Build a list is a very necessary part of online marketing. Capturing the name and email of those visitors who have come to your site and signed up for a freebie is essential. These prospects are interested in you enough to sign up for a freebie, so it stands to reason they’ll be interested in paying money for things in the future.
A powerful tools is called co-registration leads. In a nutshell, it’s where you work with a few other like-minded vendors to set up a site and all collect leads. Of course, these vendors should be similar to your business to make this apply (if you sell food storage items, your other vendors should be food, kitchenware, cooking items, etc.)
Naturally you’d want to work with very similar product vendors to keep your list streamlined. Start with maybe 5 or 8 at the most. Keep it small and grow from there. This may be a new idea for some of these vendors so when you first contact them about being involved, let them know how they can benefit. Spell out what they need to do to participate.
The primary request is that they make a special offer to the visitors of the co-vendor site. A visitor may sign up for all offers, or just one. It doesn’t matter, because all participants would get a chance to peddle their wares to this member. First, you need a co-vendor webpage. A simple way is to have one person responsible for being webmaster and each member would contribute the script for their own autoresponder or just a way to collect the leads.
One person should be the webmaster of the page where the free offers from the co-vendors exists. Each member should submit the script to be included on the site. This script (usually for their own autoresponder) will direct subscribers to their own thank you page, etc. (Be sure each participating member knows he/she is responsible for their own products and subscriptions.) They will handle all fulfillment of their own products, freebies, etc.
Each week (or whatever agreed upon timeframe), each member would email their list of new leads that came in that week. The master list would be compiled and sent to each member. In other words, if each member received 25 new prospects that week and you had 5 participating members, your list would have a total of 250 new prospects.
You could also send a co-vendor mailing once a month to each lead on the list. All vendors would have “ad space” in the mailing and you could provide a couple of good articles in the mailer. Working with vendors who participate and do their part will help you all build a big, targeted list pretty quickly!