Most people realise the importance of list building these days and you’ll often hear many different marketers obsessing over the size and quality of their lists, and how to build a good relationship with it. These are indeed important factors. However, the problem is none of that is going to do you any good if your subscriber hasn’t even opened your email to read it.

You can in fact expect only 20-30% of your subscribers to actually open any email that you send them. Don’t panic though, as this isn’t necessarily something that you are doing wrong. Some will just be too busy that day to read your email, or will maybe file it away ‘to be read later’ which of course we know that time rarely comes, or your email could just get lost in the flood of emails we all seem to receive these days.

So, is there anything that can be done about this? Well, for some people this may not be possible as some autoresponders don’t support this feature, but if you can filter your list and send to only those who did not open your email then why not send it again with a different subject? Jeff Walker tried this in a recent promotion and said that he doubled the amount of sales by sending 3 emails in this way instead of just the one. What a difference!

Neither myself or Jeff can take credit for this idea though. It is just one of the tactics that Ryan and Perry will show you in their sneaky email tricks report. I strongly recommend that you take a look at this.

The benefits of being a contributor are plain to see. You can join as a contributor for free and potentially add hundreds and even thousands of subscribers to your list in a short amount of time.

All you need to join as a contributor is your own gift to give away, an autoresponder, and some web hosting. Most of the time gifts will be one of the following:

~ Ebook
~ Report
~ Access to a membership site
~ Video training/course
~ Audio training/course
~ Software and scripts

You will also have to set up your squeeze page with your autoresponders opt-in form. When you submit your gift to the giveaway, it will be displayed in a members area along with a short description, if a member chooses to download your gift they are taken away from the site to your squeeze page where they opt-in to your list.

So how does the giveaway get all this traffic in such a short time? Well, the contributors are expected to help promote the giveaway. If they don’t promote, then their gift is removed. This is fine if you have a decent sized list already, unfortunately many of you probably won’t have but don’t worry there are still a couple of options.

1) You can upgrade your contributor account to a paid account. Now I would strongly recommend doing this if you have a small list or no list at all. You usually get a few other bonuses as well, like being able to add more gifts, being able to add offers and being able to directly download the other contributor gifts without handing over your email address. If you want to build your list quickly, this is by far the best option.

2) You can use a pay per click campaign to help promote the event. As most giveaways will tend to rank your gift depending on how much you promote the event, this can be a good way to bump your gift higher in the rankings to get more exposure. After I had got a few hundred people on my list to promote events to, I used this method if my promotion needed ‘topping up’.

If you have your own gift or product already, then you probably have a squeeze page in place and I dont want to go in to great detail here on how to set up squeeze pages and autoresponders.

If you do not have a gift to give away then for a few dollars you can buy a PLR product that you can call your own and use as a gift. I’ll give you details of where you can find these below. The good thing about these is that you are usually provided with a squeeze page too, so as long as you know how to edit a few html pages and ftp to your web space, you can’t go wrong.

So, here are the steps you need to take to start building your list fast:
1) You may want to buy a separate domain for your gift squeeze page, or use an existing one.
2) Get yourself some Web Hosting
3) Sign up for an Autoresponder Account
4) Find a PLR Product to use as your gift. (Remember to check the license to make sure you can give it away).
5) Add your autoresponder webform code to your squeeze page.
6) Upload your squeeze page to your web space.
7) Use this comprehensive list of JV giveaways and sign up as a contributor to as many as you can.
Add your gift or gifts.
9) Promote the event.

I also recommend getting a copy of Jason James Giveaway Riches which includes some invaluable information on how to get the most out of giveaways and how you can easily run your own giveaway to generate thousands or even tens of thousands of leads for your list!

If you’d like any further help on this subject either leave a comment or contact me from this page.

I really wish I had started contributing to these JV giveaways during those 2 months. It was easy enough to find some decent quality products with PLR rights to give away, so you don’t even really need a product that you’ve created yourself. Although you will build your list much quicker with your own product. I joined 3 giveaways in the last 3 days and have already got an extra 100+ people on my list!

If you want to read a little more about JV giveaways and how they work then click here. There is also a list of giveaways you can join yourself. The reason I was prompted in to joining giveaways this week is due to a project that I’m working on with 3 other Alex Jeffreys students, but more about that in a future post.