Watch how I build an internet empire from scratch!

I have read everywhere that having an email list is one of the most important aspects of marketing online. I have even seen the effects of it with my email list from Countdown To Win, however, I really saw what it can do the other day when I sent out an email telling people about the new re-design of this website.

Keep in mind that this website hardly gets any traffic at all at this point and that's not a problem because it hasn't even been around that long and I haven't even promoted it much at all. So I understand the low traffic levels and I am perfectly fine with them at this point. I only have about 13 posts at this point so it is no surprise whatsoever. After re-designing this site and moving it over to Joomla I was kind of excited about it and proud of it. I wanted to tell some people about it and have them check it out. Obviously not too many people are going to be excited about it, if any at this point. This site is a long term project and it will definitely take some time to build traction and do anything really big. But then I got to thinking...

I have an email list for Countdown To Win that has 107 people on it so why not cross promote and send some people over to this site. Almost every post I have written so far talks about Countdown To Win in some way and I have even set up an extension that automatically links to it every time I type the name in as you can see with the links in this post so far. That means anyone that comes across this site will definitely see and read about it at some point. So this got me thinking that I should also be going the other direction too. I should be sending people from Countdown To Win over here to check out what I'm doing and if they are interested they can come back and read whenever they want. Aweber gives you the option to include other lists in your broadcasts when creating a new email to send out. At the time of creating that new email I only had a couple people signed up to the email list for this site but I had 107 signed up for CTW. I wanted to try it out and see what kind of effect it would have if I included the 107 people into the email I was sending out about the new site re-design. Ill let you be the judge of the effect:

This got me really excited because it sent the biggest traffic spike this site has ever had just by including the 107 people in on the email; something that only took 5 seconds or less to do. Keep in mind that this is on a very small scale because of a number of factors: Both sites are very new, the email lists are very small, and both sites have small traffic levels. I don't really care how small of a scale this is though because I have a feeling that it will have the same effect if I had 100,000 people on the email list. This is a powerful tool to have in internet marketing and I am definitely not going to abuse it. It will be very seldom that I include people from other lists because I don't want them to complain and I don't want them to devalue the emails I send. I never want people to feel that they got junk when they get an email from me.

I don't know if every email service lets you include your other lists in email broadcasts but I do know that Aweber does because that is who I use. This is just one more tool to put in my bag as I claim my stake online and become an internet mogul! If you don't have an email list going then you are definitely missing out on what it has to offer and not letting your business truly realize its full potential.