List-Building - Two Caveats for New Marketers

By: Tellman Knudson

When you're new to online marketing, the availability of information and the dazzle of get-rich-quick schemes thrown at you can be overwhelming. But really, what you need to do can be distilled down to two very important actions--list building and decide what you want to do before going off in all different directions.

So, when you're list building, the first thing to remember is--no matter what--never let things slow you down. Every single highly-successful person that I’ve met, never lets anything slow down their progress, no matter what.

It’s more important to get something done toward list building than it is to spend money. It’s more important to get something done about list building than it is to do work two to five times if you have to. It’s more important to get something done with building your list than anything else. If it’s a choice between getting something done in regard to list building and something else, I would rather move toward building my list.

I’m not saying excuses are bad. These are legitimate, real things. But you need to be able to bounce back quickly, to move as quickly as you can.

Get something done. Build your list.

There is one exception, and that is in regard to morals and ethics. Never treat someone badly. Don’t lie, cheat, or steal. This is just some basic Golden Rule stuff, but aside from that, I would say getting something done always wins.

There are a thousand ways to get a list-building squeeze page up and running. There are a thousand ways to get an autoresponder for maintaining your list up and running, and to find what autoresponder you’re going to use.

There are a thousand different domains you can register for your squeeze page and sales letter. There are a thousand different web hosts you can use. There are a thousand different products you can sell on the back end. There are a millions of ways that you can create sales pages. There are all sorts of different systems for getting your list built.

When you build a product, you want to move on every aspect of it and work through the hurdles. If you don't, you'll never complete your aim of earning money and that's mainly because you never built your list. Get the list going first, and the rest will follow. Don't let anything slow you down.

The second thing is don't waste money while you're list building, until you know what you want to focus on, and never let it break you or cause you to go into debt. Don’t buy a $5,000 coaching program, unless you can afford to lose the money. If you can afford to flush the money down the toilet, buy it, but don’t buy anything that will destroy your life if you spend the money on it.

Use your brains to figure stuff out and study as much as you can that's freely available.

If there’s something that looks like it could be beneficial and useful to you, and you can afford to, go buy it. If you don’t like it and it stinks, ask for a refund. Most of the stuff that you buy won’t stink. It will teach you something and you will get something out of it. You’ll find a good way of using it.

The whole point is that if you're new to the online business world, don't be distracted by all the gurus telling you to buy this and buy that. Get a good, quality list building program first, that will teach you the basics, step-by-step. Then, while you're working toward gathering your list, learn as much as you can, decide what you want to do, and then, maybe spend some money to learn that one thing. List building and learning are the two most important things you can do.