FORT LAUDERDALE – Are you one of those corporate America professionals who is ready and willing at any given moment to throw in the towel and start enjoying the List Building Lifestyle? If only you knew where to start. So what is the List Building Lifestyle, anyway? That’s a very good question!

The List Building Lifestyle, as it’s referred to by many of today’s most successful mom-and-pop email marketing operations is simply the science of building your list and optimizing the quality with tests of different business opportunity offers to turn a profit with each mailing. It is a science, but not too complicated once you get a hang of it. As your subscriber base grows, you will lose subscribers. Many of our subscribers love our blog posts (we aim to please) and many others unsubscribe. It’s okay – their interests change over time. A true List Builder understands the value of their list because “The Money is in the List”.

One of the best ways to start enjoying the List Building Lifestyle is to find our passion and write about it. You can create a small downloadable e-book or set up a Website Portal. For example, do you have an interest in photography? Do you dream of starting a wedding photography studio? Start blogging and network with other blogs in your niche to build your list of potential clients fast.

One of my favorite bloggers is Mark Weins of Migrationology. He and his wife travel throughout Asia sampling different types of foods for his food travel blog and shares his videos on YouTube. The quality of his website and his videos are up there with the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmermn of Bizarre Foods. It’s great to see how dedicated he is to his craft. His travel blog is sustained by sales of his e-books. He is a true professional and he shares his success tips for blogging freely on his YouTube Channel. He talks about the video equipment he uses and how he packs for each trip. He is based in Bangkok. His enthusiasm for his Food Travel blog is very contagious.

Find your passion and start blogging. WordPress is the most powerful blogging platform. It offers easy hosting packages and lots of great themes “right out of the box” that you can start using almost immediately to match your interests. Whether you plan to use a 3rd party email list management tool such as Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact, start building your list as soon as possible.

Yes, the Money is in the List. As your list grows, you will be able to estimate the value of each subscriber. It may take some testing but you may arrive at a ball-park estimate for each subscriber’s value to your business (i.e. $1.50 each) if you are selling a simple e-book for $29. Of course, the value of each subscriber escalates substantially if you have a solid backend product upsell strategy for $197, $297 or even $497.

Okay – great – what internet marketing method do you recommend to start building my List? Most bloggers start building their lists with Google Adwords because it’s so easy to set up an account. Simply bid on your keyword phrases and Google lists your links on its search engine. You can bid on competitive keyword phrases in your niche and create an email marketing funnel to effortlessly market to your new email subscribers to convert into sales and pre-qualify these sales leads for your backend sales calls.

You can run social media ads on Twitter and Facebook if you can get a decent conversion rate, however if your business plan calls for the sale of a backend product for $495 or higher, you’re going to need to pre-qualify your leads which is more suited for the telemarketing method because it’s direct, dynamic and scalable to your marketing campaign. You will have many options for growing your list but you should always have an exit strategy for your email marketing funnel. For you to take the critical leap and enjoy the List Building Lifestyle, you need a strong backend product so that you can keep pushing the profits up the side of the Pyramid.

Another method is to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but many times it takes too long and keywords are highly competitive unless you focus on four-word and five-word keyword phrases which offers lower volume but better targeting. Most people go for the low lying fruit which is social media, but ad saturation has diminished the returns for many marketers.