Gaining Mailing list subcribers through free downloads

Hi All

hope you are having wonderful holiday season.

I have a created few PDFs to give away as free downloads in my site.
My initial idea was to give them a direct download.

Then i have seen the way seomoz does it.
The site Flaunts the PDF (i.e., gives the basic details of the pdf) but to download the pdf you need to enter your email id and then the download link will be sent to them in a mail.

But there are also other sites that take this to the next level, they ask the individuals to register to their mailing list.Once the visitor enters the email id he would get a confirmation mail and after he confirms it, he would receive the download link in mail.

Does anyone know how to do it?

and will this help my site??

Maybe you can set it up with phplist, lots of videos on youtube

Its called a "call to action" wherein you would have to give them some goodies (your free pdf's) in exchange for their information which you can then use as a gateway to reach them. Having a form on your website will do the trick. And you can set it up in a way that when visitors to your site fills out a form, their info would automatically go to your address book and they would be set-up to be on your mailing list so you could send them emails about your products or services. I call this a "campaign". PM me if you want to know more about this.

Check out Awebers autoresponder. They are pretty simple to set up and will add them to your list by confirming they want to be on it.

Have you tried doing this with ListWire? its a free alternative to Aweber.