Why build an opt in email list anyway? This question may seem quite obvious but lets answer it anyway and set a good list building foundation.

Time was when the internet marketer developed a product to sell online and left his great sales page to sell the product to a large amount of traffic, convert a percentage of them, and make lots of money.

That was then. In as much as you can send a lot of traffic to a website sales page and expect to convert many, the reality is that the average surfer moves through sites much faster, spending less time on any web sales page. Whats this got to do with list building? Well, it has been shown that it takes a potential buyer between 7 to 10 exposures to the product before a purchase is made. Think about it, there are lots and lots of products out there.

So how can we use this information to our advantage? For starters it opens up options. Let's look at them. We could continue to drive visitors aka traffic to our websites and hope that our sales pages will do a great job in getting them to buy first time round - in other words rely on the powerful copywriting with all the psychological triggers. The challenge here however, is that we have to come up with fresh traffic each time. Traffic costs money. We must look for a way to maximise the traffic that has already arrived at our website before we lose them for good.

Now, what if we could by some means capture the name and email addresses of our fast surfing visitors so we can follow them up later? Makes sense. We could send them friendly reminders to re-visit our site, perhaps once every few days, thus giving them the opportunity to make the all important 7-10 or more visits to our site that can lead to a purchase. Sounds like a great idea!

But how do we set about capturing our visitors details?

First of all we must design a lead capture page to capture the name and address of each visitor. The visitors to this page shall have no other option but to give their details or leave.

We must give them a compelling reason to leave their details - a free gift worth having.

Once they accept our free gift, they are now subscribers. We now have permission to send them reminder messages via our autoresponder (you need to subscribe to one). The beauty of the autoresponder is that we get to send reminder emails to them that go out automatically at preset intervals.

These reminder messages will have the singular purpose of building a meaningful relationship with our subscribers.

To maintain a meaningful relationship we must carefully craft each email (at least 7-10) to ensure it has what our list wants.

Once we establish that we can be trusted to deliver good quality information, then our list should immediately recognise our email address and be eager to read the content and act on our recommendations.

We are now in a strong position to send them to our product website and expect a better response. A much higher response and conversion rate than if we had sent them straight to our product website without building a relationship.

Build a list. Build a relationship and get the right response. Build an opt in list today.

Claim Your Free 10 Part eCourse on List Building From Scratch at: http://www.ListBuildingMission.com

Willi D is an expert author and marketer specialising in list building and pre qualified traffic generation techniques.