- Email harvesting - click here to see previous post
- Set up a blog
- Set up a forum
- Set up a social network
Using a blog to build your email list
Blogging is a very powerful way of getting your site noticed in google and other search engines. The main purpose of a blog is to be informative about a particluar subject or about your products and services, this way you will attract people who interested in your subject, products or services. Once people have visited your blog, they have to register to be able to leave comments on your blog, which enables you to build up a targeted email list.
The trick is to get your blog ranked in google or other search engines, so that potential customers will find your blog. The best way to do this is to write targeted posts or articles that relate to your business / subject area or your products / services. With blog posts, you can localise your posts by town, subject or anything else that is relevant to our blog.
Another great feature is that they offer RSS feeds, which you can link to twitter, facebook, digg, delicious, technorati or even furl. This way you can attract people from other social networks to sign up to your blog.
Like anything in business, to build your contacts and email lists, you can not just rely on one thing such as SEO. You have to work at marketing your blog, to get it noticed and to build up your email list.
In conclusion, google and other search engines love blogs, because of the freshness of the content. To stay ranked in google or other search engines, you have to keep blogging about relevant subjects that relate to your blog. In short it may take time to build up your email list by blogging, but the results will speak for themselves.
Designing a forum / social network website
Another way to build up your email list to put together your own forum or social network. In my opinion there is not much difference between the two, except a social network gives you a chat facility. The both have the same purpose and that is to let people to sign up, create their own profile page and add their RSS feeds into it from their own blog.
The diffrence between a forum and a blog, is that with a frorum you leave discussions where people can post their replies, whilst with a blog you write an article or post and people leave their comments.
The main purpose to have you own forum is data collection, because you will gather more information about a person by having a forum than by having a blog. You still need to drive traffic to your forum or socail network. If your members a pro active on your forum, you will always be on top of google for your forums subject area. Forums can be used in business for people to post reviews about products or opinions about customer service of your business. Also its a chance for you to communicate to your customers.
With forums, you can also generate your own RSS feed which you can post in twitter and other social networks. Some forum platforms are more powerful than others, which I will review in another post.
With your forum you still have to be proactive in pushing your own forum via inviting friends to join, using SEO techniques to get up the rankings in google and using your own blog to write about it.
In conclusion a forum is better at data gathering, but a blog is a powerful platform to advertise your business from. Once you have somebody email address, you can start emailing them about your products, invite them to join your forum and increase your after sales.
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