High Volume/High Stakes List Building Strategies
Published January 22, 2010 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
Ask any of the highly successful Internet marketers, and all of them will tell you how important list building is for promoting your website and for building a successful online business. Attempting to promote your online business without the use of an effective list building strategy is the equivalent of marketing a business strictly by cold calling. It gives you no option for passive income generation, backend sales or for increasing customer loyalty.

However, good list building gives you the option of generating repeat business and exploding the success of your online business. This article will provide you with some of the high volume approaches for building a solid customer list.

The Risks of High Volume List Building

Before you apply any strategy for high volume list building, it's important to consider the potential pitfalls. For example, using pre-existing lists which you have purchased or rented from third parties could result in spam complaints and even the blacklisting of your IP address. To avoid this kind of risk, it is a good idea to only use high-volume list building practices to get started. Also, it's important to remember that the size of your list is not anywhere near as important as your relationship with your list members.

Use the following strategies with caution and only for the sake of getting your list started. Once you have established a list of about 500 members, focusing your attention on maximizing those customers and on acquiring the rest of your list slowly.

High Volume List Building

  • List building services
List building services allow you to send an email to thousands of customers who are not already on your list so that you can build your own list faster. Some of the most popular and effective list building services are: List Joe, Viral Url and List Bandit. All of these sites have free and paid plans which allow you to build your list simply by sending out email ads leading back to your squeeze page offer.

  • Ezine advertising through ad swapping
Ezine advertising is sending your offer to a list of customers who are subscribed to someone else’s mailing list or online Ezine. Most of the time, you can accomplish this by allowing the Ezine owner to promote products to your list of subscribers. You can find these kinds of relationships through sites like Charlie’s Directory of Ezines or The Warrior Forum.

  • Viral List Building
The most effective list building strategy is the use of viral “tell a friend” scripts which encourage your existing subscribers to send their entire address book an invitation to your squeeze page offer. This script is something which your customer’s should be seeing the moment they join your list as well as the moment that they join your forum. You should always offer an incentive like a free eBook or free report to your customers in exchange for sending their friends an invitation to your squeeze page offer.  Some popular tell a friend programs are: free tell a friend script and viral inviter.

Other High Stakes List Building Strategies

  • 100% Affiliate Commissions
A powerful way to build your customer list quickly is to sell a downloadable product for a very high affiliate commission. For example, if you have a $47 e-book and MP3 file product, you can offer an affiliate commission of $45 per sale. This will give you enough to cover the transaction cost, while creating an irresistible opportunity for affiliate marketers to promote your product. Just be sure that you are capturing the names and e-mails of the customers who purchase your product so that you can leverage the high commission percentage to build your list.

  • Affiliate Awards for Opt Ins
Another fast way to build your list is to pay your affiliates a commission for each list member which they generate. For example, you might pay your affiliates $.25 for each new name and e-mail address which they bring to your customer list. When using this approach, be sure that you are using a double opt in process in order to keep dishonest affiliates from submitting names and e-mails without getting permission from the owner of the e-mail account.

  • Give Away Prizes
The final high stakes list building strategy is to offer your affiliates and list members prizes in exchange for the highest number of referrals. For example, you might have a contest for a free iPhone for the affiliate or list member who provides you with the highest number of referrals. Just be sure that if you are using this approach you are also requiring a double opt in and that you set a minimum amount of referrals which the prizewinner must achieve in order to receive the prize.

Conclusion

While it might be tempting to continue to use these kinds of strategies for expanding your list, it's always important to make sure that you are focusing on quality instead of on quantity. Always remember that you are relationship with the list is the most important factor in successful promotion of your online business.

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