The other day a friend emailed me asking how to earn money online. It's a pretty broad question and I had to stop myself from giving a broad reply. Cos I remembered how much I hate those kinda answers! Like; "how long is a piece of string".
Starting out online can be tough and there are literally thousands of methods of making money online. I would argue that list building is the best and a lot of the top earners online would agree!
List building is putting together a list of email addresses to send a newsletter to. This list of email addresses should be targeted and specific to the niche you are in. A lot of people think that the bigger the email list the better as it will mean more sales. This is not necessarily true. A list of people who are not interested in the products you are selling is as about as useful as a chocolate teacup! Think about it if you've got a shop selling wedding dresses then do you think a bunch of middle age men are going to give you much business? If the bigger the mailing list meant the more money you make, then spammers would be the richest guys on the net!
How do you build a targeted list? The answer is simple, stick to a specific niche or interest area and allow people to have the choice to give their email address or opt in if they are also interested in this niche. You can capture these email addresses by use of an opt in box, which is simply an area on a website or blog where people submit their email address and also usually their name if you don't know how to set one up ask a webdesigner to do it for you.