I've been trying to find some resources online to 'Build an opt-in list of a million users quickly' buy havent been able to find anything useful. I want to know which sales or marketing techniques one can use to get users subscribe to your website newsletter fast. We've tried things like 'Sign up for our newsletter and enter a lucky draw to win a gift hamper or iPod' on one of our websites, and have been regularly announcing winners, but havent been much successful.
I don't think there is any quick-and-easy way to get a large opt-in list (especially of 1M people). Like most things of value, it takes some combination of time, luck, hard work, and money.
Organizing a contest didn't work well for you ? I tried it on one of my sites and got a lot of subscriptions quickly. The key things to remember are : - Give away stuff that is closely related to the content/service of your site or the demographic of the people you are trying to target. This way you will get subscribers that are interested in your content/service which is much more valuable than just any subscriber looking for some free stuff. - Add your contest to all the sweepstakes sites you can find. Keep track of which ones get you the most traffic and contact them for a paid listing at the top of the list. This is the thing that got me a lot of subscribers fast. (about 200 a day for a dutch language site) There are a lot more sweepstakes sites in english so there is potential to get a lot more than I did. - Another thing I do to maximize subscriptions is this : When people have signed up for your contest redirect them to a "refer a friend" page and show the "thank you" message there. This way some people think they have to refer a friend to enter into the contest. My experience is that 1 out of 6 refers it to a friend. (mention the contest in the refer a friend email ofcourse) These methods will probably not get you 1 million subscribers in a short amount of time but you can repeat this process over and over without a lot of work.
Contests work great! You can also team up with one or more well established similar sites and share the user info (submit send emails to both sites optin lists) that people have entered. I have personally built 10K lists in a month!
I get new subscribers every day due to the free coloring book I offer busy parents- I'm targeting my target market (who but a parent would want to download a coloring book!) and they are referring their friends to the site. Good luck!
This one is great Ellen! Even though I have no kids in our house, I still joined ur list and downloaded it for fun !