List Building on a Shoestring

If you want to build a large mailing list and you have virtually no marketing budget there are several options available to you. This article explores list building on a shoestring – for those who are on a tight budget but still want to grow their list.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine-tuning your web pages and the links to those pages to improve the web pages' relevance and ranking in the organic, crawler-based listings of a search engine, for particular keyword phrase searches.

SEO requires some self-study to understand the techniques involved. It can be time consuming to grasp the various techniques and the results might take weeks or even months before you see them, but in the long term, investing your efforts in obtaining natural - also known as organic - high-ranking placement in the top search engines will pay huge dividends. Especially if you are have a tight marketing budget.

While it is possible to optimize pages for many search engines most webmasters working on SEO concentrate on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

2. The All Important Sign-up Box

You must capitalize on every opportunity to turn your visitors into mailing list subscribers.

Give your sign up form a place of prominence. It should be on the main page of your web site where everyone sees it. In fact, if you can do it, include a small subscription form or button on every single page of your web site.

3. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and GoArticles. Any webmaster or editor will then have your permission to publish those articles without paying any fee to you provided that they also publish your 'Author Resource Box' at the end of the article.

Your author's resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to your mailing list’s sign up page.

4. Give Away an E-book or Report

A highly effective technique for driving new sign-ups to your mailing list is to give away an e-book or free report. Write a small e-book on a related topic and promote it with your sign-up form. Use a sentence like "Download Your Free Report on Publishing a Newsletter When You Subscribe Today.”

5. Ad Swaps

Another free list building technique is to swap ads with newsletters on related topics. After your own list has grown to a reasonable size, owners of other newsletters will be reasonably enthusiastic to swap ads with you. This is a great way of driving highly-targeted traffic to your subscription form.

6. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is any advertising method that propagates itself. It is built on the concept of a message spreading by 'word of mouth'. The idea with viral marketing is to encourage visitors or readers to pass along your marketing message to other sites or people, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and response.

Two examples of viral marketing online are "Tell a Friend" forms, and Viral Ebooks. To make a viral ebook you use special tools to make your ebook rebrandable. This enables your partners to insert their own business name, web site links, or even their own affiliate ID into your ebook. This gives them an additional incentive to pass on copies of it, ultimately helping you to promote your business and grow your traffic.

These are only a few ideas for list building on a shoestring. There are many more list building techniques for building a huge mailing list and some detailed strategies are discussed at DanielMoro.com