There can’t be enough said with regard to the benefits of giving away free resources as a way to build your list, aka capture leads. People just love the idea of getting something for free and they will be attracted to your offer of a free eBook or report or even some small software application or tool that you may have resale rights to (PLR).
The idea is to offer them the freebie in exchange for only their eMail address, which implies permission to send them a newsletter or other document that advertises your product. Your eMail leads are what makes up your list. Once you get one, you should consistently keep in touch with them and continue to provide something of value such as information that they need to build their business.
Your list is probably your most important resource at all stages of developing your business. While eMail marketing has suffered some difficulty because of spammers, there is a report recently that says that for the first time in over a decade spam is down to below 50% (of mail received). This means it just got a bit easier for you to get your eMails to go through.
The problem is not just one of being inundated with so many unsolicited ads that none end up getting read, but also of the filters that are used by email services to combat the problem. In particular the filters seem to have difficulty in telling the difference between legal bulk mail sent by business and illegal spam. So they paint everything with the same brush and just block it all. Even mail that you have requested and are expecting gets sent to the spam folder.
This makes eMail marketing much more difficult to be an effective advertising tool. One of the other things that probably discourage people from using ‘professional’ list building services are the mass amounts of old, regurgitated eMail addresses that they buy. It is very disheartening for a newbie to realize they have 1000 addresses and probably 1/3 of them bounce because they are so old as to be invalid. Then another 1/3 doesn’t get opened because they were sent to spam or completely blocked, going to never-never land. So for the cost of 1000 leads you get less than 350 with any possibility.
It’s just ‘the name of the game’ though and the list is critical enough that we have to put up with the hardships just for the chance that we will be able to convert a few of these to sales. With that said it is good to have some free ways to capture leads directly online, using web forms on our websites, etc. In order to get your website seen you should have a way to add fresh content on a regular basis so that your link will be re-indexed by the search engines, elevating its position in the search results.
