Is THIS the best long-term method to making money online?

I would say that list building can be one of the many good foundations of any business - be it online or offline. It's a broad subject because you can even create an e-book on list building on how to start it, how to maintain it, and how to give value to your list.

List building can be very lucrative and is i agree a good long term business. But i think people (myself included) often get too caught up with list building from free offers.
Main problem being that people who sign up to a freebie list are often looking only for free gifts, solutions, push button riches, and so on. Making them much harder to actually convert into paying customers.

Lots of people also have trouble not with getting the inital opt ins but in creating good follow up messages. The content they are trying to provide to their list may be wonderful but people are so used to hype and have so much hyped up spam rubbish coming into their mailboxes that coming up with a title which will grab someone's attention when one of 30 shift+click...deleted, can be difficult.

For that reason i would say list building + quality copy writing would be your best long term business model. If that means paying someone to write your sequence for you then so be it even if that does come at hefty cost. It's worth it

I agree Braincandy, it really does come down to the basics...trust and value. And not promoting right away, etc.

I'm moving my main business models over to strictly list building and my own products and ditching SEO

List building, was, is and always will be one of the best ways to realize long term success.

I have lots of sites and i'm sick to death of google screwing things up. I had a site which was originally a sniper site which did really well so i grew it into a much larger site with over 50 pages of great content with a facebook page to back it up, 3,500 real members who like and share each new piece of content. PR2. Domain bought Nov 2011, site started Feb 2012.

Now the domain 4 weeks ago was getting 4,000-5,000 visits per month 50% from google, and 95% of that for keywords which were related to but NOT the main EMD. After the recent update my google traffic dropped to around 20 per day. My site is full of high quality content loved and supported real people from facebook and search traffic. No spam backinks. All content written by me or my best writer. Yet still gets f**ked over by google. Don't ya just love google?

Looks like things might be starting to even out now a little bit, as we all know and google admit themselves, sometimes they do these things heavy handed and tweak later. I will continue to build my site with my readers in mind and maybe google will see the light but maybe not.

List building or your own product/service.....even better both. Don't rely on SEO and don't trust people like google or especially facebook to be honest, they want our money and unless you give it to them you will always be running up hill.

I believe that YouTube is a good source of income I saw some people making there living from YouTube only

SEO is technical and so are other methods people adopt to make money online. You know why such methods don't make anyone enough or long term money? It's because they're focusing on the technology instead of the thing which really makes a person money.

Let me break it down in simple terms - Money is earned when person A gives person B some money in exchange for value.

That's it!

The key is to have something of value to offer first & know exactly how to market it to an audience effectively.

Building a list is like having regular customers for a product or future products you might have. So it's not just important, it's utterly necessary.

Just study any big company - They don't sell to a person once, they sell to the same person over and over again for years.

Dayne I think list building and providing value to your list is a great way. Offer free videos or ebooks to your list and provide value. I am just learning but someone like Alex Jeffreys does this very well. People buy from him because he provides great content and actually surveys what his list members want in products.

Email marketing is the best way to grow a business.... especially backend email marketing. This is where all of the money will come from, and is where you'll find your best conversion rates at.

Hello Dayne,

I would agree that creating your own product (or doing affiliate marketing), list building and doing email marketing is one of the smartest and best ways of creating long term income. Even though it is not the easiest way to make money online. It does give you the following advantages :

1.) High profit margins - Especially when you are good at creating high quality products that others will benefit from.

2.) List building allows you to have your own traffic source so that you do not have to rely on Google or any other traffic source to earn monthly income. (once you have a large enough list and have mastered the art of understanding and meeting the needs of your readers).

3.) You can automate the process so that your email list, customer base and profits are growing (over time) even when you are away : - )

I think the best long term method of online money making is building high quality websites. These are permanent property for a person which can be used always.

nothing last forever.
you need to learn the changes in the seo and internet marketing to survive.
also i think that internet marketing is not a stable cash flow, there are always ups and downs.

building lists, marketing to them, and offering value. It has been working for years. It is not that easy, but at the same time its not that hard also.

Absolutely...

Squeeze pages and building a list of buyers with my own offers.

And I'd rather build a list of buyers any day of the week :-)