Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

The most reliable and effective way to make money is to build a list. It can be email addresses, phone numbers, or mailing addresses — but the key with all of these is to not only collect the information, but also have a valid business relationship with people you have this information about.

Lacking a valid business relationship, you will find yourself guilty of spam. Email spam, telephone spam, direct-mail spam, it’s all spam if you don’t have their permission (however implicit that may be) to contact them.

To form the valid relationship, one great way is to give away something for free. Info products are good because they don’t cost anything to reproduce, and can help you target your audience. People who buy an ebook on marketing are quite possibly marketers, who can help you sell your products. People who download a computer game may also be interested in computer hardware.

Another important aspect of this is that with a free product, you can make it viral. People who got it and enjoyed it can be encouraged to spread the word. If over 50% tell 2 or more people, you can have a growing phenomenon.

Once you have people on your list, you can contact them with relavent offers. Keeping them interested and positively inclined towards you can be done by providing helpful content on a regular basis. You can also hit them up more than once to buy a product, or to spread the word about your freebies.

Leads are an important part of building your business. People aren’t always able, or in the mood, to buy the first time they see your product. However over time, with repeated exposure to your information, they will be much more likely to buy something (or tell someone who will). On average it takes seven exposures to an ad before a person decides to buy something.

In summary, collect leads if you want to make money. I haven’t been doing this yet at 10k Luke, but I will certainly in the future. I do have email addresses from commentors, but this isn’t quite the same as them volunteering to recieve information from me. My plan is to publish a software application (that’s what I have been working on today) and give you the chance to download it’s exe file in exchange for your email address.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.