List Building: Why Blogs Work

Now that your list building page is up and running, you need ways to drive traffic to it, right? What's the easiest, fastest way to get that traffic? A blog. Why?

Actually there are many reasons, but the primary one is because a blog is a traffic magnet. That traffic filters down to your squeeze page, and BANG! You're list building.

Here are some ideas for ways to get traffic to your blog:

• Search engines will bring tons of traffic, since they love blogs. After about 6 months, a blog can be ranked highly, if it provides the content that search engines are looking for. Any site that ranks highly ends up where? On the first page of search results. If you've done your homework before choosing your niche, you'll know just how many searches there were for your keywords. Hopefully, you've chosen a term that gets a lot of searches. If you rank highly, you'll get that many eyeballs looking at your listing right there on the first page. They can't escape it!
• You can get traffic to your blog by joining places like MyBlogLog.com, Blog Explosion.com, or MySpace.com, for instance. These are communities of bloggers, and you may find some people who are interested in your niche. They'll read your blog religiously and probably sign up for your list..
• Exchange blog links with people. Invite them to put your link into their "blogroll," and ask them to put your link into theirs.
• Write guest columns in other people's blogs, or ask people to write guest pieces in yours. Be sure your guests let their blog readers know that they've put an article on your blog, too, so you get the benefit of their subscriber bases, while they get the benefit of yours. You'll both be list building.
• Write a press release about a blog entry and submit it each time you have something important to tell people. By important, I mean earth-shattering, not that your baby just lost its first tooth. A guest columnist would be a good example of something to write about in a press release.
• Advertise in an Ezine, just as you would a product or service.
• Use pay-per-click to advertise your blog, and get the benefit of a wide range of viewers. If you're able to make money with your blog, then, PPC may well be worth the price.

These are just a few of the many ideas that might come to you about advertising your blog, which will breed traffic and enhance your list building efforts. The end game, though, is getting people to click on your links and to opt-in to your list.

You can use your blog as a secondary list building page, too. Put an opt-in box at the very top. If people enjoy your blog, they'll probably opt-in to your list without even going to your list building page.

The whole key to making your blog effective in driving traffic to your list building page is to make your blog worthwhile. If you think you'll get anything by throwing together a pile of junk that nobody wants to read and that's only updated once a quarter, you're wrong. But if you write a great blog, you'll be building a great list in no time. Blogs are just the fastest, easiest way to get things done.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. Learn how to build a powerful and responsive list quickly through his premiere list-building course, MyFirstList.com.