Viral List Building: Get Others To Help Build Your List

Many people desire to earn a very substantial income online. One of the biggest secrets of successful online marketers is acquiring a large email list. Since a new customer is relatively expensive to acquire, being able to market to the same list over and over is very important. However, building your own email list can take time. Viral list building is a marketing technique that dramatically increases one's list by incentivizing others to build it.

Most internet marketers get people to join a list using some sort of opt-in form. It can be a dedicated squeeze page filled with a sales pitch to join your list, a small box with a place for users to fill in name and email address in a small corner of the page, or a pop up box asking people to join your list before they leave the page. Usually a marketer will offer an incentive such as a free report to get them to join the list.

Viral list building takes this process a lot further. In addition to incentivizing people just to opt in to your list, one can also entice them to refer other people to your offer. This way, someone is more likely to go to Facebook and Twitter and share your link with many of their friends. Then one subscriber can turn into five, which can turn into twenty-five, and so on. This type of expansion through sharing is referred to as "going viral" due to the exponential nature of the growth.

This can be a very effective way of getting subscribers. There are a number of ways of implementing this solution. One way is by using a content locker. Content locker plugins prevent a page from being accessed until a person shares the website address with friends on Facebook. By adding a second bonus section in the thank you page following their subscription to the list, but protecting it with a contact locker, you can effectively encourage others to share the information.

There are also other plugins that help facilitate viral list building. For example, List Eruption 2.0 allows you to build a thank you page that gives each person a unique, trackable link to share with others. Every time a person shares that link and someone uses it to subscribe to your list, that particular person can be given a certain number of points. When they reach a minimal number of points from a certain number of friends who sign up to your list, you can award them with a second free report or other bonus. This has the advantage in encouraging not just the sharing of the page, but a active attempts to get their friends to join.

Facebook itself can be used for viral list building. By putting opt-in forms on a Facebook page you make it much easier for people to share the content. In fact, there are some plugins that will automate this process so that it is shared automatically when someone shares the post.

One such plugin is Connect Reveal. It allows someone to opt-in just by hitting a button so that the user does not have to enter in his or her email address. It will pull in the email address automatically; however, at the same time it will request authorization to "connect" to Facebook. When this permission is given, the plugin will automatically share that Facebook page on the person's wall. This can be a very powerful method to rapidly build a list.

If you are not building a list, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Viral list building represents a very powerful way of increasing your email list and thus your potential for internet income.