After talking a good talk yesterday about how I was going to spend 30 days concentrating on list building, I thought it would be a good idea to actually get some housekeeping done, so I could start today with a flourish! Maybe the one thing I should have done, was to check the finances before making big commitments on spending large amount on it all. More on that when it happens, but suffice it to say I will be looking at the cheaper end of the market to start with – just a small delay.

The one thing I didn’t really make clear yesterday was what I intend to do, so here’s a breakdown of the two “streams” .

List Building on a small budget

The little-to-no-money alternative may appeal to those of you without much in the way of capital to spend on building your list. Time rich, money poor maybe. I want to be clear from the start though, that there is no such thing as a completely free lunch in this endeavour. You may find some of these early sums feeling a little uncomfortable, but I think they are important to get the right start.

The first thing you will need is some kind of autoresponder – really just a hosted service that allows you to send email messages to people who have agreed that you can contact them. The big question that arises immediately is why you should have to pay someone else to send these out for you and the single biggest answer is spam. The big autoresponder services have and maintain a great reputation for being as spam free as possible. What that means for you, is that the majority of your emails will actually arrive at the person you send them to.

Now, of course, you can ruin those chances by putting all kinds of spammy words in your title or message – most spam blockers even understand misspellings like Vigara these days 🙂 but that doesn’t alter the fact that the receiving email engines check to see where your email is from. If you are running a free piece of software on a shared box provided by hostgator with a million “naughty” people on it, your email will never see the far end!

Ok, so who should you look at? In my mind there are only two real alternatives. Aweber and GetResponse and both run deals where you can get a trial period for a very small amount – in fact I think GetResponse has a free service that will get you up to 100 people on your list for free. I use Aweber, just a historical thing really and I may add a GetResponse account one day too.

So, that’s email autoresponders. We’ll come back to them later in the series to see why they are just so useful, but for now, just get one.

Next up on the must-haves is something to give away. This is going to be the core of any kind of listbuilding strategy. Unless you have a blinding personality, folk won’t part with their email for no reason at all. So, you have to bribe them. It’s a fair swap of value, if you like.

What should you give away? Frankly, anything that is going to help your customer – and let’s be clear here, you want these people as customers, so it’s probably not a good idea to screw them over on the very first occasion that they meet you. Give them something good. Many people recommend giving away your best stuff right now, so that your prospects want more from you of the same quality. Whatever you decide, make it valuable enough.

What counts as good enough? Almost anything fits the bill here. Ebooks, audio, video, you name it, it all works in this space. It obviously needs to meet what your prospect wants when they land on your page. I’m not going to go into enormous detail about niche research here, but find out what they are asking and answer it. Look on places like Yahoo answers and sites like ehow for questions and articles that others have put up on a particular subject. If you see the same subject twice or more, it might be worth answering for everyone. Film that video walkthrough that makes it clear, or get a book put together on “The top 3 questions” by a freelancer.

Or, and this is where I’m headed, get some PLR and remix it. Change the look and feel, mix the best bits of 3 books together, the sky is the limit here, take a book and do an audio of each chapter. Like I said, it all counts.

I can hear you asking how much all this costs and really, the sky is the limit here. Getting a full ebook put together on elance could cost you $300 or more for a good one. If on the other hand you are time-rich and know what you are doing, PLR can be as low as 99 cents. A quick tip here is to find what you want in any form (use google, look for “your subject” and PLR – that should get you started). Once you have it, jump to tradebit.com and see if anyone has sold it on there for cheaper. The PLR world is astonishingly cutthroat and you can get a real bargain sometimes. Just make sure that “unrestricted” rights are included that let you do whatever you want with it.

So far, we’ve spent possibly $2 on PLR and maybe taken a free account or a trial account with an autoresponder company (for the first month).

Next up is hosting it all. I would say you should just bite the bullet here and get proper hosting and a domain name of your own. This is going to be a business for you after all. Hostgator will get you set up with a baby croc account for a small amount per month (with “unlimited” space for sites) and in fact I’ve negotiated a first month discount to go along with this series. Just type mplistbuilder into the coupon box when you sign up and it should make your first month effectively free.

Once all this is in place, you can set up your squeeze pages and drive traffic to them – Again, I’ll deal with the crunchy details in a later post.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume you have a twitter following or a facebook fanpage, or something, just so you can get a few folk on there to start with. If not, I’ll be looking at the whole phenomenon of giveaways as a way to get your list started. In the low-cost bracket, I’ll be putting up a few squeeze pages and then throwing them all into a couple of giveaways this month. I will be paying for the upgrades, as this usually gives you more chances to put items into the pot. For each of these squeeze pages, I’m also going to be putting something to buy on the back-end thankyou page to see how many folk I can convert into buyers. This should cover the cost of paying into the upgraded giveaways in the first place.

This should definitely be part of your strategy too. Any money that comes in over and above the costs is going to get turned round immediately and spent on more traffic in some way.

The other thing that I will probably spend money on in this list, is launching a WSO on the Warrior Forum. There isn’t space to go into it all here, but I have just about finished my first WSO and I want to use that to boost the list as well. The biggest question in my mind is whether or not to go “free” with the WSO. I’m thinking of putting it up for free in the War Room and then launching at a cheap price a week later – I’ll obviously keep you up to date with how that goes.

Once the list has grown a little, I will also be joining Safe Adswaps and will be swapping the life out of everything to see how it builds from there.

Bigger scale List Building

On the flip side of all this, I will also take a higher cost path, just to compare and contrast.

Nothing much is going to differ here, except I won’t be so shy of spending some cash to make the traffic flow.

In the first instance, I’ll probably use a few solo ads (again from Safe Adswaps) to see how my squeeze pages convert and then move to swapping after getting them tuned up. This will be a whole new departure for me – fancy testing indeed!

As a secondary measure (or two) I also want to try upping the power of Twitter and Facebook in my list building. I’m going to get a few fanpages set up and maybe invest in a new Twitter tool and then I’ll be combining these with some paid traffic from places like fiverr, to see if I can get them building up – both on those sites, but ultimately using them to push people onto the real email lists.

Phew! Sounds like a load of work, but this is my target, so we’ll see how it all fares.

Your homework – if you want to follow along – is to get an autoresponder sorted and to get some hosting.

As usual, if you have any comments or questions, throw them in below and we will alll learn along.