There’s no point in putting out a great newsletter if you don’t have a list of people to send it to. Building your list is an ongoing process, and here are a few ways to get started:

1. Provide a free gift, such as an e-course, a special report, an e-book, or a tip sheet. Nowadays people aren’t going to hand over their email without getting something else valuable in return. You or your virtual assistant can set up your autoresponder or shopping cart program to deliver this gift once a visitor has submitted their name and email. 
2. Make sure you have a sign-up box on each page of your website; you never know which page people will land on. Also, make sure the sign-up box is “above the fold” so that visitors don’t have to scroll all around to find it.
3. Create a separate landing page at your website that’s dedicated to your newsletter or free gift. Include a description, testimonials, a sample issue or archives and of course your sign-up box. See my e-course offering page as an example:  http://www.emarketingtoolboxessentials.com/

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I wanted to share with you a marketing/list-building  strategy that I’m part of this month. And it’s been unbelievable. Joint venturing is a great idea that you can do with your clients and/or other colleageus to grow your lists. Here’s what we did:

My client has a pretty large list (1100+ subscribers) and she knows a few other people with large lists, but mostly she contacted about 15 other people who have a free product to offer and want to grow their lists. She had them each send to me their blurb, link to free product page, and a graphic. My task was to create the “free giveaway” page and pull all the info together.

We are using this month (June is Effective Communications month) to our benefit as we have each person send out two announcements during  the month, directing everyone to the free giveaway page. We provided the suggested copy for everyone as well as letting them tweak as necessary.

The result? I went from 132 subscribers to over 200 in one day. And the best part is that this is going on all month long; each participant is promoting in their newsletters, blogs, broadcasting to their ‘lists’, posting on listservs, posting on Yahoo groups… it’s viral marketing at its best! This not only forced me to up my marketing game but I created an upsell product to offer all these new subscribers. Not to mention that my client gets a nice target market to highlight her new program and new product. Genius! Continue Reading