More likely to succeed?

Anyone want to answer this one?

Many people prefer to create a blog first. It depends on many factors. For example: which will be the subject of your Ebook? I am focusing on article writing for the moment, to see which subjects are more popular. This will help me to decide on the subject of an Ebook. A popular blog will also help you to advertise your future Ebook.

It depends on SO many things.

What's your topic? How much do you know about the topic? How great of a writer are you? How great of a list-builder are you? How great of a Blogger/Webmaster are you? How are you going to drive traffic? How are you going to attract affiliates? Etc, etc.

I would say build a list from the beginning. Whatever else you decide to do as you move forward is up to you, but too many people wait far too log before they start to build lists. Here's my take on it...

The reason the "waiting for traffic" mentality is all wrong before building a list, is simple. Your focus is not laser targeted on the highest ROI for the time you put in. You will always generate some sort of traffic to your blog, but your conversions will be dramatically reduced, therefore, you will consistently see little to no results for your efforts. This can (and does) take its toll, especially when motivation is key to keep plugging away. You see, most fail online because they lose focus and end up jumping from strategy to strategy because they see little to no results in the short term.

The truth is tough, if you had been sending that "small" amount of traffic to a squeeze page, or even a blog with an opt-in form with a fantastic freebie to give away, you would have seen some sort of results for your efforts.

Even if the visitor count is low, you will see results. Now, let's say you had 30 visitors to your blog a day over the course of one month. Without an opt-in form to capture leads, you will most definitely see little to no results from that visitor statistic. This is where it can get tricky, you're doing a lot of work getting people to your website, but you feel like your efforts are being wasted somewhat.

Now let's say you have opt-in forms on that same website and have a fantastic free gift to give away in exchange for an email address. Let's assume your traffic is targeted and you get 2 opt-ins out of every 30 visitors. After a month has passed, you now have 60 leads inside your business. You can promote to them, send them to new blog posts etc. 60 leads doesn't seem like much, and to be honest, it isn't, but what you have gotten is far more valuable.

You now have seen some results for your efforts and inevitably your motivation gets that all important boost. You have more focus because you want to see how many more opt-ins you can get. You tweak things on your blog here and there to get higher conversions... you take much more focused action. You build a squeeze page that converts at 50% and send traffic directly to that.

Now you are getting 450 leads a month from the same efforts and your motivation becomes stronger. You work harder, you generate more leads, you get more opt-ins, you build a relationship with your list and you begin to make sales. There you go, you are now on the way to creating a long term sustainable business, and all because you built that damn list from the start.

The numbers and statistics may vary - but you get my point.

I recommend to build your list 1st , then you can create your blog , and have opt in box to keep building your list . then later you can create an ebook and send it to your list , and sell it on click bank.

Good luck

Starting a blog and an email list is the easiest and most effective choice, email lists are very effective

In my opinion, it is best to first build your blog and list. That way you create a following to market your ebook to. Otherwise, you are going to be marketing your ebook from a cold start and that is more difficult to do.

Why not do everything at once? You can project manage and get work outsourced? so everything comes together. Always remember create leverage for yourself and outsourcing can be very effective. I'm not necessarily saying let others write everything for you, but you can provide the subject lines and what content you require. You work along side others to do many things. As you have mentioned above.

Just to bring it up a notch, the purpose here is to build a platform more than anything else. If you have ever studied anything about publishing, most book publishers will only sign authors who already have an audience of people who listen to them. This audience is their platform.

So, really, if building your platform is the most important thing, you should be doing anything that gets your name out there as an expert in the field that you want to sell ebooks in. Also, building a list of responsive subscribers will help you way more in the future to decide what your ebooks should be about.

I really don't know, it depends. As for me, I have success with list building and paid traffic.