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Building and using a great email marketing list to send Ezine newsletters is one of the most effective ways to keep your website and products in the minds of your audience. Take advantage of every opportunity you have to build that list. The following list are proven ideas to help you do that.

1. Offer Free Stuff

Find or create free stuff that your audience would find truly useful. Free information in the form of reports is one example. You may not want to give away products you have on your website. But what about free reports on how to select and use the best products? If you offer camping gear, write reports about subjects like the 10 best camping ideas. This would be a great opportunity to show the benefits for some of the products you offer.

2. Use a Subscription Box on Every Page

Make it easy to subscribe to your Ezine. Complicated forms discourage signups. All you really need is their email address. Including an offering such as a free email report will increase your success rate. Place the subscription box in an area on every page that will catch their eye.

3. Swap Ads

Exchange ads with another website. Keep it simple like the subscription box on your own web pages. Be sure to include your free offer. You can rotate ads on a regular basis with other web partners to really increase subscriptions.

4. Bonus Offer

Gather some of your best Ezine articles and package them into a pdf format ebook as a special bonus offer. Create a one- or two-day promo where the bonus offer is given free when a certain product is purchased on those days. Be sure to include a description of your Ezine with lots of benefits and a subscription signup at the end of your ebook.

5. Use Groups and Forums

Find subjects of interest to your visitors and then frequent newsgroups, forums and discussion groups on those subjects. They usually don't allow advertising but will allow a signature at the bottom of your posts. Include a subscription link to your Ezine. Search for "forum" and the subject on the search engines. You can also find groups at groups.yahoo.com and topica.com.

6. Recommend a Friend

If you run quality content on your Ezine, subscribers might like to share it with a friend or associate. Include a Recommend a Friend box in your Ezine. Have a promotional email ready to send to the friend containing the benefits of a subscription. Have a subscription link in the email for them to use.

7. Encourage Reprints

Ezine and website publishers crave good content. Allow the contents of your Ezine to be published in other newsletters and websites. Include at the bottom of your articles that you will give permission if they request it by email. Receiving an email request is good because you can put them in a database for offering new material. The only requirement for using your material is to include your bio and a link to your site at the end of the article.

8. Create a Survey

You can get a lot of mileage out of a survey. Pick an interesting subject people care about and visitors will want to participate just so they can see the results. You can use a free service like www.bravenet.com to display instant results. You can also have visitors sign up to get the final results emailed to them. This is a great way to get new subscribers.
After the survey has been completed, the results can also be packaged in a short news story for publication in online and offline media. A length of approximately 100 words is about right. Many small and weekly newspapers will eat up this stuff. Be sure to give your website credit as the source of the statistics. With online media, a link back to your website may also help rankings by improving link popularity.