Kick-Ass List Building Secrets of a 5 Year Internet Marketing Veteran (you can't afford to miss)

As years went by, email list building has slowly moved to the top of my priority list. Now it has become the central axis of my business. I think only through experience, one can realize the power of having an email list.

So I have been thinking of a lot of ideas to build an email list and accelerate its growth. I jot down ideas whenever I get one.

The first thing is to build a squeeze page. I use optimize press for that and it works pretty well. I use google website optimizer to split test the pages and arrive at the maximum possible conversion rate. In my opinion, split testing should be a never ending process - until you reach a saturation point.

(Please note that these ideas are only for building the list. I have not gone into managing the relationship with the list or selling to it. Analogy: Ideas for how to get dates - not relationship advice)

Here is my list of ideas. (feel free to add to it!)

Ideas that will let you get started immediately... build a list of 500-1000 fast...

• Blog commenting with link to squeeze page
• Guest blogging with author bio link to squeeze page (forget about getting a backlink for SEO purposes unless they allow two links)
• Forum posting - promoting squeeze page link in sig
• Video marketing - posting informative videos on youtube and directing viewers to click the link or visit your domain name to watch part 2 of the video. (Part 1/Part 2 system works best for traffic generation from youtube)
• Submit articles in web 2.0 properties
• Convert articles to presentations and post in slideshare.net and authorstream.com
• Create a viral PDF report and give away for email address.

Leveraging existing subscribers for more list growth:

• Now is the time to start blogging. Write useful content for your subscribers and then broadcast the link to your latest posts to your tribe. You will get comments and social activity which will help in SEO. If you get some traffic to the blog through search engines, then you can use OptinSkin and PopupDomination to grow subscribers from your blog. Here's where the snowball effect comes in!

High end List building methods (Requires more time, energy and money):

Once you have a blog and a list of 1000 subscribers, these methods will really help take things to the next level.

• Use your existing tribe to understand their needs and create an info product or a software tool. Promote it at 100% affiliate commission. This should be a front end product. List will grow like crazy.
• Advertise your product and try to break even. If it breaks even then scale up like crazy. Your ad cost and profit from front end product will balance each other and what you have left is the email ID of the buyer!
• Write a good book and publish it on the Kindle store. Give away great value for a very low price. $4.99 is a good price for a Kindle book. (People won't hesitate to buy and they will also not shy away from it like they do with $0.99 Kindle books). Have a QR code and link to your squeeze page in your book. Make a special gift for your Kindle book buyers and let them optin.
• Publish real books and follow the above method.
• If applicable, develop a tool, software, theme or plugin for your niche and give it away for free.

The above mentioned high end tactics not only costs money but also requires the initial push - that's why building a list of 1000 first helps.

Have ideas? Please add to this.

I will be coming back to this thread often for a very long time!

Deepak Raj

Ideas from replies in this thread:

- Give incentives to people so that they share your content online, and when they do...get new subscribers by offering them a first-time visit bonus! - princecapri