Here follows some more standard principles you should follow to ensure that you steadily grow your opt-in list via your website.

- Be sure you have numerous cross links to various pages on your site so the visitor can browse through it. If he/she finds it helpful and pertinent he/she will be more inclined to bookmark your site and come back again. Be sure your links are well designed to catch the reader’s eye.

- Design your site so your pages can load quickly. Don’t load it up with too many pictures and long blocks of text. Leave enough “white space” so one’s eyes can be drawn down the page. Articles should be broken up into short paragraphs and adjust your text so it is easy to read–not too small nor too light. Difficulty in reading the content will discourage a visitor from continuing.

- Proofread your pages so you don’t make grammatical and spelling mistakes. You need to appear a professional. If you are not sure of the effect the page is presenting let someone else take a look. Forums are a good area to ask members to view your site or particular page. (You will probably receive all kinds of opinions!) But you should definitely get some valuable help.

- Offer your visitors freebies–ebooks, software, articles etc. that they can download from your site. Ask them if they would fill out a survey which could help you find out for what type of information they are looking, or ask if they would like to sign up for your newsletter. If a visitor does nothing else than to become one of your subscribers and be put on your opt-in email list you have won the first battle.

There are other ways in which you can build your list and these will be discussed in a future post.

Building your list via other means may be necessary especially if you don’t have much traffic to your website.site.