List-Building: Start With Your Passion; The List
Will Follow

Published on this site: November 1st, 2006 - See more articles from this month

People new to Internet Marketing often ask me, "What's the best way to start in Internet marketing?"

I'm going to tell you a story about myself as a case study.

When I started, I had no HTML experience, and I couldn't put up a decent web page. I sucked at writing copy and I didn't know how to edit audio. I didn't know what an autoresponder series was, I didn't know how to make a redirect, and I didn't know how to approach people properly for a joint venture. I had no idea that building a list was where any newbie should start. Ithink you're beginning to get the point, right? I didn't know anything.

The way that I got focused was to decide what I wanted to accomplish, and I knew that I would get distracted, if it wasn't a big deal.

So I came up with a goal that was massive to get me excited every day, when I woke up in the morning. I wanted to come up with a goal that would be inspiring to potential joint venture partners, too.

The first goal I had in mind was being incredibly successful marketing my attention deficit, self-improvement training online, and I needed to learn how to do that. So, the whole time I was learning marketing, the whole ADD idea was going on in the background for me. I wanted to be the Tony Robbins of attention deficit disorder, but I needed to figure out how to do that.

You can make a link between what you're doing with marketing, with your income, or your life and marketing, too. The question is "how" and that's where you have to apply some creativity. The first part is to really identify with what it is you're trying to go for and why it is you're doing what you're doing. It's the big picture here. You need to learn as much as you can about Internet marketing, so that you can achieve what you want to achieve, and it needs to start with building a list.

I figured that out intuitively. I thought, How am I going to learn about Internet marketing? Make a lot of contacts with self-improvement experts like Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and all those guys in the process? "Yes," I said, "I'm going to learn about list building because list building seems to me to be at least one of the core skills that a lot of successful Internet marketers seem to have mastered." Sure enough, list-building happens to be one of those core skills. In fact, list-building is the core skill.

What I did next was I said, "I'm going to start List Crusade and the goal is to build a list of a million subscribers in six months or less. I'm going to do that and I'm going to teach all of my subscribers how I do it, as I do it. That's my goal and I'm going to promote the heck out of all of my joint venture partners that helped me get this thing launched by emailing their own lists."

Here's what this has to do with mindset: I came up with a goal that was inspiring to me and it was a huge goal. And my list is still growing every day because of what I learned. As a result I've become a super-affiliate for most of the people that I promote.

What I'm saying to you is: First, have a personal goal, and then, have a more specific goal, as it relates to Internet marketing, such as building a list (which is where any online marketer needs to begin). Then, go after something huge that gets you excited every day and gets other people excited when you talk to them about it. Then, your chances of success are exponentially increased.

Tellman Knudson, CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. relays some of his most effective methods of building a list in his new online course http://MyFirstList.com