Affiliate marketers, software developers, coaches, consultants, real estate agents, copywriters, e-commerce store owners, small local business owners, in fact, anyone and everyone who has something to sell.
The importance of building an email list
Verena Ho – Rapid 5K Subs
Finally, a scalable system that allows anyone to rapidly build an email list from 0 to 5,000 subscribers!
Who is list building for?
List building isn’t only for freelancers or information product marketers.
List building and email marketing works for:
Affiliate marketers, software developers, coaches, consultants, real estate agents, copywriters, e-commerce store owners, small local business owners, in fact, anyone and everyone who has something to sell.
The importance of building an email list
Building an email list consists of gathering the addresses of people who are interested in what you have to offer, developing a relationship with them, and providing them with the products and services they are looking for.
An email list makes it possible to build an audience base around what you do.
Building an audience base is all about building trust.
Building trust is about “touches” – repeated interactions over time that are useful and reliable.
It’s about you and your customers getting to know each other:
From your side, discovering what your customers are looking for and how they like to be informed about it;
From their side, what you can provide them and how good you are at doing so.
It’s about teaching your readers, your potential customers, to trust you as an expert on a certain topic so that when you have something to sell, they know who you are, and they trust that what you have to sell them is valuable.
The power of building an email list
People love to spend money. People especially love to buy things from people they know, like and trust.
If you want to build a sustainable business, build an email list FIRST.
Get people into your circle of influence by sharing good information with them, turning strangers into fans before selling to them.
At this point in my business, whenever I want to sell a new service or product, all I have to do is to send emails to my subscriber list.
No need for cold calling, no need for crazy pitches.
Just an email.
That is the power of building a list.
But how do you build a list?
Last year, I launched a brand-new blog – Growthtext
Since most of the list building content I had been reading online was either outdated or just mumbo-jumbo list articles (listicles) which don’t provide real meat, I headed out to build my list my own way.
I tested countless list building tricks and strategies (over 50+).
#1. I experimented with different traffic sources to see which convert,
#2. Tested different types of content to see what engaged my target audience and prompted them to share,
#3. Experimented with different lead capture forms on different pages of Growthtext to see which work the best and which people hate.
#4. I tested different social media platforms, paid traffic, online forums, online communities, Facebook groups, email outreach strategies;
#5. I even sent cold emails to big name influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Mari Smith, Larry Kim, Sam Hurley and others to find out what makes influencers want to promote me to their audience and what doesn’t.
Six months of effort, of trial and error, grew my Growthtext blog email list from 0 to 5,000 subscribers.
6 list building mistakes you DON’T want to waste your time on
Growing your audience and building your list is not easy.
You must run lots of experiments to find out what works. Most of your experiments will fail.
Of those that succeed, most techniques and tricks are not scalable, meaning they are not methods you can reliably step and repeat.
My best advice-
Don’t just jump in and blindly apply what you read online.
Chances are, you will be angry, frustrated, and not in the mood to keep going.
If you are going to build your list, here are 6 list building mistakes you DON’T want to waste your time on:
1. Facebook and Twitter
Organic reach on Facebook is 6%, and falling every year.
Twitter click through rates average 0.5% across all niches.
Unless you are Gary Vaynerchuk or Guy Kawasaki, your Facebook post and Tweets will surely go unnoticed.
When you are starting out, don’t waste time building your social media followings with the intention of converting them into email subscribers.
2. LinkedIn
Just like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is noisy.
People on LinkedIn rarely pay attention to what happens in their news feed. As a result, the engagement is desperately low.
It is not surprising. LinkedIn is designed for networking to find jobs and for B2B collaborations.
It’s pretty useless if you are there to build your email list.
3. Instagram and Pinterest
These two platforms can only benefit you if you keep on producing visually appealing content.
Not only that, you need to produce a lot of visuals consistently – like making 5–10 posts a day, for months.
Even after you do that, there is no guarantee that you will have thousands of followers a few months later.
Growing your audience using Instagram and Pinterest is a marathon. A long one.
These places are not likely to be the best choices if you are up for fast and efficient growth.
Overall, Instagram and Pinterest are great. However, chances are they won’t grow your email very fast.
4. Reddit
Despite its huge number of daily visitors, Reddit is a difficult place to achieve success.
Reason being? Everyone there hates self-promotion.
Things go great so long as they do not know you are promoting your own content and building your list.
As soon as someone recognizes your true purpose, you are accused of self-promotion and are likely to be banned.
Overall, Reddit is great.
It is perfectly fine to post something on Reddit every once in a while, and attract a few new email subscribers to your list.
However, if you do it too often, their axes fall real fast.
Rule out Reddit if you are looking for a predictable and scalable way to build an email list.
5. Search Engine Optimization
SEO your site to the top of Google and convert part of the site visitors into email subscribers.
Seems like a plan, right?
The truth is – Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is nearly a complete waste of time until you have an aged website which is already loaded with a ton of content.
Performing basic SEO is all that’s needed as you write your pages, not full on optimization.
You can save that for later.
As a matter of fact, since only a few prime pages need to be optimized, you can forget about altogether at first.
When Growthtext hit my 10,000 visitors per month traffic goal, I didn’t go out to get one single backlink to my blog (links from other sites to yours are just one part of SEO).
I just didn’t pay attention to my Google ranking at all.
Google is not really relevant when you’re just starting to build your list.
6. Guest Posting
Here is the fact almost no marketers want to tell you about – guest posting is a terrible strategy for generating traffic to your website to build your list.
Tim Soulo reached out to bloggers behind 239 guest posts that were published on 78 blogs in the marketing niche, and asked them one question:
“What’s the amount of referral traffic that you can get from a guest post?”
The answer?
56 visits!
Yes, on average, 56 visits across those 239 guest posts. Not impressive.
While guest posting on websites with huge traffic numbers can result in a lot of eyes on your post (on that website), it’s difficult to move the readers on over to your own site.
So again, forget this strategy when you’re starting out.
Introducing Rapid 5K Subs
After growing my list to over 5,000 subscribers with my blog, Growthtext, I took what I learned and built a structured course with straight to the point lessons showing how to build your own 5,000 list, and beyond.
Lessons come with step by step guides, videos, assignments, worksheets, and templates.
My course is called Rapid 5K Subs.
It is a scalable method to help anyone build an email list from scratch to 5,000 subscribers and beyond.
Module 1: The Foundation
1. Starting with a quick orientation of the Rapid 5K Subs course and moving through the lessons, you will see the complete strategy I used to grow my own list from 0 to 5,000 subs in 6 months, working at it part time. I take apart every piece of my system to show you how the entire thing works. You’ll get the street view and the satellite view.
2. You’ll learn how to get your list subs to trust you as an expert on a certain topic so that when you have something to sell, they know who you are, and they’ll trust that what you have to recommend to them is valuable.
3. You CAN’T get someone to sign up to your list until you connect with them. I’ll show you the quickest and most effective way to connect with your audience so that giving away their email address to join your list becomes a natural follow-through. Tap-tap-tap-click!
4. When you go out to build your list, focus is everything. Don’t spread yourself out between all the different traffic channels. That’s a guaranteed way to fail. I show you traffic channels you should spend your time on… and channels you should AVOID.
5. You will learn the correct way to set up your email service provider (and the email service provider I use successfully).
Module 2: 50 Subscribers in 24 Hours
You will learn:
1. How to sign up your first 50 subscribers in 1 day, regardless of your persuasiveness skill level.
2. How to get your subscribers to spread news of your blog with a click of a button to get more subscribers with little to no effort on your part.
3. How to create your first email collection form.
4. The best placement on your blog for your opt-in form to maximize conversions.
5. How not to trick viewers into joining your email list (it’s a good way to get rejected), and what to do instead.
6. How to craft a compelling call to action that consistently converts at around 20% when the top 10% email collection forms convert at an average of 11.45%.
7. How to make your landing page so interesting that strangers want to share it with their friends. The result? More subscribers!
8. Why you shouldn’t write blog posts to attract email subscribers when you get started (and what to write instead).
9. Which page on your website is going to be the most visited page and how you can make it a page that’s optimized for list building.
PLUS, you’ll see my landing page that converts 21% of all visitors. Copy it to your web site to convert “strangers” into loyal email subscribers.
Module 3: From 50 to 500 Subscribers
1. You will learn how to create one remarkable content piece, and use it to grow your list to 500 subscribers (yes, just 1 piece of content; it’s that easy). Plus, I show you 4 case studies about how others implement the same strategy to build their list.
2. Ditch the boring free reports and eBooks we see out there most of the time. I’ll show you the smartest strategy to create a high converting lead magnet.
3. Typically, for blogs that put email opt-ins in the sidebar, I see conversion rates around 0.5% – 1.5%. It’s the lowest converting CTA (Call To Action) position on a blog. That’s why you don’t see me use a sidebar form on Growthtext. I’ll show you the type of email capture forms that are converting at 400% for me, plus the right tool to create them.
4. You will learn my exact system for creating bonus content that accompanies blog posts and the tool I use to effortlessly put one up.
5. Step by step, you’ll learn how I use each of my blog posts to generate 250 new email subscribers. 2X that and you’ve got 500 subscribers.
6. Read a behind-the-scenes case study on how I set up my successful technique so that you can replicate it.
7. You’ll learn 6 types of content you want to share with your audience to generate 500 subscribers (comes with case studies).
8. You’ll learn why I don’t ask people if they want to get on my list. Instead, I ask them if they want to be in my small inner circle. An Inner Circle. That’s something special that makes them feel privileged. That is a good thing… I’ll teach you how to incorporate this little technique into a much larger overall strategy to rapidly grow your list.
Module 4: From 500 to 1,000 Subscribers
1. You will learn how to build your own personal sharing army! Once you have built a sharing army, it’s just a matter of hitting a send button in your email service provider, and you get lots of bloggers to amplify your content every single time you have a new blog post published. This is very scalable technique to drive traffic to your blog and get subscribers. I’ll also show you a couple tools I use to automate the process as much as possible.
2. You’ll learn how to reverse engineer enormously popular content (in any niche) to create super content worthy of sharing.
3. You’ll see my exact system for getting 1,500 bloggers to share my content all over the internet.
4. I’ll walk you through finding and pitching to bloggers to amplify your content for you. All bloggers are not equal. They are generally split into three groups I call big, medium and small fishes. I’ll teach you how to get each blogger in different groups to amplify your content. They need different pitches.
5. I’ll teach you how to use technology to forge relationships with major influencers in your niche by making each email appear to be an individually written message.
6. You’ll learn the One Click technique that can generate 100+ new subscribers every time it’s used.
Module 5: From 1,000 to 5,000 Subscribers
1. You will learn 5 strategies to scale your list to from 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers.
2. You will learn how to set up a list building funnel. Once it’s up and running, you’ll be able to scale your list building without spending hours online every day. I’ll show you the theories (what works, what doesn’t) then, I’ll give you templates you can use for your funnels.
3. You’ll see my exact steps to create attractive, instant gratification, gotta’ have, knee-jerk reaction lead magnets to convert strangers into subscribers.
4. I’ll teach you the principals behind converting cold traffic at 45% (ad copy, landing page design, traffic techniques etc.)
5. You will get a behind-the-scenes look at my funnel that collects 3,000+ new subscribers implementing the principals, and I’ll show you how to set up your own.
6. I reveal the time-tested ad copy I put on my landing page (Hint: don’t over-pitch. Instead, focus on building trust with your copy. Anything else is just superfluous and scammy).
7. I show you what ad copy out-converts others by 300%. Literally copy my script, change a few words to fit your landing page, and reap the opt-ins.
8. You’ll see exactly how I use Overlap Targeting techniques to bring laser-targeted visitors to my landing page and convert a big chunk of them into subscribers (Most newbies completely fail at targeting. Don’t let this happen to you)
9. You’ll see how to replicate the exact steps I use to drive high performance traffic.
10. I’ll show you the RIGHT WAY to scale your list building to 10,000 subscribers and beyond.
Flash Bonuses
Flash Bonus #1
“Million-Dollar Niche” Guide
Over the past few years, I’ve built 1,000+ blogs for clients in many different niches. When I work with clients, we talk. So, I know which clients made money and which didn’t.
What were the money maker doing differently than all the others?
They picked the right niche!
With this bonus, you’ll get a proven blueprint on how to pick a million-dollar niche.
I show you 5 principles that a niche blog must follow to become successful.
You need to adhere to all 5 principles. No more, no less. If you can’t, your blog will never succeed, no matter how hard you try.
Once you are in a profitable niche, all you’ll need to do is set up a blog that is fully optimized for conversion and you’ll be 10x more guaranteed to succeed than 99% of the bloggers out there.
Don’t miss out on this!
Value: $500+
Flash Bonus #2
Niche Selection Session with Verena
Now, what if you picked a couple niches, or more, that all comply the 5 principles? They all look good, but which one should you choose?
No worries.
I’ll spend time researching each of them to determine which is best for you. I’ll personally pick the niche that will give you the biggest potential.
Not only that, I’ll draw up a game plan for you to follow to dominate your niche. We can discuss sales funnels, conversions, list building, building your first product, advertising, or anything else that’s on your mind.
Value: $1,000
Flash Bonus #3
Custom Sales Page Package
When you’ve built a list, and earned the trust of your readers, the time comes to sell them the things they value.
At that point, you need a sales page to showcase your product. And the more expensive your product, the more professional-looking that page needs to be.
The industry rate for getting a professional-looking sales page done is around $5,000 (between coding, designs, copywriting, and lots more).
With this bonus, you’ll get a copy of my entire sales page (this sales page) to use for your next product launch.
With this package and a little help from my team, you can have your very own custom sales page for your next product launch.
Value: $5,000
What Do You Get With Rapid 5K Subscribers?
Here is the recap. You get…
– 5 Modules that contain everything you need to build an email list from scratch to 5,000 subs: 41 lessons with video tutorials, assignments, swipes, and templates to help you grow your email list in record time. (Value: $1000)
– Unlimited Consulting. I will personally coach you until you reach 5,000 subscribers. When you hit the purchase button, I want to make sure you are successful. That’s my commitment to you. (Value: $2000)
– “5 Principals of a Million-Dollar Niche” Guide. With this bonus, you’ll get a proven blueprint on how to pick a million dollar niche. (Value: $500)
– Niche selection session with me. I’ll personally pick the niche that will give you the biggest potential. (Value: $1000 )
– Custom Sales Page Package. With this bonus you’ll get a copy of my entire sales page (this sales page) to use for your next product launch. (Value $5000)
Sale Page: https://rapid5ksubs.com/home/
