The Dirk Tietjen Blog - Let Dirk lead you in the right direction with his free marketing tips

Adswaps are one of the fastest ways you can build your customer list. Every experienced internet marketer who has “made it” online will tell you “the money is in the list”. No doubt you have heard that phrase so many times before; you’re fed up with hearing it. “All very well for the gurus who have a big list”, you say. “What about poor unknown little old me?”

If you want to get more subscribers you’re going to have to give them something in exchange for their name and email. That makes sense, right? Think about it, would you hand over your email address to an unknown business or person for no good reason? So if you wouldn’t, then there’s no earthly reason why someone else should. To get someone to subscribe, or opt in, to your list you need to give them something of value – free of charge. This is usually an ebook.

So you’ve set up your so-called squeeze page, or opt in page, to offer new subscribers a free gift in exchange for their email address. As soon as they enter their details your autoresponder kicks in and sends them the download link. Your new subscriber gets his or her ebook, and because you have selected a quality product and not some poor 4 page report full of nonsense they are very happy. Now you can begin marketing your paid products to them. There’s just one little problem with this scenario that you might have picked up on – how on earth do you get people to your squeeze page in the first place?

Welcome to the beautiful world of adswapping. First approach a fellow marketer in your own, or very similar niche. Then you suggest to them that you will mail out their offer to your list, in exchange for them doing the same for you. So let’s say you have 1000 people on your list, your adswap partner has 1000 on his. He mails out your offer, which links to your squeeze page, to his own list. But, and this is what makes adswapping so powerful, he does it with his recommendation.

In the long history of marketing there is nothing more powerful than the principle of recommendation. Nothing. It predates the internet. In effect your adswap partner is saying to his list “Hey my good buddy John has got a great free offer for you, I strongly suggest you don’t miss out on this”. Thanks to the recommendation, instead of getting maybe 5% of people to subscribe to your list, figures of closer to 50% are not unusual! Excited now?

Do the math – how many adswap partners will you need to approach to get your list from a measly 1,000 to a much more acceptable 10,000 names? Not many, that’s for sure. How much will this cost you? A big fat zero. Now compare that to what you are paying for banner ads, classified ads in forums etc. There’s just one more question you want to ask yourself – “Why wouldn’t I want to get started adswapping – right away?”