List Building - What You Can Learn From Fishing

Starting an online business, building a list, or introducing a new product to the market is a lot like fishing.

When you go fishing, your goal is to catch fish, right? Just like list-building, where your goal is to catch subscribers. And the hooks and bait? Those are your landing pages, opt-in forms and free thank you gifts.

When you go fishing, you don’t just drop an empty hook into the water and hope it catches on a fin or something as a fish swims past. No! You put some bait on the hook, or use different types of lures to attract fish.

And you don’t put just one hook into the water and call it good. You put many fishing lines in the lake, each offering something a bit different. You might use hooks with worms, some with leeches, and some with minnows. You might also try smelt and powerbait on other hooks.

You will let some of your lines sit quietly in the water. And while those will entice one type of fish, you won’t stop there. You’ll put flashy lures on other lines and troll the lake or cast them over and over into the water, hoping to get a different fish’s attention.

The result? You will probably catch a whole lot more fish with multiple lines and different types of bait than you would have if you had used just one line at a time, or multiple lines with the same type of bait.

The same is true for list-building.

Fishing Strategies Work for List-Building, Too!

You want to have multiple landing pages out there in the waters of the internet, each offering a different bait or ethical bribe to get people to bite on your offer — to encourage them to subscribe to your list, or buy your product.

You will definitely want to do a bit of research first to see what types of information or products are of interest, just like fishermen (and women) check to see what the fish are biting on this season. And then you’ll test your own offerings. No fish biting? Then you’ll change your location, your tactics or your lure.

Then you write your landing pages and offer a relevant and valuable free gift (just like you would select a bait or lure and attach it to your line). And you make your landing pages live on the internet (throw them into the water) for people to find.

As you think about list-building this way, the reasons for using multiple, targeted landing pages becomes so very obvious.

When you use many different landing pages, each with a different focus or slant on the material, you have a much better chance that more people will be able to find you. After all, people are out there searching for products and services just like yours, and they are using a wide variety of search terms to describe what they want to find.

Unlike fishing, there are no restrictions to the number of lines you can have in the water at any time, what bait you can use, or the number of fish you can catch each day.

You are limited only by the speed of your research, the accuracy of your targeted offers, and how fast you can create your landing pages and get them live on the internet.

To learn immediately implementable secrets you can use to create landing pages, drive traffic and power your online business, claim your copy of our Special Audio Report and Action Guide at: http://www.BuildaProfitableBusinessOnline.com and start using these simple systems that automate your business and maximize your profits.

Copyright 2009 - Business Building Shortcuts, LLC. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: We invite you to reprint this article as long as you do not edit the article in any way, leave all of the links active, give author name credit and follow all of the EzineArticles terms of service for Publishers.