Next up, this is a great starting block to help you on your way to building your list as one of your main resources. Am I building my list by doing this? Ask yourself this question every time you carry out a task. In fact, you should really be asking yourself if what you're doing is helping you build one of your five primary resources. If it's not, then you shouldn't be doing it because it's likely you're wasting your time and your money at the same time.
Always think in terms of your list. When you ask affiliates to promote your site, are you gathering the leads that the affiliates send to you for your own list? When you're discussing joint ventures, whether they're long term or short term, are you thinking about whether it'll benefit your list? Heck even, when you're mailing your own list, or contacting your affiliates, or placing an e-zine ad, or dealing with PPC search engines, are you increasing your leads, is your list getting bigger and being packed with quality subscribers? Lead generation trumps immediate profit every single time. Never lose sight of that.
Something I really want to show you now, and that's how the people with established personal lists of their own customers are pure gold. You'll want to give them whatever it takes to get access to them, even if it's just an ad or two sent by them on your behalf. Imagine how awesome would it be to be able to wake up in the morning with a new product, put it together and immediately have an instant and free promotion tool at your disposal where your product reaches not only top affiliates, but at the same time people who are willing to part with their cash.
If they're not willing to spend on your products, then quite frankly you shouldn't want them on your list. A way to ensure that the people on your list do indeed part with their cash for peoples products is to get your contacts from other private lists through simple joint ventures that allow you to take parts of their list away and add it yours, a simple ad swap for example, or joint venture that sends their list to your product/follow-up system, or even better; through an endorsement. Joint venturing at it's most basic, but at it’s most powerful.