Building a large list doesn’t happen overnight, but it can be done if you work on it consistently. It is a never-ending process that reaps many benefits. Once you’ve built a great subscriber list, you’ll be able to generate instant sales, conduct market research, and participate in joint ventures with other marketers in your niche.
Let’s see the requirements needed to build a list.
- sequential auto answer
This refers to web-based software that stores contact information in an online database and sends emails at preset times.
- squeeze page
This is a web page that contains your signup form, a free offer, and various bullet points outlining the benefits of receiving your offer. It is called a landing page because there are no other links on the page. This prevents your visitor from being distracted and directs them to take a single action…subscribe to your subscription form.
- free offer
No one will subscribe to your list if you don’t win them over with a free offer. This motivates them to take action immediately. Your offer could include a report, video, audio or software.
- Single or double opt-in
Double opt-in is when a visitor submits your subscription form and is immediately redirected to another webpage that thanks them for completing the form and asks them to verify their email to confirm their subscription. After they have confirmed their subscription by clicking the link in your email, they will receive another email confirming that they have successfully subscribed.
Single opt-in means that a potential subscriber doesn’t have to take the extra step of confirming their email address. Although this can build your list faster, it can be easily abused by people using fake email addresses. This means you won’t know if you have real people on your list. It is better to stick with the double option.
traffic generation
There are free and paid methods to create a list. Paid methods generally work faster than free ones because you are substituting money for time.
Free Traffic
- marketing article
Write a series of 400-500 word articles and submit them to the top article directories and ezine publishers in your niche. At the bottom of each article, include a link to your landing page. Often ezine publishers and website owners will publish your article in their ezine or on their website, which will drive traffic to their landing page.
- search engine optimization
Create content that targets a specific keyword or keyphrase that gets a lot of visitors each month from search engines. Include your keyword in the meta tags, title tags, headlines, subheadings, content, filenames, and links on your web page. If your web page ranks high, it will attract a lot of traffic from search engines. You can place your signup form on this page or redirect the traffic you receive to your landing page.
- social marketing
Redirect traffic from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter to your landing page. Although you may get a large following, these social marketing properties do not belong to you and could easily change their rules. It’s better to have them on your email list that you control.
paid traffic
- Google AdWords
These are the ads you see on the right hand side of Google pages. It allows you to position yourself on the first page of Google immediately. Open a Google AdWords account and create 2 ads to see which works best. Place a link to your landing page at the bottom of each ad. You can control how much you want to pay per click and how much to spend each day. Keep testing your ads to improve the click-through rate to your landing page.
- solo ads
Ezine and newsletter publishers offer solo ads to send to their subscribers for a fee. This results in immediate traffic generation to your landing page. Find an ezine publisher in your niche that has a large subscriber list and buy a solo ad. If you can afford it, run your ad multiple times, as people need to see an ad multiple times before taking action.
There are hundreds of other ways to drive traffic to your capture page, but if you implement any or all of the above methods, you’ll be well on your way to building a big list.