Why Should You Build an Email List? Free Excerpt | Introduction

As you may know, I have my very own list building ebook for sale on Amazon right now. Actually, you probably didn’t know that, but, hey, now you do! I have it up for $0.99 because I want people to be able to get this info without spending an arm and a leg.

 

Luckily Amazon no longer accepts human flesh as payment, but nevertheless I think beginners, amateurs, part-timers, and anybody without a lot of spending money should have access to all the tools they need to get started. What you do with it after that is up to you.

 

What I’ve decided to do then is publish parts of the ebook for free right here on my blog. I have no idea how this will turn out, or who cares about a freelance writer’s internet marketing tips, so what I want is some feedback from you guys.

 

If this post gets either 10 comments or 20 Facebook shares, I’ll publish the next chapter of the book. Same goes for that post, and so on until the entire book is available right here on the blog.

 

This is an excerpt from How to Build an Unstoppable Email List. If you want to go ahead and buy the whole thing, you can find the link on the right.

 

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Introduction

 

 

If there’s one thing that you’re going to hear from an internet marketer these days, it’s that you absolutely need to build a list if you want to increase your conversion rate and see a steady income from your business. If you have an eCommerce website, a product, or an idea that you want to market, a list will give you the opportunity to connect with thousands of people who actually want to hear about it.

 

Now, it may seem like an incredible amount of work to find interested people, get them to open your emails once you have them, and figure out new and interesting things to send them either weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly.

 

I’m not going to lie, it is a lot of work. If there’s one thing you can bank on though it’s that this is work that actually pays off in the end. You’ll need to invest a large amount of your time, but if you can do it right and follow all the steps, you’re going to be three steps ahead of most other internet marketers out there.

 

The brutal truth is that only the people who have a solid, unstoppable email list are successful. Go ask any marketer or salesman you know. If they’re making money consistently, they have a list. I always have the same piece of advice for budding marketers: Work on building a reputable list, and then worry about your sales.

 

Want some more proof? Consider these 4 reasons why a subscriber list can help your sales and marketing approach.

 

1. A list will let you squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of each and every customer.
2. You can use your subscribers as your very own test audience. If you have copy that you plan to launch on a large scale, test it on your subscriber list first to see the kind of responses you get, BEFORE you spend money on the launch.
3. Your cost for each new customer will decrease. It’s more efficient (and cheaper) to pitch a single person several times until they buy than it is to try to pitch multiple people into buying the first time.
4. If there’s a large launch from one of your affiliate providers, let thousands of people on your list know about it first, before they buy the product from somewhere else.

 

 

This ebook is meant to guide you through the process of building your first SUCCESSFUL list. Maybe it’s your first list altogether, or maybe you’ve attempted to build a list in the past with only a margin of success. Maybe you even got 500 subscribers on one list and felt good about it.

 

A successful list is one with thousands of subscribers, not hundreds.

 

If you want to learn these tried and true methods to building your unstoppable, unassailable, bulletproof list, please, continue reading.

 

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Well, not a whole lot of information there, huh? If you want to see more about how to build an email list, leave a comment or share this post on Facebook using the Share option below. Alternatively, you can just buy the whole ebook for only $0.99.

Why You Need to Stop Paying For Your Backlinks

When you own a business or a website, you can be tempted to use one of those services that offers “Cheap PR8 Backlinks!” or “Get on Page 1 of Google!” It’s an easy decision if you don’t know much about how these services work – What’s that? Get on page 1 of Google? Why sure, I’ll pay for that!

 

What these services do is spam a massive number of links to a whole bunch of non-relevant sites. That is bad for your business for 2 reasons:

 

1. Google doesn’t look very favorably on backlinks from sites that are not relevant to the destination page (although it’s still not a punishable offense, just stupid)
2. Depending on the methods that the service uses to get the links out there, it actually MIGHT be a punishable offense, in which case your entire site could get slammed and sent back to the hundredth page, or worse.

 

I actually had #2 done to me recently. I wasn’t using a paid backlink service (tried it once, never went back), but I was testing out some different techniques and theories that I had for getting my page ranked. I went from page 3 of Google for a certain keyword all the way back to page 92. You can guess that I was pretty bummed when I found out it happened. I lost a lot of revenue on that site as a result.

 

I’ve been able to build it back up to page 15 so far, but it has been a long, arduous process that could have been avoided if I had just stayed away from that one technique. Now, I know I didn’t pay for the backlinks that did this to me, but the point is that you never know what these services are actually doing to get the promised number of backlinks out there.

 

Google doesn’t tell you when it punishes you, and it doesn’t tell you what you did wrong. It just sends your page way back and leaves you to figure it out for yourself.

 

If you want to get onto the 1^st page of Google, put the effort in and do it yourself. Article directories don’t have the same sway they used to since the Google Panda updates, but they still hold some weight, so don’t count them out completely. Social networking sites like Facebook are apparently going to be given more weight, so make sure you use them as well. Ask other people to share your site on their pages to help get the word out.

 

If you are offering a quality service or have useful information on your site, people will have no problem linking to it and sharing it for you. If you want some quick backlinks, you can hire a freelance content writer to write some articles and then get them up on article directories quickly and painlessly, controlling the process so that you know exactly where your links are coming from.

A Few More Changes to HandleyNation

Well, as many of you may have noticed there have been a lot of changes going on around here at HandleyNation. I changed up the blog design again (for a good reason though!) and a few of the posts have disappeared. That’s because we finally got the handleynation.com site up and running!

 

From now on, this blog will continue to cover everything internet marketing related. The website is going to be the headquarters for my content writing services. Since I liked the theme that was on here so much, I decided to use it over on the main site, and I pulled a few of the blog posts that dealt with freelance writing and online writing to use as a starter for the HandleyNation.com blog. If you are interested in writing services, or if you’re a writer trying to get started in freelance writing, bookmark that blog because it’s going to be full of useful information.

 

I’ll be back to posting up internet marketing articles here again very soon once the waters settle down a bit. I’ve actually been in the trenches trying to figure out what sort of backlinking strategies are still useable after the Google Panda updates, and boy do I have a lot to report. I plan to have a long post up sometime soon about the subject of current backlinking strategies.

Spontaneous Human Combustion and Freelance Writing

When I’m not working for clients and practicing new internet marketing techniques, most of my time is devoted to writing for other sites around the web. It helps me stay focused and allows me to practice writing in different styles, which I think is a crucial skill for a freelancer to have. Different clients usually want different styles of writing, and while it’s possible to develop a unique writing style that’s identifiable as your own, you’re more likely to have success as a beginner if you can easily adapt the way you write to meet different needs. I can’t count the number of times a client has shown me a web page or blog and said, “I want it to sound like this.”

When I’m writing on HandleyNation I inevitably fall back into my own personal style, and if there’s a shortage of writing work it’s easy to lose track of that flexibility that comes from tailoring your writing to meet a wide variety of different needs.

Well anyway one of my favorite websites just bought one of my articles and published it on their front page. Toptenz.net is a top 10 list website that covers topics ranging from health to politics to bizarre and weird circumstances and everything in between. They work with a lot of great writers and I’m honored to have one of my pieces published on their site. The article is called Top 10 Unsolved Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion. As you might guess, it talks about some of the most bizarre cases of spontaneous combustion in history, of which there have been over 200 documented since the 1400′s. The newest one occurred as recently as 2010 in Ireland, and despite the modern forensics technology we have it still remains a mystery.

 

You can check out the article here: Top 10 Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion

 

-Andrew Handley