Why You Need an Opt-In List

There is only one surefire way to build an online business with a steady income, and that is by building an opt-in list.

You may have heard a hundred or more times that the money is in the list. Why do you need an opt-in list? The biggest reason is that not all visitors arriving at your website are ready to buy. A visitor arrives at your site, browses, then with a simple click of the mouse, the prospect is gone. If you have failed to capture their email address, you will probably never get another chance to make a sale.

Face it, hardly anyone buys the first time they’re presented with an offer. Some say a prospect must be exposed to an offer six or seven times before they buy. Without a way of following up, potential sales are lost pretty much daily.

Not having a list will cost you an awful lot of time and energy. You have to start from scratch searching for interested prospects on a daily basis.

When very successful marketers talk about making money while they sleep, most of them are referring to being able to send a message to a very large list. If they have grown a list of 10,000 subscribers, they know that with every message they send, some of their prospects will make a purchase. If a $20 product converts at 2% and you have a list of 1000 people, you would make 20 sales or $400. But if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers converting at the same 2% on a $20 product, one mailing to your list could potentially make $4,000.

None of this can happen overnight. Robert Allen in his book Multiple Streams of Internet Income describes being challenged to make $24,000 in 24 hours. Instead he made over $100,000 in 24 hours – but the real secret behind his ability to accomplish this was that he had spent the previous nine months building a subscriber list that had reached over 11,000 subscribers when he took the challenge.

Building a list takes time and effort. Yet if you have only a small amount of money to invest in your business, investing in subscribers to your list will result in much more long-term profit than anything else you can invest in. Some marketers estimate that each subscriber will earn them $1 a month, so if you’re hoping to make $1,000 a month, your goal should be to grow your list to 1,000 or more subscribers.

Growing your list can’t be your only concern. Remember that your subscribers can choose to unsubscribe in a split second. Treat them as the most valuable asset of your business, because that’s exactly what they are.