPress blog
- Email marketing software
- High quality lead magnet
- High impact but constant content for your blog and email
autoresponder
- Website traffic
Domain Name
The first step is to register a domain name to make it easy
for you to build an email list of subscribers from your own website. This is
the URL or virtual office address that you’ll be using to direct targeted
traffic to your website and for branding purposes. For example, HustleVim.com
is a domain name focusing on side hustle ideas. The domain URL will take you to
a landing page when you type it on your browser.
For less than $10 for a year, you can buy a domain name from
NameCheap
and use it to start an online business successfully. Namecheap domain
registration service is cheap and reliable. A lot of online business owners use
Namecheap as their preferred domain registrar. But you’ve to get the .com
extension because website visitors are wont to type it on their browsers as the
common domain business TLD.
Preferably, you can get a keyword domain or EMD (exact match
domain) to start your own business online as it will make it easy for you to
embark on profitable search engine optimization (SEO) and favorably rank on the
SERP, holding all other factors constant.
Also, it will help your potential customers to easily find
your website online and know what your business is all about in advance without
necessarily explaining it to them every time.
Web Hosting Services
Website hosting services is essential for you to host your
files and website on someone else’s servers in order to make your website to be
live and accessible 24/7. Without web hosting services, no prospect or customer
will be able to find your web site on the World Wide Web and take action of
buying any product or service from you.
There are companies whose businesses are to provide hosting
services to webmasters and bloggers on the internet. HostGator web hosting services is
one of them and they provide their hosting service at a cheap or affordable rate
and they are very reliable. With an excellent customer support, you don’t have
any problem starting an online business with them.
The icing on the cake is that HostGator supports WordPress
hosting and offers free domain name registration for first time customers in
their first year. For less than $100 for your web hosting fees for a whole
year, you’ll get a free domain name to start your own business on the internet.
In addition, HostGator hosting company provides website
builder to help you create websites without knowing a lot about HTML, coding or
having website design skills.
Click here to sign up with HostGator website hosting services
Blog Website
When you purchase website hosting from HostGator as I
explained above, you’ll get a domain name for free for the first year. And
because HostGator supports WordPress hosting, you’ll be able to install
self-hosted WordPress blog on your domain name for free. WordPress.org has
functionalities that will make it simple and easy for you to build a website or
create a blog for free to start your own online business.
Creating a blog website will provide you with a solid platform
to build an email list from scratch in easy steps. You can also write and
publish blog posts targeting long tail keyword phrases which you can easily
rank for on the SERP or simply direct your subscribers to relevant content pages
on your blog to read from your autoresponder email series.
Blogging for money is very profitable if you’re able to
integrate an effective email marketing campaigns with it. With a reliable web
hosting company, blogging is a breeze and any beginner can do it without being
tech savvy. I started blogging when I couldn’t even differentiate between HTML
and hot meal!
Creating a blog and integrating email newsletter with it
will help you to stand out as an expert, brand your business, build trust and credibility
with your target audience over time.
Email Marketing Software
Before you can seamlessly build an email list of subscribers,
you’ve to sign up with an email marketing software provider. This service will
be provided by an email service provider (ESP) like GetResponse’s autoresponder
company. It’s an essential part of your online marketing system if you hope to
build and grow your leads and increase sales.
GetResponse email marketing software has a 30-day free trial
from this link
and you can take advantage of that to start email marketing business successfully
without paying a dime at the beginning. Besides, you’ll be able to learn the
ropes of email marketing and how it works before jumping in with both feet.
With reliable ESP, you can create sign up forms, create autoresponder
messages, send broadcast messages and automate your email marketing campaigns
without breaking a sweat from your account dashboard.
High Quality Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is the incentive that will draw in would-be subscribers
to your website where they will be willing to exchange their email addresses
for your valuable content they need. In some quarters, some people call it
“ethical bribe” because you’re using a valuable product or service to coax your
web visitors to give you their email IDs for further communications in the
future.
A lead magnet can be any valuable content in the form of
free ebook PDF, video, audio, podcast, gated blog content, infographic, whitepaper,
case studies, webinar, app, software, mini online course, one time offer, and
so on.
But the best gift to give away should focus on answering
questions your target audience is asking or providing the right solutions to
problems or pain points they are grappling with.
You can learn about these questions from the comment
sections of your blog posts, lurking around in online communities or forums and
taking notes of questions being asked by members or making use of keyword
research tools. Another good place to scoop content ideas for your lead magnet
creation is questions and answers sites like Quora.com.
Constant Content for Your Blog Post and
Email Autoresponder
When building an email list, you’ve to develop a system to
constantly create high quality content to feed your subscribers. You can hire a freelance
writer for this purpose or do it yourself. But the best way to learn
and master list building is to sign up with email newsletters of successful
email marketers in your chosen niche and reverse engineer their ideas and strategies.
Obviously, your subscribers look up to you as an expert and
you’ve to prove it beyond every reasonable doubt for them to remain in your
list. With this in mind, you’ve to be abreast of industry news, trends and
information so that you can relate it to your list members before anyone else
does.
This is why constant learning and studying are paramount to
your email marketing success. It’s always easier to recommend and sell any
product or service when your followers and fans perceive you as the go-to
expert. I’ll be publishing an article later on how to generate content ideas
for your email business newsletter and blog post ideas.
Content in this regard will include blog posts, videos,
email series for your autoresponder and broadcast messages for product recommendations.
Your constant interactions with your audience through surveys, blog comments,
etc, will inform you of their content preferences.
Website Traffic
For your website to gain traction and get subscribers, you definitely
need free targeted traffic from search engines as well as paid media if you’ve
the budget and experience to do so.
However, you’ll not get instant website visitors from your SEO
traffic efforts from day one like pay per click (PPC) advertising. But creating
and publishing constant content through blogging can accelerate your online
marketing campaigns by leaps and bounds.
Content marketing is a potent way to generate inbound leads
and customers on a regular basis. You
can use any of these digital marketing channels to kick start your list
building efforts.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- List building
- Content marketing
- Blogging
- Online communities and forum marketing
- Etc
For any online business owner who wants to learn how to
build an email list from scratch, the following outline will guide you on what
to do.
- Set clearly defined and measurable list building goals.
- Know your target audience.
- Know your brand and stuff.
- Watch and analyze your competitors.
- Analyze and measure your data or metrics.
In addition to the above, you’ve to understand the moving
parts of building an email list of subscribers both the technical know-how and content
marketing aspect of it. I will dive deep into how to build an email list of
subscribers from scratch from subsequent blog posts. Just bookmark this blog so
that you don’t miss out from any of the publications.