There are numerous ways you can go about building your list, but in my opinion using Google Adwords, and indeed other pay-per-click sites, is one of the best ways of building a highly targeted list of responsive subscribers. Not only that, but if done correctly, you can effectively build your list for free, as I will demonstrate in the remainder of this article.



I own numerous websites in a variety of niches, and have successfully built up large lists of subscribers for a lot of these sites. A large percentage of these subscribers have come from Google Adwords alone, and best of all it's hardly cost me anything at all.

It all comes down to one thing: Backend Commissions.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Find targeted, but relatively cheap keywords you can use to advertise your site on Google Adwords (less than $0.40 per click). The lower the better, and as any Adwords expert will tell you, you should start off by bidding low to be placed in the top 5-10 results in the pay-per-click results, and concentrate on maximising your click-thru rate with a compelling headline and compelling sales copy, to obtain a higher position without having to increase your cost-per-click.

2. Create an opt-in page and send the traffic you receive to this page. This site has to be compelling enough for the visitors you receive to fill out the opt-in form to subscribe to your list. You should offer a free report and/or bonus to get as many visitors to subscribe as possible.

3. Here's the crucial part. On your thank you page that your visitors are sent to after they have filled-in your form, you should place links to either your own product, or to a quality affiliate product that you can earn commissions from.

This is a highly effective way of earning backend commissions and effectively recouping your advertising costs, if you have a good offer. You'd be surprised at just how many people purchase from this thank you page. In my experience a typical response rate is often anywhere between 2% and 10%, and for certain sites I've received a 30% success rate, so in some instances I have actually made more money from sales than I actually paid out in pay-per-click advertising. Therefore, I'm effectively building my list for free, and earning small profits along the way.

If you think about it, it's not surprising people take you up on your offer because they have already trusted you enough to leave their name and email address with you, so why wouldn't they take you up on your offer?

One thing I will say though is that the product or offer that you place on your thank you page must be affordable (I would say $47 or less) otherwise you may find that none of your opt-in subscribers take you up on your offer. Look at it objectively and ask yourself whether you'd be tempted to purchase the offer if it was someone else's site, and you were the one that had just opted in.

In addition to using your thank you page as a way of recouping your advertising costs, another good way of achieving this goal is by giving away free reports or ebooks to your opt-in subscribers which contain your affiliate links. This provides another way of earning backend commissions, and although, in my experience, not quite as profitable as the thank you page method, can still deliver the occasional sale, which all helps to cover your pay-per-click advertising costs.

To sum up then, if you're building your list, make sure that you are fully utilising your thank you page as a way of earning commissions. If done correctly, you can successfully recoup your Adwords costs, or indeed those costs that arise from any other forms of promotion, and build your list for free. As I have hopefully demonstrated, this thank you page can be a very profitable page of your website, but unfortunately most people simply don't take advantage of this space and leave it blank, or just provide basic instructions for completing the opt-in process. I've been guilty of this myself in the past, but I now make sure that I have a way of receiving backend commissions on the thank you page of all of my niche websites.

Admittedly, there are some niches where the high cost-per-click means that it is very hard to recoup your advertising costs completely from backend commissions, but even so, you can still claw back some of your costs by using the methods I've discussed in this article.