5 Additional List Building Strategies

By: Matt Bacak

When traditional list building strategies no longer work, it’s time to engage a more aggressive strategy.
1. Advertise in other people’s related newsletters – Most internet marketers will spend thousands of dollars on conferences and information products but spend nothing on advertising their own product. There are two good reasons to buy advertising in related newsletters: 1) people have an interest in the product or service and 2) they are already subscribed to a newsletter. Think of this strategy as a sound investment. When you advertise on Facebook or Google, you try your best to identify potential customers but you could end up with people who are not interested or sign up for the free giveaway and then remove their names from your opt-in list soon after opting-in.
2. Cross promotion campaigns with other internet marketers – When Brendon Burchard first started out he had a dozen names on his list. Every event that he attended he would exchange business cards and then follow up with each person. He offered to email his list with the other person’s product if they would reciprocate. Soon he turned his list of 50 into 100 and then 1000 by practicing this one strategy. Others have used this technique with internet marketers with products to offer. You should suggest this strategy to people with similar list size. In other words, someone with a list of 10,000 won’t be open to promoting your product or service if you only have 50 names on it.
3. Have a compelling lead magnet – Offering e-books on a topic for free in exchange for your visitor’s opt-in information works; the problem is there are thousands of e-book offered every day. The e-book message gets diluted among the majority of websites. Make your offer compelling and different. Instead of an e-book, offer an audio book as a download (where you read the same e-book into an audio program like Audacity). You can also separate the e-book into individual reports and offer each report for free. This strategy would also be good with split testing to see which report draws more opt-ins.
4. Consider offering your product to an affiliate market like Clickbank and let the affiliates sell it for you. Affiliates are motivated by commissions so offer a higher percentage commission than your competitor. The affiliates will drive traffic to your website where you can capture the leads in the form of opt-ins.
5. Paid traffic – You can buy advertising through Google Adwords or Facebook ads or you can locate websites with high traffic and ask them to place your banner ad on their site. Some web owners may say no, but many will say yes. How many times have you visited a website and saw banner ads prominently displayed on the header. Although paying for traffic in the form of ads is controversial, the potential customers you get (who click on your ad) are targeted customers. They already have an interest in the topic and may well be ready to buy.