There’s no point in putting out a great newsletter if you don’t have a list of people to send it to. Building your list is an ongoing process, and here are a few ways to get started:
- Provide a free gift, such as an e-course, a special report, an e-book, or a tip sheet. Nowadays people aren’t going to hand over their email without getting something else valuable in return. You or your virtual assistant can set up your autoresponder or shopping cart program to deliver this gift once a visitor has submitted their name and email.
- Make sure you have a sign-up box on each page of your website; you never know which page people will land on. Also, make sure the sign-up box is “above the fold” so that visitors don’t have to scroll all around to find it.
- Create a separate landing page at your website that’s dedicated to your newsletter or free gift. Include a description, testimonials, a sample issue or archives and of course your sign-up box. See my e-course offering page as an example: http://www.emarketingtoolboxessentials.com/
- Promote your free gift and newsletter on your blog, in your email signature, and on the business cards and flyers that you hand to people in person.
- Have a sign-up sheet or basket to collect cards when you’re speaking or when you attend a booth at a trade show or fair. A nice touch is to send a personal email to each name on the list with a personal invitation to join your mailing list with a link to the sign-up page. This may get a better response rate than someone receiving an “opt-in confirmation e-mail” a few days or a week after the event took place.
- Submit your newsletter to sites such as http://www.bestezines.com. Use the URL of your newsletter page (see #3) versus your home page.
- Submit your individual newsletter articles to free article directories such as EzineArticles.com, Ideamarketers.com, and ArticleDashboard.com. You can also try an automated online service like SubmitYourArticle.com. This is a great task to offload to your virtual assistant. When you submit articles to these sites you’ll increase traffic to your website, attract new subscribers for your mailing list and improve your website’s ranking with the search engines.
- Join a joint-venture opportunity. I joined two joint venture promotions this month and my list grew like wildfire! You can partner with others who offer complementary products and/or services and put together a page of free offerings and then promote it like crazy.
Growing your list takes time but the investment is well worth it as you begin your relationship with your subscribers.
Copyright 2008, Lisa Wells
Lisa Wells is a Certified eMarketing Associate who partners with coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, managing their many online marketing needs. Move your business to the next level and up your e-marketing game – sign up for her FREE e-course “e-Marketing Toolbox Essentials” at http://www.emarketingtoolboxessentials.com where she shares ideas, tips, do’s and don’ts, as well as programs and strategies you need to avoid!
I'm Lisa Wells and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs. Whether you need someone to help you get to the 7-figure level, manage your virtual team, help you grow your business, or need a mentor for your virtual assistant business, I can help.
Alot of great comments and tips here!I can really learn alot from these suggestions and hope that i can contribute as well.keep up the good work
Any tutorials out there how to become expert in List Building ?-’.
There are literally hundreds of tutorials – some are great with solid information and some aren’t. List-building can be done using many methods and it depends on your audience and target market. Generally, people don’t like giving up their email addresses for nothing of value, so if you ARE asking for their email address make sure you have something to offer them. If you sign up for my free lesson here: http://www.quickstartyourmarketing.com/ you’ll get a free lesson on listbuilding basics, maybe that will give you some ideas. Good luck!
Lisa