How To Build A List of 2000 Subscribers For Free In 3 Easy Steps!
If you are wondering how to build a list for free like many successful online business owners, I have really good news for you…
I managed to build a list of more than two thousands in the Internet marketing niche (it’s now 4000+), and more than 1000+ in my other non IM niche with completely free methods.
How to build a list for free?
First, let me tell you a short story that may inspire you…
When I first started online, I spent some time with safelists and other traffic exchange websites (it didn’t really work for me though. I heard it works for some people, so if you make money from this, make sure to contact me), and I realized that some of them were using these sites to build their mailing lists.
I ultimately decided to create a list, but I didn’t have any money to buy a paid autoresponder. I remember getting started with sendfree autoresponder and getresponse free trial. At my surprise, I quickly start to add subscribers, and I reached 100 subscribers after a couple of weeks. BUT the problem was that now, I had to upgrade (if you remember, I was broke). Get response didn’t let me add more subscribers to the list, and hence, I lost hundreds of subscribers because every visitor who wanted to optin my newsletter would see a message like “You can subscribe”. I was really upset about this…but there was nothing I could do.
So don’t let this happen to you and start with the right autoresponder software right away.
1. The right mindset
It’s really important that you understand that you too CAN build a list and make money from it. I coach many beginners and I know for a fact that many of them don’t have enough confidence to start building their own mailing lists. Don’t let this happen to you. In fact, if you aren’t already collecting email addresses through an optin form on your site, I suggest you to start right after you finished reading this article.
Let me show you my aweber autoresponder below with 3509 susbcribers. I have another autoresponder with 1000+ subscribers, so it’s 4000+:
list size in aweber
2. Create your list building pages
There are many methods to build a list, but today I’m going to teach you what have worked for me. Today, I also use paid list building methods because they usually work faster, but this blueprint is for those of you who can’t afford any of these more expensive methods…or are still not sure that this really work (don’t worry, I was thinking like you when I started as well)
What are list building pages?
List building pages definition: These are the pages that will bring the more subscribers into your list. The first is your squeeze page, the second is your pop up (or pop over), and the third is your blog sidebar – or the most visited page on your main site. You absolutely need to have these pages if you are serious about creating an income with a mailing list.
When I started, I had all these component in place, although I was a brand newbie. I remember that I read an article saying the following (in my own words, since I didn’t memorize it):
You should add a optin form to every single page you have on your website because most of your subscribers will never come back. Once they are gone, they are gone forever. By capturing their email address, you will be able to keep in touch with them, and they may ending up buying your product as a results. Even better, a percentage of them will end up buying your high end coaching programs.
Note that in some cases, you don’t want to add an optin form to you site because this will decrease the value of your MWR (most wanted response), but I let this for another lesson.
Let’s take these page one by one:
- Your squeeze page: this one will be your list siphon page. It’s a ‘separate’ page on your site. The only purpose of this page is to get people in your list. Here is an example of one of my own squeeze pages (made me thousands of dollars by the way, and paid a lot of bills!) As you can see, it’s pretty simple, and you only need a couple of minutes to create it. You will drive a lot of free traffic (as explained below) to this page, and if you write a powerful marketing message (it’s not difficult and you don’t need to be a copywriting king ever. Just look in forums in your niche to find out what are the hot topics that people are interested in, and you have your headline) test and tweak, 50% of your visitors should end up your list.
- Your Pop Up: many unscrupulous marketers (or may be ignorant?) want to make you believe that pop ups don’t work anymore because people don’t want to be annoyed with this when they visit your site, but I tested this and I found that this is a totally false statement. When you add a pop up to your site or blog, in most of the cases, you will increase your optin rate by 50% or more, and in some cases by 100%.
- Your Blog Sidebar: blog weren’t popular when I first started online, but today it’s different. The very first thing you want to do when creating your online business (any kind of online business) is setting up your wordpress blog. Blog get a lot of traffic via the search engines, and you will drive even more traffic with social media sites like facebook twitter, digg and others. As you can see, on this blog, my optin form appears on every single page, and it’s also in the header just in case my visitor didn’t notice it in the sidebar. By the way, if you are not already subscribed, I suggest you do so if you want more killer list building tips and advice. I’ll show how to grow your list to 1000+ fast.
The combination of these three will add thousands of subscribers to your list for free with the techniques I will show you below if you take massive action.
3. Drive targeted traffic to your pages
This is where subscribers will start to pour in. I’ll develop each of the point below more in depth in other posts, but this is enough to get you started. You only want to pick one of these traffic strategies anyway. The right way to do it is to pick one, become very good at it, and then, go to the next. I started with article marketing, got thousands of articles on the Internet, and I only started to try new techniques to drive traffic to my list building pages when I became an expert at driving traffic with free articles.
Here are the traffic getting strategies I used when I got started online:
- Article Marketing: I made thousands of dollars with article marketing with list building. While every marketer was driving direct traffic to their affiliate offers following the bum marketing system, I wasn’t. All I was doing was writing quality articles and adding links to my squeeze page in the author box. Article marketing is a powerful way to build your list. Today, it is tougher to get a lot of traffic with this method because after the Google Panda update earlier this year, article directory sites lost a lot of their traffic. However, you can still make it with long tail keywords in less competitive niches.
- Search engine optimization: This will also add a lot of subscribers to your list. Whether you have a blog or a static html site, working on your onpage and offpage optimization will increase you traffic. And if you add your optin form on all your pages, you will get a decent amount of optins every day. Just 10 optins per day will make you 300 subscribers per month, and 3600 new subscribers per year.
- Forum marketing: Now, this will not work in every niche, but if you provide good content in various forums in your niche, people will recognize you as an expert, and adding your signature file will not be seen as a problem. If you are an ethical marketer, you shouldn’t have any problem with this method. It works.
- Ad swaps: This is a super fast way to get results. All you need to do is to find other marketers in your list, and ask them to change your squeeze page to their list. You will then reciprocate by sending their squeeze page to your own list. There is an art to do it though, and I see many marketers doing it all wrong.
- Blogging: When I say blogging, I don’t only mean posting to your blog…I also think about all the other related activities like guest blogging (this one is powerful and I will write another article about it soon), , blog carnival and blog commenting on other blogs within your niche (blogs with comment luv, do follow, and also without these two.)
- Free ebook givaway: This is another excellent technique. You distribute your own free ebook with links that drive back to your blog/site inside. This will add subscribers to your list slowly, but steadily. And the more free ebook you put out there, the more subscribers you will get.
That’s it.
Here is how to build your list for free like the pros. And don’t underestimate these method or think that they don’t work because they do. Sure it will be slower than using other paid technique, but I still use these in my business and recommend my subscribers to do so.
You need the right mindset, then you create your list building pages, and start driving traffic to these pages like crazy. Soon, we will learn how you can make $0.50 to $1 per subscriber with a proper sales funnel.
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Franck helps Internet new and advanced online marketers to build a list for free with aweber autoresponder. He can show you how to make money with your tiny list with his proven and tested system.
