entertainment videos: Your Blog's Single Most Important Task

? drum roll please? Your website?s most important task is to BUILD A LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS!

For many of you who are new to the online world of doing business, or maybe you?ve been around for a bit without really paying attention to this, let me explain some of the reasoning behind this so that you will consider adding to your online marketing strategy toolkit.

When you have a brick and mortar store, you have the opportunity to immediately build a relationship with everyone that enters your store. You can greet them, offer to help them with selections, even strike up a conversation. All these actions build rapport and relationships and strengthens your customer loyalty. I much rather do business at a place I feel I can trust and where the atmosphere is friendly and courteous, particularly if they remember me, than somewhere I walk into and the staff is disengaged, disinterested and could care less if you were there or not (yes, that happens). You can, as the store owner, even request that your customers jot down their name to receive updates from you. Since this is a face to face interaction, most customers will say yes, even out of sheer pressure to be kind.

Now, enter your online website or blog: you have NO IDEA who has stopped by your blog AT ALL. Who really liked your site so you can follow up or who spent time looking through your wares or posts. Now, I KNOW we have analytics software (which we will talk about later, like Google analytics) that can give you pretty accurate idea of the number of visitors you had, who visited which page, and even how long they stayed. You can even track it down to the IP address they visited from if you so care to do that. However, unless that visitor specifically enters their email or contact information, you have NO IDEA who they are or how to follow up. And even if you hired someone to track down the IP, #1 that would be spam (and I am sure illegal), and #2 it would be a very expensive process to implement.

But back to my original thought: Why Build A List And How

1- Building a list allows you to capture the contact information of those visitors who visit your site and would like to hear back from you again <?that?s always a good thing

2- Building a list gives you ?permission? to communicate with your subscribers. Now, here is where it gets a little not so black and white. If you abuse that list and start sending them products they can buy, sales promotions and little or no information that is of any value to them, they will simply unsubscribe. Not only that, but they can also report you as a spammer and eventually your email IP will just get automatically blocked.

3- The money is in the follow up! If you have no one to follow up with, the chances they will remember your site, how they found you or what you offered is slim to none. And even if you send an email and the percentage that responds is small, with time, that percentage will increase and also your list will grow. The larger your list, the better your response will be (as long as your content is ethical, of course).

Now, don?t let that scare you. Website owners who use List Building for good (and not for evil) end up enjoying a very nice loyal relationship with their customers, as well as a financial benefit as we all know that people will buy things from those we trust and like.

How to build a list

In this post I will cover what company to use to build a list. There are software tools available online that helps us manage this task for a very affordable price. It will manage your opt in forms, the emails we may want to send to our subscribers, and even manage for us those who simply want to unsubscribe (which keeps you legal online). There are many companies that offer this service and most at comparable prices. I personally have been using aWeber for many, many years because it is robust, reliable, and scalable. It works nicely with your blog widgets to insert opt-in forms and I rather like their training videos on how to use the system. However as with anything new, it will require a little patience to set up so if you have a young teenager around or someone more techy, let THEM do it for you . You can get a fully functional subscription to aWeber for $1 and use it for a whole month with this link here: aWeber for $1 trial.

I will share with you in a nutshell what you do at aWeber to set up your list:

1- You will create a ?list? and give it a name: mybloglist

2- You will create a ?form? to capture the contact details you want to get: the less the better. I recommend name and email

3- You will create a ?message? or series of messages that you want to send after people opt-in. For sure a welcome message including whatever incentive you may have offered to your subscriber for optin in. I used to set up a series of emails, but then it was cumbersome to send fresh emails without doubling up on emails to the same subscriber. So I only send out a welcome email, and then I send the rest whenever I post or have something to share with my list. I do not bombard my list daily, nor do I use my emails to just sell things without rhyme or reason. I suggest you stick to a similar ethical and logical guideline as well.

4- Once you have these basic steps set up, you will then want to grab the form code from aWeber and insert it via a widget into your blog, above the fold line (so the area that users see before they have to scroll down).

That sounds like a bit of a task but if you take sometime to watch their instructional videos, it will be a piece of cake. And you will be able to create as many lists as you need for different marketing initiatives throughout your site. This way you can track subscribers to your newsletter, for example, vs subscribers from a special promotion you run.

Here is the link again:?aWeber for $1 trial.

There are other marketing companies such as iContact, Constant Contact, Get Response, etc? I have just not used them so I cannot speak to it. However, all are very professional and very similar in nature and even cost. Choose the one that appeals to you most .

Use your lists to communicate your blog posts and subscriber only ?ninja secrets? so that your readers will stick with you, learn from you and refer you to others.