Your email list will become your most valuable asset in your business. This is your customer base, your tribe, your audience’s invitation into their life. This is your opportunity to test ideas for new products, to get essential feedback, and connect with your readers in a personal way.

If you read Robert Kyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad you will learn the difference between an asset and a liability, why it is so important to have more assets then liabilities and how your passive income should work to increase your cashflow. An email capture is a way to build an asset and it will come under the passive income column because it will form while you are sleeping.

Social networks, search engines, and platforms, will come and go, change on a whim, and/or appear out of nowhere but your email list will remain in your control. Capturing email addresses in a list is different from collecting followers of your blog. It specifically gives you your clients individual email address to connect with their inbox.

So how do you build an email list? How do you gather those addresses anyway? This is what email capture allows you to do – collect peoples emails and order them in a list. It requires a simple form that you can download from either MailChimp for free or Aweber for a monthly fee. You will need to create an account with one of these services and follow step by step instructions to load the form on your website.

Its nice to have a free offer for your subscribers when they start to follow you and give you their email. This usually consists of a pdf or ebook that you have created that shares your knowledge. Many people call this a mvp for minimal viable product. You can put this free offer on its own landing page or on the side bar of your website. When you want to get fancier you might create a banner ad with your email capture form at the top of your website.

Both Mailchimp and Aweber will also keep track of a range of figures for you including your open rate. Your open rate lets you know how many people are actually clicking on your email and reading it. Its nice to have an open rate in the 80% range but at times they might go down towards 30%. Providing valuable content for your audience is the best way to keep your open rate high.

I hear over and over, i wish i would have started collecting email addresses sooner, so start today, get that email capture up on your website and begin building your assets.

Do you have an email capture on your website? Which service do you prefer? Do you offer a product for your audience? How often do you email your subscribers?