Before You Begin

I firmly believe that having your own list of people who trust your judgments and recommendations is the way to making big money on the Internet.

Luckily, this is not that difficult! Time consuming, yes. Planning is required, yes. But it doesn't need any super magical skills to implement..and implement well.

Here's why your list will make you money. If your list trusts you, they'll trust what you recommend.

Thus, let's say that a colleague in your industry releases a rather useful product. You can get an affiliate link for it, write up a review and then send it to your list. Anyone who buys from your link will cause you to receive a commission.

This is a good thing, indeed.

But better than that....when you develop a profitable list, you're also giving your subscribers some extra value ahead of time. They might not know about discounts available, they might not be aware of secret resources online that you share....they're getting quality information from being on your list.

That's a wonderful thing!

Thus, let's begin with some excerpts from the Beginners Make Money Cookbook.

Tip 1 - Pick an interesting and profitable topic.

Yes yes yes, I know.lots of people say, if it makes me money, I'm interested in it!

But writing week after week about something as exciting as clipping your toenails just won't give you pleasure at all. And your business should be fun to run.

With that as a brilliant statement, let me now add the corollary "Profitable is a Good Thing" too.

You might swoon with joy at the idea of running an Ezine about painting coffee cups. But unless you upsell that into painters' toolkits, coffee cup wholesalers etc., your profits might be more difficult to come by.

Let's say that you want to build a list about your digital camera hobby. We'll call your broad niche, Digital cameras.

Now, digital cameras is a pretty huge topic! How will you make yourself stand out? There are bunches of digital camera lists on the Internet.

I've personally discovered that one super way of standing head and shoulders above the crowd is developing your own style and personality.

For example, my online persona is wanting to be left alone, and my writing style is one of humor. I approach making money by being left alone....but that doesn't prevent me from writing about all sorts of IM topics (like this beginners book, eBay, etc.).

How can you be known uniquely in your niche? If you're thinking about digital photography, you could be (note - DP stands for Digital Photography)

The DP Warrior

The DP Adventurer

The DP Advisor

Once you come up with a tagline, devise your personal. If you choose `DP Adventurer', perhaps your website could reflect an extreme sports theme. If you're the DP Advisor, you could focus your site on tips, resources and have a school-type background theme.

Tip 2 - Get an autoresponder

Thy needeth an autoresponder - you will grow 8,378,298 grey hairs if you try to run a list manually.

Check out my Autoresponder tips for more info on that.

Then,

Tip 3 - Create a free library on your site

This is a step that hardly anyone does online...why, I do not know!

When you have a free resource center or library on your site, it gives people a non-commercial reason to link to you.

And you can include optins for your ezines and products on each page as well! You'll notice I do that on the right hand side of this page.

Rapid Niche Website gives you all the tools ahead of time to make a niche site quick, using the powerful Wordpress as a base. You can also look for free html tutorials like Page Tutorial and learn how to build one yourself.

I highly recommend that! I have free resources for other tutorials at my Helpdesk as well.

Above and beyond

There are lots of places you can get materials to build lists. Some of them are:

Master List Builder

eZine Queen

I hope you've found the above useful! Please feel free to share it with your friends.

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