List Building: Tools to Make Your Online Life Simpler

As you probably already know, list building is the most important thing you need to do for your business, whether it's an online business or an offline business. Of course, when I write about list building, it's usually the online kind because that's the kind of business I'm very good at and know very well.

With that being said, what are some of the ways you enhance your list building efforts?

• Articles
• Blogging
• Ezine Advertising
• Direct Mail
• Press Releases
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay per Click

Now, these are only 7 of the 17 ways that I've identified that will drive traffic to your site, but they all have something in common--input. You have to type something into your computer in order to complete information. Right? So, what I'd like to do today is give you some tools that you can find online to help you.

First, with all of these methods, you'll need a way to write your articles, blog entries, etc. But let me warn you. Don't write your entries with Microsoft Word. Word puts in all kinds of symbols and stuff that don't work well in cyberworld, at least. If you're writing for print, as with direct mail, it really doesn't matter. Word does a great job, but if you're writing something to be published online, you need a program that writes plain text with no frills.

You're probably thinking WordPad or Notepad, both of which come with all PCs. Well, you can use those, too, but I have a product that I like a lot and would like to pass that information along. The program is called "TextPad," and it works much like MSWord, but it doesn't include the strange character translations. It's free to try and about $35 to buy, but it's well worth the price.

Another great tool, which you can get for free, is Roboform. You probably already know that Roboform will save passwords for you, right? Well, did you ever think of Roboform as a list building assistant?

Well it is. You see, Roboform also includes a feature called "Safenotes." It's great for saving your resource boxes. You can just click on Safenotes and choose whichever bio you want, copy it, and paste it into your article submission form. Works great! This feature of Roboform also works well when you're submitting to directories for SEO purposes. You can just put the description of your website into Safenotes and copy and paste wherever needed.

For determining keyword density for articles, you can find many free resources, if your page is already online, but what about if you haven't uploaded it yet, and it's still plain text? You can go to EasySEO's Live Keyword Analysis and paste in your article. Add up to three keywords and find the density of each on the spot. Articles are a great way to drive traffic to your list building page, and Live Keyword Analysis will assure the right density so that search engines will find them.

Those are only a few of the tools that come in handy when driving traffic to your list building page. They're easy to use and very helpful. Save time with mechanics and increase your list building efforts in other areas. One thing you can never recover is time, and these tools will help you to be more thrifty with it.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. and a master of list building. Learn the 9 Laws of List Building at MyFirstList.com