Giveaways For List Building

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I’m following the advice of Chris Freville (and countless others) who have said, over and over, that a list is the single biggest key to success in internet marketing.

So, I’ve tweaked my offer (on the right) to give even more value to my visitors – and encourage all of you to grab Chris’ great web 2.0 traffic manual. The other thing I’m working on is a guide to actually getting involved in giveaways as a way to build your list.

It’s very clear that you can’t even start in the world of adswaps etc until you have a list of some size…even 100 is better than none. So how do you get up to even that small level? Well, that’s where ListBuilding Giveaway Genius comes in.

I’m putting together a step-by-step guide to what you actually need to do to take part in a giveaway – right down to what you will need to prepare before you can start. Watch this space!

If there are any particular things you want to see, let me know….comments below or an email to martin AT martinpercival DOT com.

Does Christmas Get In The Way Of Your Marketing?

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This is more a musing than a truly valuable post, but I had a chance to think about the way we run our lives when working for ourselves.

I know that there are countless “gurus” out there that will talk about automating your business so that you can get away from that one-to-one connection between hours and money that we call “having a job”. Now, I think that is a great thing to aim for…there’s no doubt that this is the only way to get to the final prize in internet marketing.

The trouble is that we all have to start somewhere and I’m convinced that many people really are trading their time for cash, just so that they can meet those payment deadlines! Heaven knows, I’m there myself. I’m sure it all comes down to an element of bootstrapping.

You need a bit of cash so that you can start to outsource some of the work, so that you can start to multiply your efforts, so that you can expand into other areas etc etc. In the mean time though, we are stuck with building our own autoresponder sequences, setting up our own squeeze pages, making our own products or countless other small tasks that make up the world of the IM expert……and then along comes something like Christmas!

I don’t know about you, but Chateau Percival tends to be a bit busy over Christmas. The world of mulled wine and presents takes over the house and any attempt to get out the laptop is met with a stare which is even stonier than normal. So, what to do? The freshness of a blog seems to me to come from its timeliness and that works against setting up a load of posts in advence.

You might think that this is exactly one of those posts…until I rave about going to see Avatar yesterday…in Leicester Square in London….in the miserable snow. Yet one more thing coming between me and IM world domination, taking up my time, but one that I would gladly repeat – an astonishing film.

So, what do you think? Are these breaks in our plugged-in life something we should try to minimise? Or do we take back some of our humanity and use them to remember why we work so hard in the first place. I’d be interested to hear your views.