List Building How To

Steps 3 & 4 – Your subscription form and back-office system…

When people put in their information in your subscription form, that information is transmitted to a software, called autoresponder.

Autoresponder softwares handle your subscribers, unsubscribes, delivery, etc. The same system also used to email your subscribers.

There are two types of messages you can send: sequential and broadcast.

Sequential messages reach subscribers at times relative to their subscription date, at once, two days later, a week later, etc. This is also called follow-up emails.

Broadcast messages are individual messages you send when you want to communicate something to your entire subscription base: an announcement, a sale, a promotion, etc.

Autoresponder softwares can sit on your server, or can be subscribed to. I recommend subscribed services: they know what they are doing…

I have had accounts with three services, 1shoppingcart, Aweber and GetResponse. These companies have been around for a long time and they both focus all of their efforts on providing the highest levels of professional autoresponder service possible. The cost is between 19 and 29 dollars a month.

Once you have an account with any of these companies, you need to add a series of outgoing e-mail messages, and decide how often you want the autoresponder to send your mail messages to your prospects. Most marketers send e-mail two or three times a week, but it really is a matter of choice and depends on your market.

Create enough outgoing e-mail messages to last you for the first month or two.

You will use your autoresponder to create the subscription forms for your site.

The more information you ask subscribers for, the fewer of them will sign up for your list, so, for this project, I would recommend that you ask for only their e-mail address. Not only does this mean that your subscriber can join your list far more quickly, but it also allows them to retain a higher degree of anonymity. This should encourage far more people to subscribe to your list, which could be a significant step towards achieving your 900 list member target.

Have a small subscription form on every content page of your site (at the top right hand corner of the page is the best position) and also add the same subscription form in the appropriate position on the squeeze page which you created earlier.

YOUR BRIBE, GIFT, GIVEAWAY, FLYCATCHER…

The final thing that you need is a ‘bribe’ that you can offer every one of your visitors to encourage them to sign up for your list.

You have to give away a valuable gift as a way of encouraging people to subscribe, because while the value of the information that you are giving away might be immense, the subscriber does not know that until they join your list. Hence, you have to do whatever you can to encourage them to join your list so they can start seeing the information, and the best way of doing this is to give them a free gift of high perceived value.

It will not be sufficient to offer them a free subscription to your newsletter, because this is what every online marketer and his brother is doing. It has to be a substantive gift of significant perceived value, something that conveys a message that is strong enough to push your visitor past their natural reluctance to give you their mailing information.

It has to be something that is appropriate and laser targeted at the people who will visit your site. To take this a stage further, this strategy becomes even more effective if the bonus gift you can give away is unique, something that cannot be obtained anywhere else.

Creating such a product is simple and quick if you know how!

What you’re going to do is create a unique market targeted e-book on the back of other people’s work in a way that is legitimate and ethical.

Go back to EzineArticles and find around 20 articles that are highly appropriate to your target audience. Copy every one of the articles, and paste each of them into the same Word document.

Next, write a page or two of introduction for your e-book (remembering to include your site details and contact information), and then add the introduction as the first couple of pages of the book.

Give the book a title something along the lines of ’20 top dog training secrets revealed’, and make sure that the formatting is ‘tidy’ – every article starting on a new page, original author’s information still included and so on.

Finally, use a free PDF creation program like PDF995 to turn the whole thing into a secure, professional PDF document.

For less than an hour’s work, you have a unique targeted e-book that your visitors can only obtain by signing up for your mailing list. This is another very effective tactic for building your mailing list extremely quickly.

Click here to continue