Is PPC the only way you can drive traffic? Do you have a blog or website?

If you want to build a list using PPC, you need to make sure your keyword selections are 100% targeted to get the most out of it. Also your landing page must look very presentable in a way that it grabs attention of the visitors that land on your page.

Theres no secret method, build a few squeeze pages - set up google experiments to split test them, set up adwords campaigns and drive the traffic

Adwords is not cheap however so if you are both new to paid traffic and list building I would focus on gaining free visits "social/seo/youtube"

Good luck

Yeah Google can get really expensive especially if you have not targeted your keywords properly. How much are you willing to pay per new list sign up? What you can do is buy some banner space on some forums and then have a squeeze page that is giving away something free in exchange for their opt-in to your list.

I recently helped get a book to market on the kindle and Amazon and we gave the first chapter free in exchange for their newsletter signup. This is helping us fuel our list building and paying less per new sign up.

Squeeze pages *can* be used with Google Adwords, but they do have restrictions. As Google's TOS explains, they do not allow advertising of sites whose "primary purpose of the site is to collect personally identifiable information."

This doesn't mean you can't capture opt-in leads. But it does mean that if Google perceives that the main purpose of a site is to capture leads or other "personally identifiable information", it can and likely will be banned from Adwords (at least until the issue is corrected).

They're fanatical about providing searchers with a "good user experience." Though they may not clearly spell out exactly how they define which sites violate their restrictions on "collecting personally identifiable information" and which don't, I think their main concern is that they don't want searchers to go to a landing page that presents only one option (or very few options) to access the content the searcher sought when clicking the ad: To opt-in.

~ Marty Foley