Hey, whats up guys, if you are a course creator
or business owner, you probably have heard this phrase a bunch of times that the money
is in the list.
But how do you do that?
How do you grow your list quickly and efficiently, while attracting the right followers, the
right subscribers who are going to buy your products, courses, and offers that you have
in your business.
In today's video, I am showing you step-by-step
how you can grow your email list from scratch to your first thousand subscribers.
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I've grown my own email list to over 10,000
email subscribers, and I help digital entrepreneurs and course creators like you get the most
out of their course businesses over on my blog courseboss.co.
So why do you need an email list in the first
place when you could just grow an audience on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook,
on Twitter, whatever it is?
You actually are taking a big risk by not
growing an email list and by relying on these platforms.
As great as things like Instagram are, you don't own your audience on social media.
And by putting all of your eggs in one basket,
you are putting yourself at risk to lose your business at any point in time.
Now, if Instagram or Facebook shut down tomorrow,
or your account got banned, or something else happened, we all know the algorithm changes
every other day.
And when that happens, you could lose your
reach, you could lose your ability to speak to your audience, to get your offers out in
front of them...
And when that happens, you're left out of luck.
If you want to take your business seriously,
you absolutely must start growing an email list if you want to be able to reach your
email list whenever you need to.
That list is something that nobody can take
away from you, and it is the biggest safety net.
So what is the best way to get people off of social media and onto your email list?
Well, I'm sorry to say again that having a
sign up for my newsletter form on your website isn't enough these days.
Now you need to give people a reason to sign up for your email list.
And we do that through a lead magnet, freebie, or an opt in offer.
Whatever you want to call them, they're all the same.
Now, these can be things like a webinar, a
PDF guide, or cheat sheet, a free ebook, a discount on your physical products, the choices
are endless.
Now, the big key thing here with your freebie or your lead magnet is that it must address
a major pain point or problem that your audience is having.
It has to be something that entices them to
sign up for your offer right now and not put it off until later.
So the whole premise behind your freebie is that it delivers a quick win in exchange for
a subscriber giving you their email.
Now this should address something that a large
segment of your audience is hungry to solve... they are desperate to solve this problem because
the more desperate they are to solve it, the more likely they are to give you their email
in order to get it.
Whatever you do, don't make your freebie something
that is general -- it should apply specifically to whoever is in your ideal target audience.
You don't want to attract a bunch of people,
say if you're doing an iPad or an iPhone giveaway, these attract just about anybody and it's
not going to let you get laser specific on who you are targeting, on attracting your
ideal customers and clients to your email list.
For example, I have a course that teaches
people how to grow their Instagram audiences to 10k and to monetize with their business.
So my freebie is a free five day email course that teaches them how they can get started
on Instagram and start growing their following to their first thousand followers.
Now this is a perfect freebie because the
people who are interested in starting their Instagram and getting their following up to
1000 are likely to want to take that a step further and grow it for their business to
a much larger audience.
So this is a perfect alignment of freebie and offer.
After they finish my freebie, the next logical
step is for them to take my paid course which helps them further achieve their goals.
Tell me in the comments: what is the niche
of your business and what kind of freebie are you offering that solves that pain point
for your audience and encourages them to go on to your paid offer?
Tell me in the comments, I'd love to hear from you!
Once you have your freebie you're going to
need to get set up with an ESP or an email service provider so that you can deliver it
and so you can start collecting people's emails on your list.
Now one of the best options for beginners
is MailChimp, and that is because you can get started for absolutely free.
And you can stay on the free plan until you get to 2000 subscribers.
So if you're not ready to start paying for
the service yet, this is a great way to dive in with growing your email list.
Now what I personally use and I also highly
recommend is a service called Convert Kit.
Now Convert Kit starts out with a paid plan,
but you get everything you need.
You have it as a very simplified platform for creating all the parts of your email funnel.
So you can set things up so your freebies
get delivered automatically when somebody signs up, you can create opt-in forms, landing
pages, and all of those little assets that are needed to get people to sign up, give
you their email, and get the freebie.
You can get started on ConvertKit with a free
14 day trial, and I will link to that below.
Once you've chosen your email service provider
and you've gotten all set up, you need to create your first form to collect email addresses.
Now I highly recommend you set up a landing
page to put your form and some more copy that encourages people to sign up for your freebie
and explains what it is.
Now you'll be directing your social traffic
from Instagram, from Facebook, from YouTube and whatever else you have -- directing people
from those platforms to your landing page where they can get your freebie.
Now you can create landing pages directly
on whatever platform you have your website or blog.
So whether that is WordPress, or Squarespace you can do it with those.
But you can also take a step out of there and make them directly inside ConvertKit.
ConvertKit has a great landing page builder
where you can set them up right there without even having a blog.
So if you don't have one, you can get started anyways.
Now if those options aren't doing it for you,
you can also sign up for Leadpages which is a separate landing page building software.
I've used this myself and it makes it so simple
and so easy to set up really great looking landing pages that convert well.
So you can get your offer, your lead magnet, or your freebie up and running within minutes.
Which brings me to promoting your freebie
to grow your email list.
Now, there are a ton of ways to do this, so I recommend that you stick to your strengths.
So if you have a really big social following,
you're going to focus on that.
If you have a lot of blog readers and you create a lot of content for that, you'll focus
on that.
But that being said, Here are my top five
favorite and most powerful ways for growing your email list with your freebie or lead
magnet.
Now number one is to put your forms, your
signup forms for your lead magnets, right inside of your blog posts.
Now you can sprinkle these throughout, I usually put one in the middle and one at the bottom.
So that way people that are going through
and actually reading your content are the ones seeing your freebie offer and these are
going to be high quality subscribers.
Number two is pop-ups and scroll mats.
Now I know I might get a little bit of flack for this because everybody is in agreement
that pop ups are annoying... but they are so prevalent on the web because they work.
Okay, so when you put these... a welcome mat
is something that scrolls down at the beginning when somebody lands on your website or a blog
post, and it has a form and an offer for your freebie.
Pop ups -- self explanatory.
But these work, and when I added a scroll mat to my blog, I quadrupled my email sign
ups overnight.
Is is just amazing.
This strategy has a great ROI if you have
a good amount of blog traffic for your business.
Number three is Instagram.
There are two ways that you can use Instagram to grow your email list.
First is to utilize your bio and your bio link.
So you're going to mention your freebie and
why they should get it in your bio and link to it.
And you want to promote this frequently in your stories, in your feed, and direct your
followers over to your biolink so they can get your freebie.
Second is to use influencers and shout outs.
Now this is a paid strategy, but it works like crazy.
When I first started my business I had no
blog, no traffic, no following, nothing.
So I took to Instagram and influencer shoutouts.
I found a few influencers who were in my niche, who targeted a very similar audience to me,
and I got them to promote my freebie to their audience.
Now I was able to grow my email list by two
or 300 new subscribers within the first week or two.
And this really jump started my business, and jump started my email list, and it's a really
powerful thing especially when you're trying to get going.
But when you do this do make sure that you
are very careful vetting the influencers you use.
Make sure they are targeting the same audience
as you, that their audience is high quality and engage, because that will give you the
biggest bang for your buck.
Number four is Facebook Ads.
Another paid strategy but they are super super powerful.
You can run ads directly to your landing page
where your freebie signup is, and you can target very specific audiences with Facebook.
You can target based on job, based on location,
based on interest, and get the exact people you need to see your freebie offer for a good
signup rate.
Number five is YouTube and I am doing this
right now.
So if you have a YouTube following, you should be linking to your relevant lead magnet in
the description below every video.
Now the best way to optimize this is to have
a separate lead magnet for each of the different categories, your main categories, that you
cover on YouTube.
That way you always have a relevant offer
for the audience that's seeing the different kind of videos that you make.
So choose the promotion strategies that best
fit your business and your current strengths, and you'll be surprised how quickly you'll
actually reach the 1000 subscriber mark.
Now I know this whole process can be a lot
to remember, so I've gone and followed my own advice and created a list building toolkit
freebie for you, and you can grab that in the description below.
With this toolkit, you'll get my step-by-step
formula for creating your lead magnet, for setting up your email list, and promoting
it to quickly grow it to your first thousand subscribers.
Also, if you want to join a community of other
digital entrepreneurs and course creators just like you, I'd like to invite you to join
my free Facebook community the Course Boss Club.
You can join that again in the link below.
And I know you're absolutely going to love it.
Inside I share my most up-to-date trainings and tips on how you can grow your course business
and market it, and make it a profitable venture.
Check out these videos next on how to take
your marketing and course business to the next level.
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