Many of the small business owners and coaches I come across have fantastic ideas for how to sell more than their 1:1 time. They get all excited, create their product (an eBook or online coaching programme for example), put it on their website, wake up the next morning keen to see all those Paypal notifications flooding into their inbox and…nothing. No one’s buying.

And if this is you, what you might have neglected to realise is that without a highly responsive mailing list that can’t wait to buy your product, you’ve got a product that probably won’t sell, primarily because building your mailing list hasn’t had the same priority as building your product.

Now is a fantastic time to be building your new product, ready to launch after the summer (winter if you’re on this side of the world!), but if you’re scheduling in time in your diary for each stage of your product development, make sure you schedule in an equal amount of time to focus purely on bringing people to your opt-in box and collecting their email addresses.

This means that when you launch your new product, you’ll already have a group of people that have got to know, trust and like you, and so are far more likely to buy from you. You’ve also got a group of people that you can go to to find out what else they’d like to buy from you, meaning your next product development will be even more successful.

My personal favourite ways to do this are teleclasses, blogging, social networking sites and article marketing and here’s where I’d like you to share: What have you found to be the most sucessful ways to grow your mailing list, or is this something you’ve yet to do?

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