Building a List- Give a Little to Get a Lot

New Internet marketers soon hear that building a list is a vital first step in their plan of making money online. Many gurus say that an email list is your starting point.

If you've done your homework, you already know the many ways that building an email list will help you reach your business and financial goals. You can promote your affiliate products or your own products and services to your list. You can promote up-sales, back end sales and design new product launches. You can see that building a list is crucial to your long term success.

The benefits of building a list don't stop with direct sales. Once you have a list, you can survey your members for market research information. You can invite testimonials for the goods and services you are offering. You can find beta testers for your new product. You can acquire joint venture partners for product launches.

"That's all well and good, you say, "but I don't know how to go about building a list."

There are plenty of approaches to building a list. Participating in a joint venture giveaway is one way.

Joint venture giveaways are events in which several joint venture partners donate gifts. Each partner invites other people to join as a joint venture member and collect an array of gifts.

The gifts are usually accessible over the Internet – downloadable reports, ebooks, graphics, software, scripts, audio or video files or subscriptions for a membership web site.

Nothing to donate? Surf to an auction site like eBay and search for "ebooks." Look for ebooks or articles that are being sold with Private Label Rights (PLR). Be sure to check the rights that the seller is offering. Typically, you can give away a PLR product as it is, re-write it, or put your own name as the author. Quite often you can get PLR products on eBay for two or three dollars a bundle.

Auctions aren't your only source. Consider using items in the public domain. Since these items are not copyrighted you can give them away freely. Run a Google search for "public domain ebooks".

Now then, let's go back to the joint venture giveaway and how you use it for building a list. The event host invites joint venture partners to participate. Participating joint venture partners are expected to attract members to collect the gifts. If you do not have an email list to contact, you can invite family and friends and Facebook contacts. You can put the invitation in your email signature and post to appropriate forums and email lists, if the rules permit you to do so.

Next, you need to create a "squeeze page " since building a list is the purpose of this event. When members click through your link on the giveaway site to collect your gift, they arrive at a page that asks for their email address before you deliver the gift Once they provide their email address, your system takes them to a second page where they receive information about collecting their gift.

If you are wondering how to set this up, it is simple to do if you have a good autoresponder service. An autoresponder will generate the form that collects the email, save the email to a database where you can use it later, and direct your gift-seeker to the page with the download information. Once set up, the entire process is automated. It makes building a list easy.

No autoresponder? Do a Google search but avoid the free autoresponders. They usually don't offer all the features you need and worse, will distract your visitors with other people's advertising. Building a list without a good autoresponder just won't work.

And that's it. You are building a list that you can use as you wish. However, do not fall into the trap of abusing your subscribers with spammy emails and trashy product recommendations. Be good to them and they will repay you many times over.