Email List Building Strategy for 48,000 plus subscribers (no ads)

May 22, 2023 Paige Brunton

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I have an unpopular opinion. I think the advice online about building an email list is completely useless, it's so bad and so unhelpful, it drives me up a wall!

I feel like experts on the internet are always giving this incomplete information about list building which means that for those who follow it, you just have no chance of getting anywhere.

So in this POST I want to explain the full picture of how to build an email list without using ads, not just the sliver of information that all the list-building courses and videos are talking about which leaves you in the same spot 6 months from now with an email list of 2 people plus your Mom.

I recently looked in my ConvertKit analytics and saw that over the years over 48,000 people have opted into my freebies! 48,000!

WILD!

So do know the recommendations in this video WORK, so read all the way until the end because I am going give you the full picture of what you ACTUALLY need to do to build and most importantly, GROW an email list like crazy!

Here is what most information online will tell you to do to build an email list (which of course you want to do to be able to promote or sell a digital product or course down the line, not to mention have more people to sell your services or products too!)

Create a freebie

In one way this is great advice, it is true that no one cares about your call to action to

"subscribe to my newsletter"

and that giving away some useful freebie will significantly up the conversion rate from people seeing the opt-in call to action to people actually getting on your email list.

BUT!

Creating a freebie is just a fraction of the equation or one piece of the puzzle.

If you just create a freebie and that's it, it's almost a complete waste of your time because you're missing the 2nd piece. And only with this 2nd piece is there any effect at all.

It's a little bit like when you want to create a sugary explosion. To make that happen you need

1. A bottle of coke and

2. Mentos.

Alone, they're just stable, sugary items. BUT when you mix them together, magic happens… boom!!

So think of the freebie as your coke.

Decent by itself, but if your end goal is a sugary explosion... it's not going to do much for you.

The mentos, the key ingredient to making the explosion happen, is the traffic.

And this for some wild reason seems to be a complete afterthought for all the experts teaching list building.

The entire reason you want an email list is so that you have an audience.

And then experts tell you "create and opt-in and share it with your audience" completely forgetting that... you don't have an audience and that's the entire reason you wanted to build an email list in the first place!

So when experts tell you to create a freebie and then promote it and you're thinking

"Promote it to who?! I don't have an audience"

just know, you're not crazy, they're just giving bad advice.

Now what I've found is if list-building experts do dein to give advice on getting people to see your freebie they often recommend you to post about your freebie to your personal social media, but this also doesn't work because you've either already or are soon about to realize, that all your friends & family aren't your ideal clients and the vast majority probably aren't all that interested in your topic.

OR you post to your businesses social media account which maybe have a grand total of 300 followers and get a grand total of 1 opt-in.

And the reason this happens is because of conversion rates.

Not every social media follower, even if they're interested in your topic will opt-in when you tell them to on social media. You're likely to get just 1, maybe 2 opt-ins from a 300 person social following.

And that's when you realize you have a longggg way to go!

If you have a social following of 100,000 then yeah sure, just posting to social will get you the opt-ins you need, but if that's not the case, this is another big waste of time for most business owners.

So how do we get the mentos, AKA the traffic so that someone actually visits your opt-in page and therefore you get opt-ins?

The next piece of bad advice experts is so bad, if you find someone who recommends this next one to you, I would honestly walk directly out the closest door and don't trust a word more that person says ever again!!!

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about ads.

Ads are not a beginner’s game with a beginner’s budget. Starting an email list with ads works in one of 3 situations.

You have a product developed already, sales materials prepared, and it converts well to a non-ads audience AND you have $20,000 to test audiences and copy and creative. They're expensive so if you want a return on that ad spend any time soon, you're going to want some decent ad startup cash and a proven-to-sell product. Or
You're independently wealthy or are the child or spouse of a multi-millionnaire and your business doesn't really need to make a profit anytime soon. or
You invent a time machine and take yourself back to 2018 when you could get leads (a.k.a. email subscribers) for $1 each.

Those are the 3 situations where I'd say it still makes sense to run ads as a list building strategy as a beginner, if none of them apply to you however, please don't do it.

So if posting to your own social media doesn't work and running ads isn't right unless you're already super wealthy and can risk losing $20k to start or if your time machine still isn't quite completed and operational yet... what can you do?

Let's see if you can guess it.

It costs only your time and effort.
It builds trust and credibility and goodwill with your ideal client more than anything else.
It'll pull it's weight generating traffic both today and years from now and final clue…
Google LOVES IT!

Think you have it?

If you guessed content creation, then 10 points to you Glen Coco, you're right!

Content generates traffic and people to your site who are highly interested in your topic.

And if you need a lil help… I pulled together a bunch of outlines for you to get creating popular and profitable posts with ease!

See this gallery in the original post

These people are BUYERS, after all, they literally Googled a thing that brought them to your content, meaning you're not interrupting them mid-scroll, but they're actively in pain and searching out answers on Google for help!

And there you appear, #1 in the search results with your fantastic, thorough piece of content.

Now I'm talking all about content Google will show here, so I don't mean that TikTok or Instagram story which has the lifespan of a mayfly.

I'm talking blog posts, youtube videos & podcasts, long-form content which is searchable, lasts beyond 24 hours and which typically appears in Google.

When you create content, your traffic increases and when you have traffic, you suddenly have actual interested people to send towards your freebies!

So here's what it looks like, it's genuinely so simple.

Create content = traffic.
Send that traffic to freebies = email subscribers.

If you don't have traffic, no one will see your freebies and that means, you won't get opt-ins and your list is likely to stay a party of 3 for a long while.

And without the opt-ins, you won't be able to get back in touch with that past traffic comes sales time.

That's why content creation and list building need to be done TOGETHER.

Now I know I know, the sexy thing you're REALLY interested to hear all about is what kind of money you can make down the line with that audience.

How would you like to make $20,000 on a $35 digital product in just a week?

That's what we did last year and in this video I break it alll down for you in a full digital product launch report! Be sure to watch this video next to get the wheels turning on how to run a sale to that spiffy new audience you've built!

See this content in the original post