List Building, Free Leads & Resources
LIST BUILDING:
I could give you pages and pages of advertising resources. These include many companies for which I am an “affiliate” and with whichI would earn a commission if I recommended their services. However, after working on the internet since 1997, there are very, very few resources I can honestly recommend as anything except a black hole in which to pour your money with very little return.
The most important thing an internet entrepreneur can do is create a mailing list. Begin collecting names and email addresses (and if possible phone numbers) and put them into your email programs Contact List. I recommend using Gmail.com or Safe-Mail.net and not the email on your computer operating system. The reason is from experience….the very bad experience of having a computer hard drive go bad with all my contacts lost in the crash. You can create different groups in your email so you can separate out your family, close friends, and perhaps a group made up of purely internet marketers. Then, when you want to send an update to a specific group, you may do so with a BCC (blind carbon copy) function within your email. The BCC function allows you to send an email without revealing everybody’s email address to each other.
FREE LEADS:
I can highly recommend receiving FREE names and email addresses from two sources. You can feel very comfortable emailing any of these contacts about what ever opportunity you are promoting.
Both of these resources are FREE!
- Triple Your List – Get 3 new leads every day. FREE! Pro version is a one time lifetime cost.
- Free Survey Leads – Free “Bronze” level gives you 25 surveyed leads per week.
RESOURCES FOR MARKETING TOOLS:
I recommend two sources for tools. Every internet marketer needs a professional autoresponder. That is the most important tool you can use. In the spirit of openness, I do earn a commission from both of these companies, but would recommend them even if I made nothing.
- 12 Second Commute – Includes professional autoresponder plus quite a few other marketing tools, all very helpful with an online business. Training is live every week! Free trial for first 30 days. You won’t find another package of marketing tools this extensive anywhere for this price. Starts at $9.00 per month.
- Aweber – Excellent autoresponder I’ve used since 1999. Aweber provides indepth video training on their web site back office.
In 12 Second Commute, you will find many resources including a company I’ve used several times called Mona’s Designs. Mona Decker and her husband, Rob, do excellent work making splash pages, lead capture pages, and banners to help you collect leads for your business. I highly recommend her services, especially is you don’t want to “go back to school” to learn how to create these items yourself. Mona’s services are fairly priced and quite inexpensive. (No, I don’t get a commission from Mona. I just like her work.)
You will see 100s of places advertised claiming to do everything imaginable to help you succeed. Don’t believe them. They are there to make money. You can buy ebooks all day long and it’s true you will learn many different things, but there is very, very little you can learn by paying someone that you can’t learn without paying a penny. Resist the urge to spend money when you’re not at all sure what a service can do for you.
OFFLINE ADVERTISING:
The subject of offline advertising could fill volumes too. Keep it simple. Make some business cards on your computer or go to Staples, Office Depot, or Office Max and have some business cards made. Keep the cards simple too. Be sure to include your web site URL for VoiParty. (I would wait until the replicated web sites are created so you can advertise your own personal web site!)
Make flyers on your computer. VoiParty will be supplying us with marketing materials in our back office, but you can make flyers yourself until then. Pass them out in the parking lots of places where many people of all income levels go. Grocery stores, Wal-Marts, K-Marts, shopping malls. Place your flyer under windshield wipers.
The very best place to advertise remains the dreadful “warm list”. Yep, people you know will listen to you better than anyone else. Success breeds success, so until you have some of your own, rely on your upline sponsors who have made money and can testify to that fact. Be honest and you will go far. It’s hard to overcome procrastination about calling your friends, family, and even just acquaintenaces. But everybody knows 100s of people. Make the list and get started calling them. If you want to succeed, you must do this……and you know it.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Plaxo, and Twitter are just excellent places to share your story. This takes more time to develop, but you can create a list of people on any of these places who have similar interests to yours. These are so important that I will devote another entire post about them. To be an internet marketer, you must employ social media marketing in this day and age.
More Resources below….
MORE RESOURCES
BaggaBucks Fun site by Marianne Myers. Free to join, get paid for looking at Sponsor Ads. You can also be a Sponsor and have others see YOUR web site, which is why we joined the BaggaBucks in the first place. Neat program!
