There’s no point in putting out a great newsletter if you don’t have a list of people to send it to. Building your list is an ongoing process, and here are a few ways to get your Virtual Assistant started doing this for your business:

1.       Provide a free gift, an e-course, a special report, an e-book, or a tip sheet. Nowadays people aren’t going to hand over their email without getting something else valuable in return. Your virtual assistant can set up your autoresponder (aweber) or shopping cart program   (1shoppingcart) to deliver this gift once a visitor has submitted their name and email.

2.       Make sure your VA puts a sign-up box on each page of your website; you never know which page people will land on. Also, make sure the sign-up box is “above the fold” so that visitors don’t have to scroll all around to find it.

3.       Have your Virtual Assistant create a separate landing page at your website that’s dedicated to your newsletter or free gift. Include a description, testimonials, a sample issue or archives and of course your sign-up box. See our free gift offering page as an example:   www.VAnetworking.com/blog/

4.       Make sure you promote your free gift and newsletter on your blog, in your email signature, and on the business cards and flyers that you hand to people in person.

5.       Have your VA design you a sign-up sheet or basket to collect cards when you’re speaking or when you attend a booth at a trade show or fair. A nice touch is to send a personal email to each name on the list with a personal invitation to join your mailing list with a link to the sign-up page. This may get a better response rate than someone receiving an “opt-in confirmation e-mail” a few days or a week after the event took place.

6.       Your VA can submit your newsletter to sites such as Best Ezines. Use the URL of your newsletter page (see #3) versus your home page.

7.       Submit your individual newsletter articles to free article directories  such as Ezine Articles, Ideamarketers.com, and ArticleDashboard.com. You can also try an automated online service like SubmitYourArticle.com.   This is a great task to offload to your virtual assistant. When you submit articles to these sites you’ll increase traffic to your website, attract new subscribers for your mailing list and improve your website’s ranking with the search engines.

8.       Have your VA research joint-venture opportunities. I joined two joint venture promotions during the month of June and my list grew like wildfire! You can partner with others who offer complementary products and/or services and put together a page of free offerings and then promote it like crazy.

Growing your list takes time but the investment is well worth it as you begin your relationship with your subscribers. Let your Virtual Assistant tackle this list building for you while you do what you love in your business.