How to Build an Opt-In Mailing List

One of the most powerful and important tools an online marketer can have is an opt-in mailing list.
An opt-in mailing list is a database of peoples names and email addresses that have subscribed to a marketers email list via a web form, giving the marketer permission to send them periodic emails on the topic and products they are interested in.

The benefits of marketing through an opt-in mailing list are manyfold with the most important being able to legitimately contact people who are particularly interested in your product or service whilst also reducing the cost and time of advertising your product or service.

There are do’s and don’ts in building a list of opt-in subscribers which shouldn’t be ignored if you don’t want to fall foul of anti spam laws. Here are some of the most important tips worth mentioning.

Do’s

1. Put a subscription form prominently on your website, usually above the fold is the best place to put it ( near top of page ).
2. Put a link in your thank you email for your subscribers to click on and confirm that they would like to receive information and offers from you, this is called double opt-in.
3. Provide a link that your list members can use to unsubscribe from your list if they no longer wish to receive information from you.
4. Be clear on how people can benefit from subscribing to your list and on how often you will contact them. Let them know exactly what they will be receiving.
5. Always try to provide good quality, interesting and relevant information in your follow up mailings to lessen the chance of members unsubscribing.

Don’ts

1. Add everyone who has ever emailed you to your list. Always ask permission first.
2. Purchase lists that you are not 100% sure are opt-in. Always have evidence to prove the.legitimacy of the opt-ins.
3. Abuse peoples trust by hammering them daily with offers of every affiliate programme on the market. Doing this will only ruin your reputation as a legitimate source of quality information and products and soon enough they will ignore your messages and probably unsubscribe from your list.

To start building your opt-in mailing list there are a few basic, but at the same time very important things to do. Firstly you must set up a simple website or blog containing a lead capture page ( squeeze page ), a hosting account and also an autoresponder that links to that site, once these steps have been completed you will have all the tools required to start building your list.

There are various ways to entice your visitors to signing up to your list and some of the most common and widely used methods include giving away a free report, ebook or a piece of software in return for for the visitors name and email address. This is a method that I fully recommend as long as the product being given away is of good quality information relating to your chosen niche.

If you don’t have your own product to give away you can always find some decent PLR material that you can rebrand as your own, from one of the many online PLR membership sites, a few will even allow you so many free downloads, one word of caution though, If the product is a free download, always review it first to ensure that the product meets your requirements in both content and quality, or you could even consider investing a few dollars in buying some better quality PLR to rebrand knowing that once you have started to build your list, that investment will pay for itself many times over.

So you now have your site set up complete with a squeeze page and product ready to give away, you have your autoresponder ready to send out your preloaded messages, what you need now is traffic to your site because without traffic all the work you have already done is going to be a waste of precious time. This is where some work and effort is needed to create targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure you submit your site to all the main search engines, google, yahoo, msn etc you should only have to do this the one time.

Add new relevant content to your site on a regular basis, the search engines love that.

Write content rich articles about your specific niche and post them to as many article directories as you possibly can always putting your URL in the resources box.

Join and participate in as many forums that deal with your niche again leaving your URL on any posts that you make.

Post free classified adds offering your free information or software.

Get accounts at Hubpages and Squidoo and build your own lens with links pointing back to your site. The trick is to be inventive and creative by using as many on line resources you can find that will give you the opportunity to direct traffic back to your site.

Ellis Wainwright has been a full time internet marketer for over five years and offers information and advice on how to build successful online businesses. For more information please visit http://buildingalistfast.com