So you’ve got your website up and running and you’ve got your newsletter up and running. You’ve just got one problem – you don’t have anybody subscribing to your newsletter.

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So how do you go about getting your visitors to go from just visiting your site to opting into your newsletter?

Well, it used to be as simple as putting little box on your website that said, sign up for our free newsletter, and if you did that, people would sign up. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. People used to think it was cool to get email, but now we’re all bombarded with so much spam that we’re not going to part with our email address so easily.

So the next logical step after just asking people to opt-in stopped working was to bribe them. Perhaps with a free report, free chapters from your ebook, videos and tutorials, or even podcasts – essentially, you give them something of value in exchange for them giving you their valuable email address.

But are you ready for some more bad news? Yeah – people are so skeptical now that even if you promise to give them something of value for their email address, they’re still reluctant to give it to you. They’ve likely been given crappy reports that were thrown together in a few minutes before from some marketer who was just trying to get their email address and didn’t actually care about providing value.

So since just asking them to opt-in doesn’t work very well, are we just supposed to give up on building an email list?

Heck no – what you need to do is prove yourself first. Give people some valuable content BEFORE you ask them to give you their email address. That can be as simple as writing great articles or blog posts or recording videos that really do provide value to the visitor even if they don’t opt-in.

Essentially, what you’re doing is what famous Internet Marketer, John Reese, calls a reverse squeeze page.

I’ll admit that I’ve been using these for a couple years now even though I didn’t know that they had a name. I just thought it was a good way to get people to opt-in, and as long as you’re providing quality content – it is.

Keep in mind, however, if your site is crap, then people are unlikely to opt-in because they just think you’re going to send them more crap or even worse, spam them. Reverse squeeze pages will not work on sites with crappy content. If you want to see an example of a reverse squeeze page in action, you can visit my snake site, boatips.com and see how I provide content before I ask for the subscriber to opt-in on all my article pages.

One of my favorite methods for implementing reverse squeeze pages is to offer a free report at the bottom of an article or blog post. So yes, they’re getting free content on my site, then they’re getting a free report from me, so there’s a whole lot of free stuff being given away before I ever ask for money.

And you know what, even the first few emails I send them are likely to contain just content, or maybe a very soft sell for a product included with a lot of valuable content, so that even if they don’t buy the product, they got value by reading the newsletter.

If your subscribers know that every email you send them is going to be a promotion for something, they’re going to start deleting your emails before ever reading. On the other hand, if you’re providing valuable content in every email you send, then people will actually look forward to seeing your emails, and won’t mind if you take a few moments to recommend a product to them.

And that covers getting people to opt-in to your site – give reverse squeeze pages a try and see how it works for yourself.

One thing I think that a lot of business owners, especially home based business, need to learn how to do better is improve productivity.

Being productive can mean the difference between working 30 hours a week and making a lot of money or thinking your “working” 70 hours a week and barely getting by.

You see, a lot of business owners spend their time in a state of chronic distraction. They are constantly talking on Instant Messenger, checking their email, talking on the phone, and doing a whole lot of other things that make them feel like they’re working, but are not helping them make any money.

Here are a few tips on how to increase your productivity.

First, you need to plan your day before you start it. As the great motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, said “Don’t start the day until it’s pretty well finished.”

What he means by that is you should have your entire day planned in advance so that you know what you’re going to be doing for that day. I like to plan my day the night before, but you can take it even farther and plan weeks or even months in advance.

Planning your day may sound obvious to some but so many people wake up and sit down at their desk to start working for the day with no plan of what they’re going to do that day. For many people, this bad habit carries over from their days as an employee. And the business owner can’t afford to have this bad habit.

I know that in my own business if I ever have a day where I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write down everything I need to get done that day, I get less than half of what I would have gotten done if I’d have taken the time to plan the day.

The next tip on how to be more productive is simply to plan more work for the day. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you need something done, give it to the busiest person you know.”

This may seem counterintuitive but it’s absolutely true. You see, busy people need to be more self disciplined with their time and will find a way to get something done by carefully planning.

Conversely, a person who isn’t very busy and has a lot of time will tend to procrastinate and do nothing since they think they have all the time in the world and can just do it later. So while they have the time, they don’t have the same work ethic as the busy person.

I know that when I plan a lot of work for a single day, I’m far more productive, sometimes getting done in one day what used to take me a week simply because I have so much to do that I need to keep a little extra “spring in my step” in order to get everything on my list done that day.

Now you can take this too far and plan so much work that you’ll never be able to finish it in one day, and that can be very demotivating. I’d recommend planning what seems like a lot of work, but not so much that you won’t be able to finish it no matter what you do in a day.

If you mess up a few times and find there’s just too much to do, then play around with it until you can get your list done in a day but have very little time to waste in the process.

If you have less time to waste and screw around with during your work day, you’ll see your productivity soaring – just give it a try for a few weeks and watch how much more you get done.