Most bloggers, when creating a blog, tend to put off building their lists until such time as they have grown their audience. While it may seem like the logical thing to do, it may end up costing you – both in revenue and in lost opportunities.
Here’s why you have to start building your mailing list ASAP:
1. List building is a number game – or should I say it’s a numbers game with some math involved. Out of every say, 1,000 visitors to your blog, a certain average number of people will opt into your list, and a certain number of them will buy from you.
The exact numbers depend on many things, including your content, the optin offer, the offers presented via email, the quality of the emails, etc.
But the fact remains that, once you have the system in place, you can start feeding it visitors at the top, and it will capture email addresses (and generate sales) from that.
Now consider this:
Let’s say it takes you six months to get your blog to 100 visitors per day (and you don’t start building your list before that). In crude mathematical terms, that means you had an average of 50 people per day for a year (0 + 100, divided by 2). That translates into roughly 9,000 visitors. Now let’s say only one out of every one hundred would have opted into your list…
That’s 90 subscribers. That might not sound like much, but if you did things right, you could have made 2 sales from the one time offer just after optin, and you could have made roughly 3 more sales of back-end products.
That translates into – depending on what you were selling – roughly $90 per month at the end of the 6 months.
But let’s say you waited longer – you waited for a year, and until you reached 200 visitors per day. That quadruples all of the figures, causing you to have lost out on roughly $360 per month, and 360 subscribers.
Now – imagine if you took that money, and re-invested it into advertising? Where do you think your list would be if you buy more traffic every month, and keep re-investing the additional profit to build your list even more?
Go do the math – the figures are quite staggering.
Note: This is illustrative – real-world figures may be more or less.
2. Once your list gets to roughly 1,000 subscribers, new doors start opening – because from here on you can start doing ad swaps with other list owners. If you re-invested the profits you made from the start, you can easily be achieved within a year.
Regardless of whether you re-invest your profits or not, starting to build your list sooner means that you will be ready for ad swaps sooner.
By doing regular ad swaps, you can grow your list by leaps and bounds. While not everyone agrees with the strategy, it has been proven to work, and it’s a quick – and free – way to add lots of subscribers to your list. In addition to that, the larger your list becomes, the more you can approach owners of larger lists to exchange list mailings.
3. All of us make mistakes when we start out with something new – especially something as fluid as email marketing. Building your list from day one affords you the opportunity to experiment and test to see what works best for your blog – and what doesn’t.
In addition to that, your audience will determine what works for your blog or not. Two similar blogs can attract very different audiences – depending on how they were marketed – and the two audiences can have different expectations.
Starting small allows you to test new opt-in forms, opt-in offers, layouts, and even content types – without risking losing too many potential subscribers as you collect information.
4. You can use your small list as a sounding board to figure out what to sell them. While your list is still relatively small, you can connect with them and find out what they need help with, or which types of resources they need access to.
By the time your subscribers start accumulating more rapidly, you will already know what to sell them.
5. Getting your list set up sooner also means that you will have more time available to get your back end offers in place. Some people prefer to email their subscribers once a week, while others prefer to email them every day. But even at one email per week, that’s still 52 follow-up emails you need to get in place.
It takes time to find the right offers, and craft good promotional emails (even if the vendor supplies promo emails, you want to adapt them and make them unique). The sooner your list is set up, the sooner you can start working on getting everything into place.
In conclusion:
When you start your blog, and you note the tiny trickle of traffic in your stats, it seems unlikely that it will be worth your while to start building a list ASAP. But in reality, not doing it is bound to cost you in the long run – in more ways than one.
And yes, it costs money to build a list (monthly autoresponder fees) – but the cost of NOT starting one as soon as possible is a lot more than that