Best ways to build an email list?

[Gerardas Norkus]

Hi,

I think you agree that "money is in the list"?

Currently I am trying to build a list using only free marketing methods like articles, forums, traffic exchanges. However, I am not very impressed with the results so far.

Of course, I understand that my site copy may suck too, and convert poorly.

Anyway, can anyone share any list building secrets? What works for you? What doesn't?

Any other ideas related to list building?

Thank you very much.

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi Gerardas,

Those methods should be working with you.

Can I ask you what percentage of visitors to your site actually sign up for your newsletter?

That might be the best place to start..

Cheers,
Rosalind

[Gerardas Norkus]

Hi Rosalind,

yes, you are right. I know I should track and test. I should also use split testing to improve my web copy.

I use my own split testing and tracking scripts for my other site. I know my site's ROI, visitor value and other important metricks for any of advertising campaigns that I run with my "paid offers" site. However, it is not customizable to use with other sites.

Unfortunately, currently I don't use any scripts to test and track with my new site, and wonder what you could recommend for this purpose? I think that readers of your forum would also be interested in this topic, although it's for more advanced Internet marketers.

As for other methods to build a list, I heard that creating a great report and giving it away to list owners for distribution could really boost the list. What do you think of that?

[rr]

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi Gerardas,

Aweber is the only autoresponder service that I recommend here at NPT. I've used a lot of different services, but Aweber's is by far the most feature-packed, and includes a number of different ways to test and track your campaign results.

In addition to being able to see how many subs you get daily, you can see how many unsubscribe on a daily basis, or from a particular mailing.

Better yet, you can also check how many of your subs open your mail (if you're doing HTML mailings), and how many click on which links within the mailing itself.

A thorough review of that data will show you what you're doing right, and which of your efforts may require improvement.

You can learn more about Aweber here.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Ros

[Lynn Terry]

I agree - Aweber is the way to go

I host all of my mailing lists, autoresponders - and now Feed Broadcasters too - in my one account at Aweber.

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi Radhika,

I agree with Lynn's suggestion that you might want to consider optimizing your pages for better SEO rankings.

For example, your newsletter archive files are names as follows:

internet-marketing-newsletter-issue1.php
internet-marketing-newsletter-issue2.php

And your page title for the first one is "Internet Marketing Newsletter" while the title of the article is "Here's a Sneaky Website...".

The article is in fact about Anik Singal's "Affiliate Classroom".

You've used 'sneaky website' to arouse the reader's interest, but you may want to use "Affiliate Classroom" in both the meta tags and the article title to optimize for that term.

Too, to get more visitors to those pages, you may want to add descriptions of your newsletter content to your newsletter archive page.

We should always strive to give our visitors what they're looking for in as few clicks as possible.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Ros

[Lynn Terry]

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi Lynn,

I dunno... I think you'd be hard-pressed to get more organized than you already are!

Cheers,
Ros

[Lynn Terry]

Well, that one page was actually a mess until yesterday - you motivated me to completely revamp the archives page! Here's the results: http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/archives.htm . I'm going to track results for the next 30 days and expect I'll see great overall improvements in the stats.

Thanks again for the tip!