List Building for Beginners – that’s the name of my new project…..but I have also decided that List Building for Beginners should also be the focus of a new product that gets built as I work through this month.

Now, I know that’s a lousy name, so my first challenge is to come up with something better, and the second is to decide if I want this to be a product I sell at the end of the month, or if it will be used as a giveaway for my list-building.

I’m veering towards selling it at the moment. What do you think? It will be super-cheap, to get folk started in the process as quickly as possible.

I started yesterday with a bunch of grand plans to get loads done in the evening, only to realise that the UK taxman needed feeding by the end of the month. As a result, I ended up filling in forms all night and my IM plans went awry yet again.

The good thing is that I had spent my lunch hour brainstorming the topics I need to cover and implement for my List Building for Beginners course, so I don’t feel so far behind. This morning I have written the first article, and I hope to get some more time at lunchtime to write a few more.

All of the articles will be posted to article sites around the internet, I may spin them before uploading, but they will all point back to my squeeze page for the List Building for Beginners product. So, one more thing I need to do is to create a freebie for that page.

Anyway, the work day beckons, so more musing on all this will follow tomorrow. Send in those product name suggestions so I don’t have to stick with List Building for Beginners!

Some of you will have seen my first stab at a month’s worth of list-building starting back at the beginning of December – and will have seen me slowly fade away as the month progressed!

What on earth possessed me to think I could really do 31 updates on here in the month of events and presents? I have no idea. In fact, it would have been almost impossible, as I spent several days in Paris before Christmas and then 5 days in Iceland leading up to New Year….and yes, I did get some pics of the Northern Lights. Due on here when I find a decent flickr plugin.

So where does that leave 2012?

List-Building is Back!

Strangely, I’m determined to follow-through with the list thing. I know that many of you are looking for ways to get this done, and I feel an obligation to finish what I started, so list-building is back on.

The problem I have now, even though it’s a fun problem to have, is that I am working as an interim manager (for 90 days) at one of the big UK media agencies. You wouldn’t believe the scale of their media buys compared to mine

As a result, I am now officially employed. What that means is that I will only be able to work on my personal business in the hours before and after doing “the job”. I guess that will make my efforts more easily comparable to all of you that still have a full-time job and are working in IM as a means to get out of the rat-race.

So, here’s my next 3o day commitment….well, up to the end of February anyway.

I will be keeping this site up to date every day with what I have achieved in the list-building challenge. In fact, what I think I will do, is set up a separate list just for those who want to follow along, with the promise that it will only be used for list-building content. If that is where you need to be concentrating next, watch out for my follow-up announcement.

In the mean time, I have a couple of sites that I’m setting up to help folk in the IM world find the information they need to make their lives easier. I’ll fill you in on those as they spring into life.

Finally, why 3 months to change the world with list-building?  Well, that’s how long I have in paid employment before I am back to earning my money from IM, and I intend this list-building exercise to be a big part of that success.

It’s very easy when you start out in Internet Marketing to think that this is a career that won’t require you to interact – with your customers, with your competitors and with other marketers. Everything is so neatly handled by being online.

Well, in practice, that’s probably the most damaging idea you could have. Removing personal interaction from your business (no matter how shy you are) can only end up hurting your prospects, no matter what personal comfort you gain from it.

I try to make a habit of going to at least 3 or 4 big events every year and if I get the chance, I’ll also attend a lot of smaller get togethers. Both have their place in my business.

The big events often turn into pitch-fests, where every hour you get a new call to action along with a price tag to make your wallet bleed. If you can find ones where this is not the case, then the opportunity to meet a lot of new people in one place is a huge benefit. Take lots of business cards and a notebook for names and numbers where others have no card of their own.

As an example of the latter, I just spent a weekend at Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom bash in London this weekend. Mark has arranged many conferences over the last few years (often multi-speaker wallet-bleeders!) but has moved more recently to running the show himself. The new format gets a huge thumbs-up from me, I always liked Mark’s speaking style and getting more of that and less of some other unpredictable speaker is a real plus. If he runs more shows like this, I’d recommend you check them out.

The smaller events work on a different level for me. It’s much easier to grab more time with one or maybe two people and really get to know them…this is where the real joint ventures are made. You’ll often hear more about what is really working (along with some smal but tasty tips) at this kind of meeting and you will also get a chance to be an answer to someone else’s questions. Don;t underestimate what you’ve already picked up…everyone starts somewhere.

One of the things that makes it harder to do this regularly is actually finding out what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere that regularly announces events, so watch out for an announcements about a new site that I’m going to set up just for this purpose.

So what did I learn over the weekend? Well, apart from being hammered by the “build a product” message, the big wake-up call for me was to build my list properly. If you’ve just started reading this blog, you’ll have seen my pop-up by now – did you grab it?   It was there because I think I’ve always known that a list of folk I can help is actually the same as a list of people who can help me, but when it comes down to it, I’ve never pushed that side of my business.

So, my commitment for the next 30 days (let’s see, that takes me up to something like the 11th of November) is that I will post my list-building efforts and results on here daily for all to read. As is always the case, I will probably end up doing too many other things as well, but that is the target.

In that capacity, I am going to set aside 2 sums of cash; the first will be just $100 to see what is possible with a small investment. The second will be more, I haven’t decided how much more yet, definitely less than $1000 but maybe not much less. This will be the real all out effort to build a substantial seed list.

As you can guess, I intend to buy traffic, but I’m also hoping to use other techniques like giveaways to boost my efforts. I will be tracking how successful everything is. Not only that, but I will probably also be following along with Valerie Duvall’s List Ignition WSO which you can guess is also about list-building!

Consider this Day Zero, I’ll update later in the day about the progress so far but just so we are all on the same wavelength, here is my rather small list on Aweber for reference:

No, it’s not a pseudo-apocalyptic rant about the world coming to an end in 2011 – although we may all revisit that comment when the FTC have finished with all their little plans for us this year.

It’s more about a line in the Bible that talks about us “doing what we know we should not do, and not doing those things that we know we should”. Of course, in the original sense it all boils down more to the spirit being willing, but the flesh being weak….an excuse trotted out for almost any kind of slightly naughty thing we think we can get away with these days. Cream buns, anyone?

On a more secular and personal level, it hits home at this time of year as we all make and break those incredible New Year resolutions. Who’s stopped going to the gym already?

Where it really gets serious, though, is in our Intenet Marketing endeavours. Here’s a list of some of the stuff I have looked at in 2010:

• SEO
• PPC
• Facebook Ads
• Outsourcing
• Local Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Amazon affiliate program
• Adsense

Now, that’s not a comprehensive list and it certainly doesn’t do justice to all the books, courses and WSO’s that I have bought in the same period. So, how many of these things made me money? How many of them should I look at in the light of the quote at the start of the post?

So, what are the things that have been “the things you should not have done” – how have they stopped you getting on with all the things you should have concentrated on and how much money has been diverted away from you as a result.

My promise to myself this year is to get down to turning all this incredible knowledge and “stuff” from 2010 into cash and to do it one step at a time. Yes, the Facebook page will get some attention, but it won’t be my first port of call. This blog and its readers and subscribers deserve first call on my time. So I’m committed to getting back to the near-daily updates on my progress, with reports of what I have learned along the way.

Secondly, my existing Amazon sites are going to get some work and traffic sent their way. They deserve it, the poor wee  orphans!!

Thirdly, my listbuilding will definitely see a new lease of life in 2011. This is one area that I have been woefully poor at and this needs to change for the New Year.

Then finally (for now) I will definitely be putting more work into reviewing the stuff that I have bought, so that others get a chance to see exactly what’s in some of these packages that are sold “sight unseen”. I’m only going to recommend and promote the ones that I have used and like. Others may get a passing reference and maybe sometimes a sneer too, we’ll see.

This is actually one of the things that worked quite well for me towards the end of 2010. I spent some time reviewing and promoting Dan Brock’s Amazon program (Deadbeat Super Affiliate) and I am still seeing sporadic affiliate sales coming from that even now.

For those that tracked my earnings progress through the Summer, I’m pleased to be able to say that the Christmas period brought in a combined total of around $300 for the month of December. Next year I will starting the site creation waaaay earlier!

This number brings my total for the year to an almost perfect $1000 and that’s only starting the counting when I did, later in the Summer. So, not perfect, but certainly encouraging as a start. My next target is to get that earning period down to one month i.e. one month, $1000 and of course to start ramping it up from there.

So, where is your New Year starting? Does any of this strike any chords?

I realize that I haven’t been on here with regular updates just recently and this is as good a time as any to reveal some of my activities in the last few weeks.

I had a pretty poor time with my sites in October, some slipped down in the rankings a bit, some failed to live up to their potential and so my earnings also slid slightly, I’ll dig out the numbers later. One of the reasons for that was because I chose to focus on some of the more seasonal events happening around this time of year.

I had a pretty well ranked site in the halloween outfit space but no matter how many visitors I got, I didn’t see the conversions I expected. There may be a lesson here for me in terms of learning my copywriting skills! Undeterred, I am also exploring the Christmas affiliate scene, so I hope to report more about that as the weeks go on.

In the mean time, and much more postiviely, I got involved with promoting Dan Brock’s latest launch. His Deadbeat Super Affiliate course follows on from Profitzon (that I bought last year) and so I felt I could offer some informed comment on the course.

Now, I’m not going to to claim overnight millions from this, but I set up an affiliate site, created a bonus and yesterday I had my very first $100 day. In fact it was a $130 day. So I’m pumped! I can finally see how this might work. I need to do more and work smarter, but this is mortgage money and that feels good!

I’ve decided to put online a few of my older bits and bobs that are doing nbody any good on my hard drive. Who knows, they may be useful to you. The first, Mindmap Mastery, is online now. You can find it linked at the top of the page.