First, before you even try to implement any of the list building methods listed below, you need to make sure you have the following things in place:
Be sure you have your website up; be sure you have your product ready for distribution; be sure you have your auto-responder loaded; be sure you have your PayPal account ready to receive payment; be sure you have your squeeze page linked to our auto-responder (A-weber or Get-Response); be sure your product is ready for download as soon as a subscriber enters their email address.
Be sure ALL of the individual parts of your business are working (and working together) BEFORE implementing any of the methods of list building below!
Got those? OK, here are three ways of building your list…
- WSO’s
I have used this to great effect and it is a great way to kick-start your list building. To do this you must be in the Internet marketing niche but if you are I highly recommend it as a starting point. The Warrior Forum is an Internet business discussion forum and the WSO section is a special place where members can advertise special offers to other forum members. The beauty of it is that the people who view your ad are going to be highly targeted and let me tell you now, this place gets a LOT of traffic. Stick your free offer on there and as long as it’s a decent product you should see the first people joining your list within minutes of posting your ad…
- Ad-swaps
Once you’ve got a small list (I would say of at least 100 people) then you can move on to ad-swaps. The concept is pretty simple – you find someone else who would be willing to mail your offer to their list in return for you doing the same for them. You’ll either need to find someone with a similar size list or agree to mail more than once. Ad-swaps are free but are a highly effective way of building your list.
- Solo ads
A solo ad is when you pay someone else to send a broadcast email out to “their list” – advertising your product. It is called a solo ad because the single purpose of the email will be to advertise your product. The key to this method is to choose advertising partners carefully. You need to make sure the person with whom you are placing your solo advertisement has subscribers who will be interested in your freebie. If they aren’t then they are not going to be joining your list any time soon…
Using these three methods WILL result in you increasing the size of your list. If done correctly, you can combine all three methods to jump-start your list building efforts very quickly! Once someone subscribes to your list – you need to follow-up with them while they are still HOT. If you let several days go by without communicating with them – all of your efforts will have been for nothing… and you will have to start over.
