The various experts will chime in with tried but true advice like “the money is in the list” and start with their advice in the middle of the process with list building. The problem that they often skip is getting the eager entrepreneur to answer the question: “Why would I want to be on your list in the first place?”

There are many enticements to get you to join an email list. There’s some promise of good, relevant content from blogs, or daily deals from a couponing site, or updated product and support information from whatever ecommerce site sold you your last video camera or laptop.

All of those are showing some sort of expertise. When you show up to a site, there’s got to be some depth to it to get your prospects to sign up for a list. The information marketers do this by giving “previews” of their teaching content with a couple of articles or a video and then asking for your email address “to get full access”. There’s the promise of more (and better) content behind the opt-in wall, but to get that they have to provide content that doesn’t totally suck on the front end.

For the ecommerce store, the list building may just be based on the “I like your products, let me sign up and hope I get a discount or coupon” impulse, but even then the ecommerce site has shown some depth in the number or quality of products that it is offering to get the prospects to opt-in.

Here's a good chart for the kind of content you can create.

If you’re just starting out, how do you develop that expertise? Here are a few tips:

1. Act like a college student writing a paper.

By this I don’t mean sleep till noon and hack 5 pages together to turn in at 3pm. What I mean here is do your own research and analysis on the topic of your new site and use that to create content. Take a look at the established authors in the field, academic journals, articles in current news magazines, and then write up a summary piece. How does the point of view of the Times differ from Newsweek on the topics? What do the academic journals say about it? What conclusion do you come to when you synthesize those points?

Grab the top 5 or 10 questions or broad topics in your niche and write out some really good content following the above approach. That will give you some really good baseline content.

2. Read, and comment.

Keep on reading. Find the blogs in the field and articles that touch on or relate to it. For every one, write up your own blog post giving your own quick summary (even 100 words will do), include a quote from the piece if appropriate, and link back to the original article.

For more link juice, go to that blog and add a comment to the article. Make your blog comment a 1 sentence summary of your blog post and link to your blog post (with something like “I’ve expanded on this idea a bit more on my blog post here.”)

3. Rinse and repeat.

Keep going back and seeing what the big topics and trends are and use that to create your top content, then do the current news topics blog commenting to inject yourself in the niche and get both links and traffic back to your site.

Once you’ve got the initial run of content and comments done, you’ve started to build your own expertise and should be able to start getting email subscribers.

Make sure you have a plan for what you’re going to do once you get those subscribers on a list. (I hope you’ve already started to figure out what you’re going to sell to them or what actions you want them to take once they read your next email.)

I’ve found in the past that building up your own point of view and expertise on a topic can lead to growing a community interested in the niche that will help you build a long-term business. It does take a good bit of work, but it’s worth it in the long run.

The site that I’m working on is very successful at SEO and sales within it’s niche. While efforts go forward to solidify that space, the product offering of the site is being expanded to transition from the niche to a broader market.

The way that we’re doing this is putting the new product line in the site with their own category and then running through some basic keyword research on what it will take to get the products to rank. One of the target products ranks #13 on Google for it’s product name (searched for over 13k times/month) just based on the strength of the domain that the page is sitting on.

The next steps for the test is to run link building and promotion efforts for the product and it’s page on the site and monitor the results. The challenge will be to gain clicks from searchers who see the niche-focused domain on our result vs. the more general named domains in other results. Once we reach page one, the headline (title) and meta-description will become very important for gaining clicks.

The email was titled “Best Soccer Goal Ever?” and showed me a video thumbnail. When I clicked on it I was taken to the store’s web site, where they showed the YouTube video of a really sick indoor soccer goal.

As I’m watching the goal and the replays of it, I notice the description to the left of the video. They have added a description talking about how creative the Brazilian players are and how much practice it takes to get this good. Then in the second paragraph they state that you have to have really strong leg and back muscles to be able to pull this trick off, and that world class soccer players all use some type of medicine ball workout.

The sentence about the medicine ball workout was linked to a specific medicine ball product (most likely their best seller.)

Now, I’m not a soccer player, but if I were one and active in trying to improve on my skills, I sure would have clicked on that link.

The video inspired me. The copy, while sparse, provided me a way to achieve some of the greatness shown in the video.

Something to test in your own markets.

BTW – Here is the video:

Sick, eh?

All they did was give me $2.50

Here’s the text of the email (with the order information stripped out):

Greetings from Amazon.com.

During a recent review of your order, we noticed that we now offer a
lower price on “[Product]” than at the time you
placed your order.

We value your business and have requested a refund of $2.50 to your
credit card.  This amount reflects the difference between the price
you were charged and the current, lower price.  The refund should be
processed in the next few days and should appear as a credit on your
next billing statement.

You may view returns and refunds by clicking the “Your Account” link
at the top of our web site, then clicking “Go!” next to “open and
recently shipped orders.”  Completed refunds will appear at the bottom
of an individual order’s summary page.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com — we hope you will visit us
again soon.

Many web sites and stores have “low price guarantees” where if you see the price of the item lower within 30 days you can go back to the store and request a refund.  Those stores bank on you *not* requesting the refund – they load all of the benefit of the risk reversal statement into the front end.

Amazon has totally flipped this around.  Instead of making me see a lower price, get annoyed enough to call a customer service rep, and feel like I’ve got to jump through hoops to get a couple of bucks back, Amazon took the initiative.  They showed that the value me as a customer and value our “relationship” enough to invest that $2.50 in me.  What they’ve done is spend $2.50 on a customer loyalty program.

Amazon already had a good place in my mind – they ship fast and the prices are decent.  Maybe I could get something for a couple of dollars cheaper at another site, but my buying experience has always been good.  Now they are way at the top of my list because they showed that they are looking out for me and will work for me proactively.

So, they took what could be a customer service hassle and part of the “cost center” and flipped it into a marketing and customer loyalty/retention expense investment.

I’ve been inspired and am already looking for ways to surprise and delight my customers with proactive, customer-centric programs.

Would this work for you?  How can you apply it in your business?  (Please leave a comment to let me know.)