Building an IM list from scratch

This is worth a try because it is a proven model which works. So do your best to plan and track your conversion and whether you have hit your target by a specific date.

Cheers,
John

David, from my personal experience, I earn about $2.50 per subscriber every 3 months, so I can afford to pay $2.00 per subscriber or more and still turn in a profit. Of course, the ideal is to pay lesser than that, but don't be afraid of paying more to get a subscriber if you can do it. I've learned that's the trick to really scaling up list building.

One of my friends makes more than $8 per month per opt-in through trial offers, so he really goes all out and spends thousands every month on Adwords. Of course, that is out of reach for most of us but anyone can earn $2 per subscriber at least over 6 months.

But I'm going off tangent. I started out using free list building techniques and they are still a big part of my game, so use those.

Fabian

Sideserver, what makes your product UNIQUE. Focus on that point in your articles and marketing. Make sure it doesn't sound like the same old song and dance and people will take that next step and opt-in to learn more.

Also, approach several potential JV partners. Offer to hold a free-teleseminar and promote the product at the end and in the middle. Offer 75-100% commission for partners whose list can benefit from your product. Obviously, approach people who aren't competitors of yours. In exchange for the high commission you want to manage the registration page and have listeners sign up through your page...thus getting the opt-ins.

Some more savvy marketers won't want you to have that much access to their list, but there are plenty out there who will be fine with it. JV's are a great way to build a list quickly. They have the list, but you have the product.

Hope that helps.

Article Marketer is a big part of the picture here if you intend to use article marketing to build a mailing list. At $33/month for unlimited articles, it's an incredible deal. I'm not affiliated in any way with them, but that's how I'd do it at your stage of the game.

Regarding how you get people to opt-in, you might want to do a split test and build two lists simultaneously. Send some traffic to a squeeze page with a sign-up offering a free product (ebook, whatever) in exchange for their name and email. Send other traffic to a sales page and collect contact info of those who pay for the product.

Lots of experts will tell you that a list of former paying customers is worth a lot more to you in the long run than one composed of freebie getters. Of course, you'll grow the freebie list a lot faster and bigger, but 100 former customers might put more money in your pocket than 1,000 freebie getters.

Test it.

Either way, article marketing is a great way to get a list built. Just be careful because there is a law of diminishing returns at play. For example, the amount of traffic you get from 10 articles all going live at the same time at EzineArticles will not be anywhere near 10X the traffic you get from a single article going live at one time. You're essentially competing against yourself if you go beyond about 3 or 4 per day. I try to hit 2 or 3. That's why a service like Article Marketer is vital. Spreads your single article out all over the place, creating lots of traffic funnels instead of a bottleneck at one or two locations from the same article. Good luck with it!

John

Well, if you aren't already at the Platinum Level at EZA, then at first I'd not worry much about the traffic from articles. Just get enough approved under each pen name to be at that level. Then your articles get approved faster (usually 2-3 days) and you can submit all you want.

Then having 5 different pen names will expand your operations, definitely. I don't have the time to write more than a few articles a day (at most), so it's not really an issue in my case, but if I was going to do more I'd add some pen names and get them to Platinum asap.

However, while the author names will be different, you're still going to have 5 articles all coming online on the same day (most of the time). So while the "competing with yourself" problem should be diminished, it's still there to some extent. Bottom line, I'd go with the 5 pen names and 1 article each scheme, but I don't know if it will help all that much to mitigate the traffic problem. My gut feeling is that it would help at least somewhat.

John