Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 53

GROWING YOUR E-MAIL LISTS ON AUTOPILOT

In my own online businesses I focus heavily and strategically on constantly growing my e-mail lists with a steady stream of new prospects. Every day I add a minimum of 100 to 200 new prospects into my various e-mail lead funnels. This level of continuous growth does not happen by accident. I've set-up several systems that drive this type of traffic to my e-mail opt-in pages.

While every organization and niche market will be a little different, there are several effective strategies that can be used to grow an e-mail list by anyone. Here's an example of one of my students having success growing his e-mail list in a tiny, strange “niche,” but it's an example of how broadly useful e-mail marketing strategies can be.

My site is TacticalPaintballSniper.com and the niche is Extreme Sports. My target customers are guys (98 percent male) that love their gear, their camouflage, and their tactical gameplay.

In 2010 I launched the site that started out as just a blog. I have a quirky and particular set of skills and training in this area, and I wanted to reach out and deliver some of this experience to other enthusiasts. I strategically set out to build my mailing list first and then survey them to find out what else they were interested in. My goal was to deliver relevant content to them while building a great relationship with my fans. Eight months after launching I had a list of 900 e-mail subscribers and 556 loyal Facebook fans. For the ...