Why Lists and Traffic Go Hand in Hand

In the previous post about Money Funnels, I connected lists and traffic.

In the preceding audio post, I showed one way that they work together – you can leverage targeted traffic to continue to bring you new people that will sign up to your list.

Now I want to go one level deeper and show you the connection between lists and traffic in your business.

Whether you own a bakery, an affiliate marketing business, or a high traffic blog that depends solely on advertising for revenue, your contact list is the lifeblood of your ongoing success. The reason? It is through your opt-in contact list that you are freed from the shackles of constantly generating new business to survive.

The reason that so many marketers and successful business owners will tell you that your money is in your list is that once you have a list of contacts, especially past buyers, you can market to them again and again, as long as you have their permission. Since previous buyers are much more likely to buy again, and they are 90% cheaper to market to, you have a low cost audience that you can make sales from again and again.

This doesn’t mean you can get your list to a certain size and stop looking for new visitors. Indeed, the key to having a flourishing business is to have a balance between new business and old business.

You see, as your present contact list ages, the people on it will change. They will have different experiences, be at different places in their lives, financially or otherwise, and their needs change as well. For example, let’s say you make and sell boxes to businesses.

Over the next year, some of the new businesses will fail and close, which will affect your business. Other older businesses will expand or be acquired, leading to more business. Still others may change their packaging from boxes to bags. Then there are the new businesses being formed every day which need your services.

For all those reasons and more, your list has to continue to grow and evolve.

How does that happen? New traffic.

The job of your new traffic is to generate new leads that will hopefully sign up to be contacted repeatedly, make an initial purchase, then become repeat clients. New business should be where your growth comes from, not your foundation.

Why not?

Well, let’s say you had the same small business. But instead of creating a list of people who need to place new orders for boxes each month, every time you needed a new lead, you used 9 times the resources to create new business. Of course, that money has to come from somewhere. No matter what kind of profit you are turning, if you have to spend nine times as much on generating new leads, you’re spending a lot more money, more than you have to, indeed.

Not only that, you have less money for staff, to take home, for other expenses like computer equipment and office space. The fewer resources and higher the expenses, the slower your growth.

And since you don’t have the revenue stream of repeat business here, you’re also attempting to run your business with no idea of how much you’ll make the following month.

That’s not a business. That’s a really expensive hobby.

You need both lists and traffic to run a successful business, online or off.