How do you grow your list fast? It took me awhile to catch on to this one. Some of the newsletters that I subscribed to grew quickly, some grew slowly, and some did not grow at all. There was not really much difference between the content of the e-zines and newsletters either. Similar stories and offers were being provided by the list owners. In fact, I found that there was often less real content in the fast growing list. How did they do it? How did they create that word of mouth/mouse buzz that is so important to the small business?f
Step 3 is about building your contact list. We just looked at building the list by getting visitors to come to you when they search. The other way to create traffic is to get in front of other website owners traffic. Other website owners are already sending e-mails out and creating traffic for their websites. Why don t you leverage that traffic? Get in front of other sites existing traffic and capture e-mails and potential customers.
Special E-zine Tactics
I have 29,000 names in my contact list today. Did I capture all of those e-mail addresses myself? Your contact list can grow exponentially if you use a number of tactics together.
The small business e-zine really started to become popular near the end of 2000. At that time, you could get away with good content and a regular schedule. Everyone was starved for information and a good e-zine spread like wild fire. Two subscribers would forward the e-mail to a couple of friends or business acquaintances and the list would grow quickly. Today the inboxes are getting close to full and finding someone who subscribes on the basis of the content alone is lower. Your list will grow, just slowly.
Key Point! You Can Build Your List By
Using Other E-zines!
If you cannot get people to subscribe to your e-zine and capture their e-mail address by them visiting your website, you are going to have to use some special tactics.
Co-operate with other newsletter publishers to get in front of their subscribers. We will look at a number of ways you can get your list to grow quickly. All of them require an investment of either time or money.
Submit Your E-zine
If you cannot get visitors to your site so that they can subscribe to your e-zine newsletter, you can let them know about it through some free announcement services. As an e-zine publisher, you can submit your e-zine to an e-zine Directory. This website is designed to provide visitors with a complete listing of newsletters organized by categories. These free directories allow you to post information about your e-zine, how often you publish, if you accept ads, what kind of information you provide and a link that someone can click on to subscribe.
As a reader, you can visit these sites and find a complete listing of e-zines all in one place. Instead of searching for all the websites about a certain topic, you can subscribe to as many newsletters as you want that will send the information to you.
Write Articles
As well as announcing your e-zine through these lists, you can include any articles that you write in a number of e-zine article directories. The Article directories work in the same manner and are used by a large number of e-zine publishers who are looking for articles to include in their e-zines. After every article that you write, visit one of the following sites and submit. You are required to fill in a form with the title and body of the article. Do not get too concerned about making the text look fancy, you are submitting in a text only format.
Make sure to include a signature file for you article. The article signature file is one or two lines that tells the readers know who you are, what your Big Fat Claim is and then provides them with a link to get more involved with you. Use your link wisely. The purpose of submitting articles is to add to your contact list. Use the link for that purpose. Whatever you include in the link, make sure that it results in you getting the e-mail address of the reader. Do you have a free e-book you can offer? Is there a report that gives more detail about the article that you can offer? Set the link up as a Mailto: link. This way if they want more information they click on the link, which sends you an e-mail. At least send them to your main theme site.
The more articles that you submit, the more e-mail addresses you collect. The more article directories you submit to the more e-mail addresses you will
The more articles that you submit, the more e-mail addresses you collect. The more article directories you submit to the more e-mail addresses you will collect.
Make sure to include this article signature file on any article that you post to your own website. Include the terms for usage of any of your articles. Often another website owner will be so impressed with something that you have written that they will want to include it or a portion in a part of their website or newsletters. As part of the terms, I suggest that you require that you be notified by e-mail of the articles used. This would include where the article was used and when it was published.
Sponsor E-zines
Are you subscribed to a newsletter that has the same type of readers that you want to have as your clients? Approach the owner and offer to sponsor an issue. Depending on how the list owner has set up the e-zine, there may be solo offerings, top/middle/end/ placing or exclusive sponsorships. In each case you will have to pay for the opportunity to be in front of this person s contact list.
A solo sponsorship occurs when you write an e-mail that is sent out to someone else s contact list. A simple ad may be 300 hundred characters or five lines of text placed in the top/middle/bottom section of a regular mailing. How good are these ads? It really depends on why you do them. If you want new e-mail addresses for your list, make sure that your ad requires them to give their valid e-mail address in order to receive your offering. You are using the same strategy as if the visitor was at your website. You provide something of value to the reader to pay for their e-mail address. The response you get from your ad is determined by what you are offering and if it gets read.
Depending on the size and quality of the list, this can be an effective way to get in front of targeted prospects. A solo ad should be better than a top ad, which should be better than a middle ad etc.
If you do decide to try advertising in other peoples e-zines, ask first for some demographic information about the list. If the e-zine is owned by a professional marketer, they will have done some surveys of their readership and be able to provide you with some basic information about their readers (age, sex, job type etc). Not everyone will, but it doesn t hurt to ask.
You also want to find out how often they publish, how many subscribers they have and how many ads they run in any issue. You can also ask if they have any statistics on CTR or click-thru-rate. Do not hang you hat on the Click Thru Rate (the number of people who click on a link in an ad), you have to test your own offers to get any meaningful information.
If you want to grow your list, make sure your ad compels a reader to click on the link and that whatever that link does gives you an e-mail address. When you get really successful you can buy ads in other people s newsletters that send them to a single page sales site. We will learn about those in the next step.
Purchased Subscribers (Co-registration)
This is the one tactic that actually surprised me. When I first started out building my list there were a couple of e-zines from Internet marketers that grew at an unbelievable rate. One week I would get the newsletter and the headline would welcome 200 new subscribers . The next week the same e-zine would come and an additional 1500 subscribers would be welcomed.
Meanwhile my list was growing by 20-25 people a week.
I took a close look at their websites and I found a couple of secrets. They were buying Opt-in e-mail addresses. These Co-Registration Services get paid by newsletter owners to find people who want information about your e-zines topic. You tell them how much you want to pay for each subscriber and they will provide you with a list of people who asked to be subscribed to your e-zine.
Key Point!
The Quickest Way to Grow Your
List is by "Co-Registration"
What you get is a targeted consumer who has an expressed interest in your company specifically and you are able to retain that person's information.
You want a bigger list fast. Pay For It!
Here are some of the sites that I found. You will also find them referred to as pay per lead services or pay per subscriber programs.
www.hiplists.com
www.officelists.com
www.listpartners.com
www.worldwidelists.com
www.rankyou.com www.profitinfo.com
www.leadfactory.com
www.tucats.com
E-zine Article and E-zine Advertising Submission Sites
Visit the sites listed below. All of them are directories that match by category people who write articles and newsletter/website owners who are looking for content to publish. Last time I checked, they were all free. Some of the directories announce your newsletter to their list. Others announce any new articles that have been added to their catalog. Be sure to note that a couple of them allow for advertising in their newsletter.
Web Sites for Submitting Your Articles:
www.goarticles.com
www.bestezines.com
www.epdigest.com
www.expertarticles.com
http://ezine-marketing.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.ezinesplus.com
http://ezine-universe.com
http://ideamarketers.com
www.marketing-seek.com
http://ezadsuccess.com
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