Marketing: List-building: Keep It Simple

By: Tellman H. Knudson

Here's a question, I get often:

"When you're just starting out, do you concentrate on building just one list and one set of products or do you just go ahead and expand into doing a list for many different niches?"

Here's my answer:

I think when you're starting out you should just focus on building one list, monetizing that list, and doing a really, really kick-butt job of that because when you start dividing your efforts, what ends up happening is that your profits get divided, too.

Let's talk about a perfect world. If you have one squeeze page and one sales letter and your job is to drive traffic there, you don't want to be going into all sorts of niches. What you want to be doing is figuring out how you can drive as much traffic as humanly possible through that one system that you're totally excited about, you're totally passionate about and you're testing like crazy to ramp up the conversion through the roof. And at the same time, you're building a list around that theme.

Now, might you have a dud? You might have a dud, and you know, if you're ripping on that for a month and a half and you're not able to make any money at all, maybe you should look at one other niche, maybe. But I don't believe there is such a thing as a niche that can't be effectively monetized.

I think that some take a little bit more effort than others. But I personally can't work on a project that doesn't play to my interest and play to my passions, play to the things that I really care about. I can't do it. Some people can; I'm not one of them.

So my advice is to focus on one niche and just get dedicated to it. Find a way to build a list in that niche and to monetize it effectively so you can build a business around it that you can be really proud of and you can hold onto for a long time. Then, once you get really good, can you start going out into other areas?

Sure. But what I'd like to point out is, let's say you have 20 different niches, you have 20 different sites that are going, you're driving traffic to all of them through Ad Works. Great. You're probably making some money on each one of them. Wonderful. You also have 20 different lists. What's the problem with that?

Well, the problem with that is, are you really going to build a business out of this? Let's say you're sending three emails a week to your lists. If you have 20 different lists, how many emails a week is that?

It's 60 emails a week! I don't have time to write 60 emails a week. Do you?

It would be even harder to hire enough people to write 60 high-quality emails a week. Whereas, if you just focus on driving traffic into that one niche, you can add one or two new sources of traffic everyday, if you focus on one site and gathering one list. And then all you need to do is write three emails a week or whatever it is. I'm saying every new niche you go into may create a new list, but basically it also creates a new business for you, which creates a whole new workload for you.

Decide how many lists you can serve, how many businesses you can run, and how taking on too much can affect your life.