If you do a search for ways to make money online and have a look at the opportunities available you’ll find that lots of well known marketers will tell you that the money is in the list. Building a list features highly because once you have acquired the names and emails of people interested in your chosen niche you can market to them over a sustained period of time.

New sites like Myspace and other social sites have seen rapid growth over the last couple of years and Squidoo is a new type of site that attracts very high rankings with the search engines. Essentially Squidoo allows users to create highly focused web pages (called lenses) which can then be joined with other lenses in related niches in a networked system.

Because of the highly focused nature of the pages and the networked system the pages are effectively linked to other pages all within a tight niche and it is this that provides for a high search engine ranking. Used properly this can be a highly useful source of free traffic for your list building activities.

When writing content for your Squidoo lens you should write in a similar way to writing a cross between an article and a blog post, ensuring that your lens is highly focused and keyword dense.

This means that you should write in a style that is easy to read and formatted in digestible chunks, using bullets or numbering whenever possible. Keeping your lens focused on a narrow niche area is key to obtaining a good ranking within the search engines.

By writing fresh unique content that ‘talks’ to the reader, like you would in a blog should ensure that your reader ‘listens’ to the end and completes the actions you want. In list building this should be clicking through to a squeeze page which has been designed based on the content of your Squidoo lens.

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List building has become so popular these days, there is more and more information available for the beginning list builder. In this article however, I want to focus on people who want to build a responsive list and are willing to work hard to do it If this sounds like you, please take the time to read this article. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

By doing just 3 simple things, you will be able to greatly increase the responsiveness of your subscribers resulting in more sales.

1) Under promise and over deliver. When someone opts in to my email list, they not only receive the free gift they requested, they also receive a series of informative followup e-mails, a weekly newsletter with relevant information, and free downloads.

2) Build a bond with your subscribers. I always send out e-mails asking my subscribers for input and advice. I want to know what it is that my subscribers are interested in learning about. Once I know this key piece of information, I teach them. For FREE!

3) Your subscribers success should be important to you. Consider your list more like a group of students that are building their business based on your teachings. If you think of your subscribers success and not about how much money you can make off of them, they will be more than happy to purchase your other products and services.

If you incorporate these three things into the management of your opt in list, I guarantee you will see a significant boost in sales.

James Germana
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http://www.jamesgermana.com/loopezine

List building is one of those things that gets easier with time – there is a kind of exponential action that happens with list building.

One of the things that I did when I had between 1500 and about 4500 subscribers was joint venture email exchanges.

Joint ventures are pretty straight forward - generally you offer a commission to them for promoting your product, and vice versa.

I didn’t really feel comfortable doing it with less than that many, especially since a lot of the lists that I exchanged with were larger than mine. And now that I have more than that, it seems I lose as many subscribers as I gain business – so if you are in that ‘sweet spot’ of subscribership – take advantage of it!

For list building joint ventures, once you have at least 500 subscribers, then contact other list builders and ask them if they would like to trade mailings with you.

You mail their offer to your list and they mail your offer to their list. It gives both of you the opportunity to grow your lists, and expand your buyership.

When I do joint ventures of that nature, I like to send their traffic to one of my squeeze pages, and offer them a fre.e gift of some kind - rather than try to sell them something.

Again, the principle is the same as I consistently teach - I would rather get them on my list the first time I meet them, rather than to sell them something the first time I meet them.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

List building of course is the process of creating a list of like minded individuals who have a similar interest to each other, and presumably related to the theme of your website.

One of the hardest things to think of sometimes is a theme for your newsletter.

The real key here is that you cannot build a list just for the purpose of building a list.

You have to have a genuine purpose for a list. For example, perhaps your purpose for your list is that you want to eventually sell your product, and for this article, let’s assume that your product is a motivational ebook.

But all you have is one product, so like you said, you cannot just send out promotions for ebooks all the time. But I am assuming that if you are building this list, it is so that you can offer ebooks to these potential customers in the future.

So this is where the newsletter comes in. You use the newsletter to build a relationship with your readers, and maybe once or twice a month you send out a recommendation for one of your ebooks.

So you need to think of a newsletter topic that would appeal to people who might want to buy a motivational ebook. We know two things about these people: they are interested in motivation and they are online (or at least have computers). Well, as long as you target them online, you know they have access to a computer, and presumably own one. So that is covered.

What about the next one? People who are interested in motivational things. These might be people who simply state need to be motivated. Or they have responded to an ad you create the offers a free motivational product. Or they could be self-employed online people – they always need motivation!

So you could build a list of people who like motivational things. And the easiest way to do this would be to set up a squeeze page offering a free motivational ebook, and anyone who downloads it subscribes to your list. Your newsletter could have weekly or daily motivational sayings or statements – possibly contributed by your readers to create list interaction.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

If you do use a tracking service that uses tracking links, instead send your visitors to a page hosted on your web domain, and redirect them to the tracking link.

That way, if you choose to discontinue using the ad tracking company, or they go out of business, you simply change the redirect on your pages. This is still cumbersome if you have to make a change, but it is far better than the alternative – losing your inbound links.

Another ad tracking solution is to use an ad tracking service that uses javascript or some other form of code to identify each individual visitor to your web page itself, and correlate that with code you would put on your thank pages or download pages. The downside to this is that you have to install the code on all relevant pages, and if you have hundreds or thousands that can be time or cost prohibitive.

Still another solution is to incorporate your autoresponders’ tracking system into your web site. You are already going to be installing autoresponder code on each of your web pages, so by creating unique web forms for each web page, in effect you are isolating the source of each subscriber to your web site, and identifying them based on their name and email address. Your autoresponder will create individual squeeze page conversion rates, and you can manually calculate sales conversion rates. At this point, you simply correlate the sales on your web site to their respective source, and calculate conversion rates per source per product.

Although this solution is the most cumbersome, it is the least intrusive to your web site, and gives you the most freedom in terms of changes to your web site and the tracking service.

So how do you test a squeeze page?

When you are testing a squeeze page (or a sale page) you need to change only one element on the page at a time. If you change more than one element, you will not know which one is responsible for the change (or lack thereof) in conversion rate.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

If you were to send all of your traffic to one squeeze page, and try to maximize or optimize that squeeze page across all traffic, you might have some traffic that converts at 50% and others that converts at 10% - but you will only show a 30% conversion rate, for example.

By isolating each traffic source and testing and tweaking each individual squeeze page and traffic source, you can increase your conversion rates across the board.

So how do you test?

There are a number of different ways you can test and track your results.

One way to do this is to use ad tracking software. Some software uses cookies that are put on a visitors’ computer, and they track when that same visitor opt ins to a specific web page. Some software actually identifies the visitors’ computers’ IP address, and uses that to track the visitors’ behaviour.

One word of caution: if you use ad tracking software, do not advertise the tracking links, if your ad tracking software uses tracking links. Basically tracking links are links generated by the ad tracking software, and are hosted on their computer, and either redirect to your content, or host your content on their servers.

Obviously, doing it this way makes things easy, unless the ad tracking company goes out of business, or you choose to discontinue using their services. What happens to all the links you have advertised?

They no longer go to your site – so you lose any links you have worked hard to create.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

It is critically important that you test the web copy on your squeeze page. I have squeeze pages that convert at 10%, and I have squeeze pages that convert at 65%. This varies dramatically based on the traffic source and the squeeze page itself. Sometimes a small change in the script will create a big change in the conversion rate.

Think about this. Assume that your average visitor cost is 10 cents. Assume that your average conversion rate is 10%. That means your cost per subscriber is $1. Imagine that you can increase the conversion rate on that particular source of traffic to 30%. Your cost per subscriber will go down to 33 cents.

You can look at that two ways. You can either afford more subscribers on the same budget, or you can increase the profit per subscriber – or both.

One thing that is important to remember is that each traffic source will convert differently, and will convert differently on different squeeze pages.

For example, a referred visitor or an article generated visitor may not need much ad copy to get them to subscribe – when they get to your squeeze page they are already prepared to opt in, regardless of the offer – and in fact may convert at a lower rate if they have to read a long article to get to the opt in box.

However, non-referred (or cold) traffic may need to read 300-500 words from you before they will trust you enough to give you their name and email address.

So in these two cases, the source of traffic dictates the type and copy of the squeeze page.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

So what do you do if you have an established web site and you simply cannot make the transition to squeeze page only? Well, you guessed it: put an opt in form on every web page, except for perhaps sales pages.

Put it where they can see it when they first get to your web site or web page (above the fold, so to speak). Put it again at the end of each web page. And if you have long web pages, put an opt in box several times throughout the web page.

Offer your visitors some free gift of incredible value to induce them to opt in.

Now, what about sales pages? Generally, if you include an opt in form on your sales page, your sales page conversion rate will go down. However, if your sales page is your main point of entry for some class of visitors, then you might want to include an opt in form, so that you have the option of continuing to contact the ones that don’t buy from you right up front.

Or you can use a pop under web form that will ask the visitor for their name and email after they have closed the web page. In this way, you know that the visitor has made the decision not to purchase (they closed the page) and therefore you have nothing to lose by asking to opt them in now.

Of course, if you really want to make the most amount of money, structure things so that only your subscribers will go to your sales pages. Instead of sending non-subscriber traffic to your sales page, send them to a squeeze page, and then redirect them to the sales page after they have opted in, or redirect them when they leave your squeeze page without opting in.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

If you are going to really make money, you have to have something of the same attitude. I realize that you might have a web site that is already set up and performing well without squeeze pages. I challenge you to evaluate the revenue per visitor of those pages, then set up a test web site or web page with only a squeeze page, and evaluate the revenue per visitor using the squeeze page method alone.

Now that my main web site has achieved (through no real effort of my own except through article marketing), I have added SEO to my traffic mix, and therefore I obviously have to have pages that are designed to be spidered and featured by the search engines. The way I do that is to create article pages and linking them to an single web page that I have indexed by the search engines. The search engines know that page exists, and they know the other pages exist, but they would be pretty difficult for anyone to get to unless they were directed by a search engine.

And, you guessed it – those pages are still basically squeeze pages.

Now, because I anticipate that the majority of visitors to those pages come to them via the search engines, I feel they need more information than a referred visitor needs, so I write an article to put on the web page, then at the bottom, I put a web form. So again, it is basically a squeeze page, although the formula for creating is somewhat different.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

My entire web site is squeeze page based. My index page and all of my entry pages (at the time of this writing) are squeeze pages. Unless you literally type in the exact name of the page where my sales copy is written, just about the only way to get into my web site is through a squeeze page. The search engines have picked up some of my other pages, so I can no longer say there is no other way in, but it is not easy for someone who stumbles on one of my squeeze pages to figure out how to get in, except for subscribing.

So I lose a few potential sales? Sure I do. But I feel I gain so many more subscribers, who have solid value to me, that I am willing to let the few people go who won’t give me their name and email address in exchange for a free gift. I figure that if someone doesn’t trust me enough to give me their name and email address, they will probably never give me their address and credit card number so I can send them one of my products. So what have I really lost, since I am in business to make money, not to give out free information. The free information is simply a tool I use to build rapport and relationship, so that people will buy from me.

Everything I do, from my list building, to my article marketing, to my sales, is designed to make me money – and unless you are non-profit – you need to think that way too.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.