As you may have heard, "The Money is in the List." Ithas been a widely accepted fact that in order to ... online, you've got to have your own ... ... the subject of ...
As you may have heard, "The Money is in the List." It
has been a widely accepted fact that in order to be
successful online, you've got to have your own opt-in
mailing list.
While the subject of successfully building a mailing
list has been widely covered and discussed, it is
surprising that very few ever mention about how to
protect your hard-earned list.
Anyone who has been building a responsive mailing
list for sometime will definitely recognize the
time and effort that must be sacrificed in order to
obtain thousands of subscribers. For new list
builders, sometimes getting a few hundred subscribers
means weeks of late nights and consistent promotional
efforts.
Why then, do I always hear news about successful list
owners losing their entire subscriber base due to a
crash on the servers hosting their lists?
Recently, I've heard news of a successful list
builder who have been building his list for over 5
years that lost his entire 10,000+ subscriber base due
to an unrecoverable crash on the server his list was
hosted on.
While the idea of losing 10,000+ subscribers almost
overnight sends a spine tingling shiver through the
backs of most list builders, I rarely observe list
owners making constant efforts to backup their lists.
In most cases, it is only when they've heard about
other people's tragedy that they run out and utilize
the "backup" function on their listservers.
A targeted, highly-responsive mailing list can be
the most valuable asset for anybody's online
business. Hence, I would expect successful list
owners to guard their lists like a dog guarding its
bone.
Dogs often dig holes in the ground and bury their
treasured bones to keep them safe. Similarly, we
list owners should also constantly utilize the backup
function on our listservers (or manually backup on
our own if such a function is unavailable) to retrieve
our valuable list of emails and bury them somewhere
safe.
This goes for ALL important data, including your
website, articles that you have written, important
passwords, and anything of value that you don't want
to lose.
If you have an extra hard drive, a CD-writer, or one of
those not-so-popular 100 MB disk drives, now is your
chance to put it to use! Provided that your backup
device has not already rusted or rotted from ages of
dust, having a backup in hand is always better than
nothing.
Backup your important files as frequently as possible
as you will never know when something terrible will
happen to your treasured mailing list, website, or
hard drive. As lazy as I am, I do it AT LEAST once every
two weeks.
Don't count on your webhost or list hosting company to
backup your data for you; do it for your own peace of
mind.
To be successful online (and that includes being a good
mailing list builder), we must learn to be a BIG DOG.
And BIG DOGS always bury their bones in the safest of
places.
