List Building for Fun and Profit
Everyone knows they need a customer list, but most businesses do a horrible job of building them. For years, we always built features into websites urging them to signup, working to integrate forum sign-ups with the rest of the website. These days, Feed Burner, iContact, and Constant Contact make it easy to build a mailing list. Feed Burner let’s you handle subscriptions from your RSS feed and automatically generate the contacts/feeds for your users while you build up a mailing list. iContact and Constant Contact give you a web widget for your site, let you write your auto responder, and use their service as a mailing service for a small fee (nominal for small sites).
It’s fascinating to realize how much less technical skill is needed for someone interested in Internet Marketing in 2009 as was required even 3 or 4 years ago. What makes this exciting is that Internet Marketing is moving from a technical field into a marketing field focused on CRM. Your Direct Mail specialists didn’t have to be experts on printing, just how to source it, your brand marketers could build a branding campaign on television without knowing how to build a video camera.
