email list

The Top 4 Email List Building Strategies

January 23, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

email list growth

Email list building is one of the most important areas of your brand. You’ll get a dramatically more effective response when you send an email to 10,000 people than when you send a tweet (or any social media post) to 10,000 people.

There are plenty of ways to build an email list. You don’t want to master the wrong strategies, but you also don’t want to rely on one method.

For a very long time, I solely relied on Twitter to grow my email list. My efforts paid off as over 10,000 content creators joined my list, but I knew that to achieve monumental growth, I needed additional email list streams.

We understand the concept of having multiple income streams, but we need to understand just as well the concept of having multiple email list growth streams.

I wrote a blog post earlier containing 50 tactics to grow your email list. While the tactics will help you grow your email list, the best tactics boil down to these four strategies.

#1: Evergreen Your Social Media Promotion

I don’t manually send tweets about my landing pages anymore. I use ViralTag to put all of my tweets in a cycle.

To not make myself too dependent on Twitter, I also created a posting cycle for Pinterest. This posting cycle was a bit more complicated as I have to account for several boards, but it was well worth the effort.

As a side note, I also delegate my social media growth to other freelancers. That way, I can focus on implementing other strategies and creating more content.

#2: Optimize Your Site For Maximum Conversions

optimization

If you get hundreds of thousands of visitors, but you have no method of converting them, then you won’t grow your email list. This email list building strategy is a focus on the visitor’s experience and getting them to subscribe.

As soon as visitors come on the blog, they are greeted by a welcome mat designed to get more opt-ins for a free offer. Pop-ups, the sidebar, and the blog posts themselves get even more opt-ins.

I use ThriveLeads to optimize my blog for generating more leads. It allows me to utilize all of the capabilities I just mentioned and more. AppSumo is another great option as well.

#3: Create An Affiliate Program

I am an affiliate for Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever Course. Michael Hyatt has impacted a lot of people, including some of the top players in various niches. When it came time to promote the course, many affiliates jumped on board.

The result?

In less than two weeks, all of the affiliates combined brought in over 80,000 opt-ins. You read that correctly, and I did not type in an extra zero.

That’s roughly 8,000 new subscribers every DAY. Many people would be very happy if that was their month.

Michael Hyatt was able to do it in one day.

I’m not saying that all affiliate programs lead to these types of results, but they will have a big impact on your business.

I grew my email list by over 25% by hosting the Content Marketing Success Summit and Productivity Virtual Summit. CMSS got me past 10,000 subscribers. When you get a team of people to promote your offers, you can reach out to far more people than you could have ever reached out to on your own.

You can use a service like SamCart to create your own affiliate program. When you recruit affiliates, it’s essential to communicate with them through a custom email list and a Facebook Group Page. These two communication platforms will be more than enough to keep your affiliates on the same page for what to promote and when.

Michael Hyatt’s course promotion was a launch which means there was a beginning date and an end date. In addition to running a launch style product launch, you can also run an evergreen promotion so affiliates can set their social media posts in a continuous cycle and constantly promote your landing pages.

#4: Use Facebook Ads

I recommend trying the other three before you give Facebook ads a try. The reason is that you don’t know how well your landing page converts until it gets enough visibility. You don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that doesn’t convert.

You also don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that converts well for getting opt-ins, but the autoresponder doesn’t bring in any sales. Then you’re losing money in the short-term even though you are growing your email list.

With that said, Facebook ads are the dominant player in the social media space. There are plenty of ways to optimize your Facebook ads, but I’ll give you the basic math you need to run a successful Facebook ad.

You’ll need to pick a Facebook ad that is measured by the cost per conversion. Before you run your Facebook ad, you should know how much a conversion is worth to you.

Let’s say you have a landing page with an effective autoresponder. Based on your past results, you know that the average subscriber spends $5 in the autoresponder. If you can convert subscribers at $2 per conversion with the Facebook ad, you make a $3 profit for each new subscriber you get from the Facebook ad.

These are the ads that become successful. It’s not just about optimizing your ad for Facebook standards, but it’s also about optimizing your autoresponder so Facebook optimization is a worthwhile effort.

To take this strategy a step further, you can focus on promoting a webinar. Webinars tend to convert very well from opt-in and sales generation standpoints. When you have a webinar that converts really well, you can even make it evergreen so you don’t have to continuously perform the same presentation.

In Conclusion

Email list building strategies are all around us. The only ones that will work are the ones that you meaningfully implement. Of all of these strategies, evergreen social media posts is the easiest to implement. It’s an easy one-off task where you occasionally have to look at your posts to see what’s still working.

Optimizing your site for maximum conversions is similar but can involve more time and continuous testing to get better conversion rates.

Creating and growing your own affiliate program is much more involved, especially in the long-term. However, this approach can yield incredible results. With the exception of affiliate program fees and having a team behind him, Michael Hyatt didn’t have to pay a penny to get those 80,000+ subscribers.

You can run a Facebook ad before you start your own affiliate program. But the affiliate program would help you paint a better picture of what cost per conversion would allow you to make a profit.

What are your thoughts on these email list building strategies? Do you have any strategies for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

50 Tactics To Grow Your Email List

June 24, 2016 by Marc Guberti 9 Comments

Email List Growth

The digital landscape is always changing right in front of us. More opportunities for growing an email list get presented as the days go by. Live streaming was recently introduced to us a little over a year ago.

Based on the number of articles and videos about live streaming since its existence, it seems as if live streaming apps like Periscope have been around for decades.

It is getting harder and harder for us to imagine life without this changing digital landscape.

No matter how often the digital landscape changes, the story will remain the same. Your email list is your most valuable asset. It’s where the money and ultimate engagement reside.

To grow an email list, you either increase the conversion rate or you get more traffic that gets directed to an opportunity to join your list. Those are the two underlying principles behind all 50 of these tactics.

#1: Create A Bunch Of Landing Pages

HubSpot came out with an article that helped us learn the importance of creating landing pages in bulk. More landing pages means more free offers that people can choose between…and therefore a bigger email list.

If you have Offer A and Offer B, some people won’t like Offer A, but they’ll love Offer B and vice-versa. Now imagine having 40 offers. Your visitor could be non-responsive to 39 of your offers, but as long as the visitor responds to at least one offer, you got another qualified lead on your email list.

Why 40 landing pages? According to the graph from the HubSpot blog post, it’s very helpful to have that many landing pages to achieve optimal growth for your email list.

lead generation

#2: Put A Site Wide Pop-Up On Your Blog

Pop-ups…you either love them or you hate them. Regardless of how you feel about pop-ups, they absolutely work for your email list.

The more your pop-up offer matches your blog’s content, the more subscribers you will get. If people aren’t interested in the pop-up offer, they can simply x out of the pop-up and continue reading the blog post.

#3: Create Udemy Courses

Udemy is a one of those unexpected places for building an email list since it is more known for course building. You can send email blasts to the students enrolled into your courses. You can segment them based on their progress through your course, when they enrolled, and which courses they are enrolled in.

The key to using Udemy to grow your email list is to promote free coupon codes of your courses into Facebook group pages that are specifically for free Udemy coupons. I got over 20,000 students by leveraging this strategy who I can send emails to.

Sending emails to over 20,000 Udemy students is free, but there are some catches. You can only promote your Udemy courses or learning material that students can access without entering personal info (i.e. an email address).

However, you can send these students to your blog posts and YouTube videos with a CTA at the end. Pop-ups are fine too.

#4: Put Your Udemy Courses On SkillShare

If you put your course on Udemy, you might as well put it on SkillShare. You’ll get access to more students who you can email and you’ll also make more revenue.

If you don’t feel like uploading Udemy videos into SkillShare, then hire a trustworthy freelancer. Putting your Udemy courses on SkillShare allows you to get more out of the same work.

#5: Use HelloBar To Promote Your Landing Page

HelloBar is a plugin that allows you to put a message at the top of your blog. Within this message, you can tell people about your landing page offer. Then you get to add a button which links to your landing page.

Since HelloBar rose to fame for putting that message at the very top of a blog, the plugin has added the capability of putting your message on the bottom left, bottom right, top left, or top right for your blog.

I choose to display another offer on the bottom right of my blog.

hellobar

If you are interested in HelloBar, I highly recommend joining here. If you sign up with that link, we both get a free month of HelloBar Pro.

#6: Leverage Your Blog’s Sidebar

The goal of a blog sidebar is to grab attention while presenting a compelling offer. The sidebar won’t be the highest converting part of your blog, but people will remember your offers.

To get more conversions from your sidebar, fill your sidebar up with awesome pictures that feel like a part of the blog post.

Better yet, have different sidebars for different content categories.

When reading Kim Garst’s blog post about Facebook live streaming, she offers her free eBook 27 Killer Facebook Post Ideas 2.0 on the sidebar.

For her blog post about tweeting during live events, she offers her free eBook on Twitter hashtags on the sidebar.

These two free offers promoted on the sidebar are relevant to the blog post. The free offers almost feel like a part of the blog post itself.

#7: Use UpViral To Create A Landing Page

UpViral is a great tool for creating landing pages in a few minutes. They are basic which can sometimes help out with getting conversions.

The magic happens when someone subscribes. They immediately get sent over to a Thank You Page that incentivizes visitors to share the landing page URL.

For my Thank You Page, I encourage people to get more leads. Each person who brings in five leads gets exclusive videos.

upviral thank you page

With this set-up, people now have an incentive to drive more leads to my landing page. The final result is that the people who get access to the three exclusive videos add five people to my email list.

UpViral can identify fraudulent sign-ups (probably based on IP addresses) so you don’t have to worry about people gaming the system just to get the exclusive videos or content that you offer.

#8: Promote Your Landing Pages On Social Media…A Lot

You can’t complete any type of list without saying “promote on social media.” Use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and all of the other social networks that you can think of.

However, don’t just stop at promoting your landing page once in a given day. At least 25% of my social media posts send people over to one of my landing pages.

Most of your social media audience will not see your first post about your landing page. The more times you promote your landing page on social media, the more traffic those landing pages will get from your social media efforts.

#9: Include A CTA In All Of Your YouTube Videos

It’s easy to promote a landing page on most social networks. Write the right copy, include the link, and then post it.

YouTube is a completely different animal. While the description is a great place to promote your landing page similarly to how you would on other social networks, YouTube requires an in-video call-to-action.

At the end of my recent YouTube videos, I have been adding this CTA.

youtube call to action

It leads people to my free eBook 27 Ways To Get More Retweets On Twitter. In the future, I plan on promoting specific landing pages that are very relevant to the video topic.

People who make it to the end of your video appreciate the value you provided. That’s the exact moment you want to provide those viewers with the CTA.

#10: Appear On Other People’s YouTube Channels

Some YouTube channels allow guest contributions similar to guest posts. While these channels are hard to find, it is possible to do a guest video on someone else’s channel where you provide the CTA.

Tim Schmoyer of Video Creators provides this opportunity for people with YouTube tips to share. So far the Video Creators channel is the only channel I have found that allows for this type of collaboration.

#11: Create A Podcast With A CTA

If you checked out my May 2016 Performance Report, then you know that podcasting has taken up a large portion of my time lately.

I have learned all about its potential. Podcasting allows you to share your expertise in the form of audio. In a world fueled by content and video creation, audio is one of the lesser utilized methods of getting traffic.

And if you utilize it well, podcasting can bring in a massive amount of traffic. Just ask Pat Flynn 🙂

At the beginning and end of your podcast episodes, you can introduce several CTAs such as leaving a review and subscribing to the podcast.

The critical CTA to mention within all of your podcast episodes is a free offer relevant to that particular episode.

When you mention the free offer, make sure the link is easy for people to remember. This is important because podcasts are all audio unless your listeners are also reading through the show notes.

When Mike Stelzner asks for a review on iTunes, he refers to the link as socialmediaexaminer.com/itunes.

He does not refer to the link as https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/social-media-marketing-podcast/id549899114?mt=2&ls=1

Both lead to the same destination, but the first one is much easier to remember. Please have mercy on the person who must recite the longer link.

While this is an example that relates to podcast reviews, the same general rule also applies to landing pages.

#12: Write Guest Posts With The Optimized Author Bio

Writing guest posts on relevant blogs is a great way to get more traffic from people reading your guest posts, and you’ll get a high-value backlink.

Whenever you write a guest post, you’ll usually get a quick bio of yourself. Within 1-2 sentences, you need to let readers know where else they can find you on the web.

Within this quick bio, you can direct people over to your landing page. In my Business2Community bio, I provide the CTA to check out my landing page.

guest post CTA

#13: Promote Your Landing Page During Podcast Interviews

The way almost all podcast interviews work is that after all of the questions have been answered, the guest has the ability to tell listeners where they can find him/her on the web.

When you are a guest on a podcast episode, mention your landing page. I have bullet-points in front of me specifically for that question so I know what to say when I have to promote my landing page.

Wondering how to be a guest on more podcasts? Neil Patel shows you how in his article How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Interview

#14: Provide Perks

Give your subscribers certain perks (i.e. discounts and exclusive content) that people outside of your email list won’t get. Then, make it known to your blog visitors that only subscribers get these perks.

You can include these perks as incentives to get more of your visitors to subscribe.

#15: Design Matters

The way you present your free offer is just as important as the value of that free offer. If your free offer has a bad design, people won’t want to enter an email address.

One reality of life is that we all judge a book by its cover. If you don’t believe me, let me know which book you’d rather want.

bad ebook cover

good ebook cover

It doesn’t matter that the content for both of them is the same. The second one looks better. The better the design, the better the perceived value of your free offer.

All you have to do at that point is deliver on the value.

#16: Live Stream Your Message

Live streaming is the hot thing right now. I think it will stay hot for a very long time (if it ever cools down at all). The attractive lure to live streaming is that you get immediate results.

Promote a landing page with an easy to remember URL, and you’ll instantly get a bunch of subscribers if you have a large enough live audience.

On Periscope, you either need the easy to remember URL or a link to your landing page within your bio. For Blab and FB live however, you can drop a link straight into the chatting section for Blab and the comments section for Facebook.

If you feel too stressed to include those links during your live stream, hire a freelancer who will get the job done.

#17: Co-Create An Offer

I have created over 20 courses on Udemy. I created some of those courses alone while I created other courses with some help.

The courses I have co-created with other instructors have combined to bring in over 12,000 new students which I can email at any time. If I didn’t co-create some of my courses, I would have lost out on a lot of extra students.

Co-creation is not something that only exists within Udemy. You can co-create a free offer with someone else and share the subscribers who sign-up for the co-created free offer.

The cool part about this type of co-creation is that both you and the person who helped you create the free offer will be actively promoting the landing page. You’ll be helping each other out.

#18: Create A Product With An Affiliate/JV Program

This is an advanced method to grow your email list, but depending on who is a part of your program, you can get tens of thousands of new subscribers overnight.

To get at that level, you need a top-notch product and a lot of connections. But even if you don’t expect to get 10,000 subscribers in one day from your program, you could still get hundreds or thousands of subscribers that you wouldn’t have gotten on your own.

Leverage other people’s marketing for the growth of your brand at any moment you get. Your landing page will reach more people and you’ll be putting in the same amount of work you put in now.

#19: Publish A Kindle Book

When promoted correctly, a Kindle book can bring in a massive amount of email subscribers. Within all of your Kindle books, promote a free offer relevant to the book people are reading.

Here’s how Nick Loper promotes his free offer within the first page

kindle offer

Promoting your free offer on the first page is important because anyone can see that offer through Amazon’s free preview option.

If you are wondering how to drive sales to your free Kindle books, Nick Loper had a great podcast episode about that.

#20: Put Your Presentations Up On SlideShare

SlideShare is a social network that people either seem to not use at all or use it often.It takes time to create a quality SlideShare presentation while it only takes a few seconds to send out a quality tweet.

However, SlideShare presentations have viral potential if you make yours awesome and promote it to enough people.

Self-published author Steve Scott uses SlideShare to grow his email list.

For his traffic and income report from 2014, Steve included that he got 1,915 new subscribers from SlideShare within those three months. That’s an average of 638 new subscribers per month just from SlideShare.

Steve did hire a freelancer to help out with the presentations to save time, but it will be worth the money if you can get those new subscribers to buy some of your products.

#21: Interact With Your Audience

Interacting with your audience allows you to build trust. The people you interact with will be more likely to enter their email address when your free offer comes up.

Even if you only interact with your audience for five minutes each day, you are creating more trust. The trust results in more people promoting your content and subscribing for updates.

The more interactive your brand is, the more your audience will love you. If you want to take this level of interaction to the next level, you can create a podcast in which you answer your audience’s questions.

#22: Analyze Your Results

If you create landing pages, get subscribers, but then don’t analyze the results, you can be missing out on a huge opportunity.

Analyzing the results allows you to discover which of your landing pages have the best conversion rates and which ones you are promoting the most.

Let’s say you have two landing pages. Landing Page A has an 80% conversion rate. It’s the king of all landing pages. Landing Page B has a 5% conversion rate which puts it at rock bottom.

You promote them equally and they each get 100 daily visitors.

The mistake lies right there. You are promoting them equally.

If you have a landing page with an 80% conversion rate, you need to promote that landing page far more often than any of your other landing pages.

If one of my landing pages had a 5% conversion rate, I would stop promoting it or completely change that landing page’s design.

#23: Offer A Content Upgrade

A content upgrade is exclusive content or video content that is related to the blog post your visitor finished reading. The only way to get access to the content upgrade is to enter an email address.

Content upgrades are valuable because they are specific offers based on the specific content your visitors were reading. While content upgrades create extra work, they get you a lot of subscribers.

I learned this method from Brian Dean. He wrote a very informative article about the subject which you can read here.

#24: Sprinkle Relevant CTAs To Landing Pages Throughout Your Blog Posts

When you have a content upgrade available, you want to reference it at the beginning and the end of your blog posts. That way, your visitors are constantly reminded of your content upgrade.

If you don’t utilize content upgrades, then promote a free offer relevant to the content your visitor is reading.

#25: Write An Expert Round-Up Article

I got the idea from Codrut Turcanu who has written several expert round-up articles. These articles get a lot of traffic because people love sharing articles that they get featured in.

You ask several experts for their #1 tip in something. You choose the best tips and put them in your expert round-up article. Then you email the experts and let them know when the article gets published.

Ask them to promote it.

This strategy works for getting traffic, and more traffic in most cases equates to more subscribers. To ensure you get more subscribers, include a relevant content upgrade within the expert round-up article.

#26: Optimize Your Current Traffic

Let’s say you get 100 daily visitors on your blog and you get five of them to subscribe each day. What if you made a few changes on your blog to get 10 daily subscribers with that same audience.

In a rush to grow and get exposure, some bloggers make the mistake of forgetting to optimize the experience for the audiences they have already built.

#27: Advertise Your Landing Page

Facebook ads, AdWords, YouTube ads, and any other type of online ad can be used. Of course, not all online ads are equal, and some of them are downright difficult.

You should only begin to advertise your landing page once it is proven to make money. You should know how much money you make per subscriber so you can identify what a conversion is worth to you.

For instance, if each subscriber is worth an average of $2, and your Facebook ad gets you new conversions at a rate of $3 per subscriber, you need to stop that Facebook ad or make your average subscriber worth more than $3.

#28: Use Permission Marketing On Reddit

The Reddit community is fierce if you get on their wrong side, but if you get on their right side, you’ll get a lot of added exposure.

The key to Reddit is leveraging permission marketing. The Reddit community will come at you full force (don’t underestimate the Reddit community) if they think you are self-promoting.

If you ask for permission, you have a chance at going viral.

Eddy Azar wrote an awesome article on SumoMe about harnessing the marketing power of Reddit. He does a better job at explaining it than I could.

#29: Capitalize On The 404 Error Redirect

When people enter the wrong URL, they get sent over to the 404 error page. Some 404 error pages don’t bring people back to the blog. Others simply reference the homepage.

Why not reference your free offer. Your 404 error page can have a message like this:

“Sorry! What you were looking for does not exist, but I don’t want to leave you empty-handed…”

Then you promote your free offer, and BOOM! People who were once lost are now sent over to your landing page.

#30: Keep Your Current Subscribers On Your List

If you get 100 subscribers per day but you lose 100 subscribers per day, then you are not growing.

Part of growing your email list is providing an awesome experience for your current subscribers so they are more likely to stick around.

#31: Host A Free Giveaway

Giveaways are great for getting subscribers because few people would turn away the opportunity to get something just by entering an email address.

When these people subscribe, you present them with a free offer that everyone gets. Maybe it’s a report or a video series. Regardless of what you choose, everyone gets it.

Only a few people will actually win your giveaway. Using UpViral to reward points to the people who share your giveaway landing page will result in more people participating.

But you want the right people to participate. Don’t be the marketer who offers a $50 Amazon Gift Card. EVERYONE wants that. You’ll get a lot of subscribers, but most of them won’t be qualified.

And you have to pay for having those extra subscribers on your list.

To avoid that heartache, offer a giveaway that only the people in your niche would care about.

Matt McWilliams hosted one of the best free giveaways for getting targeted subscribers. He didn’t offer the Amazon Gift Card. He offered five free books all related to his niche.

book giveaway

People interested in reading those books participated in the giveaway by entering their email addresses and promoting the giveaway on their social networks for extra points.

People not interested in the books didn’t sign-up. Most if not all of the leads he got from that giveaway were targeted leads.

#32: Add A Link To Your Landing Page In Your Email Signature

Email is one of the top forms of communication today. Including your landing page link within your email signature can give it more exposure.

The impact of this method is dependent on how many emails you send in a given day. The more emails you send each day, the more subscribers you’ll get from this method.

With that said, avoid getting trapped in your inbox.

#33: Promotion Exchanges

The word exchange has a bad rap in the online world. Most of us are introduced to the word “exchange” in the online marketing sense when people either ask for link exchanges (even though Google doesn’t like that) or following a random, non-targeted person just for the follow back.

Promotion exchanges can put your landing page in front of a massive audience if you know how to use them. It is ideal to do a promotion exchange with someone who has a similar audience size as you. There are several promotion exchanges you can use:

Promote each other on your social networks

Send email blasts to your lists promoting the other person’s landing page

Interview each other on your podcasts (if you both have podcasts)

The opportunities are endless, but the second option works for growing your email list. By promoting someone else’s landing page to your email list, your landing page also gets more exposure. The final result is both of your email lists will grow.

Imagine how much bigger your email list would be if you did this with dozens of people.

#34: Collect Email Addresses At Events

The old-fashioned methods still work. Go to the event with a notepad, pen, and paper. On the piece of people, provide a section where people enter their email address.

Let people know on that piece of paper and through your conversation about the free offer these people will get upon writing down an email address.

You can segment all of these people on a custom list where you thank them for meeting you at the event.

#35: Host A Webinar

Webinars convert very well because they provide free value and are time sensitive. If you have a monthly webinar, your audience will begin to expect webinars.

Some people within that audience will not currently be subscribed, but when you host a webinar they really want to listen to, these people will subscribe.

#36: Host A Webinar With A Guest

Hosting a webinar with a guest is better than hosting a webinar on your own because the guest will do some of the promotion.

You’ll get the email addresses of some of your guest’s audience members. Have a monthly webinar with an influential guest, and you’ll be sure to see a big increase in your email list.

#37: Utilize Social Proof

Not everyone can leverage social proof equally, but leverage it whenever you can. Here’s an example of social proof in action.

Within this opt-in box, Buffer indicates that 42,023 people are on their email list. This social proof indicates Buffer is a popular blog, and popular blogs almost always have valuable content.

Buffer is no exception to the rule. If you haven’t checked out their blog yet, I recommend giving it a look…after you spend some time here though 🙂

#38: Write Longer Content

This is one of my longer blog posts. At a little over 4,000 words at this point, this blog post is the second longest blog post I have ever written.

Why spend so much time writing a single blog post? They increase the reader’s time on your blog. If this blog post only contained five tips, you would have been finished reading a few minutes ago.

However, I stuffed this one with methods up to the gills. It’s a power post which is bound to rank higher on search engines. The longer your blog post is, the more search engines love you.

Plus, I wanted to use Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique, so I knew this blog post had to be massive and filled with value.

#39: Include The Landing Page Link In Your Social Media Bios

This is an easy change you can make to get more subscribers. Most people link to their blog home pages within their social media bios.

Unless your home page is a beautiful landing page, that URL needs to be changed. Notice how in my Twitter bio, I am promoting a very specific page on my blog.

More specifically, I am promoting one of my landing pages.

#40: Make It Easier For People To Share Your Blog’s Content

[Tweet “50 Tactics To Grow Your Email List”]

See what I did there? I know that not everyone will tweet my blog post with that plugin. However, some people will, and that creates more exposure.

Don’t just stop with the social sharing buttons on the top or bottom of your blog posts. Include chances throughout your blog post for people to share your post.

I used the Click To Tweet plugin by CoSchedule to put in that tweet.

#41: Pay With A Post

I have not used this method myself, but I hear it’s powerful.

The way pay with a post works is that visitors can only read some of your blog post. The rest of it gets blocked.

The only way people can get access to the rest of the blog post is by sharing that blog post on one of their social media accounts.

That’s how you get the name: Pay With A Post.

The website I recommend based on my research (but not implementation) is Pay With A Tweet. Pay With A Tweet has expanded to include other posting options in addition to tweeting.

#42: Build Relationships With Influencers

Building relationships with influencers helps out in the long-term. If you create a product with a joint venture program, you will know several influencers in advance who would be willing to help you out.

You can also host webinars with influencers as guests, and some of them may promote your content a few times each week on their social media accounts.

Having a relationship with an influencer gives you the potential to spread your message to the people within that influencer’s audience.

Some influencers will help you more than others, but any extra visitor you can get should be highly appreciated.

#43: Include An Opt-In Box At Your Blog’s Footer

Ever scroll to the bottom of a blog post? Maybe you wanted to go to the next page and see the next batch of blog posts, but you scrolled down too quickly.

Maybe you were looking for the blogger’s contact me page.

Some people make it to the blog’s footer, and within that footer, you can include an opt-in box. The Buffer Blog’s opt-in box which I showed you earlier is at the footer of their blog.

Some of the people who make it to your blog’s footer read a bunch of your blog posts to get there. These people will be more likely to subscribe since they stayed on your blog for a longer period of time.

#44: Improve Your Homepage

The homepage is one of the most visited pages on your blog. Most homepages lead to a bunch of blog posts. While this is a great way to get more blog readers in the short-term, it’s a disaster for the long-term.

Your homepage needs to make your blog easy to navigate while promoting a can’t miss CTA.

On Pat Flynn’s homepage, the CTA is to click the “Start Here” button. Scrolling down will reveal more CTAs on his homepage.

Pat Flynn Homepage

Seth Godin took a simplistic approach with his homepage. There are several CTAs, and if you have been reading Seth’s content long enough, you’ll probably click on all of those CTAs.

seth's blog

Both of these homepages include CTAs and easy navigation throughout the blog. Seth’s homepage includes a subscribe option and Pat’s homepage includes a subscribe option towards the bottom.

#45: Create Urgency Around Some Of Your Offers

If you have enough landing page, test creating offers that are time sensitive. Webinars are a great example of this.

People know the webinar will be packed with value and that it won’t be up forever. Do that with one of your free offers.

You won’t get consistent growth, but you’ll get a spike of growth from that one landing page. Your other landing pages can bring in the consistent growth.

#46: Republish Your Blog Posts Elsewhere

This method is designed to get more exposure for you and your content. Including your landing page link within the byline will help you get more subscribers directly from your republished content.

As your republished blog posts appear on more blogs, people will remember you. Some of them may decide to search for you on Google or social media and come to your blog.

Provide these people with an enticing offer and BOOM, you have more subscribers.

#47: Make The Free Offer Better Than Anything Else Out There

I believe this is an underrated tip that can be better understood with a comparison to blog posts.

There are billions of blog posts, and chances are millions of those blog posts are about growing your email list.

In an attempt to make this blog post stand out from the crowd, I went all-in and spend hours of my time on this blog post.

Are you spending hours of your time crafting your free offer? Are you truly going all-in?

There are some blog posts that would dwarf over most of the free offers someone with an email address could get access to.

Create free offers that would dwarf over any blog post imaginable.

Combine that with excellent design, and you’ll have an offer that people won’t be able to resist.

#48: Create An Infographic With Your Landing Page Link

Infographics have the potential to go viral. This is old news, but how you set up the infographic determines the success you get out of it.

One strategy you can use with your infographic is to include the link to your landing page at the bottom of the infographic.

Most people just include the link to their blog homepage, but the link to your landing page (or a homepage that functions similarly to a landing page) would be better.

#49: Waiting List For Your Upcoming Product

More people than ever are launching their courses to massive success. Depending on the people in your joint venture program combined with your own efforts, it’s possible to make seven figures in a few weeks.

But what happens after the launch? What happens to the people who missed out and didn’t hear anything about the launch?

After the launch, any pages related to the launch become redirect links.

The redirect links lead to a landing page that encourages people to subscribe so they can be notified when the product is available again.

There’s also a free offer included to increase the desire someone would have to provide his/her email address.

#50: Make Your Blog Load Faster

If the landing page takes 30 seconds to load, are you sticking around?

Probably not, and a landing page that’s one second slower is bound to get fewer conversions.

Patience is a virtue, but almost none of us have it. In certain scenarios, we want to achieve or get access to something immediately.

To Amazon, site speed time is critical. According to an article from Fast Company, Amazon loses $1.6 billion if the site loads one second slower.

You won’t suffer that type of loss if your landing page is one second slower, but you’ll definitely get fewer conversions.

I wrote a blog post about boosting your blog speed. I promise it isn’t as long as this one. In fact, it may take you less than a minute to read.

In Conclusion

Growing your email list is the best thing you can do for your online business. That’s where the money is.

Growing your email list involves creating a bunch of free offers and promoting those free offers to as many people as you possibly can.

You’ll have to do most of the work on your own, but it’s always good to leverage the help of other marketers when you can.

The next time you consider an opportunity or are utilizing a platform, ask yourself this question: How will I use this to grow my email list?

If you can’t think of a way a particular opportunity or platform will help you grow your email list, ignore it or find a way to make it grow your email list.

What are your tips for growing an email list? Did one of these tips resonate with you the most? What are your thoughts on email marketing? Sound off in the comments section below.

Want More Subscribers? Create More Landing Pages

June 14, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Before this video, I created about 10 landing pages. You can see some of them in the thumbnail.

Now I’m aiming to have 100 landing pages by the end of the year. Why so many?

The answer is that having more landing pages means more subscribers. Not just more subscribers, but they’ll also be segmented based on which landing pages they subscribed to.

Segmented email blasts tend to get more engagement and result in fewer unsubscribes.

In this video, I dive into the value of having a bunch of landing pages and how you can easily create more landing pages based on pre-existing content.

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3 Juicy Email List Building Methods You’re Probably Not Using

April 29, 2016 by Marc Guberti 3 Comments

The money is in your email list. It’s a well-known fact that gets mentioned again and again on blogs like this one.

The importance of an email list has led to marketers all around the world trying to grow their email lists as quickly as possible. The thinking is that the more people on the email list, the better.

If you know how to promote your content and products to your email list, then yes, more is better.

So most marketers grow their email list by using some of the same tactics. Create a landing page and promote that on each social network. Have a subscription box on the blog’s sidebar. Maybe some Facebook advertising if you’re serious about getting leads.

Those methods work, but there are certain methods for getting subscribers that remain untouched by most marketers. These methods can result in a significant increase in subscribers because of the logic behind the methods combined with how your audience would react to these methods.

#1: Content Upgrades

I only write one blog post per week now. Every other blog post I put up is a video. This decision allowed me to save a massive amount of time. The extra time allowed me to pursue a new email list building idea.

Content upgrades!

Content upgrades are additions to the current blog post that your visitors can get access to in exchange for an email address. I first learned about content upgrades through Jeff Bullas’ Blog.

Content upgrade example

I remember reading the article a while ago thinking that it sounded like a great idea, but in the end, I didn’t have enough time. I was also in the middle of my junior year of high school.

Outsourcing and video blogging reintroduced me to a lot of extra time. That’s why all of my future blog posts will now include content upgrades.

In other words, EVERY blog post I write from here on is also a LANDING PAGE.

I am also working towards adding content upgrades to my most popular blog posts. And the conversion rates for content upgrades are amazing.

According to the article from Jeff Bullas’ Blog, you can expect a 20% conversion rate from a content upgrade. Some content upgrades have over 50% conversion rates.

The reason content upgrades work so well is because they are hyper-targeted to the specific blog post that is being read at the time.

I recently started using content upgrades for my blog. Here’s what I did for my blog post about avoiding the top five distractions.

Content Upgrade Marc Guberti

It’s targeted and directly below the blog post. People don’t have to click on a link and get redirected to a landing page.

Imagine what would happen if 20% of your blog visitors became subscribers. If you wanted to gain 100 subscribers per day, you would only have to get 500 visitors per day in order to get that many subscribers per day—assuming all of your blog posts came with content upgrades. And that doesn’t even include subscribers from landing pages.

#2: Live Streaming

I am still exploring the possibilities of live streaming, but it is very exciting to think about the possibilities.

Live streaming apps like Periscope, Meerkat, and Blab give you the opportunity to interact with your audience live. You can answer their questions in real-time, and your audience will hear how you answer the questions.

One thing you can do with live streaming is promote your landing page. As you wrap up a live recording, you can mention a landing page related to what the live stream was all about.

This is where Blab outshines the competition. Blab comes with an interactive chat section that allows viewers to ask questions and engage with one another.

Within this chat section, you can insert the link to your landing page for everyone to click on. If you want to use something like Periscope or Meerkat, then you must state what the link is.

To make it easier for everyone to remember the link, you need to come up with a custom link.

For instance, https://marcguberti.com/2016/01/twitter-audience-remember-and-trust-you is a link that would be very difficult for me to say and very difficult for my audience to remember (where do the dashes go).

Having a link like marcguberti.com/twitter makes it a lot easier for people to access the same URL. It’s much easier to remember that “Twitter” goes after the slash line instead of all of the mumbo jumbo after the slash line for the first link.

#3: Webinars

Promote your landing page in a webinar? No, no. You promote products in webinars.

You use webinar landing pages to collect email addresses.

There are some notable differences between a webinar and a landing page.

First off, the webinar is set at a specific time and date. The landing page you use to promote the webinar won’t be good forever, so you have a stronger incentive to promote that webinar’s landing page to as many people as possible.

The incentive will force you to get more creative with how you promote your landing page. However, the creativity and extra work with promoting a webinar isn’t the only advantage to having a webinar.

The other advantage is that you can get a lot of sales with a good webinar. If you want to get high conversions for sales, host a great webinar with a call-to-action.

As an affiliate who has promoted many people’s products, I generate most of my total commission on the day I promote someone’s webinar with my affiliate link.

Webinars grab people’s attention, and the audience can ask questions. At the end of the webinar, people can take immediate action and buy your product—if you provide the call-to-action.

Then, you can invest some of that money into growing your email list even more (i.e. Facebook advertising).

In Conclusion

Building your email list should be your top priority regardless of what niche you are in. Email marketing is the most successful type of marketing on the web.

Email marketing allows you to build the strongest relationships and generate the most sales at the same time.

Literally everything you do online should have the primary aim of getting you more subscribers.

What are your thoughts about growing your email list? Do you have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

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4 Secret Methods To Get More Landing Page Traffic

December 11, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

If you were a Jedi Knight, your landing page would be your lightsaber. It is the life-line of your blog.

The landing page allows you to grow your email list by offering a free eBook, report, or video. The free prize encourages people to enter their email addresses into the form. Here’s my most popular landing page:

Landing Page

Since the landing page is like my lightsaber, I want to direct as much traffic to it as possible. I promote it like it’s my gem.

To be a successful blogger with a big email list, you must promote your landing page like it’s the gem of your blog.

I ran through some of the more common methods of promotion in a previous blog post.

This blog post is going to discuss the less traditional methods. These secret methods don’t get as much attention, but they are critical nevertheless.

These are the four secret methods to get more landing page traffic.

#1: Link To It In Your Social Media Bios

Many people believe that they should have a link to their website in their bio. That’s only half true.

Yes, you want a link to your website. However, you have full control over which page on your website you link to.

On my social media accounts, I link to my landing page. Take a look at my Twitter bio. The link isn’t “marcguberti.com.” The link is to my landing page.

Twitter Bio

It’s the simplest change you can make to get more traffic to your landing page.

#2: Link To It In Guest Posts

All guest blogs allow you to write a bio for yourself. If you give them content, and you aren’t a ghostwriter, they will feature you as the author.

Most guest blogs provide you with the opportunity to talk about yourself in a few sentences. Within that small blurb, you need to create a call-to-action.

After people read your guest post, you want people to get led away from that guest post and to your landing page.

But how?

The easiest way is to tell people about your landing page in your bio:

Business2Community Bio

The blurb at the bottom of the guest post matters the most. On Business2Community, my bio could be several paragraphs long.

However, the small blurb only contains a few lines of my long bio. I put the landing page at the beginning of the bio so it makes it into the blurb.

After reading the guest post, people will then click the link and go to my landing page.

Some guest bloggers will let you link to various posts on your blog throughout the guest post. One of those links should be to your landing page.

Capitalize on any opportunity you get to promote your landing page in your guest post. Of course, if you link to your landing page 10 times in the same guest post, people will get annoyed. The person who owns the guest blog probably won’t want you back.

But don’t be afraid of promoting the landing page in your guest posts. It’s the gem of your blog. It’s your lightsaber.

#3: Share The Landing Pages On All Of Your Social Networks More Often

On the surface, this method doesn’t seem like a secret. If anything, it seems like the most common method out there. Promote on social media and that’s where the magic happens.

But within that surface lies some secrets.

It’s not good enough to promote a landing page once in a while. It’s not even good enough to promote the same landing page several times per day.

I tweet about my landing page every other hour. That’s the amount of effort it takes to maximize the landing page traffic you get from Twitter. On Facebook, I am posting a link to one of my landing pages every day.

I share my landing pages as much as possible without annoying my audience. That’s how you get traffic to a landing page from social media without paying a penny.

You can use social media advertising to speed up the process, but I recommend avoiding social media ads until you feel more comfortable with social media.

#4: Have Your Own Affiliate Network

I was recently involved in an affiliate opportunity where I promoted a high-priced training course. I received over $100 in commissions for every sale I made.

I saw other affiliate marketers take part in the promotion of other people’s training courses. I knew that it was lucrative.

What I didn’t know is that affiliate marketing done right can help you dramatically grow your email list.

Part of the affiliate promotion was to promote the landing page with the preset autoresponder. In other words, part of the affiliate promotion was me and every other affiliate helping one person grow his email list.

We made money too, but we also helped to grow an email list.

There was a competition in place where the Top 5 people received some awesome prizes (Apple products or a TV depending on placement. People who didn’t want the prize could just get additional cash instead).

I finished in 17th place. It was very fitting since I was 17 years old at the time of the affiliate promotion. I brought in 139 opt-ins.

I was by no means the biggest player in the affiliate promotion. The numbers of everyone else didn’t get published, but since 16 people were ahead of me, here’s what I do know:

The 17 of us put together brought in at least 2,400 subscribers. I wouldn’t be shocked if in less than a month, all of us put together brought in 5,000-10,000 new opt-ins.
My username was a41 so my guess is that I was the 41st affiliate. Chances are over 100 people promoted the training course and landing page.

Creating your own affiliate network is where the magic happens. It’s how a lot of marketers make their money nowadays. If you have the right affiliate network in place, that can also mean thousands of new subscribers for you in just a few days.

Imagine the most influential people in your niche promoting your landing page to their audiences. That’s what can happen with an affiliate promotion in place.

I’ll just let that sink in as I move on to the conclusion.

In Conclusion

There are many ways to promote a landing page. Some of those methods will lead to some traffic while other methods can completely transform your business.

The only way to know which methods will yield the best results is to give them a try. Then you will know for certain which methods work the best.

Which of these methods was your favorite? Do you know any other methods for getting more landing page traffic? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get More Traffic From Your Email List

October 26, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When most people think about the success of their email lists, they think about the growth of those email lists. These people ask questions like “How do I gain twice as many subscribers?” and “How do all of these top marketers get thousands of subscribers every day?”

Yes, it is important to grow your email list. I ask myself questions related to email list growth all of the time.

However, the growth of your email list is not enough. The value of your email list is more vital. As an extreme example, if you want 100,000 subscribers tomorrow, I could more than easily give you those 100,000 subscribers. I simply hire someone to create 100,000 unique email addresses and then those email addresses get added to your list.

They are fake, and an email list with 1,000 targeted subscribers would perform better than the email list with the 100,000 fake subscribers.

This example is primarily designed to establish the difference between growth and value of an email list. The results you get from your email list (i.e. clicks, sales, relationships) determine the value of that email list.

Now for a more realistic example:

Marketer #1 has an email list of 10,000 people. Of those 10,000 people, 100 of them click on the link to the blog post. Marketer #2 has an email list of 3,000 people. Of those 3,000 people, 300 of them click on the link to the blog post.

In this scenario, I would rather be Marketer #2 than Marketer #1. Size is only part of the equation. The masters of email marketing are able to get results like Marketer #2 while growing an email list like Marketer #1. How is it possible to combine the two together? This blog post shows you how.

Note for the reader: Growing your email list is important, but this blog post will be more geared towards what you do once you have the email list. If you want a blog post more focused on growing your email list, go here.

#1: Send More Emails To The People On Your List

Sending an email blast lets your subscribers see you in their inboxes. If you consistently send awesome email blasts, two things happen:

Trust is built
People know when to check their inboxes for your content

I know exactly when to check my inbox for Seth Godin’s content because he always publishes his blog posts at the same time of day. I figured out when he publishes his blog posts after receiving numerous emails filled with value that always landed in my inbox at the same time of day.

Sending more emails to your subscribers also means more results. Let’s say your average email gets 50 clicks from your subscribers. If you send one email blast to your list per month, then you get 600 clicks from your email list per year. However, if you send one email blast per week, then you get 2,600 clicks per year. That’s a difference of 2,000 clicks.

For some marketers, sending one email blast per month versus sending one email blast per week can be the difference between hundreds of thousands of clicks. While you shouldn’t be excessive with your email blasts, sending at least one email blast per week builds recognition between you and your subscribers.

Once the recognition is built and you continue providing value, the trust comes naturally.

#2: Resend The Same Email To The People Who Didn’t Open Your Email The First Time

Some services such as iContact make it possible for you to segment the people in your list. You can segment the people within your list to provide them with content more specific to their needs.

You can also create a segment containing a list of people who did not open your email blasts. For my most recent email blast, I will create a segment of all of the people who did not open the email. Then, I change the subject line of the email and send the identical email to those people one day later.

On the surface, this strategy resembles excessive email marketing. Sending two emails in two days may sound like a lot. However, the only people who get the email are the people who did not read your first email blast.

This is an important distinction. It is possible that some people lost your email blast within their inbox. Maybe it went into spam mail. There are many different ways that even the most loyal subscribers can skip over one of your email blasts.

If they see your email the next day, the loyal subscribers will open the email and read your message. You can also get the attention of some of your other subscribers who have not been opening as many of your email blasts.

For some marketers, this one decision has led to a 10% increase in open rate for their email blasts. In the email marketing world, a 10% increase in open rate is very significant. The best part is that you don’t have to put in any additional work to make it happen.

All you do is change the email’s subject line and resend it to the people who didn’t open the email blast the first time.

#3: Promote Your Blog Posts Within Your Autoresponders

An autoresponder is the most important part of email marketing. When people subscribe to an email list, they get a series of emails delivered to their inboxes within a few days. These autoresponder messages are designed to strengthen the relationship between you and your subscriber. After you write the messages, they run on autopilot.

Within your autoresponder messages, you can promote (almost) anything. In my autoresponder messages, I decide to promote my blog posts. The reason for my choice is that most of my email blasts promote my blog posts. The autoresponder is a way of making my subscribers more comfortable with my email blasts—high value blog posts.

If I only sent videos in my email blasts, then my autoresponder messages would only consist of videos. The autoresponder sets the tone for what type of content subscribers should expect and how the relationship will build.

For my blog, this also means consistent traffic to specific blog posts. Sometimes, I will choose to promote one of my blog posts that I know is good, but for some reason it isn’t getting as much traffic as expected. I sometimes put these blog posts within an autoresponder so they get consistent traffic.

That consistent traffic combined with social media traffic allows those blog posts to perform better on the search engines.

Your autoresponder messages are the most important messages for building a relationship between you and your subscribers. If you build the relationship right, sales will follow. Choose your autoresponder messages and the blog posts you promote within those autoresponders carefully.

#4: Write Irresistible Subject Lines

The subject line of your email blasts are just as important as the content within the email blasts themselves. The reality of email marketing is that there are only two reasons why people would open up an email:

The subscriber automatically recognizes your name and has admired your content for a long time
Irresistible subject line

For almost all of your new subscribers, #2 applies more often than #1. Your new subscribers learn who you are as they read more of your email blasts. Writing irresistible subject lines is an art that requires constant experimentation.

Some of the rules differ by niche but other rules are the same. The best way to discover what works is by observing what works for other people and seeing if that will work for you too. I noticed that the email marketers who used more lowercase letters got my attention.

The traditional email subject line looks like this: 5 Ways To Get More Followers

The format that gets more attention looks like this: 5 ways to get more followers

While it’s just a small difference, I gave it a try anyway. Sure enough, more people opened my email blast.

There are plenty of pull-words and other tips that you can use to write irresistible subject lines. Some of the best methods involve outside of the box thinking with this question, “How do I get their attention.”

Nowadays, including “Donald Trump” in the subject line gets massive attention. Imagine the whirlwind of attention someone would get if the subject line misspelled Trump’s name. If you want to go viral, that would work. Whether you’d want to go viral for that though is entirely up to you.

The moral of the story is that there are plenty of tips on the web for writing irresistible subject lines. However, don’t be afraid to experiment on your own and try to discover your own methods. Maybe the email blast with the subject line “Please don’t open this email” gets more opens and clickthroughs than any of your other email blasts.

Learn the tips and then expand upon them through trial and error.

In Conclusion

Growing your email list is important. The results you get from your current email list are more important. It is easy to get 100,000 fake people on your email list. It is far more difficult to get 1,000 targeted people on your email list.

How you engage with the people on your email list determines the results that you get. In the beginning, you may not get many results, but that is true with all entrepreneurial endeavors. While results don’t come often in the beginning, patient persistence brings forth the results beyond our wildest dreams.

How do you engage with your email list? Which of these tips was your favorite? What results do you want to see from your email list? Do you have any email marketing tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.