Email List Building Techniques For Newbies: Giving Away Free Reports

Everybody has heard the saying, "the money is in the list," but the most difficult problem Internet businesses face is having to build the list from the ground up.

Getting prospects to opt in to a mailing list can be difficult, especially if you do not have an established business in your particular niche market.

The most common opt-in tactic is to place a squeeze box on your website with a free report relating to the market you are operating in to appeal to your targeted visitors. Very often, the freebie is in the form of an ebook in one format or another. Nowadays, PDF files are a popular vehicle for this kind of free report.

The trouble with this is that so many people are doing the same thing that you will have difficulty making your free offer stand out from the crowd. Do not expect more than 2 or 3 percent of your traffic to convert into newsletter subscribers.

Another technique is simply to give the ebook away without requiring the recipients to fill in a form. In this case, the ebook will contain some kind of incentive to the reader to click a link and sign up to a mailing list. The hope is that the content will be so good that the reader will want to follow up and get further information.

One problem with this method is that it is difficult to induce a sense of urgency when the prospect already has the ebook and can refer back to it whenever he or she likes. There is often no urgent reason why the prospect should do anything.

One attempted solution to this problem is to make use of time-limited offers within the ebook. The problem with this is that once the time limit has passed the prospect will have even less incentive to click the link within the ebook.

Another technique is to allow access to the downloaded ebook only for a limited period before locking it using special locking software that can turn on and turn off access to each individual download of the ebook.

Email list building techniques such as these are not guaranteed to succeed; you may get more people to opt in while your special offer is in force, but once it has timed out, you may see much lower opt-in rates. An excluded prospect can simply seek out greener pastures to browse.

Somehow, what is needed is a free ebook which can be downloaded easily from a business website without requiring the prospect to fill in a form at the point of access, but which should compel the reader to join the website owner's business mailing list at a later point in the relationship. One of the best email list building techniques is to make life easy for your prospects at the beginning and inducing them to give up their email address while they are still warm and eager.


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