In my previous post, 5 Questions to Ask Yourself After Starting Online, I mentioned the importance of having a long term plan. And list building is part of that long term plan. Every internet marketing gurus worth his salt always give the same advice, Build a list. The money’s in the list. Let me just play a devil’s advocate here by asking these questions. Do you really need to build a list? What if building a list do more bad than good in getting customers in your niche? Is that even possible? Our questions are set, now’s the time to find out the answers.
So, What’s a List?
Just to make sure we’re on the same page. The list that I’m talking about here is an email list. An email list itself contains a group of people who have subscribed to your blog or newsletter by opting in. You can use a very primitive but free service, like the one comes with your web hosting service, or you can use the paid version, like Aweber. Aweber boasts a lot of advanced features that the free email auto responder services don’t have, e.g. the ability to track the open-rate of your emails, blog broadcasts, and many more.
Why Do I Need to Build an Email List?
There are a couple of very strong reasons of why you need to build an email list.
First, building a list means that you have a list of possible repeat customers. Repeat customers are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you don’t need to spend additional money to acquire them. Secondly, they are the ones that will become your rabid fans and messengers, if you treat them right. They will tweet about your latest products, comment on your blogs, or even talk about you in their blogs.
Second, your business won’t rely solely on you finding new prospects. Imagine if one day PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing becomes too expensive to play with and SEO becomes a strenuous back links battleground. If that happens and your traffic is mostly search traffic, it’ll be very tough for you to make any money online. But, imagine if you already have a list of 10,000 subscribers at the time. It sure will ease your pain, won’t it?
Third, building a list means building your online business for the long term. You don’t rely on Google to send you prospects. You don’t rely on your Squidoo lenses or Hub Pages’ page that might get taken down. You don’t even rely on Twitter, just in case it went down (Don’t want the whale to drag you down with him, right?). You have complete control over your customers and prospects.
Why Don’t I Need an Email List?
Building a list is important, but there are some cases where list building is just a waste of time and resources.
First, you’re in the one-time buyers niche. Some examples of these niches are the hemorrhoid niche, the yeast infection niche, the sweat repellent niche, and many others. In these niches, your customers only need a one-time solution to their problem. If they found it, they won’t need you anymore. And if they tried your product and it’s doesn’t work, they’ll probably refund your recommended products and never trust your site anymore. So, there’s no reason to build a list whatsoever.
Second, you’re striving to be a news site. Some examples here are Tech Crunch, Mashable, Kotaku, etc. These blogs are synonymous to the magazines in the offline world. They have a huge monthly readership and RSS subscribers, and rely purely on ads (be it banner, video, or text) to make money. If you’re aspiring to be one of them, I don’t think it’s necessary to have an email list, RSS should have suffice.
Third, you don’t have time to write follow-up emails. The money is not really in the list, it’s in the relationship you built with your list. So, if you don’t have the time to write follow-up emails to your list, it really makes little sense to spend time collecting subscribers. They won’t be turned into eager buyers or fans anyway, since you never come in contact with them after they opted-in.
Conclusion…
Building a list is your first step towards building a long term business, not just a short lived one. But, there are a couple of cases where you don’t really need them (and might even be better off without them) as my arguments above have shown. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.
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