There is an adage in Internet Marketing: The money is in the list. For that reason, it is very important to grow your list as large as possible. In fact, it should be an ongoing and never ending project for your business, since you will doubtless encounter attrition as you lose subscribers. There are many ways to build your list. Article marketing, blogging and pay-per-click advertising are all examples of effective list building methods. Those methods are beyond the scope of this article, however. Instead, this article is about using eBay as a resource to tap into to grow your list, naturally and inexpensively. With about 8 million visitors per day and over 200 million registered users, eBay is a great potential source for traffic that can help you grow your list.

There are two methods eBay can be used to grow your list. The first is to create and sell small reports or ebooks using the buy it now auction format. The minimum price you can set and still sell multiple items is $.99, so you are practically giving away these reports or ebooks that contain useful information. In these ebooks or reports you can place your links to a squeeze page for your list. The information in these reports should be informative, but should also entice the reader into wanting more and sign up for your list. You can specify that the purchaser can give away the report or ebook, but they can not alter the content. This may result in getting more sign ups in the long term. The point of selling your report is not to make money, but to grow your list. Since the insertion and selling fees on eBay are relatively low, this can be a very cost effective way to get sign ups to your list and if you sell enough reports or ebooks, you may turn a small profit while simultaneously growing your list.

The second way eBay can help grow you list is through the use the classified ad format. This ad format is often overlooked by many on eBay, but it is a simple and very cost effective method you can use to grow your list. The classified ad is set up similarly to a standard auction. The major difference is the ad will run for 30 days instead of the 3, 7 and 10 days that standard auctions run. The title is subject to the eBay search engine just like auctions, so it's very important to optimize your ad title. Since HTML can be used here , you can paste a squeeze page that contains a opt-in form in your ad. The insertion fee for a classified ad is $9.95 for 30 days. If you purchase a Pro Pack for your classified ad, it will cost more, but it works out to a little over a dollar a day. By comparison, buying a Pro Pack for a 7 day auction would be about 4 dollars a day. Using the classified ad format can be a very cost effective method to grow your list.

There are doubtless other ways to use eBay as a list building tool, but these two methods are effective and far less expensive that using par-per-click advertising or purchasing leads and may result in a small profit or enough income to cover your eBay fees.

Best of Success,
Stephan Iscoe

Labels: auction, ebay, list building, opt-in, traffic, website