Best ways of list building?

I'm not a fan of giveaways, though they do get optins. Problem is, the optins are crap for quality. I've found the best way to get optins is to collect them off of targeted information. Joint venture mailings, adwords, squidoo, and a bunch of other marketing strategies can get you traffic to a landing page, but be sure you're collecting them by giving information that is VERY targeted to your later product(s) and hopefully presell them a bit too.

Instead of doing a giveaway you can simply charge $1 for something that is worth alot more and then you know that the people who are on your list are willing buyers and will potentially buy from you again.

In my eye's it's better to have a good small responsive list than have a list of people who won't benefit you.

Tom Brite

I have never had more success with growing a list than by giving away my music free and royalty free...and making people sign up to get it. It awesome to log in and see those number go up every day! I hope people don't think that is a shameless plug, just an honest answer to the question.

The best way I found is to offer a free mini course, not garbage either. Give something that make people think "wow I can't believe she gave that away for nothing". Seriously, this will make it go viral. Not only that you will have a list full of people just looking to give you money.

Trouble I had with contests is that 45 seconds after the person signs up that have no idea who you are. If your email doesn't say You Won, they aren't interested.

Try using twitter and promissing band tickets and then linking the opt ins to a CPA email submit.

I have been taking a look at Google Analytics to improve opt-in.

For me personally, I break things down and tryi to figure out the best method to reach new subscribers for each medium.

What I do is I click on "All Traffic Sources" tab within Google Analytics then try to figure out a few things like.

New Visits
Average Time on Site
% New Visits
Bounce Rates

For example, it's interesting to study that only 57% of visitors from Warrior Forum are new visitors, which means these people have visited sites in the past.

On the other hand, 94% of EzineArticles.com visitors are new visitors who are outside my sphere of influence -- people don't know me, don't care about me (higher bounce rate) and never met and it'll require more relationship building. I should approach them with different landing page to capitalize on the traffic coming from that site alone.

Traffic generated from organic Google search stay longer and visit more pages for me, and I assume majority come from blog traffic, reading its content.

I'd like to spend half of my research time using my left brain like this, then spend the other half using my right brain, experimenting with different creatives, opening headline, color etc.

Suppose you had three products of your own--one truly great product and two mediocre ones. The standard line of thought would be to sell the great product, for say $77, and use one or both of the mediocre products as opt-in bonuses on your main sales page.

However, a good case can be made for using the terrific product as the opt-in bonus and sell one of the mediocre products on your sales page for less than the $77 you would have charged for the great one--let's say for $27.

Another option would be to use your great product on a stand-alone squeeze page as a bonus and drive traffic to it by including a link in your resource box in articles you submit to directories. If you write enough articles you can get a lot of targeted traffic.

Disadvantages: You make less money up front and you feel a knot in your stomach about giving away your top-notch product.

Advantages: You probably grow your list faster, and when the people who opt-in see the quality of your work, they respect you as an authority figure. And--you have a larger list to market to several times a week if you choose. You can market both your own products and affiliate products for months... years...

I've mentioned Mike before, but Michael Rasmussen's Mini-Sites Profits Exposed is the very best example of this technique I have come across. His free course is worth much, much more than any $97 ebook I have ever bought. But in exchange for giving away his top-of-the-line course, he built a huge list from the thing. A fair exchange I should think.

Another guy I got a huge, free, top-notch course from about six months ago in exchange for opting in to his list now, sends me an email each and every day! Every day! A lot of people might opt-out, but he is so good at writing his email headlines and content--I study them to try to emulate his success.

Just a thought.

Video on my squeeze pages!!

There are many reasons why adding video to your sign-up page increases response. Some say it's because it cements my credibility and people feel comforted that there is a person behind the webpage. But one thing I have found from all my testing is adding video caused my visitors to stay on my website longer.

Adwords campaign with long tail cheap keywords that runs auto-pilot each day bringing opt-ins.

I think that offering a video instead of an ebook is a good idea as well.

showing something on video is valued more than reading text...