2 Simple (But Powerful) Listbuilding Tactics to Get You Started

1. The freebie/give-away. Back in the olden days of just a few years ago, giving away a free report or other item to people in exchange for their name and email address would set you apart from other affiliate marketers in your niche. Nowadays, it’s just standard practice.

By and large, the most common give-away is the niche report. You can write these yourself or hire someone to ghostwrite it for a relatively inexpensive rate. There are also tons of PLR reports out there for just about any niche you can think of.

These give-aways can serve more than just one purpose. You can easily put a few affiliate links in the report, as long as they point towards products and services that those in your niche will find useful.

Don’t forget to include several links to your website as well. Some of your readers are likely to send the report to friends they think will find the information useful. Take advantage of this opportunity to get traffic to your website by including links to your pages–and at least one to your newsletter squeeze page.

What kind of reports do well? Reports that tell your readers how to do something, or offer other niche information that is hard to find anywhere else. “7 Keys to Internet Marketing Success,” or “5 Resources to Help You Catch a Cheating Spouse” are good temptations to get people to sign up for your list (and also provide ample opportunity for a few affiliate links!).

But reports aren’t the only list-building freebies that work. Exclusive e-courses work well in some niches. Free memberships, training videos, software, or other give-aways can also make good incentives.

Once you set up tracking or analytic software on your website (and you really do need to do this at some point; sooner is better than later), it’s a good idea to test opt-in pages with different freebie offers to see which one works best. The results are often surprising–and surprisingly profitable.

2. YouTube and other video sites. Video works–yet few marketers really take full advantage of it.

You don’t have to be an actor or a great public speaker in order to use YouTube and other video sites as your listbuilding tools. All you need to do is film yourself showing how to use a product, or even just giving out relevant information to your niche.

If you want to show people how to use software, social media websites, how to research a certain topic (i.e. show would-be marketers how to find a good niche, worried husbands and wives how to look up cell phone numbers, dieters how to distinguish fake diet blogs from the real thing, etc.) you can use Camtasia or similar software without ever having to appear on-camera.

If you do want to film yourself or another person, you don’t have to spend a ton on production. All you need is a halfway decent video recorder, which you should be able to get for less than two hundred bucks.

Keep in mind that you don’t need exceptional video resolution/quality–nobody is expecting it to look like the next Harry Potter movie! Just make sure you get a model that has decent audio quality, as the most important parts of the video–the information you’re giving, plus you “join my list” pitch–will come from your words and not your image!