When you start your internet marketing venture, you go in thinking websites are the only way to make money. For many people, this is the simplest way to think about internet marketing. They build a blog and put adsense on it. This is just the beginning. What if that blog is in a niche so competitive, you get no search engine traffic? What if the ads you place on that blog, get no clicks and again, you earn nothing? That’s where building a list comes in; with a list, you talk directly to people who want to buy what you sell. They are interested in the top you write about and can become loyal to you. All you have to do is know where to find these people, and how to add them to your list.

1. Write a blog and place a subscription form on it

One of the best ways to get subscribers to your list is by utilizing the traffic already pouring into your site. If they are not clicking on your ads, they might as well join your list and receive direct advertisements to them. You can use free services like bravanet. You can also opt for a paid service like getresponse.

2. Give away a free gift

Everyone loves free stuff. By offering people what they want for free, you can force them to give you their email address in the process. Of course, on the confirmation page or in the email, you better tell them you will keep sending them emails about what they want to hear about or they will either never open your emails or unsubscribe.

3. Free Give away

If you know a few people with large email lists or email lists the same size as yours, you can make a deal to each send an email for the other persons free gift. This will allow you both to gain new subscribers. Of course both lists will be a little diluted because you both will have members that are in many lists, getting many emails a day, but it still works.

4. Use SEO, and link building to drive traffic to your list building page

If all you have is a page that says, “Join my newsletter” (in more prolific words), you must use SEO, article marketing, forum posting, and press releases to spread the word. You could use adwords, but that would cost too much. This way you are able to build a list without having to spend money. As you build links, your site will also appear at the top of search engines if you know a little bit about SEO.

5. Use traffic exchanges
Traffic exchanges are the perfect way to build a list of subscribers. Especially if they are a group related to internet marketing. If you think about it, a traffic exchange is a place where people are going to see your site for 30 seconds. If all you say is, JOIN MY LIST, and you name reasons they want to see, they will join your list. Add some flash and graphics and you have yourself a growing list. After you grow your list to 1000 which you could do in a month, you could trade lists with others, sell advertising, and make a lot of money. The problem is that you have to spend tons of time surfing when you can be doing other things. Then again, there are systems available that help you to drive traffic with traffic exchanges without having to surf.

Blogging is a great way to earn money right? Many people have been able to turn it into a science. This takes a lot of the guessing out of it and makes earning money more efficient. For this reason, some people can actually begin to earn large sums of money. This is possible because if you know what topic will have a large audience and you know how to do the SEO, all you need to do is schedule the work. You can leverage your time with your money and hope for a return later when each blog starts earning hundreds a month. As we all know, internet real estate is an amazingly profitable asset.

Now, what is a group blog? Like the name says, it’s a blog that’s controlled by several people. The reason I started talking about blogging as a science and leveraging time is because group blogging is a way to leverage time for people who don’t want to spend money. Basically, a few people get together and share the workload. All the link building, posting, promotion, and so forth, is shared by all the members of the group. In addition, everyone in the group benefits from whatever profit is generated. One of the main benefits is that each person will be able to bring there strengths into the mix. Everyone can share their ideas for monitizingthe site and increasing the revenue. Also, everyone can share there knowledge of SEO, article distribution, and other link building strategies/ promotion strategies.

There is more to this group blogging than the good side. When you think of it, who owns the blog? Some SINGLE person must have there name on the domain name. One person controls it and everyone else gets a username to post. Also, who places the adsense on the blog; who places their affiliate ID’s on the products their selling? Finally, who keeps track of all the work; how do you know who is doing what? An element of trust must be formed in order to embark on this kind of venture. It would be difficult to find people to blog with but if you do, it could be very successful!