In my last post called “5 Steps to Building a Responsive Email Marketing List”
I talked about specific ways to build a profitable, consent-based email list. In other words, you are building a strong relationship with a community of people who are sincerely interested in what you have to offer.
To recap, the 5 steps are:
1. Create an irresistible free offer
2. Create an email list and attach your freebie
3. Create an opt-in page
4. Add additional follow up emails
5. Get traffic to your free offer
Today I want to dig a little deeper into step #1 and share some ideas about creating a free offer that your ideal prospects will love to sign up for.
Your irresistible offer can be anything from a free report or list of resources to a simple audio tutorial where you share your thoughts on a specific idea. There is no reason to make this long or complicated. After all, this is a free sample of more to come. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself that you never get out of first gear. In fact, it’s my experience that many people appreciate a concise solution when they are signing up for a free offer of some sort. The idea is to get it out there in a big way and use this to establish a strong relationship with a large list of potential clients and customers.
Here are FOUR simple steps to create your free offer:
1. Decide on the topic that you want to dig into
This should naturally lead to your paid solutions so be sure to keep a theme going here. Be as specific as possible. You won’t attract many prospects if you set out to solve every problem for every person.
2. Pick a title for the freebie
Don’t get too cute here. Keep it simple and be sure that people know what they are getting. An example if you share pricing strategies with service providers might be “5 Deadly Mistakes to Pricing and what to do if you’ve made them.”
3. Outline and create your free offer
Turning a simple word doc into a PDF or creating a short MP3 audio is certainly sufficient. If you have the ability to add graphic design, etc then knock yourself out, but the most effective freebies will share valuable content without having to try to rely on fancy design elements to please the prospect 
4. Attach your free offer to your auto-responder
I like to use Aweber for email marketing software. They have an impeccable reputation and cost less than twenty bucks a month. That’s hard to beat for the value that you will begin to build by implementing consent-based email marketing into your business.
In my next post I will dig into step #2 and explain how to set up your email marketing account and attach your brand new irresistible offer to it so that you can get ready to build your community practically on auto-pilot.
