The most important business building activity you will perform as a marketer is building your own mailing list. It can have prospects, subscribers or customers (or all of these categories) – and the bigger your mailing list, the more profitable your business will be.

Building a decent sized mailing list is not something that happens accidentally or in an unplanned fashion. By having a list building strategy, and breaking it down into components and setting them up to run on auto-pilot, you can slowly and steadily build up your mailing list into the biggest asset of your business empire.

Here are 7 ways you can grow your list and make more sales.

1. Give Away Special Reports

Create a short document with high quality content of interest to your niche. Sprinkle it with links pointing back to your website. And on the pages of your website, place opt-in forms where visitors can sign up to join your email mailing list.

Then give away the report to everyone.

• List it on all free ebook directories you can find.
• Offer redistribution rights to others in your niche, so they can spread it around.
• You might even put a price tag on it to heighten the perceived value.

If the quality of your content is high, the ebook could get distributed and passed along virally, driving even more traffic back to your site, and growing your list.

2. Run Contests

It works best if you can tie the contest in to any event in your niche. As a prize, you can offer one of your own information products. A neat twist on this model is to give everyone else who joins your mailing list within a particular time frame a discount on the product – as a consolation prize.

To make it more powerful, you can involve new subscribers in the contest, and give prizes to the person who refers you the most new subscribers.

3. Conduct a Quiz

Create a set of 7 to 10 questions relevant to your niche subject. Invite people to test their knowledge or skills in the area. After they answer the questions, invite them to sign up to your postal or email mailing list and receive the correct answers – so they can score themselves against their peers who also took the quiz.

4. Run a Survey

Instead of a quiz, you might conduct a survey and include questions on topics that are of interest to your niche audience. Then ask respondents to opt-in to your mailing list to receive the compiled results of the survey when it is finished.

5. Your Biggest Questions

Asking prospects in your niche a question and getting their feedback lets you combine market research with list building. You can do this with visitors arriving at your site from search engines, from joint venture promotions, or any other source.

You can promise them a discount (or free copy) when you create your information product in exchange for answering the survey – and then get them to join your pre-launch announcement list.

6. Set Up Your Affiliate Program

If you sell a product or service, you can set up an affiliate program where partners benefit from selling your goods to their lists. By inviting new affiliates to join your opt-in mailing list, you are growing your subscriber base with partners who will help grow your business further.

7. Do List Building Joint Ventures

You can tap into other people’s e-mailing lists by offering their subscribers a valuable gift – in exchange for a name and email address. It helps if the gift you are giving away has a real dollar value, rather than simply a freebie. Once you have built your list with prospects from other lists, make sure you work extra hard to establish a relationship with them, so they begin to trust you and will become future customers.

These are just 7 out of a whole range of email list marketing methods to grow your mailing list. Try them out. Find the ones that work best. Then integrate them into a system so they continue to work automatically, steadily growing your list over time.

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