List Building to Grow Your Business and Increase Your Sales

Why Do You Need List Building To Grow Your Business?

In a key article online, BuzzSumo provided a report about what is working on Facebook now for engagement. As I read that article it felt to me like Facebook loves to play, “Guess what we are thinking and try to win.” Most entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of time for that. My advice is to do list building to grow your business and put more of your time into that effort.

Recently, in a private Facebook forum for long-time entrepreneurs, a colleague asked if anyone else was “getting crickets” for their Facebook posts – not even about business, but social posts on personal profiles. Most of the answers she got were affirmative.

If you’ve been around the social media space for long, you know that your reach on Facebook has diminished and that you are often encouraged to boost posts, place ads, and otherwise “pay to play.” Other than Facebook, you can now spend money for engagement on Instagram (daughter of Facebook), Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even Twitter. The days of getting much organic reach are gone – that’s nothing new to say, really. You have to work hard to list build from social media onto your own house list – but it's important for you to get subscribers onto your list, even if those same people are followers of your social media accounts.

In spite of all of this news, I see online entrepreneurs talk about the death of SEO for their websites, their inability to build a responsive list who buys from them, and even a shrug of the shoulders as if owning your own list isn’t necessary.

My belief is that it is definitely necessary – more so than ever before. Social platforms come and go. Do you hear anyone much talking about Periscope these days? How about Digg? Google+? I personally know entrepreneurs who spent a huge amount of time cultivating followers on these platforms only to have it come to nothing in the end. These social platforms have largely disappeared, but list building has not.

Take a look at large companies like The New York Times. They have worked consistently to build their email lists, knowing that their reach on social is lessened. Even BuzzFeed has added over a million new followers to their email list in the past year or so. Why? Because the email list you own and control is the core of your business. Adding subscribers to your email list should be, in my belief, a central strategy to grow and strengthen your business – something you work on all the time. 

It’s not enough to just list build, either

Once you have added subscribers to your list you’ve got to keep them awake and aware of who you are and why they want to read or watch your content. The single biggest mistake I see online marketers make is adding a subscriber to their list with no follow strategy to cultivate and sell to that subscriber. Frankly, if you are adding to your list and stopping there you may as well not build your list at all.

In my home study online course List Building for Success and Impact – How to Create a List of People Who Actually Buy What You Offer, I teach a 9 step system for list building that includes how to plan out what to do AFTER someone has subscribed to your list. If building a list that has true impact and a high response rate is something you can benefit from, I invite you to check out my online course and work through the two modules. Here’s the link for full details: http://listbuildingforimpact.com/

You might also want to read this blog post: List Building Tip – How to Add Subscribers by Teaching What You Know. 

My challenge to you is to consistently add 100 people to your list every single month, especially if your list is not responsive to you at present. List Building for Success and Impact will help you do that.