10 Secrets for Building Money-Making E-mail Lists (Part 1)

In my last blog I told you about ways to increase your e-mail list by improving the content of your e-mail offers.

This time I thought I’d offer you a few “secrets” I’ve found that can help grow your list fast. These 10 list-building tips may sound obvious, but too often they are overlooked by novice Internet marketers. In part 1 of this blog, I’ll give you the first five, and then in my next blog, I’ll reveal the remaining five.

Secret #1: Add a Refer-a-friend form to your site. Consider placing these forms on your subscription and order “thank you” pages. Remember to add links in your footer navigation too. Using these helps make your viral marketing efforts easier. Many shopping cart services include tell-a-friend forms and there are several free ones that your webmaster can find online.

Secret #2: Offer incentives to give visitors that “extra push” to subscribe or fill out a form. Create a free e-book or special report as a bonus that has an opt-in form for your e-mail list, and then give it away like crazy. When people give it away, those who download it will become members of your list too. A free e-book is relatively simple to create, and can become the foundation of a strong list-building campaign. The key to making this work is that you must be willing to give away something with a real perceived value to encourage people to sign up to your lists.

Secret #3: Your website must have an effective landing page design. A landing page is simply what marketers refer to as the page your prospect visits to read and take action. You can have multiple pages offering your sign-up box. The key is to position it predominately on a page without overwhelming the other content on that page. I like to position our subscription boxes in the right-hand column of our sites and place the “Contact Us” link at the top and bottom of each page. Test different placements, pop-ups, graphics, and text to see which combination works best for your site.

Secret #4: Create leverage. You get leverage and grow your list through Joint Venture (JV) deals. Joint Ventures are one of the most powerful ways to build your list fast. Who do you know in your niche that reaches your type of prospects but who is not one of your direct competitors? Contact them and set up a deal where they send a message of value to THEIR list with links promoting your site or ezine. You need to offer something so compelling or informative that your new JV partner will want to send it to their list. They benefit by providing their subscribers with exceptional content and YOU benefit from the increased traffic. Another JV method is to swap sign-up forms on your “thank you” pages. Every time someone gets to a “thank you” page you then have the opportunity for that prospect to opt-in to your competitor’s list (and vice versa). The key is to check your stats so that’s it’s a win-win relationship.

Secret #5: Use mini-sites with squeeze pages offering “Free Courses.” A mini-site is a smaller website that specializes in super-specific content with one purpose in mind–to capture your visitor’s e-mail address. While these types of sites probably won’t get very good rankings by the search engines, they can be excellent viral and JV marketing tools. For example, my company Prime Concepts Group sells a product line of prosperity-related books, CDs and DVDs, so we created a mini-site. It’s a one-page site offering one prosperity lesson a week for six weeks from prosperity guru Randy Gage. When prospects subscribed to the free course, they got two best-selling e-books and free success coaching software. Next, we wrote a compelling sales letter in the form of an article about prosperity that included links to our mini-site offering the course for free. The final step was to contact other site owners and encourage them to promote the course to their lists by placing a blurb about it in their “References & Links” sections. The results were phenomenal! We generated over 20,000 subscriptions in the first month of that promotion. Those subscribers received the lessons and bonuses… and were automatically added to a series of auto-responder messages that not only delivered the lessons, but also promoted up-sell offers.

Are you starting to see how many of these ideas overlap to give you exponential power in building your list? In part two I’ll offer you five more secrets to powerful e-mail list building.

For more Internet marketing techniques to help you increase search engine rankings and generate more traffic to your site, check out the “Internet Profit Kit for Information Marketers: 101 Proven Tactics & Tools You Can Use to Build Your Business.” Visit https://www.internetprofitkit.com for details.