10 Super Fast Ways To Build Your Opt-in List

Guest Post: By Titus Hoskins

It is a well known fact that the key to successful online marketing comes from building a well targeted and responsive opt-in email list. This is mainly because your online marketing success comes from building relationships with a large subscriber base, but just how do you go about doing this?

An opt-in list is when you are given the option to receive bulk emails that are also sent to a large majority of other people. Generally you need a person’s permission to add them to such a list otherwise it will be seen as spam. Regardless of what you’re promoting or selling, if you want to succeed online you need to build up your own opt-in list. Most professional marketers use double opt-in which means subscribers must fill in an opt-in form on a web page and then confirm or verify their subscription in an email sent to them. This eliminates any spam complaints.

Virtually everyone uses email so it won’t be too hard to build your list if you use some of the simple tactics listed below. Keep in mind, using an opt-in contact list should have a place in everyone’s marketing plan as it is cheap, fast, and still more effective than other outdated methods of promotion and marketing. This is because a large majority of the people who are making money on the Internet are those who have built up a large opt-in list or are using strategic follow-up emails in their marketing. They will have refined, looked after and built up a trust with the people on their list who they can contact in the future.

If you need any help with how to approach compiling your opt-in email list then below are 10 quick and sure ways of getting people to sign up for your contact list:

1. Set up an auto-responder which will automatically send out messages to your visitor. It can be set up with a series of compelling messages, which will encourage your subscribers to buy your products or join your business. Using Pop-Ups, Pop-Ins and Slide-In forms on web pages will quickly build your list. Some professional marketers make the “Close” button on this pop-up form very hard to see, so that visitors will subscribe as a means of closing out the window. Use your own judgment here, do you want to be this sneaky? It’s not exactly the best way to start a relationship, but many savvy marketers use it. This is the equivalent of “getting your foot in the door” and then these marketers follow-up with quality content to really get and hold your attention.

2. Have a concrete image or graphic of your ezine or newsletter when giving people the opportunity to sign up as this will increase your conversion rate. Your ezine or newsletter can then be sent out daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you need to send it. Relationship building is the key here because you just don’t want a list, you want a responsive list.

3. Make it real simple for people to subscribe to your opt-in email; it needs to be quick and easy in order to encourage people to do it. For example you could put a simple form in the left hand column of your websites home page and other pages if possible. Most professional marketers place their opt-in form on EVERY page of their site.

4. Use social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter… truth be told all of these sites are only glorified List Builders; make sure you’re taking advantage of them to build your list of contacts.

5. Use Forums – there are literally thousands of forums and discussion boards so all you have to do is find one that relates to your particular business and then participate in the discussion. The key is to get targeted subscribers, ones interested in your topic or subject.

6. Promote your website and yourself – this can be done through such things as article writing. This will promote your site in a way that will get your site known and recognized by more people; become an expert and people will want to get to know you and what you have to say.

7. Ezine advertising is a cost effective and quick way to attract visitors to your site in order to get more subscribers. Ezine ads can be a very cheap and effective way of building your list quickly. Many professional marketers also use co-registration strategies – this can be simply done by adding a form where your subscribers can check to subscribe to other related ezines or newsletters. You promote my list, I promote yours.

8. Have well written content – you need to ensure that your website content is well written, informative and appealing so that when people visit your site they will hopefully opt-in to your email list. Again, if you have nothing valuable to offer your visitors, they won’t join your list.

9. Always use incentives to reward people for joining your opt-in list. Enticing potential subscribers with a free report, video, article, ebook or software is still the quickest way to get subscribers on your list.

10. Provide access to “Members Only” areas of your site – this part of your website will be accessible only when people have signed up to your opt-in email list. Same can be done for articles or reports… give your visitors a good teaser and then they have to opt-in to get access to the rest.

These are just some of the ways to build your list quickly but there are countless others, especially if you have a product to sell and you can do JVs (Joint Ventures) with other marketers or big-name Gurus. Then using a “Squeeze Page” to collect contact information to quickly build your list. So too is creating an affiliate program and letting your affiliates build your list for you!

Just remember, building up the perfect opt-in email list won’t happen over night but by following the above steps it will build quickly. Just make sure that as your opt-in list grows, you provide your users with quality content and you keep the list organized and managed in order to keep your subscribers happy and satisfied so that they will be willing to do business with you over the long term.

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The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous niche sites. If you want to learn how to make your online marketing much more effective by building your lists try here: list building ecourse Copyright (c) 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached. To learn more Internet Marketing Tactics try: http://www.bizwaremagic.com

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

10 Super Fast Ways To Build Your Opt-in List

Affiliate Cloaking: How To Double Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

Guest Post: By Adam Bauthues

I know how the affiliate marketing game goes because that is what I do full-time. I know the ins and outs of the whole process, and the excitement of a well thought out and perfectly executed affiliate campaign, which results in a steady stream of affiliate commissions. I also know what it is like to watch those same successful campaigns dry up suddenly for no logical reason at all. Sometimes they never even get off the ground when all the indicators are there that they should be profitable.

If this has happened to you before here is what I think the main problem is and a solution to deal with it.

If you are an affiliate marketer it is highly likely that you take the following steps when building a successful campaign:

1. You build a landing page to suck in as many leads as possible
2. You follow-up with these leads via a targeted email autoresponder campaign
3. You drive traffic to this new campaign

In a nutshell, you build a highly successful sales funnel, meant to sell a product or several related products, and you drive traffic to that funnel in a number of ways.

After building this successful sales funnel what happens if you don’t seem to be getting any sales? You get plenty of leads coming in, which means your traffic is converting, but the sales seem non-existent. Why is this?

Well, the first thing I would do is check my email follow-up series. There must be something wrong with my email sales copy, or my links, or the way I am pre-selling the offer.

But what if you are getting a ton of clicks to your products but no sales? Is it the product itself that is the issue? This could be. You really cannot be 100% sure of the problem at this point, and you may never know. The product itself could be a dud.

Well, I have had many campaigns like this over the years and I usually would just let them go and move on. That was until I experienced a very successful campaign, which had a consistent sales conversion rate and everything working properly, just stop working. Not a little bit either. The sales went to ZERO, overnight.

I spent some time asking other affiliates about this and found out it was a pretty common problem. I also found out what that problem was and how to combat it too. It is unfortunate that many affiliates do not understand what is really going on with their commissions.

I’ll try to explain a little of what could be happening to your sales in this article.

The most frustrating thing of all is that it is highly possible your sales funnels could be making a ton of sales and that you are just not getting credited with those sales. In other words, you are doing all of the work and someone else is getting your commissions. That doesn’t sit well with me and should not sit well with you either.

The Problem: Affiliate Link Theft

Without getting too technical, here is what is happening.

Your affiliate ID is being changed to someone else’s at the point of sale, either manually by the user, or via spyware on your computer which was placed there at some point while you were online. You could also be a victim of “cookie stuffing” which many affiliates do to try and protect their own commissions from link thieves.

The problem is that this “cookie stuffing” sometimes steals sales from others as well. These “cookie stuffing” affiliates are just trying to protect their own commissions but they don’t realize they are becoming part of the problem.

Any of these things can stop you from receiving credit for the sale even though you’re the one who should have made it. You cannot stop ALL commission thievery online, but to stop any of it at all you must implement affiliate cloaking into your campaigns.

Link cloaking is when you create a redirect, or a hidden frame redirect on your website that hides your affiliate ID’s and makes it nearly impossible for spyware programs to tinker with your affiliate links at the point of sale.

If you start incorporating affiliate cloaking into your business today you can make a huge difference in your bottom line. It is very possible that you are losing 30-50% of the sales that should be yours. I certainly was.

So now that you know you need affiliate cloaking, lets look at the right and wrong ways to do it.

Choosing A Link Cloaking Service

There are tons of programs and software packages online claiming to be able to help you cloak your links. Many of them are offered for free even. I would not suggest that you go with the first one you find for many reasons. You need to make sure that the link cloaker you use has been created specifically for affiliate marketing and not for some “black hat” seo tricks.

There are not as many affiliate cloaking systems as their are seo cloaking and regular link cloaking software programs so you need to be careful what you choose.

Do NOT Use Free Cloaking Services

I understand that everyone is looking for a bargain these days, but when it comes to your affiliate commissions be willing to do what is best for your business. The most notable free link redirection and cloaking services online are those provided by companies like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, budurl.com and others.

These services started out as a way to shorten long URL’s but have recenly been taking steps to supply affiliates with link cloaking too.

The problem with many of these services is that they don’t work with every kind of affiliate link or program, and many times will actually hinder your ability to get visitors to your site!

The horror stories are too numerous of people who used redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly and lost commissions. Many spammers use these services to try and cloak their links too, which results in many of these links not being accepted as viable URL’s by spam filters and other email services.

It is in your best interest to not use these services at all.

The Best Link Cloaking Service

The best link cloaker is one that you can upload to your own servers so you don’t have to worry about anything breaking down or not working properly.

This means you could create a separate website to house ALL of your cloaked links, or upload the cloaking script to each individual website you are promoting and create site specific links.

Depending on which way you want to go (I actually use both methods) it can be difficult to accomplish any of it if you are not a web programmer, or don’t want to outsource the project to someone you are not sure you can trust.

With all of the different options available out there in regards to link cloaking it is very important to spend some time learning about the concept from an affiliate marketing standpoint. Once I got hooked up with the right cloaking systems my commissions doubled practically overnight for many of the products I was originally having trouble selling.

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Adam Bauthues – And now I would like to invite you to receive Instant Free Access to my affiliate cloaking report! In this report you will learn how to properly use affiliate link cloaking to generate more sales, bigger commissions, and repeat customers. You can also visit my blog at http://www.FreeInternetMarketingReports.com to get more free reports, tips and tricks to help you affiliate marketing business.

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

Affiliate Cloaking: How To Double Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight