Now that you have selected your private label rights product, and hopefully made it your own unique product by altering it, adding affiliate links and giving it a new title, let’s talk about one of the most important aspects of any Internet business: Where you will host your list.

The choice of where you’re going to host your list is one of the most important choices that you need to make at the very beginning of setting up your business.  The reason why it is so important to make the right choice right at the beginning is because once you start building your list in a certain place it can be very difficult to move it someplace else.

Now, there are some free options for hosting your list but I highly recommend that you stay away from those.  The free options may seem fine to you at first glance, but once you realize that every message you send to your list gets put in their spam folder, you start to understand that you’re only shooting yourself in the foot by taking the time to build a list and then storing it using one of the free hosts.

There is absolutely no value in a list that never sees your messages.

Most of us get caught at the very beginning NOT building our list using the proper host.  I made that mistake myself.  I though, why the heck do I need to pay someone else to host my list when I can just store it on my own computer?  The result is that you end up wasting a lot of time and money building a list that is useless to you.

Don’t make the same mistake that I did!

When I first started building my own list I had my prospects’ name and e-mail address sent to my email address and I just stored them in my own Excel spreadsheet.  Whenever I wanted to send a message to them I would simply copy everyone’s e-mail address into the bcc field of my Yahoo account and send out the message.  This can work while you have a list of under a hundred people but once you start having any size list at all, you very quickly reach the daily sending limits for any e-mail provider (like Yahoo or Gmail).

Before you decide to go with that option as a temporary measure just to try things out, here is a word of caution:   When you are ready to move your list over to a real host, you are going to have to ask your list members to opt in to that new list.  Chances are that you will end up with a very small opt in rates and you will lose the majority of the people that you worked so hard to get in the first place.

When I realized that holding the list on my hard drive was not going to work, my next plan of attack was to start hosting my list in my own database on my server.  This worked a little bit better because I could now send e-mail out as much as I needed to.  But after about a month I found that pretty much any e-mail I sent was landing in people’s spam folders.  My server got black-listed by the ISPs because a few people forgot that they had opted into my list and so they made spam complaints against me.

Here’s a sad fact…

Whether you intentionally send out spam message or not you’re going to be accused of being a spammer by at least some people.  People will forget that they opted into your list and they won’t recognize your name and so they will assume that your message is spam.

After just a couple of people have made this complaint your IP address will get blacklisted by the ISPs and then your messages will land in most people’s spam folders.

What good is sending a message if no one ever sees it?

So to make a long story short please don’t bother going through all of the steps that I had to go through.  When you’re getting started with your Internet business understand that there are two essential monthly expenditures that you’re going to have to make.  One of those is for your list host (the other is your hosting account).  Neither expense is very much money.  Do yourself a favor and don’t go for the free options on those.

When you choose a reputable host you will be assured that your e-mails actually get through to your customers.  A reputable host has built relationships with the ISPs to make sure that YOUR messages will actually get delivered.  THAT is the real value that a good list host provides - the confidence of knowing that your messages will get delivered to your customers.

The list host that I use and that I have found to be very reliable for different size lists and in different markets is called Aweber.  Actually, Aweber is probably what most Internet marketers would recommend that you use.

Here’s where you can find Aweber

For the rest of this post I’m going to give you instructions for how to set up a list using the Aweber system.  If you would like to use a different host you are of course welcome to do so but you will need to figure out how to get things set up on your own.  Since I don’t use their systems myself, I can’t help you out with them.

Okay let’s get started.  Sign up for your Aweber account and then login to your account.

Step 1: Create your List

Right after you log in, you will see a screen that looks something like this.

Click “add new” over in the upper left corner.  Then click “Create List.”  Scroll down on this page until you see this part of the screen.

Your “list name” right now is something like “default…” with a number after it.  Change the list name to something that makes sense for a list name that goes with your product.   For example, if you are giving away an ebook about Traffic Techniques, you might call your list “traffictechs.” Also add a short description.  Make sure that the description fits with what your product is all about.  Click the save button.

In the company branding section you can enter information if you would like to but it is not necessary.  For now we will skip this.

In the “reply address” area enter an e-mail address and your name.  If you don’t want to use your name you can enter the name of your product instead.  However when you are building a list part of what you are doing is developing a relationship with your customers so it is probably to your advantage to use your real name here.  You want them to know who you are and what YOU are all about.  In the long run, your reputation is what is important here.  You want them to feel like they know and respect you.  However you don’t have to use the same e-mail address that you use for personal stuff.  I would recommend that you set up a special e-mail account for your list messages at Gmail.

Check the box that says from/reply.  If you would like Aweber to notify you whenever someone subscribes to your list check “notifications” as well.  Click the save button.

Okay your list is set up.  Now let’s move on to…

Step 2: Create the code to use on your opt in page

Scroll back up to the top of the page and click on “Web Forms” (it is a subset of the tab list settings).  This takes you to a page that looks like this:

As you see there is a warning asking you to customize your verification message.  For now we are just going to use the standard Aweber message, so you can disregard that warning.  Since we are doing this for an Internet marketing list building event, the people joining your list are probably familiar with Aweber already and will be used to the standard message.

So go ahead and click the green button that says create web form.  On the page you are taken to scroll down to where it says “form details,” which looks like this:

All you have to do on this page is enter a description of your form (this can be anything, it is just for your own records) and then click Next.  We are going to leave everything else with the default Aweber settings because the purpose of my blog series here is to get you set up and running as quickly and easily as we can.  The default settings are fine so we’ll just use them.

The next screen that you come to looks like this:

Click the little green plus sign next to the name field.  This will add the name field to your form.  By default it shows up underneath the e-mail field so you might want to drag the e-mail field underneath the name field.  Personally when I see a web form I automatically think I should enter my name and then my e-mail address.  But it’s really up to you how you want to do this.

Scroll down and click save.  On the next page that you come to part way down the page there is a link for “get HTML.”  Go ahead and click that.  This pulls up the window that looks like this:

Put your cursor in the top window, select everything and copy it.

Open up notepad by going to your start menu>>click on all programs>>click on accessories>>and click on notepad.

Paste the code into this text file.  Click save and save it as optincode.txt.  You can just save it on your desktop for now.  We will come back to this after we create your opt in page.

OK, I know that today’s lesson may not have been a lot of fun for some of you if you don’t like technical kind of stuff.  But, you now have a list set up at a reputable list host, which puts you ahead of most Internet marketers out there.  I’m going to end today’s lesson here because getting this set up correctly is very important and I want to give you a chance to get it done.

Ask me questions in the comments if you need to.  I’m happy to help as always.

Tomorrow we’ll get your optin page set up.  It’ll be A LOT easier to do than you think