List Building: Who Wants to Know?

When you get great emails from people that talk about a great piece of software that you need to make your business more productive, and you get to their squeeze page, right? And you find all these questions! What's your address, your telephone number, and even your social security number!

How incredibly stupid!

Nobody wants to give up all that personal stuff just to find out about a product they might want to buy. And, I'd guess that the people who created that intrusive list building page are getting far fewer sign-ups than they would like.

The only things you should be asking for are the person's name first name, and their email address. That's it!

Here's what people think when you ask to much:

1. Why do they care where I live? Are they going to send me junk mail?

2. Why do they need my telephone number? Do they intend to call me every day to sell me things? I'm on the Do Not Call list!

3. NObody, I mean, NObody gets my social security number.

None of this information is appropriate for a list building page. Not only that, but you won't get many sign ups. Your list building efforts will be severely stunted.

When people are at the payment stage, they don't mind that kind of information. They know you have to deliver a physical product. But if you're selling digital products, you don't even need that much info. An opt-in box that's annoyingly long will just kill your list building success.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. and a master of list building. Build a massive responsive list at MyFirstList.com.