Building A List - Your Most Important Solo Build It Asset

Building a list of potential clients and past customers is the first and most important task every Solo Build It owner should focus on (after getting their site online with say 10 pages of content of course :-)

Research by many marketers shows that up to 98% of the visitors to your website will only ever see your site once and never return no matter how good it is.

Most people's attention span is limited to a couple of minutes at best and more like a few seconds when they arrive at your website, so you have to work hard to capture their names and email addresses on that one visit or they are usually gone forever...

The way to do this is to offer a free bonus of some form that will be attractive enough to your target market to make them drop their defenses and give you their contact details.

This used to be an easy thing to do, but these days with the identity theft and Spam problems we have, it's getting harder and harder to persuade people you are legitimate and won't use their details for the wrong reasons.

A good quality bonus offer will see a large number of your visitors subscribing to your database, where you have the opportunity of building a relationship with them over time and ultimately turn these prospects into satisfied customers and eventually, if you do your job right, into evangelists for your business and future marketing partners.

But first, you have to get them onto a list...

My recommendation is to forgo the free Solo Build It newsletter module and use an Aweber autoresponder because it is much more effective at helping you build a relationship with your subscribers than the standard SBI system.

Here's why...

When you use an Aweber autoresponder, you can preload all your messages into the system and no matter when a person subscribes to your list, today, 3 months time, next year... they receive message 1, followed by message 2, followed by message 3 and so on in the sequence you want them to.

In this way, you have a chance to talk with these people one-on-one and let them know you care about their situation and want to serve their needs. You don't just want to sell them stuff.

Then when you send them message 6, 7 or 8 with your first sales message or product offer, they have already read lots of great free content from you, they know a bit about you, and hopefully they are open to your suggestions and ready to respond favorably to your offer.

With the standard Solo Build It newsletter, you can cue your messages for delivery at a later date, but you can't use the system as a sequential autoresponder like the Aweber system. The bottom line is that every current subscriber receives every message at the time you send them.

This means that when you send a sales message to your subscribers, the very first or second email a new subscriber gets from you is a pitch for a product or service you are promoting.

You haven't had a chance to build that all important personal relationship with your subscriber yet, and you run the risk of her unsubscribing from your list thinking you just want her there to sell her stuff...

I use and prefer Aweber because it offers everything I need in a fully featured autoresponder.

The Aweber HTML code for creating subscriber sign up forms is easily incorporated into your Solo Build It website's pages so there's no need to worry about that part of it. There's even videos on the Aweber site to show you how it all works.

I tried several other autoresponder systems but I found them a little too clunky and difficult to manage (it could have just been me of course ;-) so I've stuck with Aweber through some very tempting offers from their competitors.

In a future post, I'll share with you the sequence of messages I use in one of my autoresponders to bond with my subscribers and create a relationship with them that encourages them to respond to my occasional offers in a very positive way :-)

That's it for today. I hope you've found this post helpful in getting the most out of your Solo Build It website.

Cheers,