Hi,

First, there are a lot of people unemployed today, in desperate need of ways to make money from home.  And most people are very good at something – usually one or two things (at least), that they’re passionate about.  Blogging is a great way to get started making some money online, by serving up your knowledge and expertise and sharing that passion with others.

Second, there are even more of us with existing businesses who realize that the bigger our email lists and online audiences become, the more money we make.  One common figure that’s thrown around a lot for small businesses and online entrepreneurs is that each subscriber on your email list is worth $1 per month (per subscriber).  For large corporations, it’s undoubtedly orders of magnitude more.

Whatever the exact value per subscriber, it’s clearly important to build your email list and attract a quality audience by providing quality content.

But how do you go about building a list these days?  Unless you’ve been hiding somewhere underneath a rock or lost in the woods for several years, you probably realize how WordPress is taking over the world as one of the leading blogging platforms.

And today, WordPress is also being used extremely effectively to build all kinds of websites, including Launch Micro Sites, portals and small business websites of every kind.  Why?  Because it’s free, it’s easy and there’s all kinds of “plug-in” extensions available.  There are millions of WordPress blog and websites in use today.

Of course, this blog you’re now reading has been WordPress-based from the beginning in 2008.  Since then, WordPress has grown into a rich content publishing and content management system (CMS).  WordPress has also evolved into a great platform for building a subscriber base, building your email list bigger and faster and making money.  In fact, there are many professional bloggers who make their living from publishing great content on their blogs.

So, how does one go about making money quickly and building a bigger email list using WordPress?  It’s taken me several years to figure all this out. Today, I decided to share it with you here.  I organized this into three main steps.

1. Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme
2. Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building
3. Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Let’s take each one of these steps and go a bit deeper, shall we?

1. Start with a high-quality, premium WordPress theme

You need a flexible, quality WordPress theme to get started.  There are many different free themes available, and some of them may be perfect for you; however, if you’re developing a site or blog for building your list and making money, you’ll want more flexibility to customize your site.  That’s where “premium themes” come in…

I have used a lot of different themes over the years, for my own sites and blogs and with clients, including Thesis and Socrates, which are both excellent themes.  However, in my opinion, the new kid on the block has them all beat hands down, in terms of flexibility, quality and value.

It’s called the Headway Theme.

In fact, I believe in this theme so strongly that I’m using it on client projects almost exclusively.  At the time of this writing, this project is still underway, but get this.  It only took me a couple of days to create this entire site from scratch over a weekend, including the graphics design and most of the content work.  If you’ve ever developed your own websites, you realize how impressive (and cost-effective) this approach to website development is.

So, I highly-recommend starting with a premium theme.

2. Get the right WordPress plug-ins that help you with list building

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress as a platform is its extreme flexibility and adaptability to changing needs.  A lot of its adaptability comes from the modular “plug-in” architecture, which enables a WordPress administrator to quickly and easily add new capabilities by simply installing and activating a WordPress plug-in.

To build your list effectively, you need the right plug-ins.  Today, I use several dozen plug-ins to operate this blog; however, there are a couple of them which are crucial to building our email list and my blog’s subscriber base.

The main list-building plug-in is:

• Subscribers Magnet – this is a premium plug-in that inserts opt-in forms on your blog, and integrates sign-ups with your favorite auto-responder software (e.g., AWeber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, etc.).

Subscribers Magnet makes it easy to automatically insert opt-in forms in various strategic places within your blog, including:

• Before or after certain posts or all posts
• In the blog sidebar (the area to the right of this article, for example) as a WordPress “widget”
• As a “checkbox” option to automatically subscribe a user who posts a Comment (very cool!)
• As an overlay window at the bottom of the page (when user first arrives at the site)
• Anywhere within a post or page

In addition to Subscriber’s Magnet, I also used regular Text widgets to insert HTML code directly into sidebar widgets (like the Launch Report you see at upper right currently).

A couple of other important plug-ins I use are:

• Register Plus – this plug-in provides the ultimate in flexibility for registering your new users, allowing you to capture just about any kind of information you want, and use your own logo (instead of WordPress’ logo)
• Subscribe2 - this plug-in emails your blog subscribers whenever you publish a new post.  This is a great way to build your list locally within the blog itself (without using an auto-responder); incidentally, there are also now numerous auto-responder plug-ins that turn your WordPress site into an auto-responder! (I haven’t tried them yet)

So, as you can see, it’s fairly straightforward to build your email list and blog audience using the right plug-in tools.

Of course, you need traffic and visitors to your blog.  Hey – write some useful content!!  (that’s what attracts people to your blog, along with some well-chosen SEO-friendly keywords in your blog title and blog permalink URLs).

When I get more time, I’ll try to post some more detailed reviews of these plug-ins.

3. Decide what products and services to promote, then advertise them on your blog

Last, but certainly not least, is you need a way to “monetize” your WordPress site’s traffic and your email lists.  Obviously, you need to give away lots of useful information, by posting it on your blog and emailing your list regularly, but what else can you do?

Advertise!

That’s right.  Find some high-quality products that meet your audience’s needs (your own and other people’s products you can promote as an affiliate) – and then advertise them in a calm, clear, professional manner.  Notice I use those qualifiers – calm, clear and professional – because if you go overboard with your advertising, you will turn people off and drive them away from your site!!  (not a good thing )

So, how can we advertise things calmly, clearly and professionally on our WordPress site?  It starts by thinking about advertising this way… if you were visiting your own site, how would you want to be advertised to?  What would you consider to be useful, acceptable practices for finding and buying high-quality products?  In other words, use the Golden Rule – treat others as you would like to be treated – it (almost) always works!

You might have guessed by now how we can make these advertisements visible on our WordPress site…

By picking the right plug-ins, of course!

Here’s the plug-ins I use and recommend for advertising on your blog:

• Ninja Affiliate - this is one of the coolest plug-ins I’ve seen and used in a long time… it allows you to define what the author dubs “ninja links” – which are basically alias URLs on your site – that when clicked on, redirect to the user to a specific offer page.  What’s most cool, though, is that you can define a list of keywords that will be automatically converted into hyper-links to your advertised offers.  And if these are affiliate links, they can be “cloaked” easily.  (you may notice certain keywords in this and other posts are now links – that’s the ninja at work)
• DataFeedr Random Ads – this plug-in enables you to define groups of related ads that rotate on a random basis, so that multiple ads can be shown in a single sidebar location.  So for example, the banner and text ads you see on this blog are served by this plug-in.  You simply define an ad group, then define each ad (by giving it a name and inserting the HTML code you want served), then you place an ad widget in your sidebar – then your ads automatically rotate and show up.

There are many other plug-ins and mechanisms available for advertising on your WordPress site or blog, but these are a couple of my favorites.

Summarizing

So, if you want to build an email list bigger and faster, and generate a revenue stream from blogging and/or a WordPress-based website, now you know how to get started.  Just install WordPress, install a quality theme, then start posting some great content.

Along the way, add the aforementioned plug-ins into the mix and start promoting some quality products that help your audience get their jobs done better, faster and easier.  You’ll find plenty of great products to promote on ClickBank, Share-a-Sale, CommissionJunction and dozens of other CPA networks out there just teaming with products to promote. Of course, you might have your own products and services to sell, too, which is great.

As long as you’re serving up real value, you can’t really go wrong.

I hope this helps you build your lists and grow your online business profits.

Happy list building and monetizing!

P.S.  Need help getting started or developing a WordPress-based website for your business?  Contact me and let’s discuss how I can help.

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In the traditional sales world, sales people used to use a Rolodex (remember those?), business cards and a call log – and of course, their telephone.  Many still do today.  Of course, modern CRM systems have automated this process nicely.  The Rolodex was the “list” back then… today, CRM software has largely displaced the Rolodex.

In my last several blog posts, I stressed the importance of building a relationship with your list of subscribers.  Don’t have a list of subscribers?

Oops!  You probably aren’t turning a profit online if you aren’t building and nurturing your list – are you?

Today I had a nice discussion with a work at home mom about her attempts to make money online.  She had invested around $5,000 in affiliate marketing and advertising based on some “make money” course she saw on TV… well, I’m always saddened to hear these kinds of stories, when good people are taken advantage of by scams or incomplete sales processes…

I explained to her that the only way to turn a consistent profit in an online business is with a list of customers, subscribers and prospects.  The reasons for this is actually quite simple.  It’s simple economics.

It costs too much to advertise and bring a visitor to your website.  On the first visit to a website, 99% are probably not yet ready to buy whatever you’re selling.  Well, it’s impossible to turn a profit when only 1% or fewer people buy from you, given the cost of bringing visitors to your site.

Instead, it’s a proven fact that in order to run an advertising-driven, profitable online business, you must build a list of subscribers – who you then can develop a relationship with over time and market to them on an ongoing basis.

It seems simple enough, yet I’m still amazed at how many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t do this properly.  There’s tons of great information freely available on how to develop landing pages that get visitors to register and there’s certainly no shortage of email auto-responders to choose from (arguably there’s too many of them to choose from today).

So what’s the issue?  Why are so many companies and people starting out still missing this critical piece of the online profit puzzle?

Perhaps it’s because they lack the content – the so-called “money magnet” needed to attract the right kinds of people to register and subscribe in the first place.  Money magnet is a term that’s been used in a variety of ways, but I first heard the term applied to online marketing by Frank Kern, a very experienced and successful Internet marketer.

A money-magnet is anything you can give away for free or nearly free that attracts the right kinds of prospective customers to register and become a subscriber.  Now I realize this is online marketing 101 stuff, but like I said, there’s so many people who are skipping right past the basics to put a gorgeous looking website up and then wonder why it’s not making money, that apparently it needs to be stressed more.

I outlined the entire process for building a profitable online business in a post earlier this year called “A PROVEN ONLINE SUCCESS FORMULA“, where I go into quite a lot of detail on proper goal setting and putting the necessary online selling machinery in place.

Incidentally, all of this is spelled out in even greater detail in the Online Leadership Guide, which comes with some very cool free tools and a mini-course you should check out (it’s very affordable, at only $19.95).  Incidentally, this is a decent example of a money magnet and landing page.

So if you’ve tried Google AdWords or other online advertising and are disappointed with the lack of sales results, if you weren’t using a proper landing page with an enticing money-magnet free offer for your visitors to register and learn more, go back and fix your front-end “lead generation” process and start building your list.

Several earlier posts discuss the importance of developing a relationship with your subscribers, giving them even more value for free, then eventually *some* of them will be ready to buy – and when they are ready, some will buy from you.

Done properly, your subscriber and customer list become your more valuable online business asset – much like that Rolodex was to a salesperson in the offline world.  Invest in building your list and the relationship with those on your list, and I promise you’ll be amazed at how much it will help you.

If you’ve been in business for a while as a small business, chances are you already have a “list” of sorts – a mailing list in the making inside your Gmail contact manager, Outlook or other mail client.  This is, in effect, your mailing list – all your contacts.  If you’re like me, you have hundreds of business cards squirreled away in a desk drawer somewhere.

Getting these entered or scanned into your contact manager will begin to round out your business contacts.  Keep in mind that these folks would probably accept a personal email from you, but would consider advertising or other forms of direct promotion as spam, so be careful how you use these resources.

If you are a more established medium to large corporation, then you most likely have a corporate CRM system, which is a primary list source for you.  You also probably have lists scattered all over the place and you may need to do some list consolidation, de-duping and cleansing.  It’s well worth the effort, as these lists are pure gold when used properly with a focused email marketing strategy.

Finally, keep in mind that one of your best sources for lists is leveraging lists of your partners through cooperative marketing campaigns, whereby your partners promote your offer to their lists, bringing lots of qualified traffic to your landing page and building your targeted list.

Ultimately, you’ll need to break out from your core contacts and build focused lists of prospects in each of your target markets.  It does take time, but done properly, it is well worth the effort and investment.

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