With so many marketers trying to build a list website visitors are now inundated with opt-in forms and squeeze pages galore. While this method still works extremely well you may need to get a little creative so that people will part with their email address.

One way to attract attention is by offering a survey or a poll on your page. This could also be done on Facebook as well. All you do is ask a couple of questions and make the last one a request for an email address for a gift.

The gift is then perceived as a ‘thank you’ gift and the person readily parts with their email, no questions asked.

Use the same thing with the poll. Who doesn’t love to offer their opinion on something? At the end use the thank you gift to get their email address.

When using this method always make sure that your free gift is related to your business. Otherwise once you start sending out emails on a totally different topic your subscribers are going to quickly leave your list.

There are various tools available for creating and running surveys and polls. Just do a search online for the most popular ones. Some of these tools will have both free and paid options. For list building purposes a free tool will be just fine.

Your main purpose for running your survey is to get people onto your list. So you don’t need to ask too many questions, enough so that when you suggest giving them a gift they think it is a good idea.

At the same time you could use the survey as a research tool as well. You could find out just what problems your readers are having and what their likes and dislikes are. This provides you with valuable information that you can use in your business, such as new products or training ideas.

Another add on to this is to run a contest and offer a great prize. Once people have filled out their ballot you then get them to share it with their friends. This provides you with the ability to target even more people.

Contests can be run on various social sites making it easy for people to share. Just make sure you read any rules regarding running a contest first. You don’t want to overstep boundaries and risk losing your account.