The biggest obstacle faced by any online entrepreneur using safe email advertising methods these days, has to be the slow speed with which email lists typically grow. For example it can take a very long time for an opt-in list to grow to a mere 100 names. Yet one needs thousands of names on their lists pronto to be able to successfully market their products or services using email.



Many Rapid-Building Email List Techniques Don’t Work

But the first thing I must caution you against is getting carried away by so-called miracle-working programs that promise heaven on earth and email list building at the speed of light. There are actually thousands of claims we all come across fairly frequently online promising swift, overnight growth of our opt-in email lists. Most of the time they just don’t work as well as they claim. This has frustrated many would-be online email marketers who will naturally get very discouraged when something that they had pegged all their hopes on and maybe even paid a few dollars to get, fails to work.

The reason why many of these so-called miracle email list building programs fail to have any impact is because they are hardly able to attract any significant traffic. The truth of the matter is that without some very high traffic, it is highly unlikely that your list will ever grow.

This is the reason why using viral marketing techniques to build an email opt-in list makes so much sense and usually ends up being so effective.

Start by Building High Traffic

The first thing you need to do is to create a viral marketing campaign designed to generate very high traffic to your web site or the web page where you intend to promote your email list.

There are various ways of doing this. You could post a sensational article in high traffic social sites like Digg.com which receives millions of hits every week. The more popular votes your article receives from other visitors to the site, the higher the traffic that you will end up getting. If your article happens to get high enough traffic, people will talk about it and link to it. This is the viral effect that could easily get you hundreds of thousands of hits.

Using Viral Techniques to Directly Build Your Email List

This is not the only way to launch a viral campaign. You could for instance offer a valuable report for free on the condition that the recipient leaves you with their email address and the email address of several friends who may be interested in the same report. So if for example the initial 50 people introduce 5 friends each, that will give you 250 free new prospects. If the 250 do the same it will yield a further 1,250. The result is that within a very short time, you will have a huge opt-in email list.

It looks easy, but there are a few key factors that you have to take good care of. Firstly, every effort should be made to ensure that the special report being offered for free is something of great value and highly desirable to a very high number of your targeted audience. This will be a major factor and detail to take care of that will determine how fast your opt-in email list will grow.

Offer Services and Products In Exchange For Referrals

One of the fastest conventional ways to build an opt-in email list for safe email marketing is by purchasing names for your mailing list. Why not then find a way to offer valuable services or products in exchange for referrals that you can put into your email list?

This is one of the most effective methods of building an email list rapidly. And remember that with a targeted email list, you will be able to recover your investment many times over within a very short time of regular email messages or ezines being sent out.