getting subscribers for your email listOne of the most important things you can do for yourself in the sphere of Internet marketing is to get yourself more subscribers for your Email list. Of course, if you don’t happen to have one, you should probably get yourself an Email list. I did a review a while back of autoresponder services which can help you automate your Email list and I suggest you see it for some ideas. However, if you do have a list, here’s how to get more people to subscribe:

Ask Them

It may sound obvious, but it’s not. The first and foremost thing you need to do if you want to build your Email list is to ask people to sign up for it. This means that you don’t just create the list. This means you include an ad on every page of your blog with a prominent sign up box so that people can go ahead and sign up for the list.
You should also use either a pop up box or a slide in box to ask people to sign up when they first arrive at your blog or website. There are several WordPress plugins that you can use to automate this if you happen to be using WordPress for your website (one example I reviewed a while back is WP Slide In).

Make It Worth Their While

You also want to make it worth their while to sign up for your Email list. This means that you don’t just ask, but you offer an inducement. Now I hate to tell you this, but the Email newsletter you offer to send out is usually not going to be enough (that’s often considered the “price” they pay for getting the free stuff). Instead, what you want to offer to your customers is something which has real value.
This may be a special discount coupon off of whatever product you sell or it may be a physical free sample that you provide to them via mail. You could also offer them an eBook for signing up for your mailing list, but if you do, make sure it’s not just rehashed junk they can find elsewhere on the web. The eBook should be professionally written and edited and should provide them with something which has real value.

Ask Them to Tell Their Friends

The single best way to increase the number of people who sign up for your Email list is to ask them to tell their friends about the list. This means doing two things:
First, you need to actually offer them something of genuine value in your Email newsletter which they think will be worth telling their friends about. Second, you may want to offer them an inducement for telling their friends.

Offer a Coupon

For example, I saw a social buying club recently which was offering a $10 coupon to anyone who got their friends to sign up for the service. This is a relatively painless ten dollars for the reader because they don’t have to ask their friends to buy anything – just signing up was enough. The key here however is to offer a coupon rather than a cash inducement so that ultimately the money flows back to you and gets your customer to make an additional purchase rather than simply being money that is out of your own pocket.