This past Friday I was able to meet my new coach and mentor, Alex Jeffreys, in person. Until now, we have only communicated via webinar and email. He lives in the UK but was here in Florida attending an event that Rich Schefren was holding for his students. Saturday and Sunday were full for him so I took off work on Friday and met him at his hotel.

We had some coffee and talked mostly about list building and email marketing. Alex has said from the beginning of the coaching program that building a list and creating a relationship of trust with your subscribers is paramount to your success and was the turning point in his career. When he made list building his number one priority is when he really started to make money online.

There is nothing new about this information! Everyone reading this has heard famous internet marketers repeat over and over again, "the money is in the list". So why is it that there are still thousands of want to be internet marketers out there that are still not building a list? I do not know for sure but for some, I think it has something to do with the fact that it is not that "get rich" button that they are looking for.

I suffered from this syndrone several years ago when I first started my internet marketing journey. I was a program hopper. I joined every matrix based, mlm, and network marketing program that came along tying to find the one that was going to make me independently wealthy in a matter of months. Man, if I had only spent that time building a list. I would have a list of 100,000 or more easily.

About 2 years ago I decided that my problem was that I needed to get out and "rub shoulders" with the gurus and start making some connections and joint venture partnerships. I didn't have a lot of money to spend, but I did manage to make it to 3 different internet marketing events. I got to talk with people like Keith and Jeff Wellman, Bob "the teacher" Jenkins, Mike Filesaime, and Jeff Dedrick, just to name a few.

They all pretty much asked me the same thing. "How are you building your list?" and "Who is your mentor?" I decided that it might just be a good idea to start building my list. I also looked into finding a coach or mentor but quickly decided that the price tag for that was totally out of my reach for the time being. I decided to work on the list building instead.

I had been using traffic exchanges a good bit in the past and had learned how to actually get some results. To this date the only sale I have had promoting the Profit Pulling Platform that Alex gave all of his students came from a subscriber who signed up via a traffic exchange. You can get results from traffic exchanges but there are much better ways.

I created a viral system that I call Traffic Hits Multiplier and I used it to build a list of 100 subscribers in a months time. I was in the process of modifying my viral system into a free membership site when I joined Alex's program. The project has been on hold since, although I do work on it a little bit now and then.

I have done much better with JV Giveaways. I have built a list of over 500 in Jan of this year using JV Giveaways. If you have read List Building With Alex, then you know that giveaways is how Alex started out with his list building. I discussed this at length with Alex and told him that I was going to be hosting my own JV Giveaway in the near future. (subject for another post soon to come)

I am using his friend, Jason James's, new product as a guide. Giveaway Riches is all about how to run your own JV giveaway event based on Jason's own experiences with the 3 Greedy Giveaways that he hosted in the past. The upsell for Giveaway Riches is the software to run your own giveaway along with some case studies and interviews with top JV Giveaway guru's like Mark Hendricks.

I have been really excited about my success with the JV Giveaways so far. It has inspired me to giveaway some PLR products for people to use in giveaways and to create some video tutorials to help you modify those products so you can use them as gifts in a JV giveaway. I am still putting the final touches on my ebook "JV Giveaways Unleashed" which I will be giving away shortly.

I am going to follow the ebook with the JV giveaway event as soon as I can get everything set up and working properly. I discussed my plans with Alex and he gave me a lot of encouragement and basically told me that right now, list building should be my number one priority. I am really stoked and ready to take this to the next level.

You know, it's one thing to read about how you should build your list and to even here big time gurus talk about it. But when I saw the look in Alex's eyes and could sense the genuine excitement in his voice as he told me about the success he had once he built a list of about 2000 subscribers, I knew that he was telling the truth.

He told me that if I keep doing what I am doing with the list building and concentrate on building a relationship with my new subscribers, that I will be able to quit my job by the end of the year. His parting words were "People make this out to be soooo hard, but it's not. It's actually easy if you just know what to do and do it."

That is the reason that I payed for a mentor. I had gotten to the point where it was difficult to put my heart into what I was doing. I wasn't sure that the actions I was taking were what I really needed to be doing. Now I have the advice of someone who is making over $20,000 a month online. I am going to do what he says and concentrate all my efforts into accomplishing the goals I have set.

My list building goals for 2009 are 7500 subscribers by the end of the year. I have over 600 so far this year. I am averaging about 15 to 20 subscribers a day participating in JV Giveaways. I expect that number to increase significantly once I start using my highly targeted ebook as my giveaway gift. I am also going to set up a nice squeeze page and pimp it using my Traffic Hits Multiplier viral system. That should increase my results nicely.

Then I am going to really kick the list building into overdrive by hosting a JV giveaway event of my own. (along with a little help that I will announce later) I don't think that I am going to have any problems at all reaching my goal for this year.