Building a list is something you’ve probably heard is important, right? Everyone says, “The money is in the list.” And that’s very true.

Sure, you can get traffic in many ways. There’s paid traffic, social media, SEO, video marketing… the list goes on. But all those traffic methods have one major thing in common—you’re depending on someone else for your traffic.

You can’t even count on a big social media following. Look at what happened to MySpace. People who had huge lists of followers on that platform suddenly found themselves scrambling to recover their tribe when everyone else migrated to other platforms like Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook, unfortunately, you can’t count on them, either.

People spent a lot of money on ads just to get more fans onto their Facebook fan pages or into groups, only to discover they had to pay AGAIN to reach those followers they already paid for because Facebook stopped delivering their posts to their fans organically! Instead, only a tiny portion of the fans they already paid for would actually see their content unless they paid to “boost” it.

Building a list is a way of ensuring that no matter what happens, you have a source of traffic that cannot be taken away from you. You’ll have your own source of traffic that you can access and pull income from any time.

And as long as you download your list (CSV) backups regularly and hold onto them, you will still have that list even if something happens to your current autoresponder service. You can just import it into another provider and you’re good to go!