A Mailing List. A Cheap Web Site Traffic Technique

Join A Mailing List, Say Hello To More Web Site Traffic

Just like forums, joining mailings lists (as opposed to having your own mailing list of customers/prospects) can be an extremely great source of traffic to your web site.

Mailing lists are different to forums in that they use email instead of a website for communication. Any time you send an email to the mailing list, every member of the mailing list receives a copy of your email (as opposed to a forum where only those people who actually visit the forum will get to see your forum post).

So in theory, every member of the mailing list reads your e-mail. In practice this does not occur as the intermediate to advanced list members will filter emails received for the mailing list and often move all emails to a separate email folder and browse/search the emails on a sporadic basis when they have time.

I’ve subscribed to literally hundreds of mailing lists over the years (and un-subscribed from a heap as well!), and they have greatly assisted me during this time.

You might think that the e-mails would not get indexed by the search engines, because they are e-mail’s, but surprisingly often they are actually indexed and many mailing lists offer an archive of previous e-mails sent to the list to enable searching, and browsing of all emails.

This can be a very lucrative source of traffic to your website, because any links you place in emails you send to the mailing list will end up being a one way link to your website! This makes it extremely important to choose relevant mailing lists (relevant to your particular niche market) and to ensure your e-mails to the mailing list have great content (no surprises there, right?).

To test this out, try doing a search in any search engine for my name (hopefully you know my name by now, but for those people who don’t worry about “details” it’s Tim Buchalka!).

Anyway, do a search of my name, and you will find various posts made by me, some dating back to the very early days of the Internet (1990’s). Yes I really have been on the Internet for that period of time. Actually I was on the Internet first around 1992, so I am certainly not new to this.

Many of these search engine results you will find were once a mailing list (although some were/are forums) that eventually got indexed by the search engines.

If you think about it, in most cases the mailing list owners would want the mailing list to be indexed, because it then increases the chances of people finding and joining the mailing list. E.g. If you had a particular software development problem you were trying to solve, your searches on Google might turn up a post made by a person in a similar position that might have the solution to your problem, and once you established this you might then decide to join the mailing list (giving the mailing list owner another member).

This mailing list you have joined is a database of potential customers for the owner, just like your mailing list of customers and prospects are, so the mailing list owners want to increase the numbers as much as they can.

From time to time, the mailing list owners may send “special offers” and other information to all subscribers, which is often where the list owners monetize their list. They will often allow other parties to sponsor a mail out or do other forms of advertising (there is a specific article on this website  on how you can obtain traffic using this technique elsewhere in the e-Book).

From your persistence you can gain a lot out of simple becoming a expert on the mailing list itself, in other words solving list members problems, offering advice, generally being “seen” on the mailing list.

Of course yet another benefit will be that you actually learn useful stuff from the list as well as contributing to it, I literally learn something new every day because lets face it no one knows everything, so don’t forget to be on the lookout for useful posts. You might just learn something.

It’s likely that as your fame grows on the list that people will approach you looking for help, assistance, perhaps to become an affiliate, to do a joint venture deal with you, etc. So there are lots of benefits!

Consider mailing lists as a great possibility for extra web traffic. Internet Web Site Traffic Never Looked so Good!