http://www.TimsMinions.com Whenever setting up an online business, or even an off line one, it is very important to build up an email list. Having a data base of existing and potential customers is very important to the survival of your business. For internet marketers, having a big responsive list of hungry customers is what brings them in the serious money. Once someone has bought from you they generally tend to buy again.So how do you start building an email list?Here we will show you how with our top10 free list building methods.

1. Free List Building Methods
Free list Building Methods. Building an Email List for Free
The money is in the list, Ha I said it, it seems every Internet Marketer or article even remotely talking about
Internet Marketing has said that, I needed to get it out of the way straight off. The fact is, it is true.
Whenever setting up an online business, or even an off line one, it is very important to build up an email list.
Having a data base of existing and potential customers is very important to the survival of your business.
For internet marketers, having a big responsive list of hungry customers is what brings them in the serious
money. Once someone has bought from you they generally tend to buy again unless you have done
something seriously stupid to offend them.
In fact while we are talking about stupidity, it is more stupid to try and create an online business without
creating an email list.
So how do you start building an email list?
Well there are many ways to build an email list, some are paid for and some are free. Google used to be the
best paid method until they decided that they no longer wanted people to build an email list to sell to
though them. (They would rather do the selling- sneaky)
The fact that many newbie marketers have very little money to invest in building an email list has prompted
me to write this article giving you as many free list building methods as I can muster. Use as many as you
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2. Free List Building Methods
want but be aware that it is often best to pick one maybe two and really focus on them until you have
mastered them and started to get good results.
10 free list building methods.
Give Away a Free Report/EBook in exchange for email details.
Write a report or EBook on your chosen topic, and give it away for free in exchange for an email. This can be
done on the side of your blog or on a dedicated squeeze page. Using an auto responder like Infusionsoft or
Aweber you create an email form that will take the person’s name and email then either directs them to the
free report/EBook or it emails it to them once they have filled in their details.
This email form is important; it is where you will send people to when using the other free list building
methods. You can create more forms on more sites if need be.
The same or similar report/EBook can be sold on Amazon and other EBook retailers for a small cost that is
not designed to make money but more as a traffic generation tool.
If you make money then that is a bonus. You cannot get an email address for this method but the book itself
can point the reader towards your site where they can sign up for a different report or newsletter if they
want more information.
This same report/EBook can be uploaded to PDF and EBook sharing sites like www.scribd.com with your web
address or even clickable links in them that readers can download read and hopefully share with friends.
Again this method does not result in an email exchanged for the freebie but can send traffic to your site
where they can sign up for more information like a weekly newsletter.
These sites will have a place for you to write a short description of what your report and EBook is about so
make it enticing and include a link to your site where the email capture form is.
However, if people find your report useful they will share it with their friends, this is a free method that can
have your web address sent all over the internet. Why stop at the one report? Why not create many?
Create Videos for YouTube
YouTube is misunderstood. Many people think it is a place where teenagers go to watch funny viral videos of
classic ‘fails’ or dancing cute kittens or something like that.
Actually it is one of the biggest search engines around. People go there to look for videos and information on
almost every topic known to man.
Setting up a channel and uploading a series of free helpful videos can go viral and get you a lot of free traffic.
Have you seen how many times some of the popular videos have been seen? Millions of people have
watched them.
I doubt a tutorial on blogging will have millions of viewers sending it viral however it can drive a lot of traffic
and having many videos could have a drive plenty of traffic to your site where they might sign up to your
email list.
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3. Free List Building Methods
Once uploaded your videos are there for people to see 24/7 sending traffic to your site for years to come.
Quietly building an email list for you on autopilot.
If the content of the video is all yours and the videos do become popular you can get a cut of Google
Adsense revenue that is made from the adverts shown around your videos if you sign up with YouTube’s
partner programme. Bonus!
Videos can come in many forms, from live screen capture tutorials, slide show presentations and standing in
front of the camera presentations.
Remember to use annotations and slides showing your web address so the viewer knows where to go. Put a
clickable link to your site in the description box with a call to action. Don’t leave them doubting where or
why they should go to your site.
Build your Email List with List Swaps
This one is fairly self-explanatory; once you have a fairly large list say 2000 people you can go to dedicated
websites where you can approach someone with a same size list and do an email swap.
www.Safe-Swaps.com is a site regularly used where you can meet other list owners and arrange to each
send an email to their own list promoting the other persons website or free product.
However, please be warned, some very unscrupulous people use list swap to build themselves good lists by
raping other peoples lists, they find someone with a list of say 2000 people, they have the owner send an
email promoting their product or website.
When it comes to them sending an email to their own list to promote the list swap partners product or site
they send an email to a totally useless list of non-responsive people that they have built fast using places like
adf.ly.
A large list built for the sole purpose to entice fellow list swappers to do a swap, meaning the unscrupulous
list owner can build a high quality responsive list quickly without the usual long term traffic generation
headaches.
It would be a shame to build up a good list for you to loose people with a sneaky trick like that and end up
with your list possibly polluted with non-interested people. So be careful when picking your list swap
partner, go with someone who has history if possible.
Social Media, Facebook, Google+ & Twitter
The great thing about social media is that it is essentially free; you can use Facebook and Google+ to build
accompanying pages for your business and grow a list of followers. Twitter can grow you a big list of people
who are interested in your products or services but there isn’t a page option like the other two.
With Facebook you can sell products from within their platform but the main reason for having a Facebook
pages is to drive fans to your website/blog/squeeze page in order to get them to sign up.
Facebook is more flexible than the rest of the social media networks and can incorporate pages within the
page where HTML can be used allowing you to have that all important email form on your Facebook page.
Click Here to see one we have. [tims page]
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4. Free List Building Methods
Using a cheap but very powerful software like Tweetadder, you can automate the follow and un following of
people and build a list of people that you can then drive to your website.
Setting the software to do its stuff on autopilot for some tasks and then loading it up with a day’s worth of
‘Tweets’ will make your job a lot easier.
(Please do not go crazy and try to mass follow thousands in a day, Twitter will get wise and close your
account, as we say ‘softly softly catch a monkey!’)
When people follow you back a message is sent to them with a welcome/thank you message incorporating
your website link.
Investing in Tweetadder is the really only cost for using social media for building your lists unless you do
invest money in creating Facebook ads.
I know this is about building an email list using free list building methods but I will briefly talk about
Facebook ads. (should you choose to pay for advertising they are cheaper than Google)
Facebook share Google’s approach and do not like traffic being sent to squeeze pages, so it is best to send
them in house to a Facebook page (and it’s cheaper) and then you send them outside of Facebook from your
page.
Facebook ads can send people to blogs and pages on content rich sites but it is advised to use them to
cheaply send the traffic to a page within Facebook, they reward you with cheaper ads if you do
Google+ is a Facebook style network that is growing in popularity but still a little hard to understand
compared to its rival Facebook. The main reason for using these sites is to create a relationship with people,
who will follow you and interact with you and then you gently direct them to your website or squeeze page
so you can get their name and email address.
Satellite Sites
Another great free list building method is the satellite sites method. This is where you create a page or site
dedicated to your main site. Open up accounts with Tumblr, Hubpages, Squidoo and Wordpress.com then fill
these pages sites with articles that are re written or simply snippets of the main articles found on your site
and link these to your main site.
Anyone within those networks who come across those pages and sites can then click through to your main
site where the email form is found. They only take a few minutes to add content to them; it can help in
backlink and search engine traffic. Best of all, they are free to set up.
There are many networks that can be used as satellite sites, the main aim here is to create your own mini
network or dare I say it, web to catch and filter people to your main site.
Blogging
This is like your main site in many ways, you can fill this site up with all your best products, offers, content,
and tutorials and of course the email capture form. This is where you want to drive a lot of the traffic if you
use paid advertising.
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5. Free List Building Methods
A content rich site is loved by Google, once people are on your site then you can drive them to dedicated
squeeze pages from links within the blog and its articles.
Posting regular keyword rich articles can get your blog ranked high in Google for many keywords and can
attract free organic search traffic.
Having social media plugins and things like a matching Facebook page can have many more free visitors
suddenly finding your blog who will then be exposed to your offers and squeeze pages.
A blog can support many pages so you can do little SEO tricks like have a ‘thought of the day’ page where
you post your thoughts on newsworthy trending topics which can get your site ranked highly in Google due
to the speed and nature of the post. [link to self-publish article]
People will find your news topical posts and hopefully take a look around the rest of your site to see what
else you have to offer.
Another great tip is to have a page of quotes, people love searching for quotes and a few pages with new
updated quotes from people in your chosen niche can help with Google rankings and free organic search
traffic.
Having a blog that you write for regularly will be good training for the next free list building method.
Guest Blogging
As the title suggests, you will be writing blog posts but this time instead of doing them for your own blog you
will do them as a guest blogger on someone else’s established blog.
This is good because if you are given the go ahead to write for someone who has a blog that is regularly
visited by several thousand readers a month then your article and website details can be seen by loads of
potentially free people who will click through to your blog to see more if they liked your guest post.
The other site owner gets free quality content (it must be well written quality content otherwise you won’t
be accepted as a guest writer) you get free exposure to thousands of new readers. It can be a great win: win
situation for you and the blog owner.
Your author’s bio at the bottom of the post can have a link to your blog or even directly to your squeeze
page as part of the list building programme. Something you cannot do with paid Google ads.
You might find that several blog owners will post more of your articles if what you write is of a high enough
quality creating a network of sites where you can legally and safely pilfer other people’s lists.
Guest blogging is, in my eyes, better than article marketing for several reasons; your article can be seen by
several thousand people as soon as it goes live.
The people who see it are regular readers of the site and trust the judgement of the site owners giving you
some respectability and authority on the topic you wrote about.
You can engage with people in a Q&A session when people leave comments after reading your post.
The site owner will honour the agreement and publish your author bio and details.
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6. Free List Building Methods
The links back to your site are good.
Article Marketing
Article marketing isn’t for the faint hearted or weak fingered, for this method you will need to do a lot of
writing. You write a lot of useful articles that you upload to loads of article directories.
The idea is that when you have uploaded your article you give permission for your article to be used on
other people’s websites and email newsletters as long as they leave your author’s bio intact when they use
it. It is a way of getting a lot of back links and traffic to your site.
There are a few problems with this method, mainly your articles can be sat waiting to be found, with so
much competition there is no guarantee that you will have many readers or that it will be used. If your
articles are used they could be taken and re used by software or people who do not (choose not) publish
your author bio correctly loosing you any exposure and links.
Another problem is that Google have now started to overlook article directories and they also don’t like
duplicated content. So having the same article dotted around the web can be used to penalise you or other
sites rankings.
It is best to upload a new version of each article to every new article directory as many of them will only take
unique articles. This means you will need to spend time re writing the same article over and over again.
You can use software to spin the articles but unless you spend a fair bit of time setting the software up
properly the spun articles can be very hard to read.
Article marketing is not as powerful as it once was however there are people who still swear by it and it is
one of the longest serving free list building and internet marketing methods around which is still being used
so maybe it is worth you taking a look into it.
Podcasts
Podcasting is easier than you think, and many people prefer to hear someone talk than read, it could be
worth you having a go. When someone listens to you they can hear your excitement and subtle tones in your
voice so they can take what you say more seriously.
You cannot tell from the written word if the author genuinely knows what he is talking about or if he has just
copied it from somewhere else.
The beauty of podcasting is that with free software like Audacity you can talk into a microphone about a
topic using several of your past articles as the script and with a freedom not found when writing you can
elaborate more on the subject.
Several past articles can be turned into 15-30 minutes of helpful podcasts that your listeners would enjoy.
Again this is free; podcasts can be attached to your own Wordpress based website with the Podpress plugin.
Podcasts can be uploaded to sites like www.Podbean.com and itunes.com.
You can sell them or allow people to listen for free. Like the videos you need to direct people to your
squeeze pages but that can be done easily when you are chatting away.
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7. Free List Building Methods
Podcasts sites are similar to how YouTube works, there will be a place for a description and a website link so
make sure that you place your blog/squeeze page URL in as many visible places as you can as well as speak it
out clearly on the podcast.
When people have learned from you and enjoyed your podcast the chances are they will want more so they
will be happier to go over and sign up for more great information.
After all, you are doing this to build an email list. It would be daft not to push your sites address as much as
you can without upsetting people.
Sharing Slide Presentations for Building an Email List
This free list building method is a great way to re-use the articles and free reports/EBooks that you have just
written.
Simply copy and paste them into a series of PowerPoint slides, you can edit them to make them more of a
bullet point presentation if you like or simply leave as is.
Once you have created the slide show it can be uploaded to slide sharing sites like www.SlideShare.net and
www.SlideBoom.com where it will be visible to anyone and everyone.
Make sure that your slides show your website address as often as possible so the reader knows exactly
where to go once they have finished reading.
Again there will be a place where you can add a description and a link to your chosen web address so get it
all filled out as best as you can. You need those people to visit your site.
If you are still unsure why you need to build an email list maybe this will help you understand
Cinemas need ‘bums on seats’, online businesses need ‘names on lists’. Simple :-)
www.TimsMinions.com
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