Recommended List Building Resources

I get a lot of emails from people who want suggestions or recommendations on what tools or services to use to build your own list. My recommended favorite list building tools and services are listed and linked to below.

Also visit my list of email marketing tools to maximize the results from your email marketing. Learn from the experts. Nothing pays off like education!

A Community of Marketers. Unlike many similar sites that discourage or ban marketing, this community was built BY and FOR marketers, and is not only friendly to business opportunity and MLM organizations, it actually encourages them to build sub-communities. Plus you get use of their free, revolutionary, universal chat tool that allows you to put audio/video/text chat on any web page with just a few lines of code, and earn when people click on your affiliate link on the widget to get one of their own and later upgrade to a paid service.

An Audio CD For List Builders was produced by my friend and monster list builder Tellman Knudson. Last I looked, he was all but giving it away for a buck, along with a trial membership to his new List Building Club. You can't help but learn a TON about list building here, guaranteed! (I suggest you also check out his free coregistration service) Use these along with some purchased coreg leads and subscribers from Nitro List Builder and watch your list explode!

Article Marketing is one of the best ways to get your site noticed, and gather opt-ins. Publish an informative article on several major article directories, and include a link in your resource box back to an opt-in page at your site, and watch your list grow by leaps and bounds.

Building a List By Blogging is another free list building tool you should be using. Blogs are search engine darlings, and will attract more traffic to your main site, as well. Put an opt-in form right on your blog to maximize the number of people joining your list after reading your informative and timely articles.

Build a List With JV Giveaways. This inexpensive report shows you exactly how you can get free email leads and make money from back-end sales by participating in JV Giveaways. You can also purchase the resale rights to the report, and make money by telling others about it, as well as benefit from viral marketing by branding it with your own links.

Build Your List Virally with this new script that uses a novel method to dramatically increase opt-in confirmations, and lets you pay for subscribers either via PayPal or via giving away a product or free report in exchange for a user-configurable number of newly referred subscribers. Once the viral aspect kicks in, your list will explode in size!

Coregistration Co-Ops are another great way to build your list. This service lets you advertise your newsletter opt-in on other publishers' thank you pages, in return for you doing the same. You can also upgrade to a paid membership that gives you a huge number of additional monthly displays of your ad.

Create Dozens of Lead Capture Pages with this simple and inexpensive tool. Choose from hundreds or pre-designed templates which you can then customize to meet your needs. This is about as simple as it gets.

Impact Popups are a great way to grab visitor attention, and build a double opt-in list. Unlike traditional popups, these are part of your web page, and can't be blocked. Buy co-registration leads, lure them to your website with your free content, and grab them by the eyballs when they visit your site.

Squeeze Pages force your visitors to "register" for your site before they can get in. While your first reaction might be to think this will reduce your website views, the fact is, the folks who register are telling you, point blank, that they are interested in your product or service. That alone gives you a much more targeted audience, for which conversion rates are substantially higher ...

ARP Dedicated Hosting gives you the chance to have your own dedicated autoresponder that you control. With your own setup, you don't have to worry about restrictions on importing leads, or being required to send confirmation emails every time you import a list. You get a leased copy of AutoResponsePlus installed on an optimized server, and scalable pricing so that your costs grow only as the size of your list does. This is one solution that many of my high volume clients use.

AutoResponsePlus For a solution that you upload and host on your own server, there is nothing else like ARP, which has every imaginable feature. As your email marketing business grows, you should seriously consider using a dedicated server with ARP installed. All of your initial mailings then take place from that URL. With your own server or VPS, this is a great choice for emailing to coreg leads. This is the top choice for many of my high volume clients.

If you're up to managing it, consider Emailing From a Dedicated Server or try a Virtual Private Server for a more economical solution. In either case, make sure you use a Dedicated IP Address. The two providers I highly recommend both provide first class service, and the servers can be optimized for emailing with AutoResponsePlus. Using ARP on a dedicated server or VPS, combined with a Dedicated IP Address, allows you to control your "whitelisting" and "sender reputation" and maximizes the chances of getting your email delivered.

Do *NOT* try using AutoResponsePlus on a shared hosting account, or a cheap "reseller" account. With a shared IP, you can get "blacklisted" if anyone else using that IP address gets into trouble, and many hosts will penalize you with a bandwidth surcharge if you send out email in any significant volume. If you are going this route, do it *right*, and get yourself a Dedicated Server or VPS.

Email delivery becomes a bigger and bigger issue every day. Sadly, efforts to catch illegal spammers tend to penalize legitimate business as much or more than the real offenders. You need to learn how email sender reputation affects the success of your email marketing, and you may want to consider using an Email Delivery Monitoring Service. Once you fully understand the issues involved, you will see why a Dedicated Server or VPS is probably your best choice for successful and profitable high volume email marketing.

Using AutoResponsePlus and having your own server on a Dedicated IP address allows you to control your "whitelisting" and "sender reputation" and maximize your chances for good email deliverability. Most of my high volume customers choose this solution. However, for those who want a more economical solution, or don't want to manage their own server, or pay someone to do it, the following are the top-rated commercial hosted autoresponder solutions.

Aweber is the hosted autoresponder solution used by many professionals. Founder Tom Kulzer is said to be the "father" of the sequential autoresponder. You subscribe on a monthly or annual basis, and all of your automated emailing needs are covered in one place. They have excellent relationships with the major ISPs, which ensures the highest possible delivery rates for email originating from their domain. They do *not*, however, allow you to upload purchased lists. Lots of people nonetheless like to run their double opt-in "warm" lists here.

BestBizCart Personally, I think this is the Cadillac of shopping cart software, and we also offer an "autoresponder only" account. You can upload 35% of your database capacity per day, and choose from one of eight opt-in confirmation messages, or use your own "custom" version (subject to admin approval).
BBC is my own "private label" autoresponder and shopping cart service.

GetResponse is the other "industrial strength" hosted autoresponder service. I have used Get Response Pro for quite some time, and been very pleased. Your account is heavily customizable, and their excellent relationship with major ISPs ensures a very high deliver rate for your email. They have recently introduced RSS publication of your autoresponder series and broadcasts, which promises to be a valuable tool. They have strict limitations on uploading of lists, though, and insist that you send out a confirmation email before your uploaded leads are added to your autoresponder series or mailing list. A great place to run a double opt-in "warm" list, however.