Making Money List Building – Good Idea Or Bad For Business?

You’ve seen the pop-up ads for a free laptop, digital camera, gift card to a popular restaurant, iPod, cell phone, etc. Who hasn’t been tempted to follow the yellow brick road and find a great surprise waiting at the end of the click?

Well, if you follow this online marketing strategy you will find that it requires much more than a simple “Fill in the form and we’ll send you your prize.” In most cases you are required to enter your email address first. As a business owner you recognize that gathering the email address is the most important aspect of list building.

Next on this trip to ‘Free Gift Land’ visitors are asked to either fill out a multi-page questionnaire or consider accepting an offer from a third party sponsor. This cycle is repeated numerous times with numerous clients.

You will likely be expected to consider (or even accept) at least one additional offer that is not free. More often than not you race through the process and fail to recognize there are certain boxes that are checked that invite the company to either place software on your computer, sign you up for additional emails, give them permission to sell your email address to third parties or other equally frustrating offers.

At this point many individuals will exit the process without reaching the goal of a ‘free’ prize, which by now seems very costly indeed. At this point the company has your email address, they may have loaded software on your computer, you’ve probably signed up for things your wouldn’t normally have and the last thing you want is the very thing you will get – email from this company, lots of it.

If you should happen to follow all the online instructions to the end of the process and you think you are ready to claim a prize, be aware that the typical pattern adds just one more stipulation. You will need to convince two others to go through the process. It is only under that condition that you may be eligible for the ‘free’ prize. If you have any enemies that trust you it might work, because most people would not send their friends through this gauntlet.

List building is a hard process and the use of this type of strategy allows the business owner to actually be paid by third party businesses for driving customers to their product while allowing the primary company to improve their list.

If you are a business owner considering this technique I promise you the emails you are able to acquire will not be happy customers. They may recognize right away they made a mistake, but by then their email information is registered and emails will be on the way shortly.

On one hand this method provides the business owner with income while they improve their email list. On the other hand you may find yourself sending email to individuals openly hostile to a tactic they consider devious.

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