Diamond Author
Regardless of what you'll be selling or who your potential buyers are, the first most essential step to growing a profitable list is to design a mechanism by which people will sign up to access your chosen incentive.
That is normally done by creating an Internet 'squeeze' page, so-called because it 'squeezes' personal information from your potential customers, and you must also organise a system whereby list members receive your incentive.
With squeeze page and incentive in place, the next most important step is to drive traffic to your sign up page and, unlike squeeze page and incentive which can be a one-time task taking just minutes, driving traffic must be a never-ending process.
Squeeze pages and incentives come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes where growing a mailing list is the sole purpose of squeeze page and incentive, sometimes where those two elements are just a small part of an overall business set up.
In the former case, for example, your entire web site or blog might comprise one single sign up page, nothing else, and your entire business is one of sending regular emails to your list members.
Or maybe your invitation to sign up to a mailing list occupies just a tiny corner at the top of your site, with dozens of 'Buy Now' product illustrations featured down the page and with hundreds of product-related articles spread across the site. In this case you're probably hoping to sell directly off the page on a potential buyer's first visit, and the mailing list option is secondary to that objective.
But which of the many options open to you is better for you and will eventually put more money into your bank account?
The decision normally depends on what you are selling, or what you ultimately intend to sell, and the only effective way to decide what is best for you across the whole gamut of gathering names and offering incentives, also processing emails, is to test and keep on testing and use whatever system or systems prove most popular with visitors.
All this talk of different ways to gather names, different incentives to use, different methods of driving traffic to your squeeze pages, might sound confusing for newcomers, but actually it's not difficult at all to grow a very profitable mailing list.
You do it by creating a plan and sticking to it and not worrying whether you've made the right choice about size of sign up box, type of free incentive, methods for generating traffic.
Just accept you can not do all things to suit all people, not properly at any rate, so once you've made your plan you must follow it through and make notes about changes and ideas you might test later.
About this Author
Avril Harper offers a range of free reports showing how to grow and make money from an email marketing list which you'll find at http://www.avrilharper.com/freestuff.html
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