When you’re first starting to run a website for your business, you want low overhead. The cost of building an email list may seem too much for you at first. You need about $30 per month use an email list/newsletter publishing service like AWeber or Constant Contact. That may seem like a lot if you don’t have the cash flow when you’re starting out.

Yet, you know that collecting email addresses from website visitors is important. You’ve heard ‘the money is in the list.’ The people who willingly give you their email address are the people who like what you’ve got and want more. They embody your target market. You need to keep in touch with them independently from your website.

You need a signup system in place to enable ongoing contact with your target customers. And if you’d like to do that without monthly fees, you can.

Here are 3 tools you can use to build an email list of visitors to your website. And they won’t cost you anything.

Feedburner - This is a service that sends your blog post as email message to people who sign up. It does this each time you publish a post. It’s been free since it launched in 2004, and since it was acquired by Google in 2007.

The service gives you copy-and-paste code to create your own sigup box. You can even add a header image to the email-version of your blog post, to show your logo or any other header you might like.

Feedburner compiles the input from visitors into a big chart. You can download the chart and see how big it is.

Free blog-to-email is a nice service. The limitations are:

• If you aren’t running a blog, you can’t use Feedburner. You need to be creating an RSS feed when you post. Blogging software does this.
• You don’t get a notice when someone signs up. To see if you’re getting subscribers, you have to log into feedburner and look at subscriber info.
• Even your subscriber stats may have issues - Google acknowledges that feedburner may not show an accurate number of subscribers - it sometimes doesn’t count each one.
• You can’t easily give away a free download to encourage people to sign up. This works best for people who are going to sign up anyway, and don’t need to get a “freebie” to give you their email addrsss. You DO have the ability to export your list as a spreadsheet if you decide to import them into the other more feature-rich email list management programs.

Mail Chimp is the second tool to get you started building an email list at no cost. They supply copy-and-past code for you to create a signup box for email addresses. And you get a powerful list management service that will store up to 1,000 addresses for you and allow you 6,000 messages per month.

You can send your subscribers a newsletter. Even better, you can send your readers your latest blog post by email. And you can create a nice looking design for it using a Mail Chimp template. If you set up your blog posts to go out as email messages, you’ve done away with the need to write a separate newsletter to keep in touch.

If you’re using WordPress, you have a host of plugins to build an email list. You can use these plugins for free. Here’s just one example –

G-Lock Double Opt-In Manager: This is a mailing list builder that offers a signup form to your visitors. It sends a confirmation link to virtually eliminate any ’spam’ signups by robots instead of people.

Your visitors opt in and then get a welcome message you’ve set up. You can even send them a ‘thank you’ freebie to download in the welcoming message.

You can use the email list in two main ways. First you can set up your blog to go as an e-newsletter to the list. Or you can export the list into an external e-newsletter program you may want to use.

That is, once you get it working. One downside to using a plugin is you have to configure it properly. Mail plugins can be a little tricky. Your web host may be able to help you enter the right settings.

If your list grows to over 100 names, it’s not recommended to keep using your self-hosted service. That’s because your web host will not want you to tie up the server sending to a large list all the time. If you have low-cost hosting, you almost certainly have a shared hosting service. Your host will very much appreciate it if you get a dedicated IP address, or move your mailing operation to a professional email list service like Constant Contact or Aweber, where the servers are designed to carry out large mailings smoothly, without slowing any other services down for others.

Okay, now you have 3 ways to get a signup box on your website and build your list! Give a shout in the comments about which one you got working for your business.

Joanne Masterson helps business owners launch a full-fledged site ready to fly. Not just a site that’s ‘up.’ But one with design and content that’s primed to build a business from day 1. And she will do everything possible to help you align your message with what your market wants and needs at http://www.bluejprojects.com.