The Secret Recipe to List Building

Okay! So let me guess. You are tired of designing optin forms and making it as attractive as possible and A/B testing it like all successful marketers say and yet you see a trickle of signups on those forms.

No marks for guessing that one, right?

Your story is not different from a lot of others, including me. I was on the same boat until a few years back. And then I stumbled upon a few marketers who were offering some real value, all for FREE.. including Andre Chaperon.

And what Andre was giving away for FREE was more than what a lot of other marketers were charging exorbitant prices for.

That was more than enough for me to be convinced and buy his email marketing course called “Auto Responder Madness“.

Anyways,

One of the most valuable lessons I learnt from Andre, was on “how to build your list”. And that is precisely what I implemented in my business.

While I did not try to reinvent the wheel, because most of the work is already done and proven to work, I still did a few things of my own.

And those were some pretty simple things.

I developed a strategy for myself taking into account all of my limitations on the amount of work I could put in and the amount of time I had, characteristics about my niche, my budget limitations and so on.
From all the information that was available, I figured out that "List Building" was a simple math and hence draw a blueprint of how I was going to achieve my goal of building a list of 10,000 subscribers
And last but not the least, I ensured that I "took action" and tracked my performance against the goals that I had set.
I was eventually able to achieve my goal and that proved that the principles work.

And since I knew that there a ton of others like me who were struggling with these basics, I thought of putting this information together in the form of a guide.

So, the obvious question – Why is it that I am giving this away for FREE?

Because, I know for a fact that if you found real value in the information I am giving you today, you will join me and together we can build a better business for you.

I get a good friend for life and you get a working business.

That ways, it's a win-win for the both of us.

During your stay with me, if you ever want to get in touch with me, please don't hesitate. I ensure that I read all of the emails that are sent to me and also respond to them.

On that note...

Let us get straight onto the course then.

Introduction

“The Money is in the List”

I am sure you would have heard that quote a thousand times before you came to this site. And you would have ignored that a thousand times too.

But the fact is that if you are not building your list, then you are running a business that is not sustainable.

The internet changed manifold in the last 8-10 years and a lot of businesses who were making a lot of money vanished from the face of the internet.

Why?

Because they were making a lot of money but they never built a list.

And there were a few others who continued with the success and grew into bigger businesses just because they never ignored the advice; “The Money is in the List”.

I come across a lot of people who have a common question. “How do I build a list, if I do not even have enough traffic to my site”.

While that question is absolutely relevant, there are 3 aspects to it.

  • Firstly, if you are not working enough to make your traffic bring in more traffic, then you are not making your traffic work.
  • Secondly, your content is not engaging enough to generate new visitors.
  • And thirdly, you are not promoting your blog enough.
paid traffic strategies

The first one is something that we will be dealing with in this course partially. But the remaining 2 aspects will need a concrete strategy, which we will not be covering in this course.

In this course, we will be showing you how to build your list to 10,000 in 180 days even if your traffic is low, say at around 100 new visitors per day. But I will recommend that you spend some time to look at the above 2 aspects of traffic and work on them as well as a long term strategy.

What to expect in this mini-course?

This course is only a guide on what to do to build your list to 10,000. What is key in the success of this system is “action”. If you do not implement the system, this eguide will be a complete waste.

We are going to work on some assumptions, which might or, might not be true in your case. Depending upon your situation, you might have to put it a little more or, maybe less effort.

But if you are ready to do it, then this guide will work fool proof for you.


Chapter –1: The Simple Maths

Let us start with some simple mathematics.

Our goal is to build a list of 10,000 subscribers in 180 days. Breaking that down to a daily target,

No. of subs per day = 10,000/180 = 55.55

That’s approximately 56 subscribers every day.

But with about 100 new visitors coming into your site, generating that amount of subscriber per day is a difficult task, but is not impossible.

For the sake of this course we are assuming 100 new visitors to your website every day.

Another thing you need to understand is that, the conversion rates are pretty low as a norm in most newbie blogs. This is because of multiple reasons, like poor lead magnets, poorly designed optin forms, bad placement of optin forms etc.

The average ones run at around 46-48% conversions from cold traffic. We will aim at that figure. (Don’t worry, we will be discussing about how to reach that figure, later in this guide). And the established ones would convert at around 75-85% which is where you and I would want our blogs to reach.

Bear in mind that this entire game is about conversions. Since your visitor count is low every day, it is important that your conversions are high, else you might just not be able to achieve the target.

Let’s understand this a little better.

Daily new visitors to your site = 100

Conversion rate = 48%

Subscribers = 100 x 48% = 48 subscribers

Now if your conversion rates were low @ 20%,

Subscribers = 85 x 20% = 17 subs.

That means you will need to put in a lot more effort by generating even more traffic to reach your goal of 55 subscribers in a day.

Now that is something that we don’t want to do. So, our entire focus will be on ensuring that our conversion rates remain high.

Okay! So it’s time to jump into the real action now.

Chapter –2: Resources Required

I am assuming you already have knowledge of how to build a list and that you know the resource that you will need.

The below are some resources that I would recommend and this is purely based on my experience. I found these tools extremely easy to use and provided me with all the required options.

But if you have a different set of tools, you are free to use it. This system, in no way is dependent on these resources.

Aweber

Aweber is the autoresponder that we recommend because it is economical and has an excellent support team to assist you.

You will want to setup your list settings for a “single optin” and Aweber can help get that done pretty easily.

Moreover, their campaigns feature helps in segmentation and simplified list management

Click here to get 30 days’ FREE trial of Aweber

Thrive Leads & Thrive Content Builder

Thrive leads is an optin form builder and comes with simple drag and drop form building capability.

You can build beautiful forms and place it anywhere you want. There are a variety of forms that you can build and since we need to build a variety of forms for our system, Thrive leads comes in real handy.

They also have an excellent A/B testing option, which helps in testing out various designs and options and finding the one with the best conversion.

Thrive content builder is a landing page builder plugin which can help you beautiful landing pages.

Click here to order Thrive Leads

Click here to order Thrive Content Builder

A Lead Magnet

You need a lead magnet to attract subscribers. These lead magnets have to enticing enough to convince your visitors to enter their name and email address into the optin form.

Step-by-step guides, cheat sheets, Infographics, handbooks, audio files, videos etc. can all be lead magnets. The only requirement is that these should have quality information inside it – information that your visitors are hungry for.

You can get almost all of these created for $5.00 at FIVERR.

List Eruption Plugin

This is a nice plugin that helps you setup a couple of lead generation pages and offers an additional gift to your subscribers if they share the page with their social media circles and friends and if these friends optin to download their FREE gifts.

List Eruption has virality built into it and since it generates buzz using the social media sites, your results just grow exponentially.

You can order the plugin here !

So now that we have all the required resources, let us get into the main action involved in this entire system

Chapter – 3: Lead Magnet

What lead magnet works well?

This is a question that I get asked often. But there is no real answer to it.

You need to find out what resonates with your readers. What is the information that they are looking for? What extent can they go to, to obtain that information?

If they can go to an extent of buying something to get that information, then it is an excellent choice for a good lead magnet.

How will you find this out?

This information is already out there. It is just a matter of using it.

Shocked!

Let me explain.

Yours is not the only blog in your niche. There are thousands of other such blogs and a lot of them are very successful (else you wouldn’t have dared to start your blog in that particular niche).

“Don’t reinvent the wheel”.

Follow this method that I used to find lead magnets for a lot of my niche blogs –

  • Note down the names of 15-20 top blogs in your niche
  • Visit each of them and note down the lead magnets that these blogs are offering
  • You will see a pattern when you have done this for all the 20 blogs. For eg: a definitive guide with x number of steps or, a guide to make an x amount of money etc.
  • Take note of every one of those aspect that you notice in the pattern.
  • Put all of what you noted down to form a headline. This headline will have an answer to a problem that readers to these blogs are facing.
  • This will be the lead magnet

Once you have figured out your lead magnet, then it is just a matter of building it.

You can head over to FIVERR and get it built. Or, if you prefer doing it yourself, then you can always do it.

I would recommend keeping these lead magnets to a simple 2 pager cheat sheet or, a 1-page infographic.

Why? We will see that in a later chapter.

If you want to get an ebook written, I would recommend iwriter. They have some good writers and you can get your ebook written for cheap.

Chapter – 4: The System

Now that we have the lead magnet in place, it is time for us to start capturing subscribers.

Let me show you another math.

Imagine you have a lightbox popup and that converts at 12%. Then you have another optin widget on your blog which converts at 8%. There is another welcome mat optin which converts at 15%.

How much will your conversion rates be?

It’s simple.

Since the number of impressions on all of these are going to be the same as all of these are there on the exact same page, the overall conversion rate will be a simple addition.

So it sums up to 35%.

I am sure you would have got the idea by now.

Place an optin form at every point, so that your visitors see it everywhere. But….

…….Ensure you have a unique design to all of these forms and unique content in each of them.

And if you can put a different lead magnet in each of these forms, then nothing like it.

You would have understood the reason why I asked you to keep your lead magnets to a 1-2 page cheat sheet or, infographics.

Because you will need a lot of them.

Why are we doing this?

Remember, in the beginning we discussed about this game of conversion.

YES!

We need as high conversions as possible. And for that we need to get maximum visitors to put their email address in our optin forms.

So, place your optin forms everywhere.

You will find this strategy being used everywhere, at Neil Patel’s Blog, at Okdork.com, at Jeff Bullas’s blog etc.

Here are 5 different forms that work extremely well in this strategy and these are what I recommend.

Welcome Mat – 

This is a fill page optin form that opens up immediately when you open a blog.

WelcomeMat

This is what you will find if you visit Neil Patel’s Blog. This is called as Welcome Mat. Neil uses it as an exit pop-up because he had another optin form that is the first thing to greet any of his visitors.

Custom Landing Page – If you can create a custom landing page for your blog and put an optin form in the area above the fold, then you can use your Welcome mat as an “Exit Popup”

This is a full page optin form that opens up immediately when you open a blog.

landing page

This is the optin form on the custom landing page at problogger.net. Notice the “Subscribe” button.

Sidebar Widget – 

This optin form has to appear immediately as the page loads and will sit there in the sidebar area. This has to be the first thing on the sidebar and should be visible above the fold.

sidebar image

This is a sidebar widget at Neil Patel’s Blog.

Lightbox popup – 

This one pops up amid a dark background and after the visitor has spent some time on your blog

lightbox

Check the above lightbox popup at Noah Kagan’s blog okdork.com

Top Ribbon – 

This is a thin ribbon like optin form that appears on the extreme top of your site.

Exit Popup – 

This is a popup that appear when then visitor is about to exit your site and click the cross button on the webpage window.

Reminder Popup –

This popup is a rectangular popup that appears on the bottom right hand corner of your webpage and reminds the visitor that they did not optin to receive their free lead magnet.

reminder

This is the reminder popup at Neil Patel’s Blog.

In post Optin forms – 

These optin forms appear in between the posts or, towards the end of the post. We will be discussing this in the next chapter.

inpost

This is the in post optin form that Neil Patel uses on one of his blog posts.

By now, you would have noticed something. The strategy that we are talking is perfectly implemented by Neil Patel on this blog… :)

Chapter – 5: In post Optin forms & Content Upgrades

This is the optin form that has built almost 35% of my list. These optin forms appear in between or, at the end of each post.

More than the place that this optin form appears at, it is what it offers that is important.

And that is why these are called as “Content Upgrades”.

Imagine, you are reading a post about optimizing a blog post for search engines. At the end of the post, you see a free cheat sheet being offered which has 3 SEO mistakes that every blogger does.

Will you optin to get hold of this cheat sheet?

YES! Absolutely.

This is called as “Content Upgrade”.

So you offer your readers an upgrade to the content that they have just read so interestingly.

Since they were interested in that specific topic, it is unlikely that they would not optin to receive this upgrade.

Content upgrades work really well. In fact, it works so well that pretty much every big blogger uses this in their posts, these days.

The only difficult part in this is that you will need to create a lead magnet for every post.

How do you solve this?

What I do is very simple. I create about 15 different lead magnets on pretty much every topic that I cover in my blogs. These can easily be used as a content upgrade in my blog posts.

Then depending upon the topic of the blog post, I customize the lead magnet to suit the requirement.

At some other times, I also package the entire post into a PDF file and an audio file and offer that as a content upgrade. And this works pretty well.

Chapter – 6: The Concept of Virality

It is unlikely that you do not know how viral content works. And the best part about content that goes viral is that the traffic grows exponentially.

If you can apply this same concept of virality to your list building efforts, then the results will be amazing.

Imagine,

  • A visitor optins on one of your optin forms to download a lead magnet 1
  • He gets shown another page where he has an option of sharing a specific private link with his social media circles and friends.
  • If any of his friends decide to optin and download lead magnet 1, then this visitor earns points
  • Once he accumulates x number of points he gets to download another FREE gift (Lead Magnet 2)
  • And this cycle continues

I am sure you can see the exponential growth here.

So, why are we using this system?

Because, all of the numbers that we discussed above is assuming everything works fine. What happens if there are any glitches that we encounter?

What happens to the shortfall?

We might miss out our target and will fall short of our goal of 10,000 subscribers.

This is why we have a backup system in place which will help us exponentially grow our lists.

Another important thing that you might have noticed is that all of what we discussed above only helps us build about 48 subscribers every day.

But out target is 55 subscribers every day.

So, that’s a shortfall of 7 subscribers daily.

Total shortfall = 7*180 = 1,260 subscribers in 180 days

We need to work on this as well.

And this shortfall is made good by using List Eruption as the technique that we are discussing.

If both of the systems work without any glitches, then you might far exceed your targets as well.

Now let’s dive straight into the system –

The Viral List Building Method

This system is simple. Most of the backend work is taken care of by the List Eruption Plugin. We just need to work out the front end.

Here is what I do –

  • Firstly, I create a lead magnet with some basic information
  • I then create an advanced technique to this basic information. This is my second lead magnet
  • I create an over the shoulder video demonstrating the exact techniques that I discussed. This is the 3rd Lead magnet
  • A one-on-one Skype consultation for about 10 minutes is the 4th Lead magnet

Let me illustrate this with a List Eruption funnel that I had put together which saw extremely good conversions.

  • First Lead Magnet - I created a SOLO ads course which showed how to buy SOLO ads for FREE. (this saw 63% conversions)
  • Second Lead Magnet - I created a video showing how to setup the page, how to find sellers and how to manage the entire funnel. (about 1/3rd of subscribers qualified for it)
  • Third Lead Magnet – I gave away 4 optins forms that were converting at 60% and more. (about 1/7th of the subscribers qualified for it)
  • Fourth Lead Magnet – I gave away a ROLODEX of SOLO ad sellers whose SOLOs converted like crazy and also sent sales. (about 1/10th of the subscribers qualified for it)

With the above statistics, you can imagine the number of people I would have added to my list.

PRO-TIP: Use the list eruption landing pages as a redirect to the Optin forms you have set up using Thrive leads.

If the subscriber opts in for the lead magnet on the List Eruption form, then you can delete them from the other list. You can setup a rule in your autoresponder account to do this automatically.

The only thing you will have to do in this method is, to start the List Eruption page from the 2nd Lead Magnet and offer the 1st Lead magnet on your Thrive Leads optin.

This way you will be sending your subscribers through the entire funnel and your conversions will also skyrocket.

You can Order List Eruption at a discounted price today. Click here to order!

Conclusion

I hope you liked this simple system to build your list. Keep in mind that this is just a guide and it carries no value unless you implement the techniques we spoke about in the guide.

About 88% of people who read this guide will not implement a single word of what was mentioned in this guide. In fact, about 23% will not even complete reading the guide and about 7% will never open the guide even.

It is entirely your choice as to which of the above categories, would you like to fall into.

My simple advice – don’t procrastinate, implement the strategies.

There are a lot more possibilities with how you can build and even bigger list. It is just a matter of experimenting.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the notifications on dkspeaks.com to stay updated with the latest posts.

In case you have any questions, please write to me using the contact-us option or, you can even comment on a blog post and let me know.

If you like listening to audio, you might like my podcast. You can find the DKSpeaks Podcast at https://dkspeaks.com/itunes

Dilip Kumar (aka. DK)

Dilip

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