Should I Be Building An Email List?

I recently joined a group on Facebook called the social media mastermind specialists group or something like that, and it was only a small group, but there were a bunch of people like me in there, or I thought they were like me.It was a group for social media managers, people who manage social media marketing for their clients. I shared a blog post called social list building, which was talking about why I stopped building an email list and concentrated on my social connections instead, such as my Twitter followers.

They seemed to think that I was making a huge mistake by not building the list, and even went so far as saying that they don’t respect the opinions of people who aren’t making huge amounts of money. I thought my fifty dollars a day every day was pretty good, especially considering it’s been doubling or tripling every year, but these guys were serious, or serious douche bags if you ask me.

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I told them that I had tried building an email list, I wrote an e-book, I learned how to upload it to my server and create the download link that I could send out via email.

I wrote about two or three months worth of free daily internet marketing tips into my auto-responder, and then it started playing up, sending out messages over and over again. I also realised that in just a few months time, the e-book had become out of date, or I had learned new things that worked better, and I didn’t like the quality of what I was sending out.

I tried to offer value to my list, but I also had to make money, and the only way I could make money was to promote my services, (which are basically likes and followers), or sell other people’s services as an affiliate. Could I Make More Money By Building A List?

I’ve heard you can make a fortune by building an email list and sending out solo ads, (which are other people’s messages), and that’s kind of what I’m doing with my social media accounts, but it just seems so much more like spam. It seems so much more like something I don’t want to be a part of, because I might be promoting products which are a rip off, or that harm people’s sites. From a small amount of experience in buying those sort of internet marketing productsthat claim to make you a million overnight, I know that they are scams for the most part, and I have integrity. Anyway, these people kept bugging me, saying that I should build a list, and that I wasn’t a real internet marketer like them because I wasn’t building a list.

It was just really stupid, because I could name thousands of sites that don’t bug their customers via email to buy something and still make a ton of money. I’m hoping that people come back to my site because they thought my services were high quality, and want to get more. I can email them in person once or twice, and that’s enough for me. I would prefer to talk to people one on one via email rather than as a robot, sending out one message to thousands. I never built my email list that big, I was using a crappy free WordPress plugin to build my list called WP Autoresponder, and I only got up to fifty subscribers before it screwed up.

I would have to start all over again completely from scratch, and write a new ebook, get an Aweber or Get Response account, pay the monthly fees for that, (which keep rising the more subscribers you get), and that means I would have to build the list quickly which means I couldn’t just get traffic from SEO, I would also need to buy traffic from ads. Google Adwords doesn’t allow you to send traffic directly to a squeeze page so I would probably need to use Facebook Ads, and that can be hard to use to get email subscribers. Why I’m Not Going Back To Building An Email List Basically, it would take a hell of a lot of money, a lot of hard work, and a lot of learning how to do this different thing before I could even say that I was in profit from the whole exercise, in fact it might be a huge waste of time and money.

I’m onto a profitable strategy, and if I don’t do that and just keep doing what I’m doing, the stats point to me being rich beyond my wildest dreams anyway, in a few years time. I don’t like email lists, I’m signed up to a bunch of them, and 99% of them have nothing good to say, just the usual spam, and I just end up un-subscribing. I don’t want to be one of those guys who sends you out Clickbank affiliate links or the lastest WSOs or solo ads. It’s spam, it’s boring, it’s inpersonal, it’s commercial, it’s old, nasty, horrible. I just really don’t like the whole thing. Maybe Twitter is the same sort of thing in a way, but the difference is that the tweets just go by on your dashboard, and you don’t have to delete it, you don’t even have to look at it if you don’t want to.

I’d suggest that everyone who has a product with a fairly widespread appeal buys random Twitter followers, because they work just fine for me, and I can get hundreds of unique views a day if I spend a bit of time tweeting. On the other hand, it would take a fair bit for me to recommend that anyone build an email list, regardless of whether it is technically a better way to get sales from traffic. It’s only better if it suits what you’re doing, and you know how to do it properly, (which takes a lot of learning), and if you’re happy to annoy people with affiliate links and stuff like that.

I can’t think of many cases where I’ve been signed up to a list that isn’t annoying, and I have personally barely ever bought anything. I have a personal dislike for email lists, and they don’t work for everybody, that’s the point I was trying to make in the group, but I won’t dispute that it is a proven business model that has made many people millionaires if they stuck at it. I can help you build an email list, I know the basic idea, but what I would suggest is that you try using social media connections first, and learning SEO, and PPC, because those things can get you subscribers later anyway. Send me a message to talk about the best possible course of action for you and your business, my email is in the sidebar.