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Hello and welcome to Episode 12 of the DKspeaks Podcast.
The last week was a happening one in Technology, thanks to the launch of the much awaited Windows 10. Microsoft was offering it as a free upgrade to all the windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users and considering that it was the first time that any version of Windows was being given away of free, it was more than news for everyone. In the first 24 hours itself there were close to 64 million downloads as per the stats on a windows central blog post. That is massive and this is just the beginning as per Microsoft. Will Windows 10 change the fortunes for Microsoft and what is the idea behind giving away the OS? These are questions that you will get answers to, only in the few months or, maybe years.
In our last episode we discussed about email marketing best practices. I got a lot of questions from people asking me to record an episode on how to build your email list. There were a lot of people who said that they were struggling to build an email list and that this was their biggest pain point.
So I thought why not do it right away as a follow up to the last episode because it was good to continue on the conversation rather than breaking it right now and coming back after a few episodes by which we would have lost the continuity.
So in today’s episode we are going to discuss about 7 ways to build your email list from 0 to 10000 in the next 90 days. Don’t forget to take notes. You can also download this episode in case you want to listen to it at a later time.
Before we get onto building an email list, there are a few things that you might want to keep in mind. Let us start with some of the metrics first. These are extremely critical in measuring your success rate and also in ensuring that you get a good ROI (return on investment).
- Conversion rate : The numbers of visitors who enter their email address into your optin page. This metric is simple to calculate. It is the number of email address captured divided by the total number of visitors.
- CTR – Click through rate : How many people are clicking on your ads and going to the optin page.
- Cost per click: This is amount of money that you are paying for every click to your optin page.
All of these metrics might not be relevant for all of the aspects that we are going to discuss today but more or, less these are the ones that you will need to measure the effectiveness of your list building campaigns.
You need to also keep in mind a few other aspects:
- It is important that your conversion rates are good, else you might be losing a lot of money. You might not actually be spending real money on buying traffic but still, every visitor who comes to your landing page or, optin page has a cost attached to it. Assume that you conversion rate is only 15%, meaning only 15 out of the total 100 people who visited your page actually entered their email address into the optin box. Compare it with a 30% optin rate. Which is better? Of course, it is 30%. For the same amount of traffic you are getting 15 additional subscribers.
- One of the factors that impact conversion rates is the quality of your landing page and the freebie that you are giving away. Hence you might want to pickup a good offer that you want to give away for free and use a nice landing page builder to build your optin forms and landing pages. Leadpages is one of the best landing page builder but is a little expensive. If you don’t want to spend so much money you can use one of the many good wordpress plugins that are available. Check some of these out in the resources sections. I personally recommend and use Thrive Content Builder and Thrive leads.
Okay so onto the tips now.
10 Methods to Build Your Email List Fast
These are just some of the ways in which you can build your email list fast. But these 10 methods are a good point to start off with. We will discuss about more advanced methods in a future episode of the podcast.
Optin, Optin, Optin
Let us start with the basics. Do you run a website or, a blog? Are a niche marketer with a lot of websites? Do you have an optin form on them? If not, then that is the first thing to do. You might feel it is not required because your websites are seeing only a trickle of traffic. Wrong! Whatever the amount of traffic coming to your blog, put an optin form on every blog, website etc. Capture visitor emails.
My criteria is simple. Whatever the traffic to my sites, if I see a bounce rate of less than 50% and if the time spent on my site is more 1 minute, I ensure that I put an optin form there. And it works. The subscriber count will be small but still… they are subscribers..
Solo Ads
This has been one of my biggest source of traffic and subscribers. I have been a solo ad seller for more than year and I made a lot of money with it. One of the biggest problems that I saw most solo buyers facing was getting scammed by fake solo sellers who were selling clicks by the cheap. People fell for the low prices and ended up getting scammed.
Another reason why people struggled with SOLO ads was because of the fact that the subscribers you collected using solo ads were all freebie seekers. And the general notion was that freebie seekers never bought anything. But I can tell you, if you have a carefully planned funnel and you filter your subscribers the right way, you will get a lot of buying customers from these. You can find SOLO ads for about $40-$45 per 100 clicks which is extremely cheap if your compare it to other modes of customer acquisition.
Facebook Ads
This is a tricky method to build your list. If you don’t do it right, you might just end up losing a lot of money. But if it works for you, then this is the best method to get extremely targeted visitors. Something that you need to keep in mind is that Facebook ads won’t work well if your hard-sell anything in your ads. You need to soft-sell a valuable content in your ads. Then direct your visitors to a blog post or, other content page. Then from that page, you sell your readers the freebie and ask them to optin. This method works really well and is proven to get your subscribers for extremely low cost.
Also keep in mind that you need to target your audience really well. Don’t target a broad audience. Narrow down your audience. This will help you improve your ROI. Facebook has very recently introduced video ads and this is another medium you can explore. I personally found that I could get clicks for as low as 2 cents from my video ads and get an optin for about 90 cents, if you are able to create a nice and short video ad.
Youtube Videos
This is my personal favorite and the one that I prefer the most. I love video marketing. If you are someone with a camera fear and don’t want to face a camera, don’t worry. You can still do video. I prefer the screen recording kind of videos. All I do is convert my blog posts into videos and post them to my Youtube channel, do a little bit of social sharing and promotion and then drive my viewers to an optin page to get a related freebie to the information I provided on the video.
If you do this well, this can be your biggest source of traffic and email subscribers.
Giveaways
Another less preferred method is to run giveaways. You can joint venture for a large giveaway with other fellow marketers who are interested in doing that and then build your list. I built my list from 0 to 20,000 in under 90 days using Giveaways. The biggest myth with this source is that the subscribers are all freebie seekers and hence will not convert.
Let me bust that myth for you.
They convert extremely well. Every mail that I send out to this list of subscribers make me about 20 cents per subscriber. That is about $2,000 in sales. But a couple of things that I keep in mind is that I don’t keep sending out promotional mails everyday to them. Instead I send a lot of valueable information and sandwich my offers in between them. This works really well. Also I use them to help acquire new subscribers which I will discuss in a while.
Youtube Ads
I do a lot of Youtube ads in comparison to Facebook ads. I am actually not a fan of Facebook ads though I do occasional promote a post ads on Facebook. But with Youtube I run a variety of ads. We will need an extensive and detailed session to go through all the possibilities on Youtube ads. But one thing I can tell you is that Youtube ads do extremely well. And you can get highly targeted and buying subscribers for as low as 50 cents per subscriber. That’s very cheap if you compare to any other paid source of traffic.
Joint Venture
If you have a good product that you are okay to give away with, then this method will work well. I have created membership sites and I giveaway a basic membership to these sites in these joint ventures. You can reach out to people who are launching products and check with them if they will be interested in adding a bonus which is valuable to their offer.
They would not refuse because these are premium products that you are offering and it is a value add for their subscribers. Most would agree to do this. The result is that you will get a lot of buyers into your lists because your offer would be shown to people who have just bought a product. So they are buyers and hence this list is extremely valuable.
Bing Ads
This is another paid method. But keep in mind that this is very tricky. Bing doesn’t accept pages that are solely created to capture visitors. Hence you might want to drive traffic to a page with information relevant to the ad that you have placed. Then use a content upgrade to get them to optin to your list. The best part about this traffic is that you can get clicks for very low at times even a couple of cents. And this again is very targeted.
Product Launches
A lot of people are using this method to build their list these days. At the same time a lot of people read about this technique and leave it there. They don’t bother to take this route because of fear. Because it involves launching a product. Alex Jeffreys in one of his products called “Digital Product Machine” where he teaches how to do it without having to break your head.
This method involves launching products at low price points and giving away 100% commissions to your affiliates. You will get a lot of affiliates promoting these products because of the 100% affiliate commissions attached to it and you will get a lot of buyers onto your list.
Contests
This is another of my favorite method to acquire subscribers. This involves running viral contests on your blogs or, Facebook pages. You run a contest with a valuable gift and tell people to share the contest in order to increase their chances of winning it. They get extra points for every people they refer to the contest thereby increasing their chances of winning. This method is really effective.
I combine this with the giveaway method I spoke about earlier. I use that list to promote these contests. I ask them to participate in these contests and because they were initially freebie seekers, they very happily promote the contest to win it. And this increases the virality of the contest and I get a lot of new subscribers into my list.
There are some nice little plugins that you can use to run these contests. These plugins are cost-effective and simple to manage. My favorite one is Social Contest. I also use Kingsumo Giveaways and List Eruption as well. You can find the links to these in the show notes.
So those were the 10 methods that I use to build my subscriber list. Most of them would not cost you a dime other than the initial few dollars that you will spend on setting it up. Yet others are cost-effective paid traffic sources. But these are amongst the most economical ones. And I can assure you that you will not find anything cheaper rather cost-effective than these.
I use these methods in conjunction with some simple methods to drive traffic. These traffic sources are so cheap that it is as good as free. You can join the 7 day ecourse, where I show you these traffic sources.
Resources in this Episode
These are the resources that we discussed in today’s episode.
Landing Page Builders:
List Building Course from Alex Jeffreys:
Contest Builder Plugins
Thank you for Joining
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