Ahem, if you’re still reading this far and you haven’t caught on, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck. There will be no free list of email addresses for marketing given away here today. But since I have your attention and you’re here on the site, I might as well offer you something else, something far better.

Instead of giving you a list filled with thousands of worthless addresses and watching you flush your campaign down the drain, I’ll teach you how to create and manage your own natural email list growth. As the saying goes:

Give a man free spam lunch, and he’ll run an email campaign for a day. But teach him to circumvent spam altogether and he’ll be an email marketer for life. Or something like that.

Creating Natural Email List Growth

In this past I’ve offered up some tips for acquiring more email marketing leads, so be sure to check those at as well before your done here. Right now I wanted to take a fresh approach towards creating your own natural email list growth.

One of the best approaches towards SEO for your website is natural link building, which now has the far snazzier name of link baiting. Link baiting is just the process of creating valuable, interesting and worthwhile content that people naturally want to link to. In other words, your content is so interesting or informative that people just have to share the wealth and post a link up on their own website or blog.

When you’re looking to create natural email list growth for your campaigns, apply the concept of link baiting towards acquiring new email marketing leads. Basically, give people such a great reason to join your list that they’ll do so genuinely – and in large numbers – rather than being pressured, scammed or trickling in on their own.

How can you apply link building to natural email list growth? Here are some ways you can go “email baiting” to build up your list to be bigger and stronger than ever before.

• Contests
• Tip/Guide Newsletters
• eBook & Mini Report Giveaways
• Members Only Website Access
• Discounts & Deals
• Exclusive News or Information
• Limited Event Registrations

Instead of clicking on the next search result for that free list of email addresses for marketing, consider dropping the bulk email campaign and opting for natural email list growth. And please, put down the spam sandwiches.

6 Ways to Acquire More Email Marketing Leads

Above the fold placement – If you want to draw in every email marketing lead that you can, you need to ensure that all of your website visitors see your signup offer. This means placing it above the fold of your website, and it means placing it on every page of your site.

Make your offer compelling – Does your permission based email marketing signup say something like “Sign up now” or “Sign up for our newsletter” without anything else going along with that? How does that entice anybody to make the move? You need to offer something that provides a compelling reason for a person to signup onto your list. You can offer store discounts, exclusive sales, a free eBook or mini-report or anything else. Just be sure you offer something, and be sure visitors know what you’re offering.

Ask fewer questions – Studies show that for every additional question or text box you have on your form, you start losing a few email marketing leads. That means your signup form should include as little information as is necessary to begin building a successful relationship. Do you really need their full address, middle initial, phone number, fax number and all of that other junk you get from them and never use? Then why risk losing another email marketing lead because of it?

Send more traffic to you website – This one might seem obvious, but it’s often overlooked. If you’re looking for more email marketing leads then you should be driving more traffic to your website to begin with. Invest some time and effort into applying good SEO, social networking and link building techniques towards the development of traffic to your site. Every new visitor is another new potential email marketing lead.

Go offline – Just because you’re building a permission based email marketing list doesn’t mean you have to gather all of your list members from online methods. Step into the real world to start growing your list. If you have a brick and mortar business place a signup sheet at the counter. When you attend conferences or tradeshows, meet with colleagues, acquaintances or customers or go anywhere you may find a potential customer or prospect, be prepared to jot down their email address and add them manually to your list.

Let your list build your list – Encourage your list members to forward messages onto their friends, family and coworkers. You may even think about offering rewards to them for doing so, to the tune of refer 3 new list members to us and get an additional 10% off your next order, or something along those lines.

If you put some time and effort into your campaigns and follow these 6 tips, you’ll be able to see a great increase in the amount of email marketing leads you acquire.