Internet marketers are very big on building up their opt in mailing lists. You may often wonder how folks like Joel Comm, Aaron Abber and others have built up their lists. All in all, it takes time and careful focus on growing your list. Now with that said, I’ll freely admit that I am NOT an email marketing guru. I don’t know too much about it like these other guys do. However, I do know a lot about practical and common sense things.

So for me, an inspiring email list marketer, one of the ways that I am doing to actively growing my opt in list is with targeting the social networks. While so many bloggers think about using the social networks to score free traffic to their blogs, I look at it as a way to score opt in entries to my mailing list. Gaining new entries to my mailing list using social networks is actually quite simple and you’ll probably kick yourself for not thinking about this too.

Most all social networks such as, Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, and Propeller require registration for a free user account. These user accounts give people a profile page. On the profile page there is a field that allows you to enter your website URL or blog URL. Most all people totally take full advantage of this thinking that this will score them an added backlink.

The only problem with this is the fact that most of these profiles pages NOFOLLOW the link pointing back to your web site or blog. In other words, search engines can’t crawl to your web site or blog from that link, meaning you don’t get credit for the backlink. This isn’t a bad thing, because you shouldn’t be gaming Google anyways, however; many people might not have put as much effort into their profile pages if they had known this up front.

The good news to this situation though is in the trick that I am about to explain to you. Rather than point a link to the home page of your web site or blog, point the link to a special web page within your site that has been made specifically for the traffic of these social networks. You can see an example of mine on a page titled, Welcome To My Blog. On this page, I briefly explain to social network traffic who I am and what the purpose of the blog is. From there, I invite the traffic to join my free email mailing list by including a very simple opt in form on that page.

So really, instead of pointing links to your home page, point links to special pages created just for the social networks. By doing this, you can focus direct efforts on what is most important to you. If increasing your mailing list subscribers happens to be one of the more important goals, then presenting that option first to folks who travel to your site from the social networks is sure to help increase yoru opt in conversions.