Email marketing is slowly growing in popularity online as more and more people are starting to realise the benefits of building a list.

With an email list, especially a targeted one, you have immediate leverage in your niche – you can sell products directly to them or as an affiliate, and even joint venture with others to increase both your levels of income.

Of course, you have to provide value to your list or else they are going to ignore you. Make sure that you focusing on providing value FIRST and making money SECOND. By doing this, you will not just build trust and credibility in the eyes of your readers, but also eventually make more money.

Email marketing is all about conversion rate. The *standard* theory is that it takes seven high quality emails on average to produce a sale.

Of course this can differ depending on the price of product, what niche you are marketing in and how credible you are before hand. A well known marketer may only need a single email to sell a product, whereas you may need to work with ten.

First, you need a high quality autoresponder service to manage your emails and subscribers.

There are free ones available but I do not recommend them. Firstly, most of them have ads for other / unrelated services that will vastly decrease your conversion rate. Secondly, when you do decide to move to a paid service, you will have to transfer and risk losing most of your subscriber base.

Start out with a well known autoresponder service – you can even pay monthly or use their free trial to test them out before you commit.

I personally recommend Aweber – I’ve used it for the last few months and have been very pleased with it.

Aweber’s service starts at just $19 per month and it is well worth it. They’re one of, if not the most well known and well used autoresponder services in the business and the functions they offer make it very easy to get started with email marketing. They also have a set of videos and tutorials to help you make the most out of your experience. Sign up for Aweber today.

After you have your autoresponder, you will want to setup a landing page. You can create this by yourself if you know HTML, or find free landing page templates using Google.

We used a simple Wordpress make to create our landing page which was worked pretty well so far. You can check it out here.

As all you’re asking for is a name and email (which is free to the end user) you don’t want to make your landing page too long. Information overload is definitely a problem for most users online, and they don’t have the time to spend thirty minutes reading your landing page.

I’d suggest you provide an incentive – we did this by offering a report detailing how I made $5,030 off a product flip; everyone loves something for free.

State the benefits of your freebie, provide proof if possible (may not be possible in some niches) and clearly mention that the information you’re providing is valuable but is being given away free.

You don’t need to have your landing page look world class (it helps though, obviously) but make sure it doesn’t look like crap. This is why I love using Wordpress, as there are countless templates that look good and cost nothing. Any of which you can use.

After you setup your landing page, you want to have at least one or two emails going out. Try and mention how often you’ll be sending emails, but give yourself a little bit of leeway. Don’t promise something and then not deliver.

If you setup Aweber’s blog broadcast function, your subscribers will automatically have blog posts sent to them via email. Like we’re doing on this blog. If you already have content going out, you can update less manually, as long as that content is of high quality of course.

Setup the incentive you offered as your first message – it will go out immediately. Some people will unsubscribe instantly after they get the freebie, but don’t worry about that. Most will stick around to see what you have to offer, especially if the information is of high quality.

Now, it’s time for the numbers…

A small list will not tend to make you huge money (that is, enough income that you can live off monthly). Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but most often you will need a list of at least 1,000 subscribers before you start seeing a trickle of income. If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers, and a 10% conversion rate (which can be built by offering them value over a period of time), you will make $2,000 if you offer them a $20 product.

You can build your list of 1,000 in less than a year. We’ve done it in less than a week.

How? Make sure you provide value, and make sure that you get your opt in form in front of as many eyes as possible.

If you aim to build a list of 1,000 subscribers in a year, that’s only around 3 subscribers a day (take a few days off to relax!). Once you break that huge figure down, it’s not that hard is it?

Three subscribers a day, or even double or triple that is easy if you are willing to work at it. Of course, some people don’t know where to start, which is what we’re here for.

Here’s some ways you can use to increase your subscriber count:

1. Killer landing page. In the internet marketing niche, this is not as necessary, but in other niches where people are not as used to opting in for things you’ll want your landing page to be as good as possible. Keep it simple, yes, but make sure it doesn’t look like garbage and offer testimonials if you can.

2. Article Marketing. The key in article marketing is to target longer keywords that are easier to rank for. The full process for article marketing cannot be covered in this post, but there are plenty of tutorials out there. We will cover article marketing in depth in a future post.

3. Video Marketing. Video marketing is becoming more and more popular of late with sites like Youtube, Viddler and Metacafe generating millions of pageviews per month. Create a simple video talking about your website, link to your landing page in the description.

4. Forums. A large part of our list was built using forums. Forums are a great resource – post quality content and place the link to your squeeze page in your signature, and you’ll not just prompt people to subscribe but also build up your level of trust and credibility just from forum posting.

5. Joint Venture. You’ll need to have a medium – large size list (at least 100) but once you attain that figure you can joint venture with other marketers to build both your lists together. How it works is that you promote his/her list and they do the same – you could also offer a freebie and they could reciprocate.

6. Blogs. Blogs are a great way to build a list – not just off your own, but off other blogs too. Look for medium to large sized blogs in your niche and ask if you can guest post on their website. Link to your squeeze page in your author bio. If your guest post is good, you’ll see people subscribe – you can also outsource the guest posts.

7. Ezines. Some niches have special, large ezines that you can advertise in for a set price. Most blogs and forums will have this as well. Create a well written ad and people will click through to your landing page – depending on how good your landing page is, you’ll see subscribers.

8. Pay Per Click. This is not for newbies, but if you have reasonable experience you could drive traffic to your landing page using pay per click services like Adwords. Make sure you target your ads so that you don’t waste money. Subscribers, those that are looking for information are worth a lot of money – as long as you can get subscribers cheap, you’re doing well.

9. Offline. Going to a marketing conference? Create business cards with your landing page URL on the back and hand them out to whoever you meet. Make a good impression and people will be rushing home to type in that URL. If you want to get it in front of more eyes, create tshirts, signs, advertise on radio… it’s all up to your imagination.

10. SEO. This will take longer than most of the methods above but will ultimately build you the best kinds of subscribers. Do search engine optimization on your landing page (meta tags, h1 / h2, targeted links etc) over time and get it to rank for targeted keywords. If you can do this successfully you can build up a list of many subscribers, all potential customers in the future.

Above are ten things you can do to increase your opt in list. If you can get yourself just one subscriber per method per day, you’ll get 3,650 per year. Simplistic? Yes, but most things online are.

You can also work with other ideas – for example using social networks like Facebook / Myspace to build subscribers. Be creative! If you have any questions feel free to ask below.