This article is pretty much in response to a forum thread where a member was complaining that it would take a whole year to build a list that was 10,000 in size. You’d think that a year was a long time. In the world of Internet marketing, it’s not. It’s a drop in the bucket. Trust me, if you can build a list of 10,000 prospects in a year’s time, you’re doing good.

Let’s look at the math. If you take 10,000 and divide it by 365 days in a year, that’s a little over 27 opt ins a day. That’s nothing. I don’t even focus that much on list building like some people do and I get between 10 and 20 opt ins a day. So 27, for somebody who really works at it, is nothing. It’s a drop in the bucket. Do that consistently every single day for a year and there is your 10,000 prospects. But guess what? Size doesn’t matter. Not in list building.

See, this is where people get so hung up and I don’t know what I have to say to make them understand that the size of your list is meaningless if it’s NOT properly targeted. There are ways of building a list so fast that they’d make your head spin. But most of those ways are totally worthless because the list that you end up with probably won’t be very responsive at all.

Somebody pointed out at the forum that Frank Kern had a million dollar day selling a $1,997 product. That’s only 500 sales. Do you really think you need a list of 10,000 people to make 500 sales IF that list is so finely targeted that those people are just DYING to get a hold of your next product? Trust me, you don’t need anywhere near a 10,000 member list to make 500 sales.

But some people just don’t get it. It’s not the size but the quality. And quality only comes from making sure that you’re targeting people who are most likely to be interested in YOUR offer. If you’re selling a book on article marketing, it makes no sense to build a list of people who hang out at pay per click chat rooms or wherever. Somebody doing PPC is never going to want to waste time writing articles when PPC is so much faster. It won’t matter what you’re giving away. You won’t make any sales of your book.

So forget about list size. Forget about how long it takes to build a monster list. Focus on targeting people who are truly interested in what YOU have to sell and that year is going to go so fast you won’t know where the time went.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.