by Daniel Scocco

Most bloggers and webmasters know that an email list is one of the most profitable online assets they can have, yet few actually build one. I wonder why that happens, as getting an email list going is not that hard. In this post I’ll give you 4 steps to kick-start your own email list.

1. Get an email marketing provider

While there are solutions and software around you can use to power your own email marketing server I wouldn’t recommend it. A key aspect of having an email list is making sure people will receive your emails, and specialized companies are much better equipped to do that.
Sure, you’ll need to spend some money, but what is $30 or so monthly compared to the money you could make by selling your products, services or affiliate products to your list?
If you don’t have an email marketing provider check out GetResponse.com. It is one of the leading email marketing providers, and they are now offering a 30-day free trial. The cool thing is that you don’t need to put a credit card, so there are no strings attached whatsoever.
GetResponse also integrates with over 20 CRM and email management systems, so you can import and existing contacts and get your list populated right away.

This post has been submitted by Yaro Starak from two of my daily reads – Entrepreneur’s Journey and Small Business Branding. He’s also working on a new site at Blog Traffic King. I’ve asked Yaro to write an introduction to finding readers for a blog – something which I’ll write more on also in the days ahead.

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best mate about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.