Building a list?

[Jim G]

Ok, so I'm full of questions today...

Building a list seems to be "where it's at". That seems self-evident if you have one or two sites. After a couple of years you have literally thousands or tens of thousands of people to contact regularly.

However, I'm seeing no point if, say after 12 months, I have 36 lists, each comprising 20 to 200 people. How do you maintain ongoing contacts with 36 tiny lists on wildly differing subjects? Or, am I being negative and missing the point?

[Marc]

I guess that depends how well you do your promotions and traffic building as to the size of the list.

My bet is that you wont have 36 sites at the end of 12 months, rather by then you would have selected your sure winning sites and put more effort into those.

List maintaining is easy as you get further into it. One of the easiest things I do to keep my readers happy is this.

I have my outsource team create a new content piece. I post that content to the site with adsense on it, or affiliate pre-sale whatever I am trying to achieve.

I then add to the auto-responder series a small blurb about the topic in hand, and tell them I have just added a great page to the site about this topic which they can go and read if they like.

This has a multiple effect.

1. You are staying in touch with the reader and they are receiving quality information from you.
2. You are driving people back to your site, with the mass of initial people in the series, and then anyone else that joins will get to that message eventually.
3. You are helping your readers discover more of your site.
4. You are making more money because everyone on that list will see your new page (and click your adsense if you have it, or buy something from it if it fits them, not everyone will click your ads, though the increase is significant)

On one of my sites I worked out for every page I added into my site, then following it into my auto-responder. I would do the following.

Drive 1000+ uniques to that page overnight

Make immediately around $5 that day from adsense, all up over the next few days would be around $10

Then consistantly make between .30c and $1.50 from that page from then on in.

Within the first month recover the cost of that page easily and break profit.

I was spending up to $20 to $40 to have these content pages created, they were awesome and the members loved them. It was only a question of how many content pages could I get up.

Hope that makes things a little clearer as to how I would manage a niche list.

Regards
Marc

[Jim G]

Yes. Excellent insight. Thank you. Starts to make a lot of sense.