Henry Winkler once said, “Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
That saying is not only true in our real-world relationships, it’s true in our online relationships….especially our online relationships with members of our opt-in lists.
Of course, first you have to HAVE an opt-in list before you can begin to build a solid, termite-free relationship.
The ways to build an opt-in list are many and varied but the most tried and true methods are:
- Offering an opt-in incentive that has real value (example: an eBook, report or software)..
- Being an active poster of online blogs and forum communities that relate to the products and/or services in your niche.
- Writing thoughtful and informational articles and ebooks about your niche topic and submitting them to article banks and eBook repositories.
Even after you have done these things, it is still not time to start trying to sell products or services to your opt-in list….not yet.
BEFORE you sell, you must build a trusting relationship with each and every opt-in list member. And trust building takes time as well as patience.
You should send between ten and fifteen INFORMATIVE emails to each opt-in list member before you try to sell anything. Think of it as termite prevention.
You will build a solid relationship and the members of your list will trust you. That way when you do begin recommending products and services to them, they will be much more likely to buy them.
In order to maintain this solid relationship that you spent so much time building, you must be very, very careful to always recommend only high quality products and services that are beneficial to the members of your opt-in list.
To sum it all up, there are three main steps you need to do to build your solid, termite-free opt-in list:
- Start building the list
- Establish a relationship before you sell.
- Maintain the relationship by only recommending high-quality products.