Building an Opt-in Email List

One of the most powerful ways to bring people to your website again and again is to have them sign up for your opt-in email list. Once someone has signed up you can send them tips, articles and special offers, while at the same time reminding them to visit your website. To see how this works, you can use the form on this page to sign up for my Home Business Tips newsletter.

To get your own free 400 day pre-written ezine in a box, complete with autoresponder, sign up for your own Plugin Profit Site. here.

If you want to start up your own ezine you can choose to write it yourself, or publish some of the many free articles available on the internet, or a combination of the two.

Once you have decided on your material, the next thing you need is the tool to make it work - an autoresponder. There are many autoresponders available on the market today, but I personally use an autoresponder from Get Response. The basic version is free and you can optionally upgrade to a paid version which has more features and no advertising.

Once you've got all of this set up, all you need is some subscribers! One free way to do this is to search for ezine directories on Google and submit your website/ezine in these directories, or use some software such as Ezine Announcer to do all of this automatically for you. Another way is by having a form on your website and promote your website using some of the ideas on my Beginner's guide to Internet Marketing, Promotion and Advertising page.

Free List Building methods

If you are on a tight budget, there are a number of free methods that you can use to build a list:

• ListInferno allows you to insert a simple piece of javascript in one or more pages of your website. This script displays a list of newsletters (scroll to the bottom of this page for an example. Every time I display this list I receive a credit. For every credit I earn my newsletter is shown on another web page.
  
  
• Advertising Know How is both a traffic exchange and a list builder. You can earn ezine credits through the list builder by promoting other ezines on your "Thankyou" page. This is the page on your website that people arrive at when they have bought something from you or signed up for something. You can also earn ezine credits by choosing to receive articles by email. Each article you receive has a link in at that you can click on to receive ezine credits. Your credits are used in exchange for free advertising of your ezine on other people's thankyou pages.
  
  

Using a Lead Capture or Squeeze Page

Another option is to use a lead capture page, also known as a squeeze page.

Here are a couple of recommended lead capture services:

• Plug-In Profit Lead Capture Page Service
• PIPS Opt-in Page Service

Purchasing Leads

If you have some money to spare, it also possible to buy leads. I personally only recommend double opt-in leads who have actually signed up for my newsletter, as these are of a much higher quality than the leads who have just signed up to receive information on a particular subject. I have used all the following before (please note that if you use GetResponse, you can't use any of these companies to build your list as it is against their terms. You can only purchase leads from GetResponse) List Builder from List Opt Click on the links below to find out more information:

• List Builder from List Opt
• List Builder PRO
• Traffic Oasis

I believe that the best leads are the ones that you generate from your own site. You can find out how I recently quadripled my daily subscribers here.