Getting visitors to your site to hand over their e-mail address and sign up to receive communications from you can be a challenge.
Many people protect their e-mail addresses and work hard to avoid an inbox that is constantly overloaded with SPAM.
Fortunately, you can do many simple things to make joining your list more appealing to website visitors.
Among the best strategies: a contest for website visitors! Contests are an effective way to attract the masses.
People love to play games and get a chance at winning something.
You can host a contest and require entrants to subscribe to your e-mail address to play.
The contest could be a random e-mail or link draw, a photo contest, a caption contest, an essay contest, or any other kind of competition you can think of.
As long as the prize is appealing, people will sign up to play! The prize is of particular importance, but you don't have to spend a lot of money to get a "great" prize.
Here are a few suggestions for "free" prizes you could give away in your contest: o Free advertising space for one month o Free tuition for your e-course o eBooks o Free membership to your paid membership site o Products or services you sell on your site Once you've outlined your rules and selected your prize, you have to tell people about the contest.
Advertise the contest on your website, to your current subscribers and by word of mouth.
You can also submit information about the contest to various directories devoted exclusively to contests on the Web.
Hosting contest is a great way to get more subscribers for your newsletter or ezine.
Remember: choose a great prize, clearly outline the contest rules, advertise the contest by submitting to directories and make participants provide their e-mail address in order to enter.