Time for a Change in Direction: Building a List

Anyone who has been reading this blog recently, in particular my monthly income reports, will have noticed a drop in my earnings. You may well have noticed an increasingly frustrated tone to these posts as my monthly total has steadily decreased. My plan was to build a small empire of niche sites and Squidoo lenses that would bring in a steady trickle of income, before then moving on to an altogether bigger project of an authority blog. Part of the authority blog plan was to build up a subscriber list. However, I have become frustrated with the whole micro niche marketing aspect of things - principally that I find myself writing about things I neither know nor care about.

What I like about the idea of the authority blog is that I set myself up as an expert on a particular niche and then build up a trusting relationship with my audience who are therefore more likely to buy from me. The big problem I have is that to do this effectively I would have to commit to writing at least three good posts per week (probably more) as well as promoting the blog. Currently, I just do not have the time to do this. I was intending to gradually build up a bank of pre-written posts that I can use when I am short of inspiration or time. What gets in the way of this is thinking that while I am writing this bank of posts I am not making any money.

Then I had a thought. What if I started building up a list now? Also what if I used Squidoo as a means of building my list. In turn, I can use the list to boost traffic to my lenses. So, here's the plan:

1. Choose a broad niche suitable for an authority blog
2. Write an ebook to give away to entice people to sign up to my subscriber list
3. Create a Squidoo account dedicated entirely to my chosen niche
4. Use Squidoo (and other free resources) to offer my free ebook
5. Send out emails to my list that provide useful information and engender trust. However, some of these emails will also include affiliate links
6. For each lens I write I will create an alternative version which I can use as a blog post at a later date.

The long term aim remains to create an authority blog in my chosen niche, but in advance of this I will use this plan to build up a bank of posts to use and also I will hopefully have a reasonable number of subscribers and I can use my list to boost traffic to the blog.

I am intending to document my progress and fully describe each step that I am taking here on this blog, so I invite you to follow me on this journey and see if I succeed or fail.