I wanna discuss building your list. I'm gonna focus on five things that you need to do and how you need to do them in order to build your list. And when I say build your list, I'm talking about your subscriber list for your internet marketing business. And specifically, I'm gonna talk about how to attract and retain subscribers who are genuinely interested in your offers. Unfortunately, a lot of times when you get list building products or training videos or eBooks or what have you, it focuses a lot on the email marketing side of things. So the list building product tends to say, yeah, hey, make a squeeze page, give away something for free on it. And that's how you're gonna get a lead. And then they jump into how to market to lead, how to write emails, how to use the autoresponder, how to get it approved for products.
And that's the marketing, that's email marketing. And that's all great. There's an important place for that. But I wanna talk in this training about specifically how to build the list. Where do you get the people from? How do you put them onto your autoresponder? How do you get them to subscribe? All of that stuff. That's what I wanna cover here. So, first and foremost, I think we need to talk about where these subscribers come from. If you're going to build a list, you have to first understand exactly what a list is. Don't shake your fist at me if you have already started building a list, or you think you're an expert at this already, 'cause you have a few hundred people paying attention here. We've been doing this a long time and we've got hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
A lot of people have a misconception about where the subscribers come from, and because they have this misconception, they think they know, and maybe they've gotten a few people before, they think they're doing it right. Well, the thing to keep in mind is that not all lists are created equally. Meaning you are not going to make the same amount of money from every type of list. There's some people that build a list and they make little or no money at all. They're hardly ever able to monetize that list because they didn't build it properly. They didn't build a targeted subscriber list. Instead they just threw spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick, and then they got a bunch of stuck spaghetti on the wall that they can't do anything with. And that's not what I want to happen to your list. I want you to build a list of valuable monetizable subscribers.
Yes, I'm making up verbs here. So where do they come from? Well, they're gonna come from traffic that's out there on the web that you tap into, and there's a lot of ways for you to tap into that traffic in order to turn it into visitors and then turn those visitors into subscribers. So when you say, well, where do subscribers come from? Mommy, daddy, where do babies come from? Where do your subscribers come from? Well, they're gonna come from web traffic. Well, where does web traffic come from? Well, that's where we gotta start. It's gonna come from ads, it's gonna come from sales, it's gonna come from your affiliates. It can also come from existing leads. That's a little bit more advanced. We'll talk about that in a second. But first and foremost, you have to understand that people are already out there on the internet.
Humans are creatures of habit. Since the beginning of time, we've been traveling in herds, in clans, in groups, we've been assembling groups based on needs and interests and social media. And today's internet is no different. So there are basically huddles, if you will, groups, congregations of people already out there. That is what traffic is. Traffic is not a bunch of people speeding by a billboard, as you might imagine it in your mind, right? The word traffic kind of makes you think of a highway. And a lot of people think that web traffic is a bunch of like just digital ones and zeros zipping by. And somehow you gotta tap into them and get 'em onto your site. And it becomes this really elusive, difficult thing. But traffic is really just groups of people that you have to go and penetrate. You have to go into those groups, you know, and, and basically gather those people, pick the people that you want to interact with and gather them together and form your own group.
And that group that you're forming could be a list, it could be a YouTube channel, it could be a Facebook page, it could be wherever. But you see the groups are already out there. The people are already out there neatly categorized for you based on interest. You nowadays have the advent of social media. A lot of us, when we started, we didn't have, so social media might have existed in some form or another when I started doing this, but for the most part, it was not what it is today. Facebook was not what it is today. Facebook barely even existed when I started. YouTube wasn't around. It wasn't like, it was not as easy to assemble these congregations of people as it is today. Right? Now, you can go to YouTube, create a channel, put up videos, put a description, put some keywords, and you can start assembling subscribers on your YouTube channel.
People that you can communicate with, people that you can then put onto an autoresponder and email, and we'll talk about ways to do that in a minute. But where do subscribers come from? Well, they come from those congregations of people. If you go to Facebook, that's just another example, because when you think of social media, you think Facebook. If you go to Facebook right now and go to the search bar and you just type any niche, anything, absolutely anything you could  type underwater basket weaving. I, I don't know, I'm just pulling that one out of the air. You could type any niche into that search bar and you're gonna get a whole bunch of results. And those results are sortable by pages, images, groups, ads, like all a bunch of different things. So, basically Facebook is saying, what would you like us to show you?
Would you like us to show you underwater basket gr weaving groups, underwater basket weaving pages, underwater basket weaving images, underwater basket weaving events, underwater basket weaving, whatever. Like they're just showing you all the different congregations or, or rather categories of congregations in the underwater basket weaving niche. Believe it or not, it's there. Anything you can think of, model airplane building, anything. It's all there. And that's just one big social media platform. Then once you select groups, you're gonna see hundreds and quite possibly thousands or even tens of thousands of groups that are all neatly assembled. Each one of them possibly having tens of thousands or hundreds or hundreds of thousands of members, people that are already there and gauging around a specific topic or interest. So when you say, where do subscribers come from, mommy and daddy, where do subscribers come from?
Well, that's where they come from. They come from congregations of people that are already out there on the net congregating, doing their thing, grouping together and becoming friends based on what? Well, based on what we've become groups for and since the beginning of time, based on needs and based on interest. And that's what traffic really is. So subscribers come from traffic, traffic comes from groups that are already out there. So how do you get them? What's the glue? How do you get them from the group? How do you get them from that congregation, from that place onto your subscriber list? We'll talk about where that list is stored and all that in a minute. But how do you get them from one place to another? Well, you gotta create something. So you gotta take some kind of an action as a marketer to kind of bridge the two.
And one of the most common ways to do it is with an ad. You can run an advertisement that displays to the members of that group. You could do this without going in the group and being a pest. You can do this without annoying anyone and being all up in their direct messages, trying to sell 'em sunglasses. You can do this very, very easily by, and in the example that I made earlier with the underwater basket weaving Facebook group, you can go to Facebook and you can purchase some ad time that you basically go in, set up a new ad, you upload an image for your ad, maybe some nice baskets underwater or whatever underwater basket weavers do and run some copies saying become the best basket weaver, the underwater, you know, congregation has ever seen. Whatever would attract the attention of an underwater basket weaver and some sales copy and a link.
And now what you could do is you can set up in the targeting of that ad who gets to see it, and you can say, only display this to the accounts that are members of these basket weaving groups or that have liked these basket weaving pages or that have attended these basket weaving events. That's called targeting. You are running an ad for your basket weaving thing, your group, your list, your squeeze page, your whatever, and you're only showing it to people that have shown an interest, that have demonstrated an interest that are active members of other groups in that particular niche. So that's how ads work to get people from that interested congregation to your subscriber list. What's another way sales you can automatically cut connect your sales platform. Like let's say you're using JVZoo, ClickBank Warrior, whatever the preferred affiliate network is for you or for your industry, your niche, whatever that is, you can connect your product directly to your autoresponder.
We're gonna talk about what an autoresponder is in a minute, but essentially it's where you store your list. So there's code that you can copy from one paste into the other, and now the two things are connected and you can get people that buy a product from you to get automatically added to your autoresponder. So when you run a sale, when you sell a product that appeals to those underwater basket weavers, maybe it's your video training, your underwater video training and waterproof laminated ebook on basket weaving. You've put this beautiful package together and you've taken a picture of it, you've done a sales video, you put it on a sales page with a big bright yellow order button, and now when they buy, they click that button to buy, they pay you your $10 or whatever underwater basket weaving stuff goes for nowadays. And now that money goes into your PayPal account and that user gets added to your subscriber list because you've connected the two, you connected your payment platform with your autoresponder account.
And again, the method for doing the technical process for doing that would be different depending on what payment platform and what autoresponders you're connecting. They would each have respective instructions for you to do that. Now it's funny that the next thing I wanna mention is affiliates as a place that subscribers come from, because for me, that's been the majority of where my affiliates have come from. So out of all of my affiliates, rather than my subscribers, out of all of my subscribers, I would say 80% of them were in one way or another, sent to us through an affiliate. And how does that work? Well, you approach an affiliate that you know, has a big following in the underwater basket weaving arena. And you say, dude, I know you are like a big shot in the otter underwater basket weaving field.
And I would love it if you would promote my product, my new underwater basket weaving course to your minions of basket weavers. I think they would love it. And that affiliate says, well, wow, that is great. And I see you're having a contest. I would love to take part in this. And you say, well, here's some emails you can send to them. And he says, well, great. And he sends those emails with his affiliate link, of course. And now that affiliate shares you and your product that you're selling to all of his many minions that love underwater basket weaving, and he refers to you to a whole bunch of people that buy your course and automatically anybody that buys your course gets integrated right into your autoresponder. So this is how affiliates can send people to you to subscribe to your list, but they're not really technically subscribing.
They're being automatically added to your list of customers when you sell a product. And when people say to me, well, I don't wanna create a product I don't wanna create, I say, well that's foolish because creating a product is the most sure fire way to have a targeted list in your autoresponder because when somebody buys from you, you have to add that customer to your list of how else would you, how would we message them about the product? How would you give them download links, password information, and updates, right? Every single person that buys from you gets added to your customer list, right? Here's the last one I wanted to mention. As far as a source of subscribers, existing subscribers can send you more subscribers. If you've got a couple subscribers already, you can double that. Yeah, I'm sure you've heard the adage you have doubled a penny a day.
Well, it's just like that. Imagine if you have a hundred subscribers and let's say you could get half of them, just half of them to bring you in one more subscriber or two more subscribers. If you got half of them to bring you in, two more subscribers, you'd get a hundred more people, wouldn't you? Right? 'cause if you got a hundred, half of them would be 50. If 50 brought you two each, that would be another hundred. Guess what your list is now at 200. Now if you get half of them to bring you two, that's a hundred people bringing you two more. Your list is now at 400. See how this works? It grows exponentially. So by rewarding your existing subscribers when they refer more subscribers, you can double, triple, quadruple your list. And you can do this very, very fast. If you're wondering, well, how can I technically do this?
What is the software to do this? There's various software out there. There are viral inviters, that's what they're called, where basically it gives them a reward, a download link, a free video, some sort of a gift when they invite people, when they share your page on their Facebook or on their Twitter or what have you. So those kinds of tools are really clever ways to get existing leads to bring you in more leads. So now that we talked about where the subscribers come from, let's talk a little bit about where you put them. So you store your list in what we call an autoresponder. An autoresponder. It's probably not the most appropriate name. 'cause it, it kind of, you know, makes you think, well that's some system for responding to people. And how could that be the place that I get my leads and store them and email them that really, yeah, I don't, don't ask me how it got coined, but that is the word that represents the place, the service that you use to store all of the names and email addresses from people that subscribe to your list.
So essentially this autoresponder is a service that you subscribe to, you pay for this service and now you log in, they give you a, a little piece of code to put on your website and now you have a form that appears on your site and people can enter their name and their email into that form and click submit. And that information gets added to your list and stored in that autoresponder. The autoresponder also becomes a place where you can come to, to type emails and send them in bulk to those lists of people. Now an autoresponder is a paid service, but there are also self-hosted services, meaning you can go and if you have a hosting account of your own, you can go and purchase the software for a one-time fee, install it on your own hosting account and email people from there. I'm gonna offer a word of caution here.
When you email in bulk from your own hosting account, it is your own hosting account that will receive any spam complaints and bounces and things that could give you a black mark, so to speak, on your IP address. So not all hosting providers are really a big fan or proponents for self-hosted email autoresponders. However, what you can do is kind of like a compromise of the two where you buy the software and then you subscribe to a service called SMTP. And this is basically you hosting the interface that you paid one time for the software that does the mailing that constructs the emails that source the, sorts that data for you, but then it's connecting to these big powerful mail servers maybe at Amazon or another company and it does the actual sending from there. So that's definitely more affordable than what some of these paid autoresponder services are going for nowadays.
So I definitely recommend you look at that. And another thing is when you're using a self-hosted autoresponder, you have a lot more flexibility as to what you can do as to the lists and the data and what you can upload. Autoresponder companies tend to be very, very difficult when it comes to uploading your leads, downloading your leads, and doing really custom things 'cause they're trying to protect those IP addresses. And as you know, there can be a lot of bad actors out there trying to take advantage of them. So now you know where the subscribers come from and now you know where they go to, well, what are ways that you could get them physically onto the autoresponder list? We know that the traffic or the visitor comes in the way of ads, sales affiliates, and existing lids. We know that they're gonna get stored onto this autoresponder database thing where we can mail them from.
How do they actually get on there though? Well, we use forms. I already kind of mentioned that you can get a code from your autoresponder and you can put it on your site. Well, what kind of sites? How, how does that work exactly? Well, we call those types of web pages. We call them squeeze pages. Again, in other industry terms, don't ask me how we got to squeeze from entering a name in an email, I don't know, but here we are. So it's a squeeze page. You may have heard it called a landing page. I don't know how they call it that, but hey, it is what it is. Landing page, squeeze page, whatever. This is where your visitor is. They came here from your ad or from your sales page or from your affiliates or whatever. And now they're here and there's a form on here and you've gotta convince them to enter their name and email into that form and click submit in order for them to be on your list so that you can market them and try to make money off of 'em.
Not an easy feat. So usually what we do to make them comply is we give them free stuff. We just offer them something free. It's a bribe. It is an ethical bribe, meaning, hey, I know you're interested in underwater basket weaving because you click the ad to get here. Well, now here you are, I've got an underwater basket weaving course, but what I'd like to do is give you my free report, which is gonna give you the introductory tips to my basket weaving course. It's absolutely free. All you need to do is gimme your email so I know where to send it and put it in that field below and click. So you see now you've got somebody that's like, okay, well hey I'll, I'll you know for a free book, I'll, I'll enter my email. And they just got their foot in the door.
This gives you an opportunity now to build trust and to now establish a rapport and quite possibly get them to buy your full underwater basket weaving course. Right? Again, it's just a thing that I pulled out of the air for an example. It's not an actual niche that I'm involved in. So I don't know how it would work or if it would convert well for that niche, but squeeze pages are great. Another, another thing that you can use is popups. Now popups get a bad rap. A lot of people say, oh, I hate pop ups, I hate pop ups. Yeah, but you know what? You interact with them, you use 'em, popups work. That's why every website has 'em because they work. And you can do it tastefully. You don't have to be annoying. And all up in people's faces, you go to some of these news websites, I just wanna read an article, they're just popping things all up.
I can't even see the article underneath 'cause there's so many pop ups and videos, I don't even know where the sound is coming from, what's going on. You don't have to be that guy. You can have a very tasteful and strategic popup that comes up only when somebody's leaving the page and says, Hey, thank you for visiting, by the way, would you like a free copy of my underwater basket weaving report as a thank you for coming and visiting today? And now they enter their name and email and you, you know, you interact with them that way. You don't have to be all over them. Their face making their user experience horrible blogs, you know, a blog is a very underestimated way to put content out there. You know, we'll talk about this in a minute, but content is the way that everything happens on the internet.
And blogs are a really good way to get people interested in the subject matter. 'cause they don't have to do anything to read the content or watch any videos that are on your blog to read the report. They have to opt in to take your course, they have to make a purchase. But to learn a little bit on the subject matter, they could just read an article on your blog, right? So a blog is a great thing to do if you're planning on doing a course. If you're planning on doing a free report, you might as well do something on a blog. Create a blog about your niche and on the side of it have you know an offer for your free report. So now people are coming to consume the free content on the subject matter. You're showing them a free report that's a more detailed thing about the subject matter.
And inside the report, you got links to your sales page, which is going to be the trip wire that gets them eventually to buy your products. You see how this marketing thing works? There's actually a method to the madness. Now, people can stumble across any one of these things. They might just come right directly to your sales page or they might go directly to your free report, squeeze page, or they may just stumble upon your blog one day. They might come into this funnel because that's what we call all these interconnected funnels. They might come into this funnel through any entry point, but once they're in, you wanna get them to subscribe to your list. Now I wanna talk a little bit about adding leads directly into your autoresponder. There's this thing, this magical thing called an API, it's a code, it's called an application program interface.
I think, don't quote me, I think that's what it stands for, something like that. It's some technical gizmo that allows one software to connect with another software or one website to talk to another website. Essentially what this does is it enables you to connect your list from your autoresponder directly to a whole bunch of different types of software. And I thought it was worth mentioning here as a tip to build a list because you can create a fancy schmanzy squeeze page or funnel using any one of these fancy schmancy tools that are out there. Now, things like lead pages, things like groove pages, things like optimized press and all that. And most of these applications have an API built in, which is the function that allows you to connect them directly with your autoresponder, which means in a nutshell, you don't have to use those clunky, outdated, ugly forms that are tend to be provided by autoresponders and they, they're getting better and better.
I've seen some pretty nice ones now, but you can use pretty much any page builder, any kind of funnel builder and, and a lot of different tools to connect directly to your autoresponder. There's actually a tool out there that I wanna mention. This is a service. I think they have a free level, but I I pretty much it's a paid service and there are now a couple of spinoffs off of it that are even more affordable. It's called Zapier. So Zapier is kinda like a hub for API connections. You can go to zapier.com, I think that's the URL, don't quote me, but you can go to Zapier, Google it if you can't find it. And you can connect pretty much any software you use with pretty much any other software you use. So if there isn't a native API connection already built into the software, a lot of these tools do have Zapier functionality, which means that now you can connect your optimized press directly to your AWeber account and also connect it to a spreadsheet on Google Sheets.
You can connect your Google sheet to your autoresponder and also connect it to so basically when somebody puts their name in one, it automatically gets added to all these others just in a zap. That's what Zapier calls it in a zap. So this allows you to do very, very clever configurations of tools and this allows you to stitch together different processes to get people onto your list. Now I wanna talk about content and you, you might say, well, hey, I thought this training was gonna be about just building the list. You said yourself that they usually start talking about emails and email marketings and just start getting sidetracked. Okay, well, I don't want you to believe for one minute that this is getting sidetracked. Content is the way that you pull in leads, period. Content is everything on the internet.
I'm sure you've heard the saying, content is king, right? It's king, it's queen, it's everything. The content is what attracts the lead. The content is what entices them to subscribe. The content is what they pay you for. The content is what they stay subscribed for. Content is everything. The amount of content and the quality of the content that you give out will determine the following that you're able to build and the amount of subscribers that you're able to get on your list. Make no mistake about this, you can't just rub a couple of quarters together and build a valuable responsive subscriber list. I hate when marketers teach this, and unfortunately there's this whole generation of newbies out there that think all they need to do is slap some, some crappy squeeze page together and pay money to some guy or some girl who's gonna send them a solo ad and they're gonna be able to build a list.
Yeah, you might get one or two subscribers on there. Heck, you might get a hundred, but whether or not you're able to make money off of them is gonna remain to be seen if you are not dedicated to creating valuable content. And the problem with all these kinds of arbitrary methods of generating traffic is that you don't know the source of that solo ad. See, when you're running an ad and you're targeting Facebook or on Google or wherever it is, you can select specific locations or pockets of people to show your ad too. And you can say, Hey, listen, I only want people that have shown an interest in basket weaving to see this ad. But when you purchase a solo ad, and by the way, if you don't know the difference between a regular ad and a solo ad, a regular ad is generally a visual ad that someone sees in the process of surfing the internet.
They're on their Facebook looking at posts or on their Instagram, and all of a sudden as they swipe up an ad comes up. That's a regular ad. A solo ad is the type of ad where you approach an internet marketer that already has a list and you pay that internet marketer to send an email to that list about your squeeze page. So it costs you money to get clicks or visitors to that squeeze page problem there, like I said, if you don't know if any of those people were actually interested in basket weaving or if they are even English speaking people or, or, or what have you. It could be just completely untargeted traffic. So it's, it's really, really difficult to fine tune a list and really create a responsive list if all you're doing is solo ads and if, if you've got, you know, different types of niches that you're in, content is the way that you can assemble your own audience if you're good at creating content in your niche.
So if you are an underwater basket weaver and you're constantly taking pictures of your projects and you're constantly recording videos and broadcasting live every time you go on another dive to weave another basket, I really don't know if this is a thing. I suspect it is. But if you're constantly out there on social media engaging with people that are interested, if you're out there creating content about the types of basket, the type of wicker that you purchase and, and the materials that you use and the special scissors and the clippers and the scissors and the decorations and all the tools and you're constantly out there engaging with people that are interested in this thing and you're writing articles about it and putting on your blog and you're making posts and YouTube and you're tweeting about it and you're snapping selfies of you and your friend on your new basket weaving adventure and you're creating videos for your basket weaving YouTube channel, and then you're turning them into reports that you're letting people download for free, and then you're creating PDF books and you're, you're creating trip wires inside of those books where people could click and now go to your subscription form.
If you're doing this, if you're putting content out there, you will attract a following. You will attract people that are gonna come across the links to go to your squeeze pages and that are gonna join your list. And now once they're on your list, what are you gonna do with them? Now you are gonna give 'em content, you are gonna put stuff in emails and you're gonna fill that need. They are hungry for content on the subject matter. That's why they joined your list. You're gonna feed that need. You're gonna make them dependent on your content. And then eventually what are you gonna do to monetize them? You're gonna sell them content, you're gonna sell them paid level content. So you're gonna have all different types of levels of content. You have what we call the free line, and there's a line in your content levels below.
This level is free. This is the kind of stuff that I'm willing to give out. Free pictures, posts, articles, then there's maybe the commitment level kind of content where you've gotta take some kind of an action. You've gotta share, you've gotta enter your name and email. You've gotta make some sort of a commitment. It could be a micro commitment or a macro commitment, but the macro commitment will probably be the purchase level content. Somebody that actually invests money and I'm gonna give them my full course that took me weeks to produce. And then you've got even more content that you can give them, like coaching and things like that. You've gotta have content that keeps them engaged inside of emails. Content, content, content. So tips to build a list. Well make sure you know where your subscribers are coming from. Make sure that you know where you're gonna store them.
Make a good decision on which autoresponder you're gonna use because this is an important part of your business. Make sure you create those different forms. Don't just, don't just do landing pages, do popups, do blogs. Get them on there with APIs. Add your leads through APIs, automatically connecting them from your payment processor directly onto your list. Those are the best type of leads. By the way, the most responsive leads you can have if you're an affiliate marketer are customers, people that have bought from you in the past. No other list makes you more money than a list of people that have already given you money. And then finally, make sure you're producing content. A lot of content. Everything that you do every single day can be content. If you just document it, you just document it, shoot a quick video, take a quick selfie, do a quick blog post. Everything that you do if you are into this niche can be potential content. And content is the way that you build your list. I hope you've enjoyed this training and I look forward to seeing you build your list very, very soon. Take care.