How I Built A List of over 1,000 Subscribers in 4 Weeks

This is a guest post by Paul McCarthy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

We all know that to making money online is all about building a list – if you have a responsive list of many thousand people then making money online is just so easy…But how do you actually build a list of this size quickly?

Most people will tell you that to build a list of 10,000 people would take an average internet marketer a couple of years of consistent and dedicated action.

In this article, I’m going to tell you a few list building strategies that I used recently to grow my list to four figures within the first four weeks of launch. These strategies aren’t incredibly difficult to master – in fact, anyone can do them…So let’s get started:

1. Create a Giveaway that People Want!

It sounds obvious but I see so many beginners get this basic step wrong. A great giveaway is one that people want to get their hands on so much that they’d pay for it, let alone enter their name and email address into the opt-in box.

I always look for the most prevalent problem in any given niche. If I’m building a list in the internet marketing world and I want to target beginners, then I’ll offer a free course on how to build your first web site.

If I’m going to target slightly more advanced marketers then I may put together a course that tells people all the ways they can get traffic to their site.

Either way, the giveaway must have a high perceived value in the eyes of your visitors.

2. Create a Web Site with a High Opt-in Percentage

I always create a “squeeze page” web site – this is simply a one page web site that is solely designed to capture the names and email addresses of visitors. It will advertise the “benefits” of the free giveaway that I briefly spoke about in my point above with the view to “bribing” the visitors to enter their credentials.

I always try and shoot for a squeeze page that converts at around 35%, although anything above 20% is still very good.

3. Driving Traffic

Driving traffic is the key part of the list building equation – the more visitors that you get to your web site, the more people that will opt in to your list.

Here is a traffic strategy that works in competitive niches (such as make money online, FOREX and internet marketing):

• Find a number of high profile blogs and web sites that accept guest posts and submit posts that really provide excellent value. This will keep the blog owner happy as the readers will be pleased with the content.
• Joint joint venture giveaways – This is a very powerful tactic that can really explode your list size. You should try and seek out giveaway events in your niche and add your free giveaway as a contributor.
• A joint venture giveaway is basically a promotion where many people come together and offer free gifts at a special event. Each contributor then takes it turns to promote the event to their existing list of subscribers. If you have a great giveaway that catches the eye of people then you’ll be able to grow your list by hundreds for each giveaway that you attend.
• Integration marketing – One of the most powerful ways to create a consistent stream of traffic is to form joint ventures with other players in your niche. Integration marketing is all about adding advertising someone else’s product or giveaway in return for the same. This can be very powerful if you seek out the right strategic partners
• Aswaps – Similar to integration marketing, this is where you find partners to advertise with, however an adswap is a one off event whereas integration marketing is advertising that’s integrated into an email campaign on an ongoing basis
• Create a Viral Report – this is incredibly powerful if you can do it properly. The idea is to create a brandable PDF report so people can add their own affiliate links and promote it to their list. I had incredible success creating a brandable report about article marketing that contained affiliate links to related products. I then took this report and offered it to my list so they could quickly make some money. Of course, embedded in the report is links to my web site encouraging people to sign up to my list!
• Forum Marketing – Last but not least, when you’re in a popular niche you can be rest assured that there are popular forums that you can take advantage of. Make sure that when you join these forums you have an attractive signature that’s benefit driven and makes people curious (so they are more inclined to click through).

4. Use Your Subscribers to Promote Your Content Themselves

The final part of the equation is to encourage your existing subscribers to promote your site as often as possible. Subscribers on my email list get a lot of valuable content for free – in return for this free content, I ask them to socially bookmark the content and make references on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

You can also incorporate a refer a friend script into your backend – this script alone has added 42 subscribers (according to my tracking software) to my list in the last month.

In Summary

If there’s one point you should take away from this post it’s this: When you are in competitive niches you need to collaborate with others for mutual gain. Joint ventures are hugely powerful when done correctly, so make friends and create some mutually beneficial arrangements!

About Author :
If you’d like to learn how to do everything in this article and how to make a full time living from home then visit FromZeroToWebsite.com and Paul McCarthy will teach you personally himself for free.

Tagged as: List Building, Make money online