List Building For Your Online Marketing Business? Start Blogging

Once you’ve decided which market to focus on for your online marketing business, you will probably start getting excited about creating your first product.  Before you actually get going on this, though, it’s very important to start your list building, and here’s why.

If you start blogging now as a means of list building, your list will be growing and developing during the time you are subsequently creating your product.  Then, when the product is ready, you can hit the ground running by having a list ready to promote it to.

Otherwise, you will have your lovely, shiny new product all dressed up with nowhere to go! That would be very frustrating and disheartening.

Why a blog?

Without exception, every online marketing professional I know is a blogger and some have many blogs in different markets.  Why, because they know the value and effectiveness of this means of building your list.

You can, of course, buy or rent lists to get you started, but a drawback to this is that you don’t know the relevance and how up to date the list is.   The main disadvantage, however, is that people on these lists don’t know you.  They are highly unlikely to buy a product from you when they have never heard of you before.

When you have a blog, people visit your site, they get to know you and what you are about.  They can interact by posting comments and you can build relationships.  When they know you and trust you, they are much more likely to buy a product when you offer one.

Equally important if you’re running an online marketing business is the fact that search engines treat blogs very favorably, often more so than static sites.  If you frequently and regularly update your blog, the search engines will pick this up, get used to this and give your pages higher and faster rankings.

To quickly get set up and blogging, you can use Blogger.  This is a free facility from Google and very easy to set up.  You do need to be aware, though, that since the site is owned by Google, it is controlled by them.  They have been known to shut down sites without warning – in summer 2010 over 15,000 Blogger sites were shut down.

I set this blog up with WordPress and use a domain name which I own.  This way, I control it and it cannot be shut down by anyone else with the consequent loss of content.  This is the system I recommend.

So, my marketing tip today is starting blogging for your list building now.