Friday, February 29, 2008

How To Increase Opt Ins To Build Bigger Lists By Michael Ullman

If you've been involved with Internet marketing for more than 10 minutes, you've probably heard that "the money is in the list". That is true. If you can build an e-mail list of people who are interested in what you have to offer, you can communicate with them over and over again and continually sell them on the benefits of your products. The result: a lot more sales. In this article I will show you how to build your list with the most powerful list building technique I've ever come across. It involves giving perceived value, and there are three ways to do it. By reading this article, you can use one or all three strategies described and watch your list grow faster than is ever grown.A lot of people use e-books as their main product. Really smart marketers use e-books as incentives to get people to subscribe to the list. Then, once somebody subscribes to the list they have other products that they sell to them. In other words, they give away something that most other people sell. E-books are probably the most often used incentive for enticing people to sign up for lists. That is because e-books are pretty much free to create, or can be outsourced at a very low cost. It's a fair exchange: you want to communicate with them to buy your products, and they want the information in your e-book. This is what was building is all about.In some markets, e-books don't have as high a perceived value as in other markets. A way to get around that is to take your service, and brainstorm a way to offer a free trial for it. It might be a simple as giving them seven days to evaluate your e-book before they need a password to continue looking at. Other ways you can use free trials are to give the first month away of a membership site for free, or creating a trial version of a software to use. Have them sign up to try your trial version, and then continually market to them on upgrading it.Speaking of software, sometimes creating software that is complementary to your product is a great way to build your list fast. For example if you're selling a book on how to market using youtube, you can create a free piece of software to give away that automates adding comments to other peoples videos. Don't know how to create software? There are plenty people on the Internet who will create it for you for very low price. Just do a little digging around to be surprised at how cheap you can get software created for you. Sites such as Rentacoder and Elance that allow you to create inexpensive but professional products.There are many additional, free resources for tips & tricks to leverage these strategies, such as Improve Your Internet Marketing.In conclusion, the best way to the lists is to give them something of high perceived value that they would normally have to pay for to get. If you're willing to take the initial time up front to create this product and give it away, you will reap the rewards by getting high sign-up rates. Then do some simple e-mail marketing to them, and since you have a bigger lists, you also get bigger profits.Michael Ullman is President of Analogy Marketing, a leading NY-based Internet Marketing firm, and a Google Certified Professional. You can visit their blog Improve Your Internet Marketing for proven strategies from over 5 years of Internet Marketing success, or subscribe to their widely acclaimed free newsletter "Melanes Tips"!

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