If you have been online for any length of time you will have noticed that when you visit a blog you are usually offered a free gift in exchange for your name and email address. The free giveaway for list building is a tried and tested method and one you should adopt by giving away something from your blog.

Below is a list of five different ways that you can build your list by giving away free gifts :

Use a newsletter or ezine

A newsletter (also known as an ezine) are great list builders because people love to get free valuable information. They are also simple to set up and inexpensive to offer. With an ezine you can keep your subscribers in touch with what is happening in your organization, telling them about new product launches and other innovations you have introduced. Not only that, it’s a good publicity tool for your website. To start your ezine you will need a good autoresponder company like Aweber.

When you plan your ezine, decide on a specific theme that suits your market, and the kind of people you want signing up with you to buy your products. This will enhance the type of list you want to build. You want the people who opt to receive your newsletter to read them and recommend them to others, who will also build your list by subscribing to your ezine.

Give away a free ecourse

If you have time to write an ecourse it is worth giving that away. An ecourse can be sent to your subscribers in a series at varying intervals. This is easily put together using your autoresponder. An ecourse is a great list building giveaway if you want to maintain steady contact with your users. You can choose to either create a seven day ecourse where subscribers receive one message day over seven days or a seven week ecourse where your messages are sent out once a week over seven weeks. It has been suggested that you maintain contact at least twice a week with your subscribers if not more. I will often set an ecourse to run every three days so people hear from me two or three times a week.

Give away an ebook or a few of them

Giving away a free blog relevant ebook is a tried and tested list building strategy, which means to get people to sign up it really needs to let your visitor know why it is worth signing up for it. If you don’t have time to write your own content or you don’t want to then you can of course outsource it to a ghostwriter or you can use private label right products but as an authority blogger you will need to add new graphics and rename it at the very least!

Free reports, blueprints, manifestos etc

This is a good method that will build your contact list. If you have expertise in a particular field or are knowledgeable about a subject, write interesting reports and give them free as sign up bonuses. Send the report only after they leave their email and name. This way you also make sure that you have their permission to send them the report. Your autoresponder can take care of mailing this.

The report could be a generalized report on your industry or a specific topic that relates to your business, that gives information of value to the reader. It can also summarize the results of a survey you took. Make sure it contains links to your ezine, website, autoresponder URL, blog, etc. Also include a link, which enables your contact to pass the free report around.

Audios, videos, software

Build your list by giving away audios, videos and software. This is becoming more popular and is a great alternative to an ebook which is fairly common online. You can record some of your best articles onto audio using a free tool like audacity so it doesn’t have to cost you a lot to create an audio. When it comes to video you can set up a bunch of slides in powerpoint and then find a free desktop screen capture tool to use (do some research there are a few good free ones).

Software is a little more complicated, especially as it may require more support from people who download it but if you have the capability to offer free software why not try it.

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