We’ve all heard it countless times: “The money is in the list”.

Yet, according to all surveys, a very small amount of online marketers do have their own list. Among those few, a very small percentage have a list of more than 100 prospects.

This statistic in itself might not be of great significance for most of you, but it will start to make sense when you combine it to another well known (yet vastly ignored) fact: only 3 percent of online marketers do make a living with their business.

Statistics also show that 100% of successful online marketers have their own list of prospects.

From this series of facts, we can draw the following conclusions:

- having your own list is not an absolute guarantee for success (we’ll explain why later)

- not having your own list is the perfect receipe for failure.

That being said, how do you make that big step from blindly advertising your sales page to potential buyers to actually building a relationship with people that will ultimately trust you and buy whatever it is you want to sell them (the latest being the natural purpose of list building)?

I don’t want to sound overly serious, but it is a life decision in a way. You may not even try to build a list, but in this case, unless you’re using very specific techniques (or are selling to a very specific market) and really know what you are doing, you’re basically doomed.

If you are serious about making money online, the odds of this happening without a list are VERY low. This is why my first piece of advice would be to ask yourself how determined you are about your business, because you will NOT succeed without working for it. Even ultra famous marketers like Frank Kern who brand themselves as laid back people say this in their free videos now!

The next aspect of list building that you absolutely need to be aware of is that there is no point in building a list if you don’t know your stuff well enough to be able to give serious information and advice to your prospects. Having your own list involves making the decision to become knowledgeable and to pass on this knowledge (in a little while, I’ll explain why transmission is key to a successful business) to your list.

If you think about it for a second, this is common sense: only by knowing enough to pick or build a good business opportunity and advertise it successfully can you persuade people to join your opportunity or buy your product. If your business involves recruiting new members (network marketing, affiliate marketing), you will have to teach them how to do the same, because what they earn is what you earn, so you might as well know what you are doing. If you want to sell your own product or create your own business, you will never succeed if you don’t know how to provide good value to your customers and market your product efficiently.

As you probably figured out, it’s all about knowing what you’re doing. This sure doesn’t sound sexy, but you might as well be aware of it right away: there’s no such thing as making millions overnight. But if you play by the rules, you will inevitably succeed overtime. So it all boils down to this: how much time and effort are you willing to spend on your business?

Another key element to building a list is using the right tools. Simply put, in order to build a list of potential buyers, you will need to have an autoresponder, and you will need to learn how to create and use good squeeze pages. An autoresponder is a system that automatically delivers prewritten emails to people opting in to a specific list through a squeeze page. A squeeze page in an advertising page containing a form allowing potential customers to provide personal information (genereally their name and email) in exchange for information on a topic or a product. As a seller, you are providing this information and writing the letters containing it.

Any successful online marketer will confirm this to you: the use of autoresponders and squeeze pages is the basic knowledge any online marketer should possess.

In order to really have all the elements to make a choice as to how you want to make money online, you need to know a couple other things:

- while building your own business requires more skills and work, it’s not as hard as it seems, and it is a more powerful way to make money since it allows you to use other marketers’ lists through joint venture partnerships. You don’t even need to create your own product to build your own business, so consider this option seriously. People making money the fastest typically joint venture with marketers already having big lists of customers, which is a fantastically powerful way to build a big list fot themselves and make money in the process.

- you may choose to never sell your own product nor become a network marketer by opting for affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliatemarketers earn commissions for selling other people’s products, and there are countless good products to sell out there. This option has some great advantages: it allows you to focus on advertising, which is the most vital skill for any business, and it is the most flexible activity: you will never be stuck with a product, and you can even get other people to promote a product for you. Should you choose to create your own product later, affiliate marketing will teach you how to advertise it efficiently.

- if you want to be a network marketer, you absolutely need to know how to sell, advertise, promote, AND you need to pass this knowledge along to your referrals, because the more money they make, the more you earn. So for any of the previous options, you can’t afford to not to acquire some solid knowledge.

List building is not overrated. It is a vital task to constantly focus on. It is also a long term strategy (unless you joint venture with other people already having a big list). Take the time to think about how you can incorporate this aspect of online marketing in your daily routine. This will multiply your chances of success exponentially.