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.
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