You might wonder why this idea of building a list is so important in your ability to make money as an online marketer. Many wonder why they cannot just build websites, write some copy and collect their profits.

Why is it so vital that you consider building a list?

First, let's talk about what building a list means. Basically, this is where you have visitors to your site fill out a form with their name and email address.

Using this information, you stay in touch with your list (whether they have bought from you yet or not) via email. You will send good, quality information as well as the occasional sales letter to this list.

With any niche that you choose, you will need to make the decision as to whether building a list is even a viable option. However, if you think about it, there is usually some room for up-selling in just about any niche.

For example, if you have a website related to infertility and how to overcome it, you might wonder what else you could offer that group of people. If they use your program and are successful at getting pregnant, you could offer them all kinds of baby related items during their pregnancy. It is important to think outside of the box!

As marketers build their lists, they often see the huge potential they have in that niche. Taking the example above, perhaps you decide to write your own ebook that will complement the one you have been selling.

For example, if you have been selling an ebook  titled "How to Overcome Infertility Naturally", you might decide to write one called "Yoga Moves for Infertility".
This way, you can still sell the original book, but now you can also offer your list this accompanying book.

To see the potential, let's assume your list has only 500 people right now. Your ebook is priced at $19.95, and you send an email out to your list (which takes all of about 2 minutes). If 150 people on your list purchase your ebook, you just made a quick $2992.50 for one email! That is the power of list building.

Of course, if you had to hire out the writing of the book, your profits would be a bit reduced. However, what if your email pulled a better return? You could make even more than that!

About the Author:
Cheap Resale Rights Provide List Building eBooks With Resell Rights and Private Label Rights.

1. Get more customers and clients.
2. Get your customers/clients to buy more frequently.
3. Get your customers/clients to spend more money per transaction.
4. Keep your customers longer.

While there are only four primary strategies for growing a business, there are literally dozens of different techniques you can use to implement these four strategies.

Strategies are important because they give us something concrete. They endure while techniques may come and go.

But the techniques are equally important. Strategies tell us WHAT to do; techniques tell us HOW to do it.

With that in mind, I’ve provided a list of 31 techniques for growing a business, all categorized by one of the four strategies.

This way, you can skip to the strategy you want to implement in your business, and focus only on those techniques.

Get more customers and clients.

When we talk about growing a business, this is by far the most common approach: get more customers and clients.

And while this is certainly an important step (you MUST start here if you have no customers or clients yet), it is also the most expensive way to grow a business. And it takes the most effort, too.

Here are 9 ways to get more customers and clients:

• Drive more traffic to your web site.

• Improve the effectiveness of your ads and sales letters.

• Find new/better places to advertise (newspaper, TV, Adwords, ezine ads, social media, etc).

• Create stronger offers that appeal to more people in your target market.

• Enlist the help of affiliates to reach more people.

• Ask for referrals.

• Down-sell prospects who reject your initial offer.

• Craft irresistible guarantees so your customers have little or no risk when they buy.

• Host a free teleseminar where you can demonstrate your expertise and ask for the sale.

Get your customers/clients to buy more frequently.

Most entrepreneurs and business owners focus on getting the first sale, and then neglect to ever get a second.

This is unfortunate because you make much more profit on sales two, three, four, and so forth.

Here are 6 ways to get your customers and clients to buy from you more frequently:

• Create a customer mailing list; send them customers-only offers on a weekly or monthly basis.

• Send out promotional emails to your house list on a more frequent basis.

• Run time-limited or quantity-limited promotions and use scarcity to get customers to act now instead of later.

• Design a product funnel that automatically moves your clients from one purchase to the next.

• Start a monthly continuity program that automatically bills customers every month. (Print newsletter, membership site, etc.)

• Use autoresponder email sequences to automatically introduce your prospects to all of your products.

Get your customers/clients to spend more money per transaction.

This is probably the simplest and easiest way to grow a business. But for some reason, many entrepreneurs avoid this strategy because they fear how their customers will react. They fear their customers don’t have more money to spend.

Here’s a suggestion: Get over your fear.

By implementing these techniques, you can easily grow your business 5% or more within the next few months.

A word of caution though… raising prices is not something you do willy-nilly. It helps to have a good reason for raising prices; it also helps to add more value to a product/service.

Here are 7 ways to get your customers and clients to spend more money per transaction:

• Increase your fees and prices.

• Add more value to your products and services.

• After a person buys one product, up-sell or cross-sell them another related product.

• Offer payment plans on your expensive products and services.

• Charge for shipping separately.

• Use phone sales to help close large ticket purchases.

• Do a product launch.

Keep your customers longer.

This fourth strategy is often overlooked, but is highly effective.

If you can keep a customer or client for an extra month or two, or even an extra year, that could bring thousands of extra dollars to you — especially if you have a continuity program or a well-designed promotional calendar.

Here are 9 ways to encourage loyalty and keep your customers and clients for a longer period of time:

• Send out surprise bonus gifts with new purchases. (You may even consider giving away business promotional items that are branded with your business name so you stay in the top of your customers’ minds.)

• Create a follow-up sequence of communication designed to get customers and clients to actually use the product or service they’ve purchased.

• Call your best customers and clients and thank them for their business.

• Send out birthday cards and Christmas cards/gifts.

• Deliver more value than you’ve promised to deliver. Go above and beyond.

• Ask your customers and clients for testimonials. (After a customer has publicly declared their support of you, they will automatically be more loyal to you and your business.)

• Create incentives to encourage customer longevity.

• Publish the date when a person subscribes and/or becomes a customer. (Ex: Customer since 4/99.)

• Give your customers and clients public recognition in your newsletter, blog, or ezine.

So there you have it: 31 ways to grow business. Now the only thing left for you to do is pick one or two of them and actually implement them. Learning is good; doing is better.

Bonus tip: Don't struggle with finding new leads for your business. If you're ready to get more prospects now, you might want to grab these tips, techniques and methods to help grow your small business.

Here's how it works – you setup a blog and allow guest bloggers to send you articles. Once approved, the articles go live and show up on your blog. Each article is surrounded by paid advertising (e.g. Google AdSense)… and when your visitor clicks on these ads, you get paid cash (whether they buy something or not).

This is a brilliant business because the profit margins are off the charts. The only real cost is time… time to approve each article draft. And it's a never-ending parade of profit because every word doubles as search engine bait… delivering visitors to your site day by day — and never ends.

I run a blog directory. And I bet you've never heard of it (until now).

Unlike most blog directories, I don't accept author submissions. I don't need to (I explain why below). That's WAY too time consuming. Plus most article writers put out worthless junk.

Instead, I borrow content from a competing blog directory (ArticlesBase) and let them do all of the hard work for me… screening authors, approving well-written content and even formatting each article perfectly to insert into my blog directory.

This is 100% ethical and 100% legal. In fact, this article directory actually encourages anyone with a blog to steal their author's content and clone it to a blog. But here's the best part…. the entire process is automated. Every morning, a fresh batch of precisely-targeted content awaits my approval. I simply preview each post and click the [Publish] submit button in my WordPress Dashboard. That's it! It couldn't be easier.

So what's my secret to complete blogging automation?

My #1 secret is I installed this autoblogger WordPress plugin. I bought it when it was just $47, and it's the best under-$50 purchase I've ever made. Every day, it grabs precisely-related blog content from an article directory and post it to my blog.

By default, this autoblogger software posts each article live on my blog, but gives you the option to wait for your approval — I choose this option as I'm a bit of a control freak. Each articles takes me less than 45 seconds to scan.

Now there's no reason for you to struggle with making money online. If you're ready to put your internet marketing on autopilot now, you might want to grab these internet marketing secrets, tips, techniques and methods.

It seems there's a new spam connection between those who subscribe to email marketing offers and AWeber. Those who track this sort of stuff find that they're getting inundated with spam offers — and the common connection is AWeber.

The evidence seems to indicate a very simple explanation… someone accessed AWeber Communications' master database of email address, copied a percentage of these emails, and sent a bunch of pharmaceutical spam.

The spam is not coming from AWeber's emailing system, but rather from an army of email bots. But it's becoming obvious that the source of the email addresses is from AWeber Communications.

The good news is this particular spammer is going to get shut down very quickly. That's how it works. Spammers make their money quickly until they're caught (sometimes just minutes is all that's needed to make a fortune).

The bad news is this could seriously affect AWeber Communication's solid reputation.

I've known the founder (Tom Kulzer) for about 9 years. I've eaten dinner with him. If you know me, I rarely meet up with internet marketing gurus and vendors (I live way in the country and HATE traveling to the cities). And Tom is a VERY reputable guy…

… With that said, many are upset that AWeber is completely silent about this. And I get it. When my hosting company EV1 "claimed" to have a fire, my site was down for almost a week. It wasn't the outage that frustrated me, but rather the lack of communication.

Yes, this is new news. The first report of this showed up at this Warrior Forum post on Friday at just after 1 p.m. (NY time). And yes, it's the weekend. And yes, you have to be careful these days as lawyers run our lives.

With that said, AWeber Communication's blog and Facebook and Twitter accounts are totally silent about this. And this is a very bad strategy. Tom is notorious for replying to message board posts about his company in rapid fashion. But the silence on this particular issue is deafening. All Tom has to do is to recognize that there SEEMS to be an issue and he's personally looking into it. That's it. Just a one paragraph statement would fit the bill for now to let his concerned customers know he's on it.

Bad things happen to just about every business. And when bad things happen to your company, the worst thing to do is to be silent about it. It's beyond obvious that this spam is coming from AWeber… I hope Tom ignores his legal advice and gets ahead of this issue (instead of the other way around).

Update (12/21/2009 @ 7:12 p.m.): AWeber Communications updated their blog about this compromise here.

When Google first offered to share their advertising revenue with us in the Spring of 2003, it was pretty easy to bank some nice cash when our visitors clicked on those tiny classified ads displayed on our site…

… But these days, those Google AdSense revenue payments are getting smaller and thinner… even as our traffic grows.

Most say it's impossible to make money with AdSense. I felt the same way until a few months ago.  Today, I know there's money to be made with AdSense ads… if you know the secrets which I'm about to share with you.

This short AdSense tutorial is going to reveal my best-kept AdSense secrets to DRAMATICALLY boost your Google AdSense earnings. I stumbled upon these secrets by reverse engineering some of the websites that brag about making over $100,000.00 a year.

Tweak your title for higher AdSense revenues
Tweaking the title on your webapge is often the difference between banking a few pennies per click on your AdSense ads to generating over a dollar per click.

Compare these similar phrases:

- DIY home surveillance
- do it yourself home security

Both keyword phrases seem identical… and they are in meaning. But the difference is advertisers are willing to pay 169 times more for webpages themed for "do it yourself home security" (average of $8.47 per click) compared to "DIY home surveillance" (5 cents a click).

Hit the Google AdSense "sweet spot"
My never-ending testing reveals there's a direct correlation between the placement of the AdSense ads and the resulting click thru.

When ads are placed in “content zones” (rather than in “advertising zones), you typically generate more Google AdSense revenue.

Where is the content zone? It's located just above your content. Most visitors are blind to ads placed in the traditional spots… but those same ads placed above the beginning of our content usually get clicked more often.

Introducing the perfect AdSense templates
While there are currently 12 AdSense templates to display, I find the 336 x 280 (large rectangle) ads convert better than any other format.

And don't fret about optimizing for smart phones and mobile devices… my testing shows they hardly ever click on AdSense ads.

Make your AdSense ads blend in with your content

Let's face it, our website visitors HATE ads. Most use ad blockers and their 6th sense to avoid ads.

That's why you want to have your AdSense blocks blend in with the overall appearance of your webpage. Have the background of your ads match the background of your webpage. And don't add borders… this tips off your webpage visitors that you're displaying ads.

Triple your AdSense revenues with this one addition
AdSense for Search is MUCH more profitable than AdSense for Content. It's true.

In addition to placing standard AdSense template ads, I place a Google AdSense search box at the bottom of my content… and each click averages 317% higher eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) than displayed ads.

Dumb down your webpage
A new and very interesting study reveals the way a person arrives from a search engine like Google. It helps us understand how they click on your ads.

Specifically, people who search by clicking the button on Google’s homepage are 50% more likely to go on to click ads on your page than people who search by any other Google means, according to online ad network Chitika.

Confused? I understand. Let me explain… if Joe Blow searches Google for "hard drive recovery" and completes his search clicking the [Search] submit button, Joe Blow (on average) is 50% more likely to click on your AdSense ads than if he were to search using the [Enter] key.

Why the big difference? One can only guess that sophisticated web surfers are searching without the additional effort of clicking Google's [Search] submit button (while less-sophisticated searchers are clicking the search button — and clicking on our Google AdSense ads.

Bottom line:  It appears advertising click rates are inversely proportional to the “tech-savviness” of the people receiving the ads. So tweak your webpage theme to target beginners, not sophisticated users.

Eliminate unprofitable advertisers in a click
How'd you like to delete the worst advertisers (displayed on your webpages) in just a few fast and easy mouse clicks?

Google now offers a best-kept secret way to ban advertisers who don't write profitable ads. It's called "Category Filters" and you find it by logging into your AdSense account and going here:

AdSense Setup –> Ad Review Center

As you see, Google shows you "Filtered Categories" and up-to-date results.

Google AdSense allows us to eliminate categories if they're unprofitable. For example, 8.9% of my ads display "Get Rich Quick" advertisers… nothing wrong with that, but my "% Recent Earnings" is 0.0%. That means I'm displaying ads that are paying me nothing. So I checked it off, clicked the [Submit] button… and now those unprofitable ads are no longer displayed.

Final tip
I wrote a tutorial on how to find the most profitable words in your niche… click here to read my online manual on keyword discovery.