The best time to learn how to build your email list for your particular niche is early in your business setup. You need to go to the trouble of building an email list simply because these are your “people” and they want to hear from you.
* The Magic List Machine *
The second best time to learn how to build a list is now. When a person goes hunting for information on the web and stumbles across your article, AND they find it helpful, immediately you have a leg up over your competitor in your same niche. Take full advantage of this small window of authority and capture their email.
There are two things that immediately occur to your new visitor subconsciously. The first is; because they found you while searching it feels like they were “meant” to find you, and two, because they liked what you had to say then obviously you know what you are talking about!
Giving a person a way and a reason to sign up on your list is a solid brick towards building a profitable business.
It is the people on your list that will be most likely to be your biggest fans AND your major purchasers.
Be good to your list and they will be good to you. As they say: “The money is in the LIST!”
Its almost like magic!
7 Different Ways to Build Your List
Here are 7 effective ways you can use to build an email list.
1.How to Build an Email List with Optin Forms
The most commonly used way of list building is to have optin forms on your website and Facebook pages like you will find at the bottom of this post.
These optin forms can be coded yourself, using your own privately run databases, or more simply by using one of the highly esteemed email services. Where you place your optin forms and what you do to incentivize people to sign up can increase the number of subscribers you get.
The next step in this process is to build the responsiveness of your list by different methods. Using your autoresponder effectively can also make a big difference to your bottom line.
2. Build Your List using Solo Ads
This is probably the fastest and cheapest way to build an email list. There are drawbacks though. There are many places out there that will sell you nonresponsive and out of date lists. Before buying a list from a brokerage or individual, investigate their reputation.
A solo ad is simply “borrowing” someone else’s list. You write up an email and THEY will send it for you. The general purpose is to leverage someone else’s mailing list and their influence to send traffic to your offer.
3. How Offline Methods can Build your List
Believe it or not there are several ways to tempt fresh prospects into your shop. Some favorite offline methods include newspaper, direct mail, and flyers.
Marketing offline is just another strong point of contact which will solidify your presence in the public eye. By making contact offline you can direct people to your online list. You can tie them together by encouraging people to follow you from the offline list to your online list or vice versa.
4. Referral List Building Software to Build your List
Sending out an email with a link that goes to a page promising to reward the person with something really useful IF ONLY they forward the email to some of their friends – will sometimes work.
The older method of doing this is to request people to “refer a friend” and manually keep tally of who did what using ?=tags or a special coupon code.
You can set up the customer referral program to reward your referring customer at different levels. For example; if three of their friends sign up, you give them ITEM A, if five sign up they also get ITEM B, and so on.
Fortunately today we have access to some pretty neat-o viral list building software.
5. Building your List using WordPress Plugins
This one is a little more complicated but fundamentally it really isn’t that difficult to build a plugin and put it on the WordPress.org repository for people to download. Developing a free plugin with the option for people to sign-up for a free upgrade or some other type of reward will give you more names. In some instances the developer will require you sign up before the plugin can be activated.
There are other ways you can contact your plugin users too other than just asking their email. You can code your plugin to place ads on their website dashboard, so every time they sign in they will see your offer.
6. Keep Split Testing your Conversions
Regardless of where you are collecting your leads or how you are driving traffic of people to your various offers, you need to always test.
Investigate why some folks sign up for your list but others won’t. Test to improve your numbers. For example you could be losing people because; your message isn’t focused on your target, or your cheap offer isn’t worth the print on their computer screen or the time it took them to read it.
Set yourself apart from the rest of the crowd and keep testing to improve your conversion rate.
7. How Generating More Traffic will Build your List
Once you have your offers set up and you have a way to capture leads you can now start sending traffic. Traffic comes from many sources, both paid or free.
Paid traffic can be anything you pay for to send traffic like using PPC campaigns from the Search Engines or Social Media. Free traffic can come from these places too by using reliable SEO methods to improve your rankings and popularity.
When you tie in driving traffic methods with planned social influence you can quickly build your list and following seemingly without effort.
