Do I Need My Own Product Before I Start List Building?

This post it sponsored by Market Samurai. Download it today!

In the comments of my post yesterday about how Your Small List Can Equal Big Profits, Suresh Knanal from ICTtrends.com posed the following question:

I don’t have any product yet to sell, Do I need to start building mailing lists? What shall I make use of it?

Suresh makes an interesting point. The reason I made all the money from the one email was because we had our own product, but what if you do not have your own product – is it still necessary to build a list?

The Simple Answers… ‘YES!!!’

One of the benefits of internet marketing is the fact that there are so many of us.

While some of you might think that this just increases our competition – I beg to differ. Instead I see it as a large pool of potential JV partners. With so many of these internet marketers desperate to sell more copies of their products they are willing to pay big commission if you are able to find buyers for the product.

I know this is a simple concept for some of you, but it may also be an eye opener for others.

The reason that I have not created my own product yet is because I don’t have a big enough following yet to have a successful and profitable product launch – but that is the same reason I am building my list.

Start With The End In Mind

If you have the desire to create your own product to sell online, then wouldn’t it make sense to create an large email list of subscribers that will be interested in your product?

But building a list takes time, so how do you cover the costs of your Aweber account for 12-18 months while you are building your list big enough and your reputation strong enough to create a successful product launch?

Recommend Products In Your Niche

With Aweber costing about $19 a month – with your first month free, you know that you have to at least make $20 a month from your list to make it pay for itself.

Now cutting back to all the internet marketers willing to pay you to sell their products, how many would you really have to sell each month to break even? Probably just one!

If you visit ClickBank or PayDotCom

, you will find 100′s (maybe 1,000′s) of ebooks, software and much more, with commissions of up to 75%. You will find the majority of these will provide commissions of $20 or more.

But How Do You Find The Right Products To Promote To Your List?

It may all be good and well that there are so many products that we COULD sell, but which ones will be the best to promote? Which ones SHOULD we sell?

There are 3 things you should look for when choosing what products to promote to your list:

1. Must Fit Your List
   

   Why Are People Subscribed To Your List?

   Once you can answer this question, you can easily find multiple products that will solve you subscribers problems.

   The easiest way to do this is to visit the ClickBank marketplace and do a search for the topic of your blog.

   This will bring up a heap of products for you to consider!

2. Must Have Credibility
   

   Don’t Recommend Anything That You Would Not Consider Buying

   This is one of the most important thing when it comes to list building – your integrity.

   Don’t ever promote anything that you have not either personally tried and recommend, know the creator personally and can vouch for their content, or is extremely popular and real testimonials can be used to verify the quality.

   This is the main reason I chose Market Samurai as the main product that I promote on this blog and to my list, because:

   • I Personally Use And Love The Product
   • Over 100,000 Users Vouch For The Quality
3. Must Convert Well
   

   Make your making efforts worthwhile and test to see which product converts best.

   The thing you will find when you start promoting products through your list, is that some products will work really well for you, while others won’t make you a single sale.

   If you have sent a couple of emails promoting a product and you are not getting a response – then maybe it is time to try another one.

   Coming back to why I chose Market Samurai as the product I would focus on promoting through my list, I just love the way they promote their product.

   You see, all I have to do is encourage people to download a full-featured, trial copy of Market Samurai and they do all the follow up, and I get a nice commission for each person who purchases the software.

So you can see that it is not necessary to have your own product to start building your own list.

What is stopping your from building that list?

Tagged as: List Building, Market Samurai