It seems to us that most people have this strategy that consists of basically building a list as large as possible. Their number one focus in life is to build it bigger and bigger. While having a huge list is definitely not a bad thing, most people are putting their focus on the wrong thing. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that “the money is in the list”. You’ve probably also heard the counter-response that “the money is not in the list… it’s in the relationship that you have with the list”. Obviously, the second one is probably closer to the truth. Today I’m going to put a new spin on the idea…

Focus on Building Fans Instead of Gaining Subscribers.

When I talk about a fan, I’m referring to the people that purchase every product that you create just because you made it. These people have so much faith in you that they are willing to blindly purchase what you are selling simply because you made it and they trust that what you made will live up to the quality that they’ve come to expect from you. These fans will purchase products through your affiliate links because they trust you and that you would only recommend the best for them. One fan is worth infinitely more to you that even 100 subscribers on your list.

Think of Apple Computers… They have thousands (if not millions) of fans. There are people out there that will purchase every single product that Apple puts out just because it’s Apple and they’ve come to expect a certain level of quality and usability from them. We call these people Apple Fanboys / Fangirls (and day by day I’m becoming one too). When they put out an iPhone 4, hundreds of thousands of people who already have perfectly fine, working, iPhone 3s drop their old phone to go grab Apple’s latest new toy. It happens with each new product they put out… They have fans.

Another example would be the gaming company, Blizzard. They do games like WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. I’m a fan of their company. In my opinion, they’ve never released a bad game. As a result, I own every game they’ve ever released. I buy the games before even reading reviews because I’ve come to expect a certain level from them and they seem to never disappoint. I am a fan…

Let’s put some math behind the idea… Written on the white board on the wall in my office I have “1,000 FANS” written in huge writing. That goal has been on board for months and months now. It is my opinion that if I can build my business to the point where I have 1,000 fans, I will be set…

One fan can be worth any amount to you. I would say at the very minimum, 1 fan is worth $100 per year. Remember, a fan buys everything you release and also purchases most of what you recommend. You only need to sell 2 products in a year, valued at $50 each for one fan to be worth $100 per year. However, at this rate, 1,000 fans is equal to $100,000 per year to your business.

Realistically, though, one fan is probably worth more like $324 per year (or about $27 per month) to your business. So at 1,000 fans, you are probably closer to a business worth around $324,000 per year. At this rate, you only need about 309 true fans to have a $100,000 per year business….

It’s fun to play with these numbers. Obviously, people who only sell and promote really high-ticket items will have a higher value per fan. However, in the high-ticket market, one fan is probably a little harder to come by.

Are you starting to see how simple the concept of building a huge income becomes when your focus becomes building fans as opposed to building a list of subscribers?

How to create fans

There are a few simple rules that myself and Josh tend to follow. Do these things and you will be on your way to building a list of adoring fans.

1. Give tons and tons of high value content for free. Use your blog, create eBooks, make video tutorials, and record interviews. Then just give them away for free. People love to get for free what most other people probably charge to give. As long as the content is quality, people will stick around to see what you’re going to say or offer next. I do my best to share everything I know and learn and I usually give it away for free. The funny thing is, that has never hurt the sales of the products I sell. So don’t be afraid to share what you know for free. People will still pay to get even more details or to dig down a little deeper in to the concepts.

2. “Learn to love getting the short end of the stick” This is one of my favorite quotes and it comes from, fellow internet marketer, Eben Pagan. It basically means that when you do sell products, sell them for a lot less than you think they are worth. Have a philosophy of always over-delivering and make sure that when people purchase a product from you, they are always getting much more than they paid for.

3. Be customer service oriented. I still personally respond to most of my e-mails myself. I do my best to answer questions about my products or my ideas to the people who take the time to e-mail me and ask them. I’m not always the fastest at responding (I get a lot of e-mails) but I pretty much always get back to people. I hired people to manage my support desk as well. I want to make sure that even if I can’t respond quickly, you will get a quick response. No question goes unanswered and theres usually someone to answer quickly no matter what time you send it. These little details really solidify the confidence that people have in you and your business.

4. Never promote anything that you don’t know much about. Don’t jump on launches just because everyone else is promoting them and don’t agree to adswaps without knowing the product of the person you’re swapping with. Make sure that you do what you can to protect the list that you do have. Don’t violate the trust that you are working hard to build by sending crap that you don’t know much about. I’m not against promoting products, promoting launches or even doing adswaps. I just think that you should never mail anything to your list unless you are confident that it will benefit them. Don’t put your credibility with your list on the line by blindly mailing them everything that pops up to promote.

5. Always live up to the standards that you’ve created. If you are going to follow in these footsteps and build a business around creating fans and trust, make sure that any products that you put out continue to be high quality. Don’t let your true fans down. It may take only one misguided slip up to ruin that relationship. Don’t blow it.

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to creating a huge list of fans. I know people with lists of 60,000 to 100,000 subscribers that get a worse response out of their lists than people with lists of a few hundred true fans. True, sustainable wealth comes from buildings fans and creating trust, not from making a list…

If you enjoyed this post, can you do me two huge favors? Click the “Like” button to let me know that you enjoyed it and leave a comment so we can further discuss it. What are you a fan of? Do you agree / disagree with this philosophy? Get your input heard.

If you are curious about how I made this poll and how you can implement one on your site, check out Blogpolls.com. It literally takes about 4 minutes to set up a poll.

Please make yourself heard in the comments below. If there’s something you’d like me to talk about that is not mentioned in the above poll, let me know.

Thanks so much for you input!

I decided that I would try my hand at promoting a launch. This is the first time I’ve ever done it before. I had no idea how my list would respond. I figured it would be good because Mike is giving away a free video to check out immediately. I never imagined that I would end up in the top 10 for generating leads!

He posted today the leaders that are promoting the product… I managed to top a bunch of really big name players. I’m really excited about this. I had no idea that my list was capable of actually being a “player” in the launch game.

Anyway, just wanted to make a quick post because I’m excited.

Ask me anything so that I can share my?philosophy?on the question.

Ask things like how do I retain the list that I have, what do I write about, how often do I write, what subject lines work best, etc. I want to know what sort of things people want to know most about list building so that I can share what has worked for me.

They say that you can make $1 per subscriber per month. I’ve found that I have averaged closer to $1.50 per subscriber.

To get my list building tactics by e-mail, simply enter your e-mail address below:

Today I want to explain how I build my list so fast.

About eight weeks ago I had no mailing list. I had zero subscribers. I made it my 100% focus to build that mailing list as fast as possible. In a period of about seven weeks, I went from not even having an Aweber account to having a mailing list with over 1,000 subscribers. The cool thing is that I know for a fact, that I will double my list in less than one more month. My list grows at a rate of about 50 new subscribers per day. So it really should only take about 20 more days to completely double my list.

Why has building my list been my number one goal over the last several months, you might ask… You may also be wondering why I made the statement that building a list is the fastest way to grow an internet marketing business. Well, to answer both of those questions, internet marketers much wiser than myself have said over and over again that one subscriber on your list is worth one dollar per month. So if I am growing my list at a rate of 50 subscribers per day, I am growing my business by about $50 per month! If you do the math, I should have about a $3,000 per month business in no less than 40 days time at the rate that I am going.

So now that you know the importance of growing your mailing list. Let me share with you the top 3 techniques that I have used to grow my mailing list.

JV Giveaways - This was the absolute first thing that I started doing after I had a free product created. You can enter your free product in to these JV Giveaway events and every single person that has submitted a product, promotes the JV giveaway. This causes a massive flood of traffic to the JV giveaway and some of that traffic finds, and opts-in for, your product. JV Giveaways usually have an option to upgrade for a price. I tend to like to upgrade as well. Upgrading gets your product in front of a lot more people. I have done about 50% of my JV giveaways without upgrading and about 50% with upgrading. When I upgrade, I usually get about four times as many subscribers from the event than if I didn’t upgrade. JV Giveaways are the best way to start building your list before you really have many people on your list to leverage. For the sake of?convenience, I have started to compile a list of current JV giveaway events. I will make sure to keep this list updated as new ones come up and old ones shut down. You can find JV Giveaway Events Here. Bookmark that page because you are going to want to access these JV giveaways as soon as they come up.

ListJoe – ListJoe is a cool little site that I found that I don’t think is very well known yet. Basically, when you sign up for ListJoe (100% Free), you will be able to send out a mailing to 2,000 people immediately. That’s right, you will mail 2,000 people within 10 minutes of signing up. From that point on, you will begin receiving e-mails from other ListJoe members. For each e-mail you open, you will receive a certain amount of points. One point is equal to one person mailed to on your next mailing. You will receive a lot of e-mails per day but you can build up your points and send out to a list of about 3,000 per week. You might think that this doesn’t sound too effective because you are just sending to other ListJoe members. However, I have only sent 2 mailings so far and it has accounted for over 150 new subscribers. I would definitely not downplay the ability of this service. If you are interested in playing around with ListJoe check it out here.

Adswaps – Adswaps are probably the absolute fastest way to build your list up. However, adswaps are difficult unless you already have a little bit of a list built up. Basically, you are telling someone that you will promote their opt-in page to your list if they promote your opt-in page to their list. Most people will only do adswaps with people who have similar list sizes to their own. Adswaps are basically a way to leverage the list that you currently have. I have, however, asked people with lists much larger than mine to do an adswap and been surprised that they had accepted. So I would say that even though your list may be smaller than someone else’s, it never hurts to ask. You might be surprised at some people’s generosity.

Because I have made list building my complete focus over the last several weeks, I have decided to dive in deeper and explain some of the advanced techniques that I have also learned that I have used to boost my list exponentially. I want to teach people how I manage to grab about 50 new subscribers per day. To do this, I have created a two-week course that dives in to list building. The course is 100% free and each lesson is delivered to your e-mail. There is no site to log in to and you can save all of the information to your hard drive as you go. The course digs in to everything from the initial setup of a mailing list all the way in to super advanced techniques that can potentially build your list by hundreds of subscribers overnight. I also cover several resources to find things like adswaps and JV partners. You really don’t want to miss out on this free opportunity to explode your list over the next 2 weeks. To get started with the first lesson today, simply enter your e-mail address in the form below. Otherwise, please leave a comment with your list building tips or your thoughts on my list building tips.