List Building With a Blog Makes Sense

List Building With a Blog

Blogging was a relatively new phenomena when I came online in 2006. I had used one in my classroom to teach and encourage interaction with my science students but I never thought of blog as having any real value in business. I needed to build a list and increase my visibility and credibility, so when marketing expert Denise Wakeman offered a blogging class I jumped right in. Learning about list building with a blog made all of the difference for my new business.

One of the best ways to convince someone to sign up to your list is when you share good content that turns them into a fan from the very beginning. It’s human nature for people to flock to those who serve their needs, and a blog allows you to step up and serve an audience that’s hungry for solutions that can improve their lives.

Whether it’s on the topic of success, health, pets or cooking, men and women alike want to lend their precious time to top tier individuals who showcase their expertise and tap into their ability to explain things on a level anyone can understand.

Is List Building Too Slow with a Blog?

One common worry for new online entrepreneurs, authors, and marketers is that trying to build a list from a series of blog posts might be too slow. While it’s true blog posts have to get indexed and ranked in search engines, keep in mind that you can use free social sites to gain more traction for your blog in a shorter amount of time.

This means you can take time to create a blog post that will knock their socks off and then link to it on sites that have a relevant audience for your niche, allowing users to like, comment and share exponentially. By blogging regularly since 2006 I have improved my writing and amassed a body of work that is available on the three blogs I maintain.

So you really aren’t relying on the SEO (search engine optimization) gods to catapult your post to the top of the search results. You have some control over how much traffic lands on it, and how fast. The main thing you need to focus on is not volume, but quality of your content and visitors alike.

There are some marketers who get into this business with their eye on statistics. Only, it’s the wrong kind of numbers – quantity only. They want as many subscribers on their list as humanly possible, because they mistakenly believe that will translate into more sales. I learned early on that having a small, highly responsive list was way more valuable than having a massive list of people who couldn’t even remember how or why they joined my list.

The problem is, much of the traffic you receive from spammy list building opportunities is junk, so they’re uninterested in what you have to say. Some will shrug their shoulders and sign up to get whatever freebie you’re offering, but they’re just tire kickers, not the kind of people truly interested in investing in solutions or growth.

You might quickly be able to build a list of 50,000 subscribers, but less than 1% ever buys, if that. On the contrary, you might slowly build a list of 10,000 subscribers, but have an 80% email open rate and a 40-50% conversion rate! My list is somewhere between these two extremes and is much closer to the higher numbers, I’m happy to tell you. I use AWeber as my autoresponder service and you can get started for free with them. List building with a blog makes sense.

The reason the conversion jumps so high is because, instead of purchasing a list from someone else and spamming their inbox, you’ve taken the organic route to weed out your non audience and cater to the people who are rabid about learning from you.

Keep in mind, too that this isn’t just about sales of your own products. If you’re an affiliate for someone else, you might be able to get a link from them when they find out you have a list of 50,000 subscribers – but they’re going to probably ban you or decline you next time when the traffic you send to their offer tanks their conversion rate because no one on your list cares to buy what you’re touting.

List building with a blog is a worthy endeavor and one you will be thankful for as your business continues to grow over the years. Make the commitment to blog at least twice each month and you will reap the rewards in more ways than you can imagine.

I’m bestselling author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you to help you to achieve your goals. If you are interested in learning how to optimize the syndication of your content, please take a look at my popular Syndication Optimization training course and consider coming aboard to increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability.