As you’re no doubt aware, subscribers are an essential element of a successful blog. They read more, comment more and return to your blog more than more passive visitors do. This means that blogs are excellent vehicles for list building.

Many people are now bogging in an attempt to develop a following and create a steady source of income for themselves. If you are not using efficient list building strategies to get the kind of internet traffic you need, let me give you three tips to get you started.

Do you have a subscriber box at the top on your blog? Where is it located? Is it in a place where everyone can access it easily? Make sure that there is no barrier to them signing up.

If you want to build your subscriber list, you have to think in terms of list building. There is no shortcut to solid marketing principles to bring in the dedicated readers.

Set up a special offer to your readers to get them to subscribe. You may offer them a free book or a program to get them into your opt-in list. Whether you display a banner or text based ad, establish your offer prominently on the page.

Make sure that you display your ads and links prominently in order to gain advantage of you current audience’s interest in what you have to say. Offer people an incentive to sign up for your list and even tell a friend about you.

Even if you don’t have a full fledged website, you should have an offer page for signups. This squeeze page should be dedicated to list building. I can’t emphasize this too often.

Create a banner ad and place it on your blog to advertise your squeeze page. Set up a separate auto responder monitor your list building squeeze page results.

Prominently display your offer when guest bogging as well as linking to other bloggers. If you can get other bloggers to place your banner on their blogs, you’ll be able to do the same for them.

If you go this route be sure to test out different banner ads to see which ones generate the highest response for you. Remembers this… testing and tracking of your results is everything online, it’s the only way of knowing what truly works.

You can offer several bloggers an opportunity to join venture with you on an ad that features all of you blogs. This vertical group ad would be featured on all your blogs and websites. The list building potential is enormous dependent on the number of links participants. You could have a rotating system which would randomly display each participant. Think about it.

Another way to create a co-op vertical banner is to create a form that outputs names and links in a vertical format using action script and flash or JavaScript.

You can enhance your list building by offering an RSS feed. Another way that many successful bloggers build their lists. The RSS feed will allow more people to access your blog conveniently.

Focusing on list building is a great idea but it pays to remember what your goal is. You’re trying to get more traffic to your page in order to achieve a goal. If you can get a link from another site that will give you more traffic to your site then it’s a good link. If you’re trying to get your search engine rankings up to the top of your niche list then you’ll need to secure links with top ranked bloggers.

You may have heard someone mention it is a good idea to build a list. But you may not realize just how important it is to build a list. Or, you may feel a bit daunted at the prospect of list building and communicating with your list on a regular basis.

But it doesn’t have to be difficult at all to build a list and communicate to your subscribers on a regular basis.

Here are 5 reasons to encourage you to build a list to make money online…

Reason 1 You are probably driving traffic straight to your website or blog. Most people won’t buy from you on the first visit. In fact, a typical conversion rate (buyers per 100 visits) is 2%. That means that 98 out of every 100 people to your site is leaving without buying anything. That’s a lot of wasted traffic.

Market testing says it takes around 7 exposures for someone to buy from you. Imagine trying to get someone to buy from you on the first visit knowing this as well!

A list helps you solve both these problems by getting a higher conversion rate by giving something away for free to get someone to join your list. And by being able to follow up with them as many times as you need for free to get the sale.

Reason 2 You can automate the process of following up with 1000s of people on your list quite easily with an autoresponder. Imagine trying to follow up with all the people you have on your list by phone or sending emails manually. It would take forever.

If you have an autoresponder set up, you can keep in regular touch with people on your list easily and you can automate the whole follow up process. Even if you have 100,000 people on your list.

Reason 3 You are actually building a real asset for your online business. This is something even the biggest changes at Google can’t touch. Since you know your potential customers by name and they are safely in your database. So, even if your traffic topped tomorrow (which can happen) you know that it won’t affect your business too much.

Reason 4 Once you build your list, you can email it whenever you want for free. You can recommend your products or services at any time for free. This means you don’t have to worry about putting the time and effort into a traffic generation campaign or worry about high advertising costs.

Reason 5 You can build a much closer relationship with your customers by email. You can build a rapport and trust and show that you are someone that knows what they are talking about. This is the best way to increase sales. Since people are more likely to buy from someone they trust.