List building is one of the most important parts of any online business. By building your own list you have the opportunity to try selling your products more than once. You also have the benefit of being able to offer your subscribers other products, and services when they become available.

So just how would you capture those leads and make them profitable for you?
Here are your 5 simple steps to setting up your own profitable lead capture system.

1) you will need your autoresponder setup, ready to accept your subscribers. To make it easy on yourself you can pre-load it with messages to send your subscribers from the outset, to remind them that they are on your list. Useful, informative and educational messages sent once or twice a week automatically will keep your list subscribers interested.

2) Setup an irresistible offer page, giving something of value to your potential subscribers for filling in the form to subscribe. This page needs to be as powerful as any sales page where you are charging for a product, as you will want it to convert as many visitors to subscribers as you can. Outline the benefits of what you’re giving away, and even the benefits of the information in your preset messages (you did setup those messages right?).

3) Most autoresponders allow you to set a url (website address) to send your subscribers to after they subscribe, you should send them to a thank you page, and let them know if they need to confirm their address before they receive the first email from you. If they do need to confirm (they should, this is called double opt-in and may help save you from spam complaints), let your new subscriber know they will only get the email with the gift link after they confirm their subscription to your list.

You finally realize that you need a good opt-in list. After reading countless articles and sought expert advices and have read many success stories of people creating a small fortune with opt-in lists you finally decide to have one of your own. Then it happens, you think you have known everything there is to know about opt-in lists and have followed their advices to the T and you still weren’t able to make a profit.

In fact, you may be losing money. You maybe hiring writers to help you out, or there are some expenses incurred, even if you have a big list, but only a very small percentage actually buys from you, your still losing profit. You’ll realize that after a few months when you see your statistics and sales figures.

So what could have gone wrong? Why have others succeeded where you have failed? The most common mistake is that you dived straight right in. You chose a topic where you think could be quite popular and would earn you money. This just not the case. Just because you wrote people from the list doesn’t mean they are going to buy instantly.

Here I will offer more advice, for those who have started an opt-in list and have failed, you can rejuvenate your failed venture. For those who are starting, here are three quick and easy ways to build a profitable opt-in list.