Building a mailing list is one of the most important – and one of the most satisfying – aspects of running your home based online business. Your mailing list can be considered a long-term investment…something that can provide an income for the future. Getting started on building a list is relatively straightforward; you need an auto-responder (preferably not a free version) and a squeeze page…plus something, say a short report, that you can give away as an ‘inducement’ for people to opt-in to your list.

This article does not cover the technical aspects of setting-up your list building page – there are plenty of tutorials available on line for this. Rather, this article covers three ways you can place an advertisement on high-traffic online websites (at little or no cost) thus giving you a good chance to build your list at a decent rate.

Place your report on Upload.com

Upload.com (part of CNET) attracts a huge amount of visitors and you can place your report on the site as a giveaway in return for an opt-in to your mailing list. Placing your report on Upload.com is free although there is the option to upgrade to paid insertions, giving faster approval times and other benefits. There is a three stage initial sign-up process, each requiring approval, to get through and this is time consuming, however, this is a one-off process and is worth the effort in order to tap into the potential of the site.

Use eBay Classified Ads

For a few dollars per month you can place a classified ad on eBay and, again, give away your report in return for an opt-in. In fact you have to put a price on the report (say $0.01) but in effect you will give away the report, since eBay allows you to place an opt-in form on the sales page. A professional looking description and adding some free graphics will make your ad that much more appealing to visitors.

Sign-up to Giveaway events

Giveaway events are, as the name suggests, online sites that host a giveaway for a fixed period (usually two to three weeks). You sign-up for the event as a contributor and upload your squeeze page URL. To do this is free, however there is almost always an option to upgrade to paying contributor (recommended by the way) and by paying, your product will be given preferential exposure to visitors. There are a number of websites that promote giveaway events (such as giveawayeventssite.com) – a web search will provide all the information you require.

Building your list can be done with little or no extra expenditure (over and above your regular business outgoings).

You will need to make sure your giveaway report is of value and is your own work – do not just hack a free PLR report together…spend some time putting together something of worthwhile, even to the extent of investing in some graphics if your budget can stand the additional pressure (if it cannot then you can search for free graphic generators on the Internet). With practise, putting together a list-building campaign will become second nature.