Terez Dunn, in his article “Getting Free Prospect Lists and Building Your Own,” wrote:

“…if you feel that going out, meeting people, and promoting your products or services personally is not your cup of tea, free prospect lists are excellent alternatives. You can achieve this by simply downloading a software tool and installing them on your computer. ….The number of software tools dedicated on generating free prospect lists is huge. Plus, they are also free meaning that you can get the best of both worlds; free software tool and free prospect lists.”

What comes into your mind when we talk about list building? Personally, the list refers to the people. Your own people you send emails and you want them to sign up in your squeeze page to subscribe on your services and eventually, you want them to purchase your product. However, will you agree with me if I say list building can be more fun if it’s absolutely for free? You heard it right, it’s FREE.

These days, free list building is believed to be an ineffective technique in generating leads. Some of them will even rationalize that free services are no good and free is all hype when in fact, the best things in life are still for free. Believe it or not, you can create a reliable list of subscribers for no charge at all.

The secret ingredient here is patience and consistency. If you are patient enough to look for your people and you are consistency doing all the things you should be doing everyday, there’s no doubt why you can’t build a list on your own.

How To Build A List for FREE?

The inception of various Web 2.0 is a big blessing to online entrepreneurs and to tell you the truth, if you are going to use these hundreds of social community bookmarking sites to your advantage, you can get as many prospects as you want.

As a matter of fact, Twitter.com is a very good microblogging site that allows you to connect with people at anytime. Here, you can invite people, compose a juicy message with links to it of not more than 140 characters and once you tweet this message, the message sends out to all your friends and potential prospects.

Before using Twitter, be sure to have your own blog or promotional website first. If you have a blog or a website, your Tweet visitors can easily click on the anchor link you have provided in your message. This is a good practice than putting your Blog URL in your profile sidebars.

Same with Plurk.com, the concept is same as Twitter, the only difference is, you are trusting an elephant friend than a bird (LOL).

But here’s I want to share with you: Just for the record, if you want to become a popular person in Twitter or Plurk, make your page the best attractive one. Your background must not be too dark and not too shady. Your background should tell your readers how great you are and you can help them earn money online.

Invite as many people in your Tweet or Plurk page but see to it that you also include the people who can be your loyal customers as well. The most important key here: You know who are the people you can make affiliates with.

Remember there are three BIG golden rules to increase the number of subscribers in your opt-in list (David Hardin):

• We hope they like what they see on our web sites.

• We hope they like what they read in our e-mails.

• We hope they like the product(s) we are offering them

FaceBook and Myspace Mania

Are you a member of Facebook or MySpace?

Never waste an opportunity to make at least five thousand friends in total. These are the social community sites that allow you to blog, post shout-out and bulletins and upload pictures or videos.

Imagine if you’ll consistently doing these activities all the time? Truth is, finding the right prospects in these sites will take a lot of time and you can’t expect it to be easy. You should effectively spread your mission without putting much pressure on their leg.

Become the person who can listen to their needs and you can also ask for their help and tips if you want. Who Knows? You might only be shocked when a number of your friends will send to you a reply message and says: “I will buy your product.”

Article Marketing

If you love to write informative how-to articles then why not post as many articles in your blog. After that, you can spin these articles into three or five versions each and post these in various article directories with high page rank such as EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.

Spinning articles is hard. Paraphrasing, rewriting and tweaking your sentences and paragraphs using the symbols | and {} consumes a lot of your time. That’s why; I won’t suggest you to manually spin your articles. You can hire an agent to do the spinning for you or better yet, find a website or a free software that can spin your articles in just one click.

An example of automated free article spinner site is freearticlespinner.com and if you go for a manual spinner site, use jetspinner, it’s good.

The only disadvantage to using automated spinner sites is your content will not be coherent. The sentences became awkward and the ideas are not logically arranged. In this case, you may need to edit it to retain the nice quality.

The purpose of this objective is to promote your campaign through your author resource box. Your author resource box plays a vital role in free list building technique. If these readers subscribe on your ezines, there is a huge possibility that they will be forced to click the anchor link provided in your author resource box and immediately sign up to your squeeze page. Make sure they can immediately see your opt-in box in your squeeze page. Position your opt-in box above the fold.

Blog Commenting

How about spending two to three hours of blog hopping? I’m sure you are hungry for new details, new ideas and new insights. And everytime you visit a blog, write a comment on how you appreciate his ideas and the way he writes his articles.

Then don’t forget to leave a comment script. A comment script is like an author resource box. You say it all over again but limit it to one to two sentences and what’s more important is, you do encourage the blog owner to visit your blog.

This is a sample of a comment script:

“If you have time, try visiting my blog (the url) and I think we can build great business ventures.”

Know What Your Readers Crave

This is another great and effective strategy to free list building. A lot of people want incentive and they seek for items that are for free. I see no reasons why you can’t give these things to them. You can entice people in various ways: through your words, through mp3, through instructional videos, through webinars, through podcast and through ebooks.

In most cases, people will not mind lending their email address to you as long as they are satisfied with your incentives.

Venture Co-registrations

This technique is somewhat new to me and I get this idea from Terez Dunn in ezinearticles.com. In his article, he wrote,

“This kind of strategic partnership involves you promoting another person’s newsletter on your sign-up or thank you Web page and the other person will promote yours. This way, if a potential customer visits the other person’s newsletter, that customer will be given your name and a link to your sign-up page. This is an excellent way for you to build and create your own free prospect lists.”

The general idea is somewhat similar to exchanging links, right?

Conclusion

There’s no final conclusions to end this article. Your journey to finding free list building is not yet finish. List building is a tool and every now and then, there will be new techniques for you to follow and if you some ideas to add, don’t hesitate to write a comment.

Before pursuing a life-changing career in email marketing, you must first research what kind of email marketing services you will need for your business.

Fact is, not all email marketing companies offer same range of services. It also doesn’t mean free or cheap marketing services are not good. Here, the rule states: The kind of services you need should equal your marketing needs.

If you simply pay for email marketing services without thorough research, this strategy is simply a waste of time, effort and money.

For this reason, research is the key to solve this dilemma. Read, read and learn before purchasing any email services and make sure you completely understand its features, benefits and its uses for your business.

Basic Email Services

The basic features of an email marketing service include autoresponders, product delivery tools, shopping carts and email HTML option.

If you are looking for more advance features such as advanced search options, export mailing list capability, mailing time reports, quick email deliverability etc. you should look for a company that offers these services. Nowadays, several online entrepreneurs go for Aweber and Get Response.

You can also choose to buy or rent email addresses for your email opt-in lists. This services are offered by some marketing companies but this is not a good practice. You can gather many leads as you want but utilizing this technique without proper consent from the email owner can simply turn you into a spammer.

I’m not trying to be a saint here. Email marketing is a risky business and selecting the right marketing services is not also easy. This is about getting leads and for some marketers out there, the quickest way to build list is buy it.

If this technique is what you believe is right then do it. It’s a choice but believe me, if you want to make good sales in a long run without sacrificing your credibility then you should not completely depend on purchase or rent email list.

What To Look for?

One of the good strategies you need to do to attract readers is the overall layout of your email message. If you want an appealing message, you should get the HTHML text editor from your company provider. Using the HTML text editor allows you to include interactive items, images or videos in your mail. This is a good trick to catch your readers’ attention.

You should also focus on the rate of email deliverability. One expert recommends ReturnPath.net, PiperSoftware.com, Deliverability.com and DeliveryMonitor.com. These companies will help you in monitoring your emails and they also create report showing you your deliverability scores for every Internet service provider.

There are also websites that offer spam filter services. Try ezinecheck.com and
OpenRBL.org for spam database lookup. You can also avoid spamming if you tell your subscribers to include you on their whitelist. The whitelist is one of the great features in your email account and if the prospect will put you on their whitelist, your messages will not be blocked by spam filters.

Paddu Govindaraj is a lead management blogger who specializes in effective email marketing, auto-responder and other marketing software tools. His goal is to help small online businesses boosts their number of sales.

I read his one of his great articles in EzineArticles and he wrote some of the most powerful and important advices about email marketing services.

To him, there are eight variables every marketer should take note in choosing email services:

1. List Size and Email Volume (how many emails you want sent per month? Will they allow you room for your opt email list to grow?)
2. Email Personalization (is it possible for personalized messages to be sent to your prospects?)
3. In-built Autoresponder System (do they provide “drip email messaging feature” without any additional cost?)
4. List Segmentation (does the service include good list segmentation filters?)
5. Customer Service and Technical Support (do they offer 24/7 support and email ticket system?)
6. Test with Free Trial (do they offer free-trial services? If yes, for how long?)
7. Contracts, Commitments (how will you pay them? Every month? Every six month? Do they have contractual?)
8. Cost of the Service (are the services cheap? Expensive? Are there any special discounts? Freebies?)

And here’s a good suggestion from me, if you want to constantly have a satisfying life with marketing, never stop learning and regularly update yourself with the latest and innovative email marketing services you think you might need.

Some authors define email marketing as the proper utilization of electronic system to make sales. Apart from its inexpensive cost, when you use email marketing as your mode of marketing and advertising, you can guarantee that your mail reaches your list of subscribers right away.

In just one click, your subscribers will read your mail and if they like what they read, they will eventually trust you and later on, buy your products.

What’s good with email marketing is, even without your desktop or laptop, you can still continue rolling the ball. With the various top-quality mobile phones around such as Blackberry, Sony Ericsson and Nokia, you can still communicate with your potential prospects even you’re inside a train or having a cruise vacation in the Caribbean.

Some Effective Tips and Techniques in Email Marketing

To be successful in email marketing, you need to have a marketing plan before laying out the softwares and gadgets you’ll be needing afterwards.

As what Karan Smith wrote in her article “Fine-Tune Your Email Marketing For Increased ROI,” defining the objectives of your campaign is the first thing you must have in mind.

Stick with the BASICS. Decide what will be your niche. Who will be your audience? What age group do they belong? Do your audience live in a wealthy lifestyle or just the average? If so, how will you approach them through writing?

Answering these following questions will let you understand the bigger picture of your goals. Writing down your personal insights in your journal might be a big help. There are certain techniques that might not work for you when you are only reading articles or blogs.

Marketing is about your ideas. Other people may have thousands of great ideas to share with you but it’s up to you how will you use these ideas to your advantage.

Next in line is the set-up. The first time you research about email marketing, you will meet unfamiliar terms such as email list management, database marketing, opt email list etc.

What’s more frustrating is, some authors don’t have any clear explanation what these terms are. They simply write the article and assume that their readers will get what it means.

The first time I read an article on email marketing, my head was spinning around. Thanks to my SEO friend in MySpace and he has answered all my inquiries with great ease.

After numerous email training courses, these are the important things I’ve learned:

1. Database Marketing refers the process of gathering, organizing, and analyzing your customer’s data. All these information will be stored in an electonic database for your easy retrieval. From these data, the database marketers will create various insights, statistical numbers and predict customer’s behavior. This way, you can directly email your prospects with the ideas you think they might need.
2. When done with that, the next thing you need to do is how you can improve the number of subscribers in your mailing list. These days, there are various techniques you can do to level up the number of your subscribers:a) You can choose to invest for as low as $30 to some marketing websites and purchase or rent email lists of seven million email addresses. Yet, it’s still BEST if you find your prospects in forums or online communities such as MySpace and Facebook. Purchasing or renting email list can can only destroy your reputation online. If you want to build lists right away, better hire an well-experienced email list broker. The role of a list broker is to help you find new email lists at affordable cost. b) Choosing a reliable email marketing companies. The success of your email marketing campaign somehow relies on the type of company you are into. Three of the most famous email companies are Aweber Communications (ideal for the starters), Vertical Response (self-service online marketing) and Quantum Digital.c) Using your autoresponder, entice your readers with juicy and powerful headlines. A powerful headline is direct, concise and it gives your readers the valid reason to click on your mail and read the entire body.

   d) Offer freebies, free ebook downloads, special discounts and promos.

3. Create your own blog and create an attractive squeeze page. A squeeze page is defined as an an introductory door which automatically pops up when someone attempts to visits your blog and these readers have to option to input their name and email address in the subscriber’s opt-in list in exchange of free reports, newsletters or free training courses.
4. Lastly, observe follow-up maintenance on your email system. According to Jeremy Long Chia Teik (webmaster), “Maintaining an efficient follow-up system for your email marketing campaign will ensure that all emails whether previous or current will be well taken care of. Your customers deserve the best attention in terms of prompt replies to their complaints, questions and comments.”

Final Say

The world of email marketing has a bright future ahead of you and if you continue to use it to prosper your online business, there’s no reasons why you can’t take your business on new heights of success.