Internet Marketing Basics - Using Free Reports to Build Your List

One of the best ways to get someone to subscribe to your email list is to offer them something of value. That something can be the information they are searching for in the form of a short report. By doing that, you are essentially giving them something of value in exchange for their email address so that you can contact them again in the future.

In order to set this up, You have a couple of options. After the visitor opts-in to your subscription form, you can either:

a) send them to a thank you page with a link to download the PDF file or

b) use a follow-up email to let them know where they can go to download the file or

c) send them a follow-up email with the PDF file as an attachment.

You can implement all these using an autoresponder system. If you need a recommendation, I suggest taking a look at Aweber. When you create a web form in Aweber, there is a field for setting the URL of the page where you want to send the visitor after they have filled in their details such as their name and email address. The default return URL is set to a thank you page hosted by Aweber. You can easily set up a page of your own and place your own URL in this field.

The first thing to do would be to create the report that you will give away. You can do this with any word processing program. If you do not have the money to buy Microsoft Word you can use Open Office which is free. Once you have the report written up, you have the option to convert the document into PDF format. This is the most popular route as the Adobe PDF Reader is a free download available to anyone on the internet.

There are many free PDF converters available. Just keep in mind that some of the free trial versions do not allow you to convert links into clickable links. Others will place a watermark on the page. Just check to see what features are enabled.

If you know some basic HTML, setting up a download page is easy. It can be a plain page with instructions on how to download the PDF or you can get fancy and spruce it up with some graphics. What I like to do is to tell people that they have to check their email to confirm the subscription as I always use double opt-in. You can also let them know to check their spam folder in case the email ends up in the wrong place.

Here is the entire process of setting up your free report step-by-step:

1. Write your report using your favorite word processing program.

2. Convert your Word doc to PDF with a program like DeskPDF.

3. Upload the PDF file to your server using FTP. There are many free FTP programs out there. I use one called AceFTP. Do a Google search for it.

4. Set up your autoresponder options. Do you want to redirect them to a download page after they subscribe?

5. If not, set up the appropriate follow-up email message that will be automatically sent out after they confirm their subscription.

Hopefully, you will see more traffic convert from visitors to subscribers resulting in more sales.

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