7 Secrets of an Opt-in List Building Strategy

7 Secrets of an Opt-in List Building Strategy by Dr. Deepak Dutta

Want to develop a direct communication line with your web site visitors without spamming? Develop an opt-in list with a large subscribers' base. You will be able to send personalized emails to your subscribers who have expressed their willingness to receive informative as well as commercial offerings from you. However, you have to tread a fine line between annoying your visitors and making them volunteer the information you need. Knowing the right strategy and implementing it correctly will decide whether your offerings end up in spamboxes or inboxes. These seven steps will guide you in the right direction.

1. Decide what information you need to collect. Names and email addresses are the minimum. Do you need their home address, their gender, or their age group? Don't collect information that you don't have any plan to use. Don't collect information for any anticipated future use. You may get plenty of chances to collect those information from a revised list of prospects. Keep the information collection to the absolute minimum.

2. Publish a privacy policy and provide a link at the point in the web page where you collect users' information. Mention in bold letters that you don't sell their emails to others and practice the same. Your opt-in list is very valuable and don't sell it to others for a few bucks. Don't violate the trust of your visitors and ruin your reputation.

3. Provide instant incentives for subscribing to your offerings. Free e-books, report, software, video tutorials, etc. that interest to your target audience are very effective incentives. If you have a paid member's only area, you can provide time limited access to that section of your web site in exchange for their subscriptions.

4. Publish your past offerings in your website. Each offering should be in the form of a newsletter with quality contents that improve your readers' quality of life. Conclude your contents with your commercials that explain the benefits of products or services you are selling.

5. Set up a discussion board (forum) at your site and make it available to registered members only. The discussion board should focus on your target market. By scanning the posts and their threads, you will be able to identify problems your visitors are trying to solve. Do your research and find solutions to those problems, organize them and publish those solutions your newsletter.

6. Use Co-registration. This will build your list rapidly in a short amount of time. What is co-registration? It refers to the practice of referring subscriptions or leads for memberships with another registration process. There are several ways of doing this.

When a visitor signs up for a free subscription or other service, give them the chance on the thank-you page to opt-in to another offer. Another way is give the visitors to a website the opportunity to sign up for another opt-in list. These do not need to be your thank-you pages or websites. You need to partner up with another web marketer.

The goal here is to find other website owners who you can joint venture with you to offer your newsletter along with theirs. Do a search via your favorite search engine and directories for similar offers and contact the people to set up your joint venture.

Two additional secrets to this co-registration process. First, make sure you offer more value than the other party involved in your joint venture. Second, offer your leads you get from this process more value than you usually offer by giving them a huge giveaway only available to them.

7. Use Squidoo, a social media website, to create lenses. A lens is a web page on any idea. Provide a RSS feed of your website on your lens. Embellish your lens with YouTube videos and Flickr photos related to your target market. Squidoo splits its revenue with lens creators (or lensmasters). Sign up to donate all your revenue from Squidoo lenses to a non-religious charity. Call for action by announcing that subscribers are helping a charity by joining your list.

Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of semanticbay.com - an interactive social network website based on user shared text and picture. His other website classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest free online classifieds site where users can post ads in more than 600 US cities and 60 countries.

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