Lesson #4 covers why it’s important to build an opt-in email list. Having your own responsive list is like being able to legally print money on demand so don’t be lazy and skip this step. If you want to be successful long term in this business, you need a list.

Today I’m going to cover why you need to build a list. I was initially planning to just jump right into how to build a list, but I figured I should explain why it’s so important first because otherwise you might not see the point of going through all the extra work.

Here’s the best way I can explain it – having a responsive list is like being able to legally print money. You need to make some quick cash, you send a promotion to your list. Want to buy a Lexus but don’t have the cash? Just send the bill to your list.

Do I have your attention yet?

When you have a list, whether that be past customers, people who’ve subscribed to your free newsletter, or people who’ve requested a free report from you, you have a captive audience that you can market to.

I know that most people prefer to just put up a salesletter on their website to sell a product. And then they go about driving traffic. Well, on a site a good salesletter will sell 1 or 2 people for every 100 visitors. The other 98 people go away and don’t make you any money.

If, on the other hand, you built your site to do nothing but get the visitors contact info, you could get 20 or 30 people out of every 100 to give you their information. Then they’re yours.

Still not convinced – consider this. It takes a person seeing your advertisement seven times before they buy. That means you can either try to attract the same person to your site seven times to get the sale, or collect their contact info once, and then you can market to them as much as you want. And if you’re using email, you can market to them as much as you want for free.

Whenever someone visits your website, you should be doing everything you can to get them to get their information. The more of it the better. Name and email is okay. Getting their mailing address, name and email is much better. So rather than salesletter, try to make getting the email address the focus of your sales pages.

When it comes to the actual setting up of your website, you have a lot of choices. You could write a book about it. In fact volumes of books have been written on this subject. So rather than giving my own version of what’s already been written, I’ll point you in the right direction and let you decide what works best for you.

Not when it comes to setting up a web page, it helps to learn a little bit of HTML. Even if you don’t on building the site yourself, it’s helpful to know a little in case you need to make a simple change and can’t get ahold of your designer right away. If you type in HTML tutorial into google you’ll get a lot of good options where you can learn html for free. One that I think is particularily good is davesite.com/webstation/html You’ll learn all you need to know there.

Alright, now that we’ve got learning a little HTML out of the way, it’s time to design your site. And you have a lot of different choices of software, templates and services. First, let’s cover the software. Now there are a lot of choices, and I wouldn’t call this an all inclusive list – just some of the better programs out there. As far as webpage editors, Dreamweaver and Frontpage are two of the most popular. A lot of designers say Dreamweaver is far superior to Frontpage, but I’ve used both, and for my purposes, they both work fine. I tend to use Frontpage just because that’s what I learned with. Another piece of software you make want to consider is Xsitepro – it’s designed specifically for Internet marketers and has some extra features that Dreamweaver and Frontpage don’t. All of these programs have a bit of a learning curve, but if you plan on building the sites yourself, they’re worth learning. Pick one for now and stick with it instead of trying to learn them all.

There’s also some online software that your host may provide that will help you build a website. Honestly, I find that these programs tend to be a bit limiting, and most are flexible enough if you’re trying to build money making website. So if you run across one, you may just want to pass.

Now if you don’t want to go through all the work of designing everything from scratch, there’s a lot of options out there for you to buy website templates. Now, if you’ve never worked with a template before, try to stick to simpler designer, as the more complex ones can be very difficult for a beginner to work with. Also, avoid any design that includes Flash animation. Unless you have a flash editor, you won’t be able to customize it, and it just makes working with the template more difficult, and rarely makes your site sell any better anyway.

And if this all sounds like too much work, then there’s the easiest method. Hire a designer. And if you hire a college student or outsource the design rather than calling up your local design firm, this can usually be done pretty cost effectively.

So that covers your options for designing and setting up your website. You have a lot of choices, and you should be able to find one that fits your comfort level and budget.