How and Where to Build Your Email List

How and Where to Build Your Email List

 

With all your subscriber and opt-in tools in place and your software ready for email collection. What’s left to do is to find out how and where to build your email list.

Within the beginners list building series, we’ve covered some good ground so far, but now it’s time to actually get into building your subscriber list and find out where, and how to do it.

 

So Where Should You Look?

First of all, you should figure out your audience before you do anything, you must first pay attention to who you want on your email subscriber list or who you want to attract. There’s no point looking for gardening interests and writing about internet marketing is there?

An extreme example I know but you really need to sit down and decide who you want to serve.

 

Remember Who You Serve

DefineYour Audience

Think about your business for a minute or two and really dig deep and find out what sort of people you want to serve. You don’t need to serve everyone, this simply won’t work! The world is diverse enough without trying to make everyone happy. You will fail trying to achieve this so don’t start with everyone!

“If you go about trying to please everyone, there’s going to be endless struggles”


Create Content to Serve

Once you have found your audience and your voice, it’s time to create your content. Whether this be video, the written word, digital product, physical book, it time to start working on your content for your chosen audience.

Attract Your Audience

Now you have your content and audience figured out, you can start to attract the right people. And because you have your voice and content, that will now allow you resonate with your target audience. It’s now easier to attract the people you want to serve.

 

So Where Should You Look?

In no particular order, let’s take a look at were you can find subscribers both free and paid.

Guest Posting

A great source of traffic to build email subscribers is the guest post. By asking for a guest post spot on another blog, (most importantly a popular blog with a good following) you can automatically qualify as an expert in your field. If you make a top class post, traffic will come back to your own blog through people craving knowledge of your niche. Guest posting is great source of traffic and you should try to guest post on a regular basis.

As a result of guest posting, you should ensure you have an opt-in and a great lead magnet on your blog to build subscribers.

Host a Challenge

While we are on the subject of blogs why not host a challenge? You can advertise a challenge on your social media pages, such as Facebook and Instagram, challenging people to achieve something?

Let’s take list building as an example here. You could setup a challenge to build 100 subscribers in 1 month. You initiate the challenge on your blog and social media, linking the challenge back to a landing page or your blog with an opt-in. People will opt-in to watch you complete the challenge.

Can you see where we are going here?

You are the challenge host, and as a result the people who want to subscribe to your challenge and watch you build a list of 100 people, subsequently opt-in to your list to watch you complete the challenge. These people also join in a share your challenge with others who also join in and watch and share. Many 1000’s of subscribers have been built this way.

 

Create Your Own Products and Launch Them

Probably my greatest list building and income generating technique. There is no better subscriber than a customer, but how do you do it?

By simply creating an online product or course and selling it… it’s that easy?

Once you build out your product and set it on the marketplace, all you need then are customers. Let’s take a look at an example, using Clickbank as an example:

Step 1 – Create a digital product with a members subscription on the thank you or purchase download page.

Step 2 – Place this product on Clickbank for sale with a killer sales page.

Step 3 – Advertise your product on the Clickbank marketplace.

Step 4 – Add an additional affiliate program and give 50% to all affiliates who make sales of your product.

Step 5 – Contact all vendors, affiliate marketers, likeminded bloggers and email marketers and alert them of your product and the 50% (or more) commissions and benefits of your product and how much they can make by advertising it to their subscribers.

Step 6 – Cash in and build your subscribers.

If you create a great product with a great affiliate offer, you need only create 1 product and this could build subscribers for the rest of your life. Likewise, if you create 10 products and 10 great offers, you increase the chances of success greatly. Similarly if you create 20 products… oh you get the picture.

Host an Online Webinar

Hosting an online webinar takes practice and knowledge. But the benefits can be great especially if you automate it. This could be the ultimate lead magnet and sales magnet if you have a good offer at the end.

Earlier we spoke about defining your audience. Online webinars are no different, you attract an audience seeking knowledge through the usual channels such as social media Facebook groups, Insta, blogs, forums, other peoples blogs and also recommendations from other people who enjoyed your content.

All you have to do is serve the content to a hungry niche with a webinar service such as Everwebinar and the software will do the rest! You can put hundreds of people on your mailing list this way.

Use Facebook Messenger

How can you use Facebook Messenger to build your email list? A software called EasySendy Social, you can add Facebook Messenger widget to your website so that you can engage with your visitors directly on Facebook Messenger.

Why Messenger?

Most people use Facebook. It’s a great way to communicate with your visitors and some more feel comfortable using it over email. You can communicate with all your Facebook subscribers in bulk with EasySendy. Also, due to some cool features, you can automate various tasks like replies and comments.

 

Cross Promotions From Marketers or Business Partners

Do you have your own product or service to offer?

Why not find a community of likeminded people to cross promote with?

How can you do this?

You can ask to have your own products or informative posts on a promotional page of a fellow product creator, blogger or service provider. And in return you can do the same for them.

Here’s an example. Imagine having a thank you page for a product. On this page, you could advertise another product as a cross promotion. Similarly, the person you are cross promoting with can advertise your service on their pages.

As a result, you build subscribers from alternative thank you pages, landing pages, blog posts, even Facebook pages. Both parties benefit from cross promotion and build their lists.

Page Exit Strategies

Previously explained in The Tools to Building Your Subscriber List. The use of a popup on the page of your website when people leave is a great way to build subscribers.

For example. Imagine you are about to leave a page and ‘X’ away. Using the popups we have talked about previously, these can be setup in a way to activate when the viewer hovers over the ‘X’. \

Crackerjack timing allows the popup to hit the page at the right moment before they click. This action readjusts the brain, alerting the viewer to something that has changed or an unexpected event in a split second. In other words, you weren’t sure what you seen and you have a what the hell is that! Moment.

Here is an example of a popup lead magnet you may see on the exit of a website which will all you to build subscribers:

Dan Sumner

Social Media

As discussed at the start, you have to define your audience. Once you have done this you can find out where they hangout so you can interact and build relationships.

We’re not going to get into creating Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, these things won’t get you subscribers right off the bat. What will get you subscribers right off the bat is interaction with an audience.

Why create a facebook groups or pages when you can find an already established ones and join in? Share you knowledge with people, build your relationships. Subscribers will come to you because you are the expert.

As explained earlier, you don’t have to make everyone happy, just the people you want to make happy within your circle or niche. When people are looking to you for help, they will seek you out via your profile on Facebook, on Instagram and within Linkedin etc.

As a bonus for people within these groups on social media, why not provide a in-depth PDF for people to use and save as their own?

Within this PDF and the information provided, you can link back to your landing pages, blogs, products and especially your opt-ins to build your subscriber list.

Ad Revenue

I’d like to start with ad revenue with a “be careful’ warning because you can spend every penny you’ve made as a business trying to get ads to work.

My advice to you is to find out what works, test and scale it up accordingly. This rule goes for Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Here’s are 6 great tips to get you started with ad campaigns:

  1. Develop an email marketing plan – figure out what you’re going to do with the subscribers when they click your link, where you are going to send them and what they are going to signup for.
  2. Ensure you clarify your target audience – there is nothing more important than targeting the right person or people, when creating an ad campaign. If you send the wrong people to your ad you are going to spend a shed tonne of cash for nothing. Clicks mean cash, and the wrong clicks means cash with no results.
  3. Set your budget – Figure out what you can afford. You can set a maximum daily budget, and select whether to bid manually on your ads or let Facebook do automatic bidding for you. Automatic bidding is generally the best choice for anyone that’s not already an expert in PPC advertising.
  4. Write smoking ad copy – It’s imperative to create great ad copy to appeal to the people you want on your list. Remember, an image can’t tell the whole story, so add great copy that your audience can resonate with.
  5. Include a clear Call To Action (CTA) – We ventured into CTA earlier in this course. A CTA is highly relevant when creating an ad. You want them to take an action, so tell them what to do. If you want people to sign up, then explicitly ask people to “Sign up today” or “Subscribe”
  6. Test the Sh*t out of your ads – Test test and test again. If it’s converting, try to get it to convert better. It’s simple… test until you get the best results possible for your cash.

 

 

Do Not Pay For Lists

The answer to this is simple. Don’t pay for lists!

Simply put, you don’t know what you are buying. All email addresses could be blocked which will hurt your database and spam filters, they could be used by 1 million other people who bought the same list, hurting your rankings. I’m not going to go on here, you get the point.

DON’T BUY LISTS

Are You Enjoying The Email Marketing for Beginners Series?

Finally, I hope you are enjoying the How and Where to Build Your Email List. If want to learn more or skip to the next part. Check below you can find the links to the full 10 part series:

  1. Introduction
  2. How to Write The Perfect Email
  3. 50 Email Marketing Headlines to Make You a Legend
  4. Tools to Building Your Subscriber List
  5. How and Where to Build Your Email List
  6. What is Email Segmentation and How to Use it
  7. How to Avoid The Spam Filters
  8. Impressive Email Marketing Style
  9. How to Automate and Test Email Marketing
  10. Beginners Email Marketing Conclusion

Comments – Over to You

Please comment on your thoughts below. I would love to hear what you think about How and Where to Build Your Email List. Is there anything you would add or any tips you se yourself that would help others?

 

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