Aside from pre-selling your products and affiliated offers, the other purpose of your free viral report should be to build your mailing list.

This is because if you are unable to pre-sell, let alone sell, the products and services featured in your free report, the last ditch effort should be to collect leads. In short, if you cannot convert the reader into a ready buyer, you should then attempt to convert him or her into your subscriber.

In that manner, you can still follow up with your reader on future offers and have a chance at converting him or her into your customer, preferably lifetime.

You can do so by offering a lifetime update to your report or a unique notification list your reader will be interested in subscribing to, which leads to having him or her subscribed to your mailing list.

One of the few success factors in viral marketing of your free report is quality. If your readers find your information worth sharing, and you encourage them to do so by giving them the right to give your report away for free, you will be able to have your name, status and links within the report passed around without any effort on your part – simply because others are willing to do so for you!
Give Away Ventures
With the awareness of the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a couple of years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

This method is more recognized as a “starting a Give Away venture”.

In a real sense, a Give Away event is much like a big time version of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product he is already selling (if he is kind enough to offer into the event).

The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then endorse the Give Away event to their own mailing lists.

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

You can easily get notified about a Give Away event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers often or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Visitors and Subscribers
If a person visits your website and leaves, chances are that he or she will not come back, especially if there are no compelling reasons to do so. After all, we all behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that we can easily forget where we were 10 web pages ago.

But the bottom line is that your visitor may not come back to your website again. If 1,000 visitors visit your website, leave and never come back again, you can imagine the amount of potential revenue lost, simply because they do not come back. You could have converted a fraction of the visitors into your customers.

Some may say that creating unique content can keep some of the visitors coming back, but very often, unique content is not the solution. The real, long-term solution lies in converting your visitors into subscribers of your mailing list.

Before your visitor leaves your website, you want to convert him or her into your subscriber via a simple opt-in to your mailing list. You do this by asking for your visitor’s name and email address through your opt-in form.

And if your visitor signs up to be on your mailing list, you can still follow up with him via email. You can get your subscriber to consider your offer, or endorse another offer to him or her.

All in all, you want to convert as many visitors into subscribers as possible and obtain the potential revenue you rightfully deserve – the easy, wise way.