Building an email list is one of the best ways of growing your business. But these days, email spam is rife, and people are justifiably reluctant to give out their email addresses. So how do you convince them to enter their details? One of the best ways of building your list is to give away a free report.

A free report can be used in a couple of ways. For one, it can be used to pre-sell your products. With a report related to the subject of your products, pre-sell the reader on the idea of buying your product. Also, you can use it to promote affiliate offers by placing affiliate links in appropriate places within your report.

As beneficial as selling your products and affiliate offers is, the main purpose of your report is to get the customers contact information so you can build a list focused on your market.

The idea is to write a report with information about your niche. By offering it to the reader, you are in effect trading information the customer wants for their contact information. Once you have the information, you can begin building a relationship with your list and start a systematic campaign of providing valuable information and offering your products and affiliate products to your list.

Once you have a list, you have a valuable asset because you can market to your subscribers over and over again, whenever you want. Without a list, a subscriber has to visit your page for you to offer them something for sale.

One of the main success factors in viral marketing of your report is quality. If your readers find your information worth sharing, and you encourage them to do so by giving them the right to give your report away for free, you will be able to have your name, status and links within the report passed around without any effort on your part – simply because others are willing to do so for you.

Building a targeted email list is all it takes to start any business empire. It will be your most valuable asset.

Tags: Email Marketing, List Building

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.