Listbuilding by Ethical Bribery

One of the trickiest parts of getting started in Internet Marketing is listbuilding. Many people out there have different ways of doing this, but not all of them work.

You should especially not bother with buying a premade list. You will hardly ever get a return on that investment. Unless you have a super-powered mass mailing program in line, it’s just not worth it if 1 in a million recipients convert.

One of the best listbuilding techniques out there is giving away a product in exchange for opting in. Everyone loves freebies. You might try a free sample of smoked sausage at the grocery store or take a free Frisbee that some charity group is giving out at the park.

These are often just to convince you to buy their product. Other times, they’re used to get you to sign up to a mailing list. This form of marketing in Real Time has been around for quite a while, but is wearing kind of thin in that context.

However, this form of “ethical bribery” is an especially awesome technique in Internet Marketing. Nearly anything you can give away is in some electronic format. It will cost you nothing but a little bit of time to make, and you only have to do that once for each freebie.

You can make a video, a pdf, an image or a podcast for your freebie. You can even cut and paste selections out of your main product to use. After that, you don’t have to worry about creating duplicates. These products will duplicate themselves for each person who decides to opt in and claim them.

It doesn’t cost you anything to do this. You will also get a dramatic increase in your opt-ins. This ultimately means that your mailing list will expand. Another great thing about doing this is that if your freebie goes viral, you will find yourself with a growing army of volunteer affiliate marketers.

Now, the nature of your give away is important. To really be effective, it has to be relevant to your product. It may be its own stand alone product, or it may be a selection from the product itself.

For example, you wouldn’t want to give away a video about how to make lightsabers in your own videos if your product is about selling Squidbillies videos. The people who would be interested in filming their own lightsaber fights may or may not be interested in watching Squidbillies.

The reason for this is that while listbuilding is a goal, your ultimate goal is to convert your visitors into sales. While having a nice large list is good, it doesn’t mean much without actually selling your visitors on your product.

To this end, it might also be a good idea to send them promotions for other products while they’re on your mailing list. Of course, you will want these products to be related to the product they were looking at when they opted in to your mailing list. Otherwise, you may wind up having people opting out of your list, having decided that you’re just a spammer.