One Month to 1000 List Members Get Creative
To Get to 1000 Members Get Creative the list building tactics that you have read about so far – building a content rich site with a list subscription form on every page, using squeeze pages, giving away ‘bribes’ to encourage signups, building your list with an autoresponder and focusing on generating traffic – are all highly effective constituent parts of an integrated list building project.
However, to get to 1000 members in a month, you are going to have to be a little more creative, and willing to think more laterally than we have so far. It is going to be far easier to reach your target within your allotted time if you are not working alone. What you really need to do is ‘leverage’ off the time and effort of others if you really want to be able to hit your target. (“1 month to 1000 list members : eBook – ebooksa.com”)
It is possible to succeed on your own, but why make things more difficult for yourself than you need to? If you can get other people to help you, it must make sense to do so.
Let us consider a selection of ways that you can do this.
Existing list members
If you have an existing mailing list, you have several advantages that you could be exploiting if you are not already doing so. For a start, you should have some meaningful statistics so that you know that for every X number of people who see your promotions, Y will visit your squeeze page and Z will sign up.
From those Z number of prospects, you should know what percentage become customers and how much each customer is worth to your business (if you do not know, you could use the commonly held belief that each customer on your mailing list is worth an average of $1 per month). (“To get to 1000 members, you’ve got to get creative…”)
Imagine that you have a small list of 200 people already. How about incentivizing those people to help you build your list by offering them prizes for doing so? Look at the collection of digital products that you have gathering cyber-dust on your hard drive – dust them off and give them away. Present your existing list members with a product list from which they can choose any gift they like for every new subscriber they refer.
Also, (and here is why you must have some idea of how valuable each new prospect is eventually worth), give the top referrer or top three referrers valuable ‘real world’ prizes – a new laptop, a Blackberry, or a couple of iPods. (“To get to 1000 members, you’ve got to get creative…”)
Give your list members everything they need to help you, such as pre-written e-mails as well as other ‘perks.’ For example, for new subscribers that join during this limited period, stack up a few extra gifts over and above the ‘normal’ gifts they get for signing up any other time. This makes it easier for your list members to help you, and improves their chances of winning prizes themselves, so some of them at least will pitch in and bring a hundred, two hundred or more new members in.
It is hard to see how this could fail really, isn’t it?
But I have no list at all…
Okay, that makes it a little harder, but is possible.
One thing you can do is to get new subscribers to help you by including the option to ‘tell a friend ‘About the great offer and information that you are providing.
Set your autoresponder so that after a new subscriber confirms their desire to join your list by double opting in, the URL that the autoresponder directs them to is your ‘Thank you’ page.
On this page, the new subscriber will find the download link for the gift that they are expecting, but they will also see a ‘tell a friend’ Button or form. The call to action attached to this form or button tells them that for every friend they recommend, there is an additional free bonus available for them – again, offer them a list to choose from because having a choice could make the idea far more attractive.
The free button that you can download here has the advantage that it can pull contact details from their friend’s list registered with most of the big online e-mail programs, such as Gmail, Hotmail and so on.
They do not even have to type the names into a list, so it could not be any easier for them to use.
Alternatively, there are free scripts and programs that produce ‘tell a friend ’Forms that do need manual completion, but which are still highly effective and extremely viral in nature as well.
Give stuff away for free…
Here is an amazingly simple but amazingly effective way of persuading people to sign up for your list. You give them something for free, but for it to be ‘activated,’ they must request a suitable activation code from you. To do so, they need to send you their e-mail information to which you can send that code.
If you downloaded the recommended squeeze page templates earlier, you will have seen this in action already as one of the recommended squeeze packages uses exactly this technique. It can be applied to anything that can give away on the internet.
If you can create any kind of webpage or a market targeted e-book, you can give this away, but the recipient cannot use it until it is registered. Alternatively, you could give away free screensavers or desktop wallpaper.
If is a software program – something related to your market, a program that helps people run their online business more efficiently, or even a game – you can let anyone who downloads it use a few times (so that they begin to like and/or rely on it) and then ask them to register.
In effect, using this strategy, you can build your mailing list on autopilot because you can create your product only once, after which every time someone downloads it, they must give you their e-mail details.
The best software for running this type of list building operation can be found on this site.
Best Wishes, Coyalita
Also See: “Joint Ventures with a Twist”
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