We’ve all entered contests at one time or the other. And isn’t it really exciting when we win? Everyone enjoys the feeling of winning a prize – so why not try running a contest on your website or through your ezine and emails to get your users enter for a chance to win? It’s a valuable way to get a huge optin list. Ask your visitor to give you their name and email id for a chance to win. Your autoresponder can send a confirmation email back to them saying that they are in the running to win a prize. Let the prize be some kind of useful information or tip or idea.

Different Kinds Of Contests You Can Run

You must again think about what is relevant in your business and what can suit your readers and use the following ideas:

- How about an essay-writing contest? Give your readers a particular word limit and tell them that the selected ones will be published in your ezine. This will also ensure that they sign up to receive your ezine. Who doesn’t like to see their name in print? Give them a limited period within which they must submit it, with guidelines as to what is acceptable. Make it clear whether it will become your property or whether the writer can feel free to post it elsewhere as well. This can generate a lot of enthusiasm and create rapport with your visitors.

- Some online marketers run photo contests, according to the theme of their sites. Works in the same way as essay contests.

- Get your visitors to link to your site – that is, put your link on their site. Ask them to give you the URL where they’ve put the link. Every fortnight or whatever timeframe suits you, have the draw. The winner is the name you have drawn!

- A much simpler version is having a draw of your contacts’ email instead of the essays and photos and links. The email you draw is the winner.

Make the entry free for all these contests, but be sure to get the name and contact email id before they enter. There are several contest directories where you can post your contests, in case your site doesn’t get that many visitors.

What About Prizes?

You can give away information in various forms – they are simpler to handle because of the sheer numbers. An ebook you would normally charge for can be promised to get the visitors to take part in the contest. Be sure to mention the value of the ebook or whatever you plan to offer. Merely saying ‘valuable’ is not enough. You have to say it in terms of specific $. If you run a paid ecourse, your winners can be offered that for free. If you have premium paid memberships to your site, offer your winners the same for free. Give your contest a catchy name, get those entries and go build your list!

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We know what pop-ups are – those little windows that pop up and open when a visitor clicks a link. This could while entering the site or leaving it. These can be great list builders. But traditional pop ups have a problem -they can be easily blocked, what with the number of pop up blocking tools on the Internet. This brings us to the question of how to solve it.

It is possible to get past the blocker! There are what is called unblockable DHTML pop ups. These are used by many online businesses when they partner with other sites to share traffic. These are a very valuable way to collect visitor’s email ids to enable you keep in touch with them to send them promotional information.

How To Add Pop Ups To Your Site

You can create these DHTML pop-ups using free software downloadable off the web. They are simple to make without having to use the services of a professional. The most important thing is what you write in the Pop-up. Your words must be convincing enough for the visitor to take action, namely fill in his or her contact information in the form. How can you get your visitors to do this?

- You can offer something in exchange for their email ids. This could be a free report or an ebook.

- The title of your pop-up could be an effective keyword that can also help in taking it up in the search engine ranking. Make it catchy.

- Then write a really attractive headline. Your visitors are not going to wait for long while they browse through the Internet. You must get their attention in the first few seconds – so write something that will capture their eye and make them continue to read. It should be something that will excite them enough to want to sign up.

- Minimize the graphics or use none at all. If your pop-up takes forever to load, there is every chance that your visitor will simply close the pop

-up and keep moving on.

- Your pop-up must look good and appealing. A simple design can have the desired effect.

- Often we find that some pop-up windows do not have a close option. Make sure you give it one.

There is no point in forcing your visitors to sign up just so that your pop up will go away! Those that are not interested are not going to buy from you anyway.

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The more RESPONSIVE subscribers you have, the more money you can make. Here are seven ways to make money using nothing more than your list.

1) Place advertisements.

There are many corporations who will be willing to pay to put their banners and ads on a list with many subscribers. Selling or renting out lists is not a good idea so rather than doing that, many companies would just rather place ads with lists that have a huge subscriber base. Your newsletter could be placed with many ads and each one spells money.

2) Have affiliations with other companies that have at least a semblance or relation to what your site is about.

Here other companies will provide links and brief descriptions of what they offer, products and services. With every click made on the link that directs or leads a subscriber from your list to their site, the company will pay you. This P4P or pay for performance.

3) Make deals with other companies by asking for a small percentage of sales done through your list.

With every sale done by customers that have come from your list and have gone there because of your newsletter, the other company will pay you a small percentage of your sales. The more people who buys from them, the more earnings you get.

4) You may also get products from other sites on a consignment basis and sell them to your list via your newsletter.

Place descriptions, articles and photos of the product in your newsletter. There will be those who will buy from you and when that happens, you can order the product from the other site and sell it to your buyer.

5) Sell e-books or a compilation of your articles on your list.

Manuals and how-to articles are in great demand. Many people will be willing to shell out money to gain knowledge about a certain topic and subject. With your existing list trusting your expertise in that area, an e-book could be offered and sold or used as an incentive.

6) Create a network out of your list.

Get people to invite more people to view your site and subscribe to your list. The larger your list is, the more people will be able to click on your links and affiliate links as well as make your advertisement rates higher.

7) Subscribers are willing to pay for information if they know that it can be trusted and relied upon.

Use your list to get more and more people to subscribe to you as well as browse your site. Lastly, you can use your list to earn money by making them your partners. Your list will be the bloodline of your growth and increase.

Read more on how to use the secrets of opt-in mailing lists here

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Joint ventures are formed for mutual benefit. Your promotions must be innovative. Rather selling space in your newsletter or blog advertising, ask your associates to promote you instead. The important thing is not to be competitors in the same line of business. Joint Ventures are a wonderful way to build lists and expand your customer list while getting great exposure. Some online marketers join hands with similar sites and exchange links and content; they even sign up with each other’s affiliate programs, promoting each other while making money in the process.

Joint ventures can apply to your blog and ezine too. Just imagine: here you are, running an ezine and a blog to a targeted audience. You have got a massive readership. This makes you a very attractive business proposition for other online marketers. Why? Because if they tie up with you, they can build their lists through your traffic too, without competing with you. That’s why ezines and blogs are like valuable property. What do you do when people are interested in partnering with you? Exchange links, grow your profits and build your lists at absolutely no extra cost.

Getting The Right Kind Of Partner
The most critical factor to consider, if you want your joint venture to be highly beneficial is the kind of partner you select. This means, your partner must be someone whose business is complementary to yours. Without being direct competitors, your businesses must be related. Your visitors must find both of you attractive. If you subscribe to newsletters that are related to your business, you will probably be able to start building your lists right from there. You can check the ranking of a site and then decide whether to partner with it. When you choose your JOINT VENTURE partner, check whether their strengths influence your products positively.

Types Of Joint Ventures
Your joint venture could be a joint subscription – an ezine Joint Venture. This is how that happens – you get a user on your site who signs up for your ezine. You send them a thank you message and invite them to join other ezines of interest to them. These other ezines are you JOINT VENTURE partners. They do the same for your ezines. You promote each other. When you let them advertise on your site, you get to advertise on theirs. It is a good idea to have a simple message for your user but remember to focus it on the kind of users you want.

These days exit pop-ups are being used very effectively by online marketers to partner with similar sites on the Internet. You will be incurring a cost for each visitor who clicks through your site while only a few will actually make a purchase. It does not matter whether you got them through an advertisement or a search engine, you are paying in some way. The solution is to make them all yield a return for what you are spending. As soon as a visitor leaves your site, exit pop-ups show them another site. What is clever about this is the fact that your visitors are through with browsing your site when the exit pop up opens in a new window. Suppose your visitor becomes a customer by buying something from you, and then they need not see the pop up. If they don’t, you can trigger the pop up when they exit your site.

How about making use of your email list to let your contacts know about your joint venture partner’s offers? Your list will hear it from a reliable source – you. You should get the partner to do the same for you.

Joint ventures and their success depends on how complementary the services of the two partners is.

Your Joint Venture Should Be A Long-Term Arrangement
One tactic that works is to give your visitors something exclusive, not commonly found elsewhere. This could be someone else’s services also, but should make your visitors feel that they are getting something special through your site. Your partner should also offer something of equal value to your visitors.

Keeping Track Of Your Progress
Any business activity must be tracked to see how successful or effective it is. In online marketing, it is vital to keep track of your advertising’s results. Make sure your joint venture partner sends you as much traffic as you send them. It makes no sense to send 5000 visitors when you are getting only 50 in return. So keep track of your sales as you share visitors.

The greatest thing about joint ventures is that you not only have access to the visitors on your partner’s site, but you also have full access to their buyers. Its much easier to make an existing customer consider your product compared to the effort to make a new prospect buy from you.

Joint ventures are one of the most effective tools for building your lists.

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Let’s also have a little bit of fun here, too, and introduce a rating system to make things interesting. As we discuss each of these techniques, I’ll talk to you about their pros and cons, and where they would most likely be used, and you can decide if it’ll be relevant to you. I’m also going to give these a starred rating system that will show you the most significant stats related to running such a list. Understand that each list will vary, and these star ratings are only to give you an idea after talking to over a hundred successes with their lists in the following categories. The star rating will be one to five:

Unsubscription Rate: One star means a high unsubscription rate per mailing, and five stars means the best, a low unsubscription rate per mailing.

Subscription Rate: How easy it is to get people to subscribe to the list using a variety of different methods. The subscription rate at one star is the hardest, and at five stars is the easiest.

Ad income: Ad income is the amount of money that’s earned through selling adverts to the list. One star is the worst, or the least amount of money earned through ad selling, and five stars is the best, or the most amount of money earned through ad selling.

JV Circle: This is the ease of using your list as a bargaining tool, for example in ad swaps or product launches, and specific joint venture opportunities. One star is the worst, which is also the least valuable in terms of gaining joint ventures, and five stars is the best, the most valuable that marketers want to get their hands on for joint ventures.

Response Rate over Time: Response rate over time, measures how quickly the quality of the list diminishes, for example when sending endless paid for ads and nothing else, the response rate goes down over time. One star is the worst, where response rate over time goes down badly, five stars is the best, where people keep reading and even wait for your mail to arrive in their inboxes in the morning.

General Usefulness: For things such as research, surveys and requesting information, testimonials etc. Five stars is the best, easiest to get results from. One star is the worst, the hardest to get results from.

Maintenance Time: The time it takes per issue to put together and send out. One star is the worst, taking a lot of time to prepare and send. And, five stars is the best, the fastest, and the easiest to prepare and send out.

Important note here: These are base figures and your exact results may be higher or lower than the following. It’s more to give you some insight into aiming your business in the right direction than to give you exact figures and numbers and guaranteed base earning, response rate, income, number of JV prospects etc.

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