Make your list happy through a white paper.

Capturing names to build a database is the starting point for any long-term online marketing strategy; one way to do that effectively is to engage in white paper marketing and below we show you 5 steps you can take to get the results you’re after.

Choose A Hosted Service

You can try to run a mailing list yourself but the problems start when you grow and are sending out large amounts of emails; you’ll find that your “hit” rate of successful deliveries starts to drop because of being blocked or classed as spam and not making it through the mail filters of your customers.

Services like www.aweber.com and www.getresponse.com are specifically designed to successfully deliver emails and know how to navigate past mail filters. They have built their success on it, so it’s best for most businesses to take out a hosted service like one of these.

Promote The Heck Out Of Your White Paper!

When visitors come to your website you want to make sure they see your white paper offer and know exactly how to get it.

That means creating a catchy title, featuring a graphic of it and also an accompanying form that they are told to fill in if they want to download a copy.

Keep this form simple with just name and email address fields to fill in – long forms may frighten people off.

All Over Your Website!

Make sure your offer is visible all over your website, above the fold (this means before the visitor scrolls down) with a clear call to action each time.

Make sure the instructions can only be interpreted one way – for example “Click here to download” – you don’t want to give your visitors a choice.

Getting The Customer Into Your Sales Funnel

You will need to spend some time setting up your auto responder emails in your hosted service. Normally when the customer completes their name and email address they get taken through to a hosted page where they are asked to verify their email address; they log into their email, click on a “verify” link and then this triggers the first email with the link to download the report.

The contact is then in your database and part of your sales funnel, ready for future marketing campaigns.

Keeping Your Customers Happy!

Marketing white papers is only effective in gathering names for your database if you ensure that not too many of those names unsubscribe.

That means you need to make your ongoing content interesting, convincing them that there’s more useful information to come and ensuring them that their email addresses will not be used for any other purpose – tell them you hate spam as much as they do!

You can see how we manage our white paper marketing with our SEO Manifesto report on this website; this has been very successful in growing our database and a similar strategy can work well for your business.

This is just part of the overall set up and marketing strategy for an online business; many more tips are available in the Competition Crusher. Just click here to learn more about it.