Don’t Have a List? Here Are 5 Ways to Build a Profitable List

So how do you go about building that list without mortgaging your house?

Here are 5 low cost but practical ways to build your list:

1) Article Marketing:
Article Marketing is defined as marketing your own unique articles with a view to drawing targeted visitors to your site because they find what you have written to be valuable i.e. it resonates with them.

However, to most internet marketers unfortunately Article Marketing simply means spinning purchased, often poorly researched, re-cycled, and written PLR articles to article directories for publication.

2) Paid Advertising-
Paid advertising can take many forms. The one that immediately comes to mind is Pay Per Click (which I am a big fan of). However, if not managed properly, this approach to building a list could wipe you out financially in a hurry. The ‘Big Daddy’ of PPC is Google AdWords because you can have your campaign up and running inside 15 minutes.

However, a perhaps just as targeted form, probably most cost effective form of PPC is Ezine advertising. There is however a downside to Ezine advertising that you should be aware of.

You will need to be very selective about which Ezine that you advertise in. Many Ezines have beat-up unresponsive lists and so you will be wasting your time, energy and money advertising there.

Perhaps the most famous Ezine and the best value for money Ezine to advertise in is EzineArticles.com.

3) Search Engine Optimisation-
Up to 5 years ago this was so relatively straight forward. But with the explosion of the internet gold rush, SEO has become a very long-term activity in terms of ROI (Return On Investment).

Search Engine Optimisation can be described as the system of using various processes commencing with website indexation on the 3 major search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN Bing through to core activities such as back-linking ( i.e. generating credible inbound links to your web-site) and including article marketing activities.

SEO covers a vast array of intricate processes especially in competitive markets. The end objective of any SEO campaign is to generate free traffic through page 1 listings primarily in Google Search for specific targeted keywords/keyword phrases.

As you can imagine this SEO activities are ongoing and can take substantial time and resources to achieve its objective especially in highly competitive markets.

It is not unusual for companies to spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on their SEO campaigns.
It is neither easy nor advisable for the little guy/gal to compete against that without knowing for sure that his/her offer converts to dollars in the bank.

4) Press Releases
Press Releases can be highly effective and gain you a lot of fame and notoriety very quickly. News outlets are always looking for new and interesting stories. Therefore there is an art to writing a press release which will catch the eye of those seasoned hard nosed press reporters in less than 5 seconds literally.

The art of writing a good eye catching press release is very different from that of writing an article for an ezine.

However, a well written press release will reap great dividends and could potentially flood your website with potential buyers.

Press releases however, have become increasingly expensive so if you are on a tight budget, you may just want to hold off initially.

5) Viral Marketing

Perhaps I can best describe viral marketing to you by giving you two classic examples of viral marketing

1) Hotmail- This was probably the earliest and most famous example of viral marketing. In the early days of the internet (before Google) when MSN was king, MSN launched its free web based e-mail platform called Hotmail. Everyone who signed up for a Hotmail account was encouraged to invite others to sign up for a free Hotmail address. The use of Hotmail spread like wild fire. Soon Hotmail became the standard web based e-mail platform.

2) A few years later as Google eclipsed MSN and Yahoo and became the Search Engine of choice for millions around the world, it used a very similar tactic to virally market it new Gmail e-mail platform to its Google surfers.

In Viral marketing you give away something for free by getting others to spread your brand to as wide a population as possible for free.

The objective here is branding and thus setting a stage that your future offerings that will generate your profits will be easily, quickly and eagerly accepted and taken up.

Sean Wells http://www.ProvenNicheDomination.com