Top 15 Ways to Build Your Subscriber List

Further to my post "Start Your Own List", below you will find several list-building ideas that will help you make the most of your email marketing efforts:

1.Provide useful, relevant and unique content. Your visitors will not give you their email addresses just because they can subscribe to your newsletter free of charge. You have to provide unique and valuable information that will be useful to your subscribers.

2.Add a subscription form to every page of your website. Make sure it stands out so it is easy to find. If appropriate, you can also include it in more than one place. For instance, your opt-in form might always appear in the top-left corner of your site, while you also include an opt-in at the bottom of some of your popular articles.

3.Make it easy for your reader to sign up. The more information you request, the fewer people will opt-in. In most cases, a name and an email address should suffice. If it's not necessary, don't include it here. (Note: If you don't have a Privacy Policy, put the words "privacy policy generator" into a search engine and you should be able to find a suitable form for your readers to review.

4.Publish a Privacy Policy. Let your readers know that they can be confident you will not share their information with others. The easiest way to do this is to set up a Privacy Policy web page and provide the link to it below your opt-in form.

5.Show your first issue or other sample to your visitors. This lets potential subscribers review your newsletter before they sign up to determine if it is something they'd be interested in.

6.Archive past newsletter issues. A "library" of past newsletters is both appealing and useful to visitors and builds your credibility as an authority. In addition, if your articles are written with good SEO techniques in mind, they can send additional traffic to your web site through good search engine positioning.

7.Contact other newsletter publishers. Introduce yourself and explore ways you may be able to help each other. Perhaps you can introduce other publisher's newsletters or print articles they have written to your list, with a link to sign up. When you contact them, be sure to tell them why you think THEIR readers would like what you have to offer and why YOUR readers would benefit from their newsletters. This is a win-win scenario; both of you will build your lists faster!

8.Give away bonuses subscribers can use. Create an opt-in bonus for joining your subscriber list. You can write an ebook or PDF report, or even hire a programmer to create downloadable or web-based software. But don't limit yourself to only a gift for new opt-ins. Remind your readers that the next bonus is coming soon. People hate to miss out on things. If you systematically pass on "goodies" throughout the year, your subscribers are unlikely to leave.

9.Ask your subscribers to pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with email marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.

10.Let others reprint your newsletter as long as the content is not modified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high-quality content and, if they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.

11.Include a "Sign Up" button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online. You want to make it easy for them to subscribe.

12.Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page has one goal − to get an opt-in and build your list. Think of it like a mini-sales letter for your subscription or opt-in bonus. It features a powerful headline and a couple of very important benefits that should make subscribers salivate to sign up to your list. Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds of targeted keywords, and advertise there using pay-per-click advertising from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

13.Include testimonials on your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put 1 or 2 strong testimonials from satisfied subscribers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video social proof) is more "believable". To increase that believability, include full names, locations and/or urls; don't use "Bob K, FL" as a testimonial name.

14.Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with your potential customers, and it creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign-up form on each page of your blog. You can start a free blog at Blogger or Wordpress.

15.Post on other blogs. Post great comments and information on similar blogs with a link to your squeeze or opt-in page. Also comment on others' blogs through trackbacks. In most cases, your comments will be posted on their blogs with a link back to your site. This is an easy way to generate new traffic and subscribers.

Lastly, you can get started with a free account GetResponse that lets you create a Web form to capture Emails and Create Targetted Marketing messages to subscribers.

Start Your Own List

Most websites now use a simple email address capture form for interested readers to subscribe to some form of newsletter or site update. Whether you send that Newsletter daily/ weekly or monthly or whatever frequency is up to you.

But I just wanted to make you understand how important it is for you to capture your reader's email adresses. I am not talking spamming, but legitimate means to reach your readers outside your blog or website.

Think about it, your readers read your blogs or articles and once they are off, you have no way of connecting to them again! Unless they come to your site again. What if you have some new products that is related to your overall theme and could prove very useful to your readers.

Welcome to the world of online list building. People also call it as Cash Registers, because having a focused interested list of people following you is an relatively easy target for selling more products (then approaching totally new customers). This is because of two reasons- the reader liked your articles/ content and trust that your opinion/ views presented on the site are honest. So whatever product you will suggest, readers will ofcourse trust them as well. That's the power of list.

Let me take an example. Let's say your site gives information on Online Money Making tips (something like this blog). You also promote some products (may be an ebook / course) that are relevant to your overall money making opportunities.

It receives unique visitors- 100 per month and out of them, 5 people buy some product of 20$ each (your profit 5*20 = 100$). If you didn't have a list that's your max profit.

You don't know who visited your website and you don't have a contact to followup. If you had asked your readers to subscribe, you would have easily followed up with them to understand their queries, and answered all their doubts regarding products. See, this means extra profit!

Now comes the question of how do I implement this...a web form that can capture your readers' email adress and may be a name. You should perhaps not really try to capture any more detail than this. Why? Because people feel offensive to be asked their email addresses. Online world is begot with spammers and it's a risk for anyone to just give theitr email address to someone. How would you feel about it? So forget something like phone no.

You could coax people to give their phone numbers as well, if you could promise them some free report and something significant for them to let go their phone no. Otherwise, don't even try.

Second point, be sure you always have a privacy policy...or may be even a simple statement like 'We respect your privacy and will in no way share/ sell email ids'.

Now comes the form that will capture your reader's email ids.

There are many services that allow you to capture this, both free and paid. I suggest to start with, start with a free account at GetResponse.com (you can watch a free tour)

Just follow their instructions on how to create a web form, it generates a html/ javascript code which you merely needs to inject somewhere in your website html code. Overall it takes approx 10 minutes to set up your form and see your list growing.