Unorthodox List Building Tips That Work

List building is a very important activity, and many marketers claim it is the single most important step in making money online. While it is possible to make a sizable income without an email list, it is much easier to do so with one. The truth is, the average customer requires 4-7 contacts with you prior to buying. Therefore, by not signing them up for the list, you will often lose them forever.

However, building a responsive email list is imperative for making money down the road from the same customer-not just the initial sale. After all, assuming they had a good experience with you, that customer will now trust you and will be likely to keep buying. So having a list can help you not only make the initial sale, but also more sales beyond that.

However, to build a list you need traffic, and you need to get that traffic to sign up for your newsletter. Without either step, your list will not grow. There are a number of options for driving traffic to your site. You can use either search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click, co-registration, or some combination of all three. You might want to start out with SEO, since it is totally free. Once you are making money with this, then you can turn your attention to the other two methods.

Assuming you are using SEO or pay per click for list building, you need to get the traffic to your website to convert into subscribers to your newsletter. To accomplish this, you want to have your signup form prominently displayed somewhere on your site. Also, make sure you give them a compelling reason to sign up. For instance, you might have a newsletter that gives 7 tips to lose weight in 20 days (just an example). Be certain to include plenty of benefits to entice people to sign up.

In addition, a very underutilized strategy is viral marketing. This is where you offer those who have just signed up some sort of reward for referring you the names and email addresses of other people who might be interested. For instance, you might give them a free e-book, or some other unexpected bonus.

However, while SEO and pay per click are very popular for list building, one thing that does not get a lot of attention is co-registration. This is where somebody signs up for another offer, like a newspaper subscription. Then, on the signup page they are given a list of other offers they can sign up for as well (yours being one of them).

Make sure they are not pre-selected, because otherwise you will get a lot of people who are not really interested. If they do sign up for your offer, the company you have the arrangement with will give you their name and email. This can be a great way to build a huge list of subscribers. However, keep in mind that it is pricey, and you should only use this list building strategy once you are making money with SEO and pay per click.