Are you building your list?

If you’re going to attract more business you need a list of prospects and customers and a good list, too.

I’m not talking about the lists you buy in or the lists on your database.

I’m talking here about the lists you build – one address at a time.

Good lists take time to build because when you build these lists you are starting to build relationships. As you know building relationships takes time.

So how many lists do you need? There are three that will really help you to attract more business.

Your opt-in list

Your most important list is your e-mail opt-in list. This is the list of people who have agreed that you may contact them from time to time and they welcome your contact.

That doesn’t mean they have given you permission to send sales messages to them every day. In fact, you’d be wise to limit the number of sales messages you send out to this list.

The people who have opted into your list have given you permission to send them interesting and useful information that they will value. That’s what they want and that’s what they expect.

Your challenge is to make sure that your communications fulfil their expectations because you can lose people from your list as well as gaining them.

Your Twitter list

You also need to be on Twitter.

Attractmorebiz is on Twitter. Find us here.

I’m on Twitter. Find me here.

You need to follow people and organisations that you are interested in and which serve your marketplace. As a result some of them will follow you.

Again, the rule is to make your tweets interesting and that means avoiding too many sales pitches. It also means remembering that Twitter is at the heart of the social media revolution. Social is the word to remember. You’re creating links and relationships with this list. Be social. Communicate. Interact.

So get onto Twitter and get a Twitter list going.

RSS Feeds

This is a different sort of list, and it’s strictly not your list. You don’t directly know who is on this list but you can check how many of them there are.

When you blog – and, of course, you should be blogging as well as tweeting and building up your opt-in list – you should offer your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feed. This means that each time you post an item on your blog they will be notified about it.

The majority of people still subscribe to blogs via e-mail, which means your blog post ends up in their e-mail inbox, so remember to make sure that your RSS feed allows for this type of subscription.

All very basic stuff, but it will pay off in time and if you keep working on list building.

We have a growing opt in list and a monthly newsletter that is starting to be passed around. We know this, because people join the list as a result of receiving a newsletter from a colleague.

We are growing our lists of followers on both our Twitter accounts.

And, yes, statistics for our RSS feed show increasing numbers of subscribers.

These are the ways to build lists and to build business. Make sure you are building your lists in all these ways.

This is the eighth post in a long-running series about client attraction basics.

See also: What should your website do for you?