Caroline Middlebrook is about to build a list. Besides finding her post a challenge to me, it did set me thinking about how I would go about this if I was to start to build a list from this blog. Many gurus say and teach that a list is essential to making money online. This is something I have shied away from, as it is a lot of those gurus lists who I have recently unsubscribed from.
Caroline comments, that building a n e is a skill she has yet to master, and will use it to offer an email course, probably many of us looking to build traffic to our blogs could benefit from. I for one would like to learn how to use stumble upon effectively to build traffic to my blog. I am sure Caroline will document her mastering of this skill and will provide another great learning for her many readers.
I notice that some of the successful bloggers, Darren Rouse, John Chow, Wendy Piersall to name a few, do have a list but, don’t use the list to bombard my email on a weekly or even more frequent basis. Leo Babauta from Zen Habits has been able to achieve success and 40,000 plus subscribers without having a list.
Caroline is about to use what I consider to be the best autoresponder service on the net , Aweber.
Aweber provides great service and seems to be continually updating what they offer their customers. They also do have great customer service.
Thanks to Mandy Maebe for the great photo and to Caroline for the challenge and the competition.
I have struggled with setting up a list as well, everyone tells you that you need to build a list to make the big money online. Most of the lists that I’ve subscribed to I either only read about 25% of the emails, or I just unsubscribe all together. Nice Blog by the way… I’ll be back.
David
Suzie,
This post is wonderfully intriguing.
At first I thought that the list you refer to was subscriptions to an Ezine or other regularly-generated content, but then you wrote:
“Leo Babauta from Zen Habits has been able to achieve success and 40,000 plus subscribers without having a list.”
So tell me, what is a list if it isn’t for encouraging subscriptions from people who visit your blog or Web site? Or maybe I’m mis-translating this, and a list really does mean subscription sign-ups.
Shirley
Hi Shirley,
Thanks for the question. I understand what you are saying. With Leo and Zen habits, what a mean is RSS subscribers, to me that is not a list. He has built as he would say, his readership through great content and somewhat organically. His topic is hot!
A list in the sense Caroline was talking about, is to collect names and email addresses for
1. As you do send a weekly newsletter
2. Onselling JV products
3. Selling your own products
4.Flogging other gurus products- this is the one that has had me unsubcsribing.
My choice is to make money online following what John, Darren and Leo do.
To your abundance
Suzie
Okay, Suzie, now I’ve got it.
I can understand what you opted out of lists due to your No. 4 reason. That method obviously works to gain dollars, as we can both imagine, but it’s also a “turn off” for others, as with your unsubscribing.
For me, increasing my RSS numbers helps me to convince advertisers interested in promoting products that there’s a good quantity of people who read my blog posts. That’s quite different than the newsletter subscription numbers, which are higher than the RSS readers but less of interest to advertisers.
Shirley