You will hear every IM guru say that building an email list is the key and as much as it pains me to admit it…they are right! But that is where my guru praising stops because what they don’t tell you is how to grow your list correctly. Most will just say “put up a free offer and an email optin form” but does that really help you?
You could have a he email list of 10,000 subscribers but if they were collected with a piss poor offer or some guru bait what good are they?
Imagine if you had a store.. would you want it packed with 1,000 shopper who had no money and had no intention of buying anything or would you rather have 20 people inside your store that had a pocket full of money and intend to spend money in your shop? The guru mentality is more = better…but that is false.
Building a list is important for many reasons. You always need new prospects to put into your conversion funnel due to:
- People changing their email addresses
- People unsubscribing from your list
If you are not constantly trying to build your list with quality emails you will eventually run out of people to market your service to.
Since I am just starting to get back into list building myself (some of you guys on my lists no doubt seen this) I was putting together a list of ways I am going to use to build lists for several projects I wanted to share them to help you out and also see what you guys are using to build your lists. By doing this we can help each other build lists that = more profits.
Here are the ways I am building my lists currently along with new techniques I am working on.. If you have anything to add to this list please post in the comments so we can gather a heap of list building ideas all in one place!
1. Market to Facebook pages with your offer
If you are promoting an offer on your website you should have a dedicated landing page that you are sending people to in order to complete your form and collect whatever you are bribing them with.. this could be a guide, digital book of tips or a special coupon.
Instead of just having a sidebar offer create an offer on a dedicated page. This allows you to push traffic from other places directly to the offer.. If you just send traffic to your home page you have to hope they see the offer. A dedicated page puts it right in their face without any distractions.
Promote the landing page for your offer on Facebook. You should have a Facebook page dedicated to your website even if it isn’t a real business.. make one even if you are promoting an affiliate weight loss product. You can build up a good FB following and push your offer to them on there. Unless every single FB like has joined your email list there are plenty of new subscribers to be found here.
2. Include an offer on every page of your website
Above I just said you need to have a dedicated landing page for your offer.. this is true but you also have to have the offer in several places on all pages of your website. Your traffic isn’t going to look hard for offers.. You have to put them directly in front of their face.
The sidebar is always a good place and make sure there is one that can’t be missed above the fold so even the lazy people that don’t scroll anywhere see it. You can also put one at the bottom of all pages just to get those that will scroll down all the way and then click off your page. If they see a good offer at the bottom you can catch some of them before they leave.
3. Make your offer known on guest posts
If you are writing a guest post you don’t want it to sound like an ad for your website. No site will publish it anyway.. but that doesn’t mean you can’t let the readers know you have a special offer for them.
Write your post.. make sure it is full of good information and don’t mention your website or offer throughout the post. Most guest posts will give you a sentence or two as a credit for the post. Include your offer and a call to action in that author bio line of text.
If you were guest posting on a health blog and wanted to promote your offer of a free 10 weight loss tips ebook you could have a simple line like this: “For more free weight loss tips make sure you download my free 10 tips to dropping 15 pounds in 30 days by clicking here” – most sites will be fine with this as long as you provided a great guest post article.
4. Twitter cards = instant targeted email subscribers
Twitter ads are something I don’t hear a lot of talk about. They have twitter cards and it lets you advertise your offer and you only pay each time someone opts in. This is why I like this.. when someone agrees to opt in Twitter automatically passes their email address to you and it is the email the person uses to log into Twitter so it is going to be real.
Know how many times I see emails like sdbhgsfdhjkgffsghfsjghgfsjkhg@aol.com register to my lists? They are 100% fake and useless. Doesn’t it makes sense to pay $1 or so per email when you know for a fact they are 100% real and legit? Since they use it for Twitter it probably isn’t a throw away email either. You can target your audience on twitter too and this is one of the best ways to build up a very good list as fast as you want. You just need the money.
5. Google+ promotion
You want to push your offer on Google+ for the same reasons you push it on Facebook but Google+ has a totally different user. These tend to be smarter users.. they don’t fall for the typical “free offer” that a Facebook crowd will.
Instead of directly promoting the offer to your Google+ connections share blog posts and content with them. This will actually land you more email subscribers.. they aren’t falling for free offers but they want to read your content because they are obviously interested in what you are selling since they connected with your G+ page.
If you share all of your content on your Google+ page you are going to push traffic to your website and you will see some signups come from this crowd.
6. Tell your current subscribers to forward the email
If you are building an email list then you are sending emails out to them. Adding a simple line of text at the bottom of every email will get your new subscribers every single time..
Something like:
“We are glad you love our free information. You MUST know some friends or family members that would love it just as much, right? Forward this email to the first 5 people that come to mind 
”
It is so simple but they will do whatever you tell them. Don’t ask them.. TELL THEM.
If you are giving them good info for free they will feel like they owe you something. This is marketing 101 but I never see this. I subscribe to every list I can find so I can see what people are doing and I can’t remember the last time I saw this being used. If you aren’t doing this you are missing out. If the email is coming from a friend or family member the person receiving it is going to automatically trust it.
7. Publish an eBook (but price it high on Amazon)
Everyone has a freaking free ebook on their website.. In order to create a real value make a really good ebook. Outsource the writing so it doesn’t suck and then hire a designer to make it look pretty. You can actually get this investment back this way too.
After you finish it list it for sale on Amazon but list it at a ridiculously high price. List it for $99 or even more. Now, when you offer it for free on your website you can mention “As seen on Amazon for $99” and link to the listing. You will want to buy some Amazon reviews or have some friends review the book. Make it free on Amazon for the promo so people download it and review it….then jack the price up.
Since everyone else has a free ebook with no value your offer will stand out because they will click over and see that it really does sell for $99. So many people will opt in because they feel like they are getting a deal.
Oh, and if anyone actually does buy it on Amazon just apply that $$ to the cost of the book.
8. Business card + QR code
This won’t work for every niche but if you have the ability to promote offline do it with a business card with a QR code to your landing page. You have to make sure your landing page is responsive so you can take advantage of mobile traffic.. every single visitor that comes from your QR code is going to be on a mobile phone.
If your landing page isn’t responsive then forget this…you will just be wasting time and money. Selling a weight loss diet pill? Print off cheap business cards that have a free offer and the QR code and then leave them in the gym locker room. There are a million places to get them into people’s hands. You can get cheap business cards printed online.
9. Send an optin offer to purchased lists (walking a fine line here….)
Ok this isn’t CAN-SPAM compliant so just be aware. There are so many email marketing lists you can purchase online pretty cheap. There are scraped and usually never targeted…but you can target them and try to get them to opt into your legal list.
If you do this you will want to get set up with a VPS mailing server and send the list an offer to subscribe to your list. Never use domains related to your main site. You want a short and sweet offer. Your subject line is 90% of it. These lists get spammed to death so you need to make them open it…then have a to the point offer to click over to your landing page and sign up for your list.
Just understand the laws and what you are doing. You walk a fine line doing this.. but it is a great way to add to your list 
10. Find niche related Clickbank offers and give them a free bonus
This is an easy way to get people to join your email list that are know to buy shit lol. Find products in the Clickbank marketplace that are related to your offer. Look for ones with high gravity and ones that have a good sales page.
Contact the site owner through the affiliate contact and tell them you would like to offer them another “free bonus” for their product. It will have to be generic and 100% information (without selling) but at the end add in an offer kind of like I talked about in the guest posting tip #3 above. You will need to make sure it is a high quality guide if you expect a top product to take you up on the offer.. and it will require a small investment to get it made.. but you can get your offer in front of a lot of people that obviously buy crap online.
I can’t think of a better email address to have in your list than someone who actually buys Clickbank products.
11. Crank out YouTube videos
You should do this for two reasons.. YouTube is the second most popular search engine and videos are easier to rank. Order some video gigs on Fiverr and have them talk about the free offer they just signed up for. Optimize the videos…buy some full retention views and throw some dirty links at them to push them on top.
Have a good description that sounds like it was written by the person who made the video and include a link to the landing page where they can get the same offer that the person raved about in the video review.
12. Add an optin after each blog post and in the middle of blog posts
In #2 I mentioned having multiple offers n your page…guess what? There will be people that still miss them. If your content is good enough you will see a lot of email opt ins come from the end of your post. Someone who really liked what they just read is going to be willing to hand over their email address to you because you have them at a weak point. They are all about you at the moment because you have them good content and information. Some will want more of it so they join and others will just naturally drop their name and email.
In order to catch the skimmers and the ones with ADD you can also put an optin within the blog post. If I have a really long post I will put on in the middle so I know even the people who don’t read all the way down will see the offer.
13. Host a webinar with a popular guest (and bribe them with emails)
Webinars are a great way to keep pulling new emails because once you create it you can set it to auto play multiple times a day.. there is a ton of webinar software out there that will link up to your list they will allow the person to select a time that works for their convenience. They don’t have to know that it is a recording.
Get an expert from your niche to agree to do a webinar. You can usually get someone decent if you agree to allow them to have access to the emails generated through the webinar registration. Yes, you are sharing the emails with someone but think of it this way.. they are emails you wouldn’t have gotten if it wasn’t for the webinar guest.
14. Donate a prize or piece of content to a popular blog
This one is as easy as breaking out the credit card.. find very popular website in your niche and reach out and offer to donate a prize or giveaway. Tell them you will give them something in exchange for the person registering for the contest (and joining your email list at the same time).
Would you spend $250 on a prize if you knew you could add 500+ people to your email list that are targeted? I would.
There is no simple method for this.. you have to get creative and think of a prize suitable for the particular website you are targeting and make it so good that they would be crazy to turn it down. If you offer something great the site won’t think twice about letting you collect emails.
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This is what I am doing as well as rolling out in my attempt to build better lists. If you have any ideas or tips to share that would be great? Until next time..
