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Sunday, April 24, 2011

How To Build Your Mailing List Using Downloads

By Gene Fink


Considered as the lifeblood of your online business is a mailing list. The old adage "the money is in the list" cannot be true enough -- if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

Building up a targeted list of prospects who will be interested in your products is what you can actually do as long as you offer a relevant download on your website. For example, let's take a look at a very good example -- apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via -- guess where -- iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full-feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. What's important is for your download to offer enough value for the prospect that they would be willing to give you their contact details such as their email address.

But when it comes to attracting qualified prospects, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won't be enough. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. Doing this, there is no way your visitors won't be able to find the download page and when they do find it, then you will be able to get some of them converted into your prospects.

Putting a little effort when it comes to promoting your download is another thing you need to do. What you need to do is explain and elaborate on the values of the download and also why your visitors should download it. You may think anyone wouldn't be able to pass on a freebie, but because most of their downloads would just sit on the hard disk and collect virtual dust, a lot of your visitors would be too lazy to make any effort to download. Therefore, showing your visitors why they should download your freebie is very important.




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