The Easiest Way to Build a List

Almost everybody new to Internet marketing ends up asking the same questions. One of the most common is, “What’s the easiest way to build a list?Well, I guess I could answer, “Collect email addresses!”, but that wouldn’t be particularly helpful. So I’ll try to go deeper.

First, understand that there are two flavors of easy:
-one that costs money
-one that doesn’t

It’s pretty common for beginners to have more time than money, so getting what you can get for free is a great strategy. Assuming, of course, that the free way actually works.

In this case, it does. In fact, either way can work extremely well, and I’ve used both myself.

The free strategy starts with offering something free, like a downloadable PDF report, or maybe an ecourse.

Then you need to send free, targeted traffic to that offer to entice people to sign up.

Here are three free ways to get traffic, and I bet you’ve heard of them all:
1) Post in forums, with a link to your site in your forum signature. That “sig” is likely to get you some click-through traffic, if what you say is compelling enough. (HINT: You could tell them about your free offer!)
2) Write short articles and publish them for free at sites like EzineArticles.com. You’ll put a link to your site in your author box at the end of the article, which most article sites encourage. You might say something like this:
“Michael Rasmussen wrote this article. If you liked it, there’s more where that came from! Visit http://www.SomeSite.com to read more, and get a free list-building kit just for stopping by.”
3) Create what’s called a lens at Squidoo.com. That site lets you create your own page (they call it a lens), much like a blog. Then you can link to any other site you want. You could create a lens, describe your free offer, give people a link to your site and see your traffic soar.

All of those techniques will give you high-quality inbound links to your site, which will help you Google PageRank.

A side benefit of all of those strategies is that search engines like Google love sites with frequently changing content. Forums, article sites and especially Squidoo all fit the bill. Google loves them. So you’ll probably get an extra SEO boost for any keyword you put in your link text in your forum sig, your article author boxes, or your Squidoo links.

None of this is revolutionary. All of these techniques have ALWAYS worked. They haven’t changed much over time. Squidoo is a new ripple for free traffic, but forum posting and publishing articles have been around a while.

Best of all, every single technique I’ve talked about here is free.

If you want to spend some money, put some cash into a Google AdWords campaign to get some targeted PPC traffic. But be careful. Unless you know what you’re doing, AdWords can be costly.

But hey, why spend money when the free techniques still work great? If you’ll start using them yourself, pretty soon you’ll have a growing, healthy list you can use to make your business more profitable.

All the best,
Michael RasmussenCEO, BulletProof Marketing, Inc.

About the Author
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU! Go to http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/