List Building For Your Online Business? Start Blogging.

Once you've decided which market to focus on for your online marketing business, you will probably start getting excited about creating your first product. Before you actually get going on this, though, it's very important to start your list building, and here's why.

If you start blogging now as a means of list building, your list will be growing and developing during the time you are subsequently creating your product. Then, when the product is ready, you can hit the ground running by having a list ready to promote it to. Otherwise, you will have your lovely, shiny new product all dressed up with nowhere to go! That would be very frustrating and disheartening.

Why a blog?

Without exception, every online marketing professional I know is a blogger and some have many blogs in different markets. Why, because they know the value and effectiveness of this means of building your list.

You can, of course, buy or rent lists to get you started, but a drawback to this is that you don't know the relevance and how up to date the list is. The main disadvantage, however, is that people on these lists don't know you. They are highly unlikely to buy a product from you when they have never heard of you before.

When you have a blog, people visit your site, they get to know you and what you are about. They can interact by posting comments and you can build relationships. When they know you and trust you, they are much more likely to buy a product when you offer one.

Equally important if you're running an online marketing business is the fact that search engines treat blogs very favourably, often more so than static sites. If you frequently and regularly update your blog, the search engines will pick this up, get used to this and give your pages higher and faster rankings.

To quickly get set up and blogging, you can use Blogger. This is a free facility from Google and very easy to set up. You do need to be aware, though, that since the site is owned by Google, it is controlled by them. They have been known to shut down sites without warning - in summer 2010 over 15,000 Blogger sites were shut down.

I set my blog up with Wordpress and use a domain name which I own. This way, I control it and it cannot be shut down by anyone else with the consequent loss of content. This is the system I recommend.

Imagine now that you are getting your online marketing business up and running and you have been blogging frequently and regularly (at least twice a week is generally considered to be a good guide). So, when someone searches for your topic, then your site will come upin the search results.

Arriving at your site they will find lots of great information and helpful posts on different aspects of your market

If you are reading this and your internet marketing doesn't yet include blogging, you may at this point start thinking along the lines of 'But I'm not a writer. How do I know what to write about? Who will want to read what I have to say?'etc.

Well, remember that for your online business you have chosen an area in which you are already an expert and therefore know more than most of your potential readers. Or you've chosen an area in which you have a strong interest, in which case you will have some knowledge and will be keen to find out more.

In either case, you probably already know a lot more than you realize and almost certainly more than your audience. Imagine who your target market is, who a typical reader might be and what they might find interesting and helpful.

For example, if your online business concerns beekeeping, your head might be buzzing with ideas such as what to look for in a well-made hive or tips on how and when to feed your bees, things that you know will be of interest to an existing or potential beekeeper.

If however, that is not case, and you just don't know where to start, one way to start getting topics is to brainstorm a list of 'twenty things you need to know about beekeeping'. Then when you sit down to write, instead of agonizing over all the possible things you might write about, look at your list, choose the one that appeals to you the most and start there.

One important point to note is to be yourself and write naturally, rather than think you must write in a certain 'internet marketing' way or try to copy a style that others use. You will develop your own style which reflects your personality.

Not everybody will appreciate it, but remember that you have a potential audience of billions of readers on the internet and there will be plenty of people out there who will find you and your site interesting and useful.

They will become followers of yours and value what you are offering because they relate to your style and approach to your subject. So once you move through your initial uncertainty about what and how to write your blogs, you may actually find yourself enjoying this aspect of your internet marketing business.

The most important thing is to just get blogging.