HOW TO DO IT

One of keys is to choose a product or service that COMPLIMENTS what you already do. Whatever your product or service is, think through what your customer is likely to buy based upon purchasing your product.

If you sell shoes, someone is going to sell them socks and it might as well be you. Not only will you increase your revenue but you will encounter less sales resistance and show your customers that you are thinking of them.

Another method is to choose a product or service that CONTRASTS what you sell now. If you normally sell a business related product come back at them with a personal product. Why should they NOT buy it from you? You have proven yourself as honest and dependable; now cash in on that hard work.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK

One final word. Your customers decided to trust you when they bought what you sell. Capitalize on those good feelings and ask them for their feedback on what you have in mind. This is by far most powerful, yet virtually free, market research available in land. Use it wisely and your EXISTING CUSTOMERS will tell you both what they want to buy and when they want to buy it.

All you have to do then is step up, fill need, and go to bank.

This has a huge snowball effect, and should see you exponentially growing your opt-in mailing list.

This isn't too hard to create either. Just go down to elance.com and ask a programmer how much he would charge for such a thing.

However, you must remember that you must start your marketing efforts with some fuel, and that fuel is people. You have to start with at least a few people filling out this questionnaire for this to even begin. 0 people telling 3 friends each still equals 0.

Another way to grow your mailing list, is to pay people for every subscriber they send your way. This isn't exactly type of marketing I've been discussing throughout this article, but it will grow your opt-in list quite well if you pay enough and enough people start doing it. I think that 10 cents per subscriber is fair.

If people start sending you more subscribers than you can afford to pay, then you can always stop it for a while. But remember this, is you treat your subscribers well, then you have a life time value of them, which is worth far more than 10 cents.

Hotmail.com used this form of marketing in a small way that produced big results. At bottom of each of emails sent, they included a small line that said something like "Get your free email account with hotmail.com". This meant that every time an email was sent from hotmail recipient would read this and perhaps think, "Hmm free email account huh? Better check this out. This resulted in hotmail's huge growth in a relatively short period of time. Eventually Microsoft brought hotmail.com for an obscene amount of money.