You want an email list of potential customers who are interested in the Internet Marketing, make money online and blogging niche. With the market saturated you have to coax people to join your email list by giving away a free ebook/ report or maybe a video showing people what to do in a specific niche like ‘Making Money Guest Blogging’ etc.
But everyone and their dog these days are giving away weak free reports to get people onto their email lists so they can bombard them with even weaker email newsletters, many of them not even having newsletters but going for the simply annoying ‘buy my shit’ style email.
So what can you do to be different and to deliver a seriously good value for your potential email subscribers?
Why not run a competition and give away something of real value? Something that will get the right people onto your list and give those newbie online business people a foot on the cyber property ladder, like a fully working website?
Think about it for a minute, how much does a domain name cost? About £10 $8? How much is a years hosting for a basic package? £50 $70 ish? How much time or money does it take to write a few posts and follow up emails?
I suggest as an email list incentive you run a competition where you offer to build a WordPress website, add to it 10 quality articles, add an opt-in form to collect emails and create 10 follow up newsletters. Add all the relevant plugins, create a custom header set and create a Facebook and Twitter account to go with it.
If doing the work yourself doesn’t sound appealing to you, you can get most of the work like WordPress installation, graphics and opt-in forms created etc by people on Fiverr.com, you could also outsource the writing if you so wished.
The whole project could cost as little as $100, an eBook can cost more than that to be written. OK unlike an eBook, only one person gets and benefits from the free website but what a thing to get free! A fully working website with content and email opt-in set up. All the winner needs to do is add to it, and keep on top of it.
You could get a report from sites like Master Resale Rights.com for a few dollars and the winner will have a free report to give away from their opt-in form to help build that list. These are the things that newbies really struggle with.
As a blog owner you know how easy it is to create a simple WordPress site, and as we write posts regularly we know that when planned out properly we can soon fill a site with ten quality posts. This post is one of four I have written today with around 4000 words probably more. Ten posts could easily be written in a few days. The site with all the posts and the email newsletters could take a week tops to put together. If you set your stall out properly as they say!
Why not take ten of your own posts from a few weeks or months back and re write them? It is the same for the email newsletters or follow ups. Take something that you have done in the past and rearrange it. There is no need to make it hard work for yourself.
The winner would be so pleased to have a system set up and ready to work with, the fact that they might have reame topics, it is unavoidable.
Obviously you want to get maximum exposure from the competition so run it for as long as you can, if you ran the competition for 3 months you can build the website as you go along and send regular emails to the growing list of competition entrants telling them how the site is going and growing.
That itself takes a lot of the thinking away from creating new newsletters for a new list. Once a week you can write a few words on how the website is taking shape, what has been added and what is going on behind the scenes with a link to the site itself so people can click through and take a look for themselves.
This will create excitement and keep people’s minds on the website. When the day comes and you chose a winner you could follow up with emails offering a paid service where you do everything that you gave away in the competition but for a price. It won’t be long before you have recouped the cost of the free website you gave away in the competition.
So if we said that the price of the website was(£) $200 to build and fill with content from scratch, the people who did not win saw the final site and realised what they could also get for (£)$200 (to build only not including on-going yearly hosting or autoresponder costs) do you think you would get some buyers?
I pulled (£)$200 out of the air; I believe people would pay a lot more for a website that is built with content, opt-in forms and quality content already added. You might not want to go down the route of building websites for people but with people on Fiverr.com it is possible to not only get the money back that you invested in the competition but make a profit from the new email list you have built.
So what are your thoughts? Do you think this is a good idea to generate leads for an email list and potential custom?
Andi the Minion is the writer for Tims Minions and specialises in small home business ideas, social media, WordPress, blogging, traffic generation and general how to make money online methods.
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