This is a guest post by Troy Broussard. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Human nature is odd some times. There is this rebellion that is inherent in our nature – something embedded in our psyche – that just compels us to do the opposite of what we’re told. You would think we would just “get over it” after childhood, but the reality is that we tend to repeat the same mistakes.
You Know The Drill
Any new blogger will tell you how important list building is. They can give you a dozen or more reasons and likely present you with a formula you should be following. You know the trick – create a great giveaway, sell the value of it, get optins, build rapport, market to your list and triple your revenue. It’s ingrained in all of us. If this is new ground to you then you should check out Email Marketing Basics: All You Need To Get Started to get the lay of the land. So if list building is such common sense, why is it that so many bloggers still don’t have a decent list?
It may be that we’ve just heard it too many times and refuse to accept it, or it may be that from the same message being constantly preached at us we just brush it off as hype. If I’m speaking to you personally, well, it’s because I too went through the same evolution. Maybe it was because it seemed such a daunting task at first, but the likelihood is that it is for another reason – pride.
Don’t Let Your Ego Hold You Back
Our ego doesn’t want to start off and build slow and grow over time. Our ego wants 5,000 people on our list overnight and so many – like me – let that hold them back from getting started. There is this notion that until you have a big list, talking about it is almost embarrassing. But the reality is, list building, like blogging, or link building or traffic building is something that takes time and effort and the sooner you get that small snowball started, the sooner you can roll it down the hill.
Don’t Procrastinate
My business partner and I fell into that same trap. We focused our efforts on “building traffic” on the site before starting in on the list building – big mistake. The problem is the longer you wait, the more of a pink elephant it becomes and the worse you tend to procrastinate about doing it. Well, let me tell you right now, you don’t want to make that mistake.
We’ve all seen the many benefits of list building as they are commonly presented, but most of these benefits tend to be discussed in financial terms. How list building can double your income through back end sales – that’s the #1 reason you hear everywhere for getting started. And it’s true. In fact in our own experience we can attest to those types of rough numbers – generally a doubling or more of our sales after we started to develop a meaningful list.
Here It Is
The fact is, however, that there is one huge benefit to list building that I rarely see mentioned at all – increased traffic. It seems so obvious and perhaps that is why it is overlooked. But over time you can significantly change the traffic patterns on your site via list building. Rather than being a passive recipient of visitors you can instead direct traffic at will as your list grows.
Let’s say you have a site that generates about a 100 unique visitors a day and you begin to really concentrate on your list building. You create a great giveaway and optimize your site towards getting optins. Now, just for purposes of the example, let’s say you only get about 5 people a day to optin to your list – that’s a small 5% of your traffic. We’ve seen much better percentages and worse – the numbers will vary dramatically based upon how targeted your giveaway is to the needs of your reader, your niche, your site design (is it really geared towards getting you optins?) and many other factors including the catchy title and subject of your giveaway. Another factor that can really impact your optin percentage is the quality of the eCover artwork. Sounds picky, yes, but it’s true.
Do The Math
Now just 5 optins a day doesn’t seem like much, but remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Let’s extrapolate that out over the course of a month and say that it nets you 125 optins a month (after those who unsubscribe). And then let’s go ahead and fast forward about 5 months and assume you have around 700 people on your list (we’ll assume you got a little better at it over time). Here’s where the fun begins.
What begins to emerge is a shift in your traffic patterns. As you send out a broadcast or a pre-programmed autoresponder, you will get a percentage of people who will then come to your site and check out the blog post you mentioned or the product you reviewed, etc. With a list of 700 and assuming a 10% click thru (we often see numbers in the 25% to 40% range, but let’s keep it conservative here) that’s another 70 visitors coming to your site. For a site getting only a 100 unique daily visitors, an additional 70 off a single email is pretty impressive.
Be Patient
Now the effects of this will be small at first and will take time to build up – just like your list will take time to build. In fact it will probably sneak up on you and at some point you will wonder where this additional traffic is coming from. Another factor that will influence how quickly you begin to see this trend in your analytics is the approach you take to engaging your list. Some prefer to simply send broadcasts, but for others less disciplined or time constrained, they choose to simply create an autoresponder and let it drip feed the messages out over time.
With today’s sophisticated autoresponders such as Aweber, you can actually do both as well. For example you can have an autoresponder and set it up to only send out on Thursdays so that the rest of the week is reserved for you to send out a broadcast as well (on Tuesday perhaps).
Depending upon your method, you will see different traffic patterns emerge. If you want to see how the list can affect your traffic the quickest, use the broadcast approach. This way each time you send out a broadcast , your entire list will be seeing it all at once and the traffic response will be more pronounced. When we first set this up on one of our sites, we had it all programmed into an autoresponder and it took us longer to really observe the gradual growth in traffic that was occurring. Either way the net result is the same – more traffic. Over time your list can become a very valuable traffic driving commodity for you. This can give you many options that you currently just don’t have.
Lessen Your Dependence On Search
Recently the Google Farmer update hurt a lot of sites. Now, most bloggers weren’t affected as they tend to write all original (or mostly original) content and these scraper targeted algorithm changes didn’t likely have much impact on them. But we all know that Google is constantly refining the algorithm and that at any time we could lose – even if temporary – significant traffic to these changes. It’s not uncommon to see traffic fall way off for a period of 5 to 10 days when an algorithm change has got sites bouncing all over the place and several data centers down while others are being updated. But if you’ve got a big list, you can remain in control of a significant portion of your traffic. So, rather than depending on Google for scraps, you can still command a significant audience.
Summary
Of course all of the old reasoning for list building still applies. List building will still forge more rapport with your readers and make marketing to them much more profitable (especially if you’re marketing your own products or services). List building also has many other positive impacts on your site development and they all increase the bottom line. But just in case you needed one more reason to get off the proverbial couch and get your own list started, list building can become a hidden gem of your own traffic on demand if you just give the chance and get started!
About the Author: Troy Broussard is the co-creator of ArticleSubmissionReview.com a non-traditional blend of in-depth candid reviews of SEO tools and services as well as a blog of pertinent SEO and article marketing tips and advice. He is also the author of “Article Marketing Lies,” a 60 page candid look at practical and effective SEO strategies without the hype.
Original Post:
The Most Overlooked Reason For List Building 
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