This week I’m sharing a series of emails I’m calling the “Beginner’s Guide to Growing an Email List”.
I’ll walk you through how to start and grow an email list from scratch.
If you’ve been wanting to build your own online business as a solopreneur, but haven’t been quite sure exactly what your first steps should be – starting an email list is the best option in my opinion.
And if you’re already established and have an email list – you’ll learn how to scale up and grow more quickly.
How To Grow An Email List Overview:
The first thing we need to do is understand how and when email list “funnel” works best.
There are many, many ways to start getting people onto an email list, but I want to show you the best way to do and the quickest path to success.
Here’s what a good email list funnel looks like visually:
Note: A “funnel” is the buying journey a customer takes with you and your business.
Traffic
“Traffic” is how you get an audience of people to your website and/or Landing Page.
There are two types of traffic.
- Paid
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Organic
Paid traffic is any traffic that you buy with ads. You display an ad, someone clicks on it, and they’re directed to your website.
Organic traffic would be something like social media (X and LinkedIn are the most popular with solopreneurs/“creators” these days) or a blog. You post content on social media – someone clicks your link and lands on your website.
Organic traffic is a slow (but powerful) way to get traffic to your landing page. You’ll need to post a lot, consistently, and have high quality (or drama) in order to generate enough traffic to start growing an email list. Organic traffic should be viewed as a long-game endeavor.
Paid traffic, on the other hand, is a fast source of eyeballs. The amount of traffic, and how quickly you can get it, is dictated mostly by your budget.
Paid traffic is perfect if you want to test ideas quickly, and as I’ll explain later, most people incorrectly view paid traffic as an “advanced strategy”. It absolutely doesn’t have to be – and I think it’s actually less risky than spending years trying to build up an audience organically only to find out that your audience won’t purchase anything from you.
Landing Pages
The next part of a good email list funnel is how you get people onto your email list: the Landing Page. (This is sometimes called an Opt-in Page).
The easiest way to think about your Landing Page is this: you want to promise the traffic you’ve generated (an audience) that you’re going to solve one of their biggest problems for free, in exchange for them subscribing to your email list.
What you provide to them – the thing that solves their problem is typically referred to as a “Lead Magnet” because it pulls leads in, like a magnet.
“If you can find something people really want in exchange for their email address your life will be easy. If you write great copy for a thing people don’t really want, it won’t matter.” – Ian Stanley
The two best types of Lead Magnets are:
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“How to” trainings (video, audio, pdf, email sequences)
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Templates
Again, this is the high-level view of what building an email list looks like. I’m sure this is just a review for many of you but I think it’s worth a review.
As you can see – if you have just 2 things, you can start building an email list.
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A pre-existing audience or paid traffic
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Something free that that audience desperately wants
The First Step To Building An Email List
The first step to building an email list then becomes: Figuring out exactly what some audience desperately wants – and how you can build something to solve that problem and give it away for free.
That’s it on the surface.
Obviously, the entire process is a bit more complicated, but most people never fully grasp what I’ve written above (even people who have started building an email list).
Figure out what an audience wants. Help them solve their problem for free, in exchange for their email address.
That statement alone can help you determine what audience or problem you should go after and solve to build an email list.
If you’re still uncertain, don’t worry though because you can test audiences and problems very quickly and I’m going to show you how to do that in this series of emails.
Before we jump into testing though, I need to explain the 2 grayed out parts of the funnel image above.
When I explain those 2 parts tomorrow, you’ll have a much better understanding of your traffic source and what type of Lead Magnet you should create.
Hopefully this is making sense to you. I’m slowing down, breaking these emails into chunks, and going step-by-step so you can slowly absorb how building email lists works.
Chances are if you haven’t started building an email list, it’s because you don’t have a true and deep understanding of the full picture of how email lists are built.
I’ll have more for you tomorrow!
– Derek
P.S. All this week I’m going to do my absolute best to give away as much free advice on growing email lists as possible. However if you do want to go deeper, I’ll be promoting Ian Stanley’s list building system this week. It’s called the "List Snowball Method".
Tomorrow, Thursday at 12noon Pacific, Ian and I are going to discuss “How to Grow Your Email List with the ‘List Snowball’ Method” on a live webinar (it will be recorded).
If you’re even slightly curious about email lists work and especially if you’d like to know how Ian scales them up quickly into 7 figure businesses, you won’t want to miss this.
P.P.S. I made a mistake in my email yesterday. I said that the Landing Page of Ian’s that I shared was getting 50 subscribers per day. It’s actually getting 100-200 leads per day.