Sheri Helvey

You will often hear “The money is in the list”.  So what does that mean?  It simply means that you, as a marketer, should focus on building a list or a “tribe” of followers that you will be able to market to for the life of your Internet journey, no matter what company you are with. 

Companies come and go; programs come and go . . . and many times the lists you have built within a company can go too.  So, bottom line, you want to build a list or tribe that YOU own independent of any company, product or service.  This allows you to introduce new services, products concepts, ideas or whatever you want to YOUR list in the future.

Building a list and developing a relationship with the people on your list is a great way to add value for your customers, develop a strong reputation in your field and encourage sales. Many of the most successful Internet marketers make list building a top priority for those reasons. When done correctly, list marketing is extremely powerful and is so much easier with the internet at our fingertips.

Seth Godin’s book, “Tribes, We Need You To Lead Us” is a quick read and well worth it!  It is a book on leadership and talks about the importance of “tribes” or your “list”.  

“A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea.  Now the internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time.  All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born — groups of ten or ten million who care about their….” ~ Seth Godin

How Do I Build A List?

There are several different ways to build a list depending on your purpose.  First and foremost, you need to decide what you want to offer someone in exchange for their contact details.   This is usually something that is free and offers some sort of value.  Following are some ideas of offers that might resonate with your style of marketing:

• Newsletter subscriptions
• Ebooks
• Articles
• Training
• Sample Products
• Audios
• Podcasts
• An Interview with an influential person
• Webinars

The offer that you make is done through an “opt in” box.  These can be easily created through an autoresponder service or you can hire someone to design one for you.  If you look to the righthand side of my blog, you will see my “opt in” box for my offer.  This is attached to my autoresponder service, but I had someone design the graphics for me.  You can put an “opt in” box on almost anything, including your Blog, Facebook, and Lead Capture Pages.

One of the most important tools for your business is a Capture Page . . .

Every serious marketer must have the ability to create lead capture pages so they can collect prospect information and conduct effective follow up marketing to make more sales. The problem with this up to now has been that new marketers simply don’t know how to create their own lead capture pages.  And other services are either too expensive or complicated for new marketers to use. 

If you design your own, you will need to know html, be familiar with FTP, etc., etc.  Way too hard for most people.  The simplest way to create a capture page is to find a company that provide “ready made” templates for you to choose from.  You will want to have the option to customize it as much as possible.  In my journey in the “Capture Page” world, I have found, what I believe is the best software for the industry.  It’s simple.    It is called “Instant Capture Page“, created by Jeff Long and he gives a wonderful overview with examples on his video . . .  

It really is that simple. 

Here is a guideline as to what should be included on your lead capture page . . .

1. Attention grabbing “Pre-Headline”
2. Headline – Presents a compelling and powerful benefit, targeted to what the prospect is searching for.
3. Description –  Explains the specifics of your offer and how it will help your prospect get what they want, fix their problem, or avoid what they don’t want.  Usually bullet points are used here.  Video and audio are great to add to increase conversions.
4. The offer and opt-in box – Offer something of value here, like free training or an e-book.
5. Call to action — Specific instructions on what to do next.

Have fun and enjoy making a variety of different capture pages!  Get Creative!!!