AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey, hey! Welcome back to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield and I am so excited for today because we are talking again about my favorite topic, list building.
Before we dive in, I wanted to make sure you’ve already listened to Episode #83. That episode is all about cultivating a list-building mindset. You’ve likely heard the phrase that success is 80% mindset, 20% mechanics. I believe that and if you believe that too and you’ve been struggling with growing your list consistent, then you definitely want to jump back to Episode #83 where we dive into the mindset of list building.
I share a personal story with you where I kind of could have gotten off track really bad, more so than I actually did, if I had continued down a certain road. I share that with you in hopes that you might see some parallels with your own stories. We also did a really cool exercise in #83 where we uncovered what your mindset blocks were around list building.
If you’re not generating 75 new leads per week, yes that sounds aggressive and we’re going to talk about that here today as well, but if you are not, then you might have some mental blocks or possibly some excuses and some ego issues that are getting in the way. I know that might sound weird but I explained it all in Episode #83.
Go uncover some of those and then come back to this one where we will get into the mechanics of growing your email list. Specifically, we’re diving into how to set up the foundation of your list-building strategy.
We’re talking about lead magnets, we’re talking about hosting those on your website, and we’re talking about driving traffic to them through social media and some other channels. For my newbies, because I know I’ve got some newbies on here, a lead magnet is something you create and give away in exchange for a name and email.
Lead magnets can be a bunch of different things like cheat sheets or check lists (PDFs), videos, webinars, and things that are like that where you will create something and give it away. A lead magnet might also be a discount code or free shipping. There are different things you can do with a lead magnet.
I tend to talk about the cheat sheets, check lists, videos, webinars, and all of that because most of my students are creating online training programs or courses or membership sites or they have services that they are packaging and selling online. For those types of businesses, the PDFs, videos, or webinars work best.
For the sake of this training, sometimes I say freebie in exchange for lead magnet. Lead magnet and freebie are the same thing to me. I just wanted to make that really clear. Before we dive in, because I’ve got a lot to cover, a quick word from our sponsor.
Before we dive in I want to thank our sponsor today, 99Designs. I am such a huge fan of this company because they can take care of all of your graphic needs. We are talking logos, social media cover images, website graphics, and so much more. So visit www.99Designs.com/amy and get a $99 upgrade for free.
Okay, moving on and diving in, as always I have a freebie for you to help you take action with today’s mini training on list building. I don’t know about you but I love when someone shows me a bunch of examples of what’s possible for my business. I love to see what other people are doing. Of course, not to steal their ideas but just to get an idea of what it might look like and what the lead magnet might be and where I would place it on the web or on my website specifically.
I like a lot of examples. If you’re anything like me you will love today’s freebie. I put together 17 stellar examples of list-building opportunities. There is a really good mix inside this free cheat sheet that I’ve created for you. To get it, go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/84download or if you’re on your smart phone text the phrase 84download to 33444.
Now let’s dive in and we’re going to first look at the big picture when it comes to growing your email list. When it comes to growing your list I truly believe you need to become a master at knowing what your tribe needs and wants from you. That’s a whole other episode. Specifically, I did an episode about understanding your audience more through surveys. I’ll link to that in the show notes at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/84. You really do need to know what they want and what they need.
That’s not going to happen overnight. The more you dig in, ask questions, pay attention, listen (you’ve heard this all) and understand your audience the better (more powerful) your lead magnets will become. That’s the first thing I wanted t put out there.
If you don’t know your audience I want you to listen to the episode about surveying them and really understanding what they need and want.
When you create a lead magnet for your tribe I want it to be swoon worthy. I know that sounds really silly but that’s the phrase I kept thinking of when I wanted to explain this to you. I want them to think, “Oh my goodness. This is so good I can’t believe it’s free!”
Every time someone downloads anything of mine, whether it is from my podcast or if it’s a webinar they show up on or if it’s some kind of free PDF that I’m promoting before a big launch or whatever, I want them to think it is so freaking good! The way I do that is understand my audience. Then I’m never afraid to give the best stuff away for free.
You’ve heard this, right? Even though you’ve probably heard that you should give your best stuff away for free before, you might still have questions about that. You might want to know how much to give away for free in the lead magnet or freebie and how much you should save for your online training program, product, or service.
I always say to never really be scared about that. So much of what I give away for free on my podcast can be found in my paid programs. However, inside my paid programs I go a whole lot deeper, give a lot more examples, and supplement everything I teach with cheat sheets, check lists, blueprints, and I organize them in a way that you have it all there in front of you at once.
That’s the beauty of joining someone’s online training programs. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find some of that information out there on the web for free. I never worry about teaching something and giving really good content and making it actionable inside my free content because I know I go even deeper with my paid programs.
When I say I go even deeper, that doesn’t mean I just scratch the surface in my free stuff. Then no one would actually want to buy my stuff if my free stuff wasn’t so good.
You’ve got to think of that. And I don’t want you to be fearful about putting your best stuff out there for free. There’s always more of that where that came from.
We already know you will knock their socks off with the content inside your freebie. However, there’s another layer to this that you need to be really aware of before you decide on your lead magnet. That’s what I’m going to talk about next. I will get there in a moment but I first want to set the stage.
I believe if you are struggling with list building and you want some really clear direction one of the best ways to go about this is to start with the three-tiered list- building strategy. There are three ways you will grow your email list every single day. Consistency is the key word of this episode.
The first way you want to build your email list is through a signature freebie. The signature freebie is meant to be your most powerful and often most popular lead magnet. It’s often very specific to one topic and therefore attracts an audience that is genuinely interested in what you’re ultimately focused on in your business right now.
It’s that one thing that comes up a bunch when you’re talking to people about your business. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Everyone has seasons in their business. Right now you can probably guess, if you follow my podcast, I’m in the season of teaching people how to do webinars. That is my main focus right now.
Because I’m in that season, and I’m going to be in it a few more months, every time I’m talking to people about growing their business online when I know they are a good candidate for webinars I just start talking about webinars. I tell them how to do them, how to get started, and why they are so powerful.
I just find myself constantly talking about webinars right now because they are top of mind and they are a huge push inside my business. Because of that I know that’s a great signature freebie because it’s where I want most of the people that find me to go. I want them to experience something free around webinars to see if they are a good fit or not.
The great thing about a signature freebie is that it can change. It probably shouldn’t change more than once a quarter because when we are in a season in our business most entrepreneurs look at quarters as a season. Right now if I’m in the season of webinars, we will flip that early next year and will likely be in a new season where we are going to focus on a different program.
Your signature freebie can change but it shouldn’t be changing rapidly. Whatever it is, it should be something that relates to what you’re selling. Let’s talk about this. If you walk away from one lesson from today’s episode this is the one I want you to walk away with.
To help you decide on your signature freebie, it’s important that you consider your end game. This is what I want you to ask yourself: What does your ideal audience need to understand, be aware of, or believe in order to want or need your paid product, program, or service?
You get really good with lead magnets when you start aligning them with what you ultimately want to offer as your paid program, product, or service. Mine is really clear cut and yours might not be this way.
Right now my signature freebie is a free webinar on webinars. At the time of this recording if you went to my website, right at the top of my website you will see an invitation to a free webinar all about webinars. Mine is very easy in terms of wanting my audience to know the value of webinars, so I’m going to do a webinar about the value of webinars. That’s kind of easy.
Yours might not be so black and white. But when you really start to understand what it’s going to take for your audience to want and need your product, you want to back up and see where they need to be. Where do they need to be in their mindset? Where do they need to be in their body? What shape do they need to be in right now in order for them to feel they need my product (if it’s a health and fitness type of thing)? Or, what opportunity do they need to understand is in front of them before they are going to decide to put money into it because they want it?
Your freebie may have to do with sharing an opportunity with them or helping them to understand how easy it is to get a quick win in a certain area. They will then dive deeper with you into your paid program.
Maybe you just want to teach something where they really start to see things click together and then, of course, you go deeper with them in your paid program, product, or service. For a signature freebie, this is really important. I’m not just teaching you how to grow your email list, I’m teaching you how to grow a lucrative email list, one where you can generate revenue from it consistently.
The only way that’s possible is if your signature freebie is aligned with what you ultimately plan to sell. For my newbies, those that aren’t ready to sell anything, then you won’t be really clear on this area. That’s okay. You’re going to do your best and get a good idea what you eventually want to sell and start from there.
Others that are listening now know what they are selling. You know the #1 thing that sells the best. I would choose that one and create a signature freebie for that. Remember, this one’s going to be front and center on your website. I’m going to talk about that in the next section.
Because it’s going to be front and center you want to make sure it is going to be valuable to a big audience. If only ¼ of your audience will find this valuable, that probably isn’t a signature freebie. With webinars, I know that 100% of my audience is not interested in webinars. But I’ll give you a little peek into my business. I’m really trying to focus on the audience out there that are interested in creating online training programs, products, services, and membership sites.
Digital training courses and digital training programs are the people I feel I can help the most. I know some of you are listening with a physical product and you feel you have gotten value out of my podcasts. That is amazing. But if I had to really narrow it down I’m really trying to appeal most to the people that want or have an online training program or course.
Because of that, I know webinars are really a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. That’s why I made that my signature giveaway. Although I won’t appeal to 100% of my audience, I know I’m going to appeal to a large number of my perfect, ideal audience that I want to reach. Hopefully that helps you start thinking about what your signature freebie might look like. Again, we’re going to put it front and center on your website and I’ll come back to that.
Let’s move on to the second tier, what I call secondary freebies. I couldn’t think of a really amazing name for that. I’m not good at naming things. So we’re just going with secondary freebies. The secondary freebies are not as elaborate. My webinar on webinars is a really big deal. It took me weeks and weeks to create. I put a lot of work into it and we had to turn it on automation. There are a lot of bells and whistles there.
Not that your signature freebie has to be that big, but it is something you will put some really great effort into. Your secondary freebies shouldn’t take you as long to create and they should be easy to get going in terms of where you are putting them and how you are using them.
Let me give you an example of a secondary freebie. A secondary freebie for me would be all of the freebies I offer you on my podcast. I always put a lot of thought into them and as a team we work really hard on making them stellar. But, if there is a freebie for a podcast that will take me weeks to create I probably wouldn’t make that a secondary freebie.
I know only a certain amount of people are going to listen to this podcast episode. If it’s something really big, like a really amazing freebie, I’m going to take it to the next level and not just make it about one podcast episode. A secondary freebie for me would be all of the different freebies I have on my podcast.
Another example is something I love to teach, and I’ve talked about this before, blog posts. If you are interested in writing a few epic blog posts, blog posts that are going to be the meat of your site and talk about everything you love to talk about in terms of your brand and all relate to what you sell, everyone should have three epic blog posts.
One of mine would be Facebook engagement because I have a Facebook 101
program. It’s a really big epic post all about getting more engagement on Facebook and that lives on my site and gets me a lot of traffic. If you have a few different blog posts that talk about topics you love to talk about and relate back to your entire brand and what you sell, those will get you a lot of traffic on your site.
Inside those blog posts you can have a secondary freebie. Inside the blog post if I’m talking about Facebook engagement I might do a free PDF and show you 10 ways to get more engagement on Facebook with images and examples. It’s not a freebie that would showcase everything I’m about right now in the season of my business. But it’s one piece of it because I’ve got a Facebook 101 program that I sell.
The secondary freebies will definitely attract a more general audience. But when they get on your list you can then nurture them week by week if you are emailing your list and really cultivating a relationship. This secondary freebie might not lead directly to a sale. None of my podcast episode freebies lead directly to a sale but you are getting on my list if you like one of my freebies. I get to get to know you more and you get to know me more through weekly emails of cultivating our relationship.
The signature freebie doesn’t have to, but my signature freebie does, lead to a direct sale. On the webinar I sell my webinar course. It doesn’t have to be like that for you if you’re not ready yet but it could be. You could do a three-part video series as your signature freebie. You could do a webinar like I do or you could do some kind of email marketing autoresponder that eventually leads to a sale.
That’s getting a little bit more advanced for my newbies just starting out with list building. I don’t want you to even worry about selling yet. I just want you to focus on what your audience really needs and what you ultimately plan to sell. I just wanted to show my more advanced students there are layers there that you could get into.
The second way to grow your email list is with secondary freebies. You can have as many as you want. I have a whole heck of a lot of them because I try to do one with each podcast episode. But you don’t have to have tons. I say start with one, baby steps. Create an epic blog post and put a freebie in there.
If you want to see how I do it, I’m going to link to one article that was a really big success with this, a blog post with a freebie in it. I will tell you that I love to use lead boxes for my secondary freebies. If you want to see how it works you could go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/84 you will get my show notes. I treat them as blog posts. If you read my blog post you will come across a big yellow bar. Click on the box and a pop-up box will appear. That is a lead box. We use them for all of our secondary freebies on my website.
As you can see, it’s not just a typical pop up. It doesn’t just pop up for anybody. You’ve got to click because you are interested. You click that you want the freebie, a pop-up box appears, you put your name and email in and I send it to you.
I love lead boxes for secondary freebies and I will link to an article all about lead boxes which, of course, is from my favorite business, Lead Pages, my tool of choice for all things list building. I can’t do a list-building episode and not talk to you about how passionate I am about all of the features that Lead Pages offers.
I’ll definitely give you some resources if you want to dive deeper into Lead Pages and see what they have for you in terms of what they can do for your business.
We’ve got the signature freebie, the secondary freebie (start with one and you can add on), and the third one is the promotional freebies. These are freebies that you have to really get ahead of. Not everyone will be ready for the third tier and that’s okay a well.
But let me talk to you about this because it is important and it has made a huge impact in my students’ list-building strategies as well as my own.
A promotional freebie is something that you would do ahead of a big promo. For my students in Webinars That Convert this is your Fill-Up Formula. You already know about this. You could look at the Fill-Up Formula (I’m speaking in code to my students) as a secondary freebie but for you I’m actually looking at the Fill-Up Formula as a promotional freebie because you’re doing some kind of pre-webinar freebie before a webinar launch.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, just wear ear muffs for a second so I don’t confuse you. But I just wanted to make that clear to my students.
Let’s talk about these promotional freebies. I do them as a way to grow my email list with people that will be genuinely interested in my next launch. I do live launches and then I have automated programs out there. I hate the word launch because it scares people but, for any of you that are going to do a live promotion then the promotional freebie is a great idea.
Let me break it down and show you how I use it. The last time I launched one of my programs, the Profit Lab, in April I created a really cool PDF called the Product Maximizer about a month before I launched it. The Product Maximizer talked about three different ways to make more money online. It gave a list of three things you could be doing right now to start making more money online.
The Profit Lab is focused around making money online so there was a direct correlation. It was fully aligned and I wanted to start getting more people interested in the topic. I wanted to build an email list so that when I started to promote the Profit Lab I would know this was a special group of people that were interested in the topic of my paid program.
Because of the timing, that’s the magic of these promotional freebies, a month or maybe a few weeks or few days leading up to when I launch the program these people opted in and said this was a topic they were interested in right now. I could follow up with them and say, “Hey, I know you downloaded the Product Maximizer, I hope you got a lot of value from it. If you were really struggling with sales online come join my free webinar where I dive even deeper into this topic.”
On the free webinar I promote Profit Lab. This was a two-tiered lead magnet; it was a free PDF in the beginning, which tends to be a less serious way to give your name and email. When you are signing up for a webinar you have to give a date and time and that is more commitment so getting people to sign up for a cheat sheet may be a little easier for you.
You have to experiment. For me it tends to be equal but my students have said they can get people to sign up for a cheat sheet easier than for a webinar. Great, let’s start with a cheat sheet. Once they are on your list for that you can email them and invite them to your webinar down the road.
If you want to see an example of my Product Maximizer to see how it works I will make sure to link to it in the show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/84. You can see the registration page that I set up for it. You can even download it and see what I talked about in it. You can see how that worked.
I did the same thing for my webinars course. Before I launched Webinars That Convert I came out with a blog post all about webinars and mistakes that people make. Inside that blog post I had a PDF free giveaway about the rookie challenges you would have on a webinar.
To back up, I think it was a blog post about webinar myths and then the freebie inside that blog post was five rookie mistakes that people make on webinars. Of course, all of this related to my webinar course. That one was really valuable as well.
When I do promotional freebies I run Facebook ads to them. We will talk about that in a moment but that tends to help a lot. I want to attract people on my list to this freebie because I want them to raise their hand and tell me they are specifically interested in the topic because I can talk to them differently in my emails. But I also want to attract a new audience. So, for any promotional freebie I do, I heavily use Facebook ads.
We went over the three-tiered list-building strategies: Your signature freebie, secondary freebies, and promotional freebies. These are three ways to grow your email list looking at it in a really simple way. Let’s just build out the simple foundation first. You can keep it really simple with the three-tiered strategy.
Moving on, I want to talk to you briefly about places to host your lead magnet. That sounds weird and I couldn’t think of a better word than “host”. I mean where you are placing it on the web so that people can find it. It is usually some kind of registration form because you want their name and email.
This is what the freebie is all about. I wanted to show you some of these examples with the freebie I created. I have four different examples. One is an extra credit. That is why I’m saying there are three different places you can host your lead magnet with one extra credit. The freebie that I’m giving you today in this episode shows you all of these examples.
If you want to see really good examples, I’ve curated a great list for you and put a bunch o f pictures in the PDF . If y ou w ant that go t o http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/84download or text the phrase 84download to 33444.
Of the places you can host your lead magnet, the first one is a feature box. A feature box is a big box across the top of your website. It is so hard with a podcast because I can’t show you; that’s why I create these freebies, to show you. But, if you want to see one instantly, mine is http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com When you go to it you will see a big box across the top inviting you to my webinar about webinars. That is a feature box.
Your feature box should usually feature your signature freebie. See how that works? There is another thing you can do if you don’t want to do a feature box. You could do a pop-up box. I think pop-up boxes are really valuable.
I know people say they are annoying. But the statistics show they are incredibly powerful when done right. When you are giving away something people really want you will be amazed how many people opt in through a pop-up box. I love pop-up boxes because they are really simple. PopupAlly is one that I think is really great and I will link to it in my show notes. Nathalie Lussier and her business are the creators of PopupAlly so you can go check that out.
There are some other great pop-up companies that you can use but either you want a pop-up or feature box. I personally think the feature box is more powerful because every time someone visits your website they will see it right there. With a pop up you can set it up so that people only see it once every 30 days or a set time. The feature box is static. It is already there all the time.
If people are constantly coming to your website to read your weekly blog they will always see it and maybe they need to see it three or four times before they actually realize they need it and sign up for it. That is why I think a feature box is really valuable. It is also right there in front of their face showing them it is important and what I am about.
When you have a really good signature freebie it tells people instantly what your brand is all about and where you are focused in your business at the time. I am going to show you examples of freebies and will give you some resources of WordPress themes that allow you to do a really easy feature box.
There are some themes out there that offer the feature box functionality. I will make sure to link to those in the show notes as well. The feature box, to me, is really valuable. If you don’t want to do a feature box or if your website is not going to allow it, the second best thing is a pop-up box. That is for your signature freebie.
The second place you will host your lead magnet opportunity is in a side bar. The side bar would be the right-hand side of your website. I don’t put the sidebar on my home page because I already have a feature box. I don’t want the feature box talking about my signature giveaway and also see a sidebar talking about my signature giveaway.
I tend to not have any kind of sidebar on the home page. But when you click on my blog post you will see a sidebar promotion for my giveaway. For me, it is usually for my signature giveaway. I always have a sidebar talking about the signature freebie that I’ve created because they are no longer seeing the feature box at the top.
That doesn’t mean that at the same time you can’t have your lead box inside your blog post. Let me explain how this works and I will actually show you pictures in the freebies. If you are on my website and you go to one of my specific show notes (for example #84, the one you are listening to now) you will read the show notes and see a big yellow box for the freebie that I’ve been offering today.
When you click on the yellow box a pop-up box appears. It is a lead box and you can get the freebie. At the same time, in the right sidebar you will also see an offer for my signature freebie. It’s okay if you have the two going on at once because if people are really interested in your content they will read your blog and will want the freebie. At the same time, they might also want to sign up for your signature freebie. If it doesn’t catch their attention right at that moment that’s fine too.
I know some of you are thinking that the same person will sign up for your list twice. With your email service provider the duplicates should be able to be managed inside your provider. If you sign up for every one of my podcast episodes it doesn’t mean you are in my Infusionsoft system 20 times. Infusionsoft knows when a person has already signed up.
In Infusionsoft, you get a tag and it shows me what you signed up for. If you signed up for a bunch of things I can know that and can talk to you in a specific way because of that. But you’re not in my system that many times.
I also know that some of you feel that it is a pain to sign up for things. You feel it would be nice if a person didn’t have to sign up if they were already on your list. That is typically not easy for most email service providers to know if a person is already on your list or not so we aren’t even going to go there. It takes two seconds. If they are genuinely interested they will sign up again.
I have already told you three different places you can put your lead magnet: The feature box/pop up, a sidebar, and inside a blog post as a lead box. Those are three different places you can put your freebies.
For extra credit, if you want to do a webinar a lot of times my webinar sign-up page is hosted outside my website (not always but if I use Lead Pages it might be hosted by Lead Pages so it is not something you would find on my website). Let me give you an example of that: We have recently changed this, but at one point you couldn’t come to my website and find the registration page for my automated webinar all about Facebook 101.
We ran ads to it, it wasn’t really part of our signature promotions we were doing, so if you came to my website you wouldn’t find it. It lived outside of my website on a Lead Page. That’s one thing you just want to be aware of. Not every opt-in opportunity needs to be on your website.
If you are running ads to your opt-in opportunity it could be outside of your official domain. Some things don’t live at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com and that’s okay. I say that to my more advanced students that are thinking everything can’t be found on their website. That’s fine. You might have another strategy for a lead magnet and it’s not necessarily directly coming from your website. Instead, you are running ads directly to it. If you have any questions about that you guys let me know. It is important for you to know where you are actually placing these opportunities.
Another thing to think about is that you’ve got to drive traffic to your lead magnets. I’m going to talk about three smart ways to drive traffic to your lead magnets but you probably already know about these ways. I still need to bring them up because if you’re struggling with list building you’re probably not doing them consistently.
Remember, I started this mini training and said, “consistency is the name of the game.” That is the theme of this episode. The reason is that all of the work you are going to do to create your three different freebies and host them in different areas on your website or outside your website, all of that won’t matter if you don’t get consistent with driving traffic to them.
The great thing is that you don’t have to be consistent at constantly creating freebies. If you just do one signature freebie, one secondary, and when you do your next promotion get ahead of that and do it, you are good. You don’t have to consistently be creating them like I am on my podcast.
If you told me to do this two or three years ago I would say, “Go fly a kite! You’re absolutely insane.” It is a lot of work to do these freebies for every episode. I would never suggest this to people that are in their first or second year of business. It is something I had to grow into.
You don’t have to be consistently creating new lead magnets, what you need to be doing is consistently driving traffic to the ones you have created. A lot of people struggle in their business as entrepreneurs because they are stretching themselves too thin and trying to do a million things. I’ve probably said this a million times on my show, I don’t do a million different things, I just consistently do the same thing over and over again.
Getting really clear on how I’m driving traffic to all of this became a very big focus in my business. Remember, we already talked about the mindset of list building. But I want to add to that and say consistency is going to beat out anything else you do when it comes to list building.
Let’s talk about that a little bit. The first thing you want to be doing is driving social media traffic to both your signature freebie and any of the secondary freebies you’ve created inside of a blog post. I think everybody should write those few different epic blog posts and put freebies inside of those. You want to be driving social media traffic there.
Where the consistency part comes in, I want you to use a tool like Edgar. I think Edgar is the best tool you can use and I’ll link to Edgar in my show notes. Edgar is basically so brilliant because you can put a post inside Edgar to schedule it but it goes into a library so that it will actually post it today and then in a few days, in a few more days; that’s when I’m talking about consistency.
If you are going to create great blog posts and signature freebies and all of that good stuff we want to give people multiple opportunities to check them out. Using something like Edgar will make sure that you are driving traffic to it every week.
Maybe it will take people three or four times to see the post on Facebook before they decide to click on it. That’s awesome. You’ve built in consistency so it will actually happen.
Let’s talk about social media. It’s not just enough to load some posts up in Edgar to drive traffic to these different lead magnets you have created. In addition to that I want you to find your core platform. Maybe you have found your core platform where you want to really focus when it comes to talking about how people can sign up for your freebies, maybe you haven’t.
For me, my core platform is my podcast. I can talk about my webinar course and I can talk about all of the secondary freebies. It is really easy for me to build them into what I am teaching. For you it might be Periscope or it might be videos you put on social media or it might be building up your YouTube channel; or, it might be SlideShare.
I’m not going to get into this but I am going to link to an article about SlideShare where one of my students, who now has her own amazing business (Donna Moritz), uses SlideShare to grow her email list. I look at that as her core platform. She is so smart with it and builds amazing slide decks where she gets people to opt in at the end.
SlideShare loves what she is doing so they put her on the first page of SlideShare. It’s truly one of the major ways she’s been growing her business. To me, that is her core platform. Again, I’ll link to an example of that so you know what I’m talking about if you’ve never heard of SlideShare. It is kind of amazing.
Not only do I want you to load up your social media channels with consistent posting about your freebies, you want to use different images and different copy so it’s not always the same everyday. But, in addition, find your core platform. It might just be blogging. That’s cool too.
Blogging, podcasting, Periscope, video, YouTube, SlideShare, whatever it might be (there are others I’m not mentioning), when you get really comfortable with one platform it is so easy to create conversations that lead back to telling people all about the freebie you have. That is what I want to hear you saying more and more.
I think Periscope is a really cool thing to check out. It is live streaming video and I see people talking about how they have grown their list from their Periscopes all the time. I think podcasting is one of the most amazing ways to do it. You don’t have to do a freebie every single time. You can maybe have two freebies and just mention it at the beginning or end of every podcast. I know a lot of people that do it that way. Social media is an important part of the puzzle here.
Another way to drive traffic to your freebies is though guest blog posting. I don’t do this a lot anymore because I’ve got to choose my battles in terms of what I have time for. But in my first two years of business, holy cow, I guest blog posted everywhere. I chased it. I went after opportunities. I think there are some amazing articles out there about how to be a good guest blogger and how to get the opportunities. I’ll link to those in the show notes too.
ProBlogger has an excellent article and I will make sure you get your hands on that because if you’re not guest blogging and you are in your first two years of business and don’t have a big email list and you feel you are having a hard time getting your name out there, you definitely want to be guest blogging. It is so very valuable and it gets you into the habit of creating consistent content.
If you’re not guest blogging and you know that’s something you want to be doing more of, give yourself a challenge to do two a month. You will be getting on somebody else’s blog two times a month. Here’s where list building comes in to play. A lot of people guest blog post and when I go to their website because I want to learn more about who wrote that article there is no opportunity there.
Imagine if you had your feature box on your website, imagine if you have a blog that actually went live the same day your guest blog went live and the two are aligned with similar or complimentary topics, and someone goes to your website after reading your guest blog post on a bigger site and sees another article they like and inside that article happens to be a secondary freebie. That is good stuff.
Never, ever guest blog again without setting up an opportunity on the home page of your website to opt in to something and then, if you can get really creative with this, the best guest blogging opportunities are when you can link to a secondary freebie inside that guest blog post. There are a lot of times you cannot do that.
I have guest blog posted a lot where they don’t let me link back to some kind of freebie. But sometimes they will and it doesn’t hurt to ask. On one opportunity I had, I got to put a link in my bio to a freebie. I loved that one too. If people wanted to see who wrote the article it would say something like, “And to get your hands on a free cheat sheet about XYZ, click here,” and it went to a page outside of my website (a Lead Page) that was a freebie related to the article they had just read.
There are some ways to do it. Don’t be sneaky though. Don’t ever try to sneak in a free giveaway into a guest blog. You are in somebody else’s home with that so you have to ask permission but it never hurts to ask, especially if you make it super valuable.
The final thing is paid advertising. I think you probably knew this one was coming because I am a huge fan of Facebook advertising. I really do believe you should be putting money, even if it is a modest budget like $20 or $50 a week, toward Facebook ads and driving traffic to either your webinar (if you have an automated webinar) or to those blog posts.
The best way to do it is drive traffic to your blog post because it is really inexpensive to send traffic to your blog post where you have your secondary freebie built in or sending traffic to a podcast episode. You can send Facebook ad traffic to an opt-in page where they can get your freebie.
Or, if you want to really utilize Facebook advertising with their targeting you can put a custom audience pixel on those specific blog posts, drive Facebook ad traffic there, start building up a targeting group of all of the people that visited, and then you will have your secondary freebie built into the blog post so you could be getting opt ins as well; but you can always retarget those people that visited the blog post and dive in deeper.
I talk about this inside one of my freebies http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/ freeguide which I will show you as an example in all of the examples I give you today.
Anyway, I talk about the whole idea of sending ad traffic to a blog post in that freebie.
Holy cow, I covered a lot. I know I’ve been talking a lot longer than I had planned but this is important stuff. I hope you went on this journey with me where first you dove into the mindset around list building with me in Episode #83 and then you came over to Episode #84 and we talked more about the mechanics.
If you put the two together it’s golden. You are going to start seeing some really solid results. That’s what I want for you.
If I were to leave you with any words of wisdom before we wrap up here it would be that having your own quality email list is totally a game changer in your business. You do not need to have a list of 100,000 people in order to make money online. I know so many marketers that are my friends that said they had 4,000 people on their email list and they made $60,000 with a launch.
I hear it over and over again; even bigger numbers. So, I don’t want you to be so focused on the numbers that you lose site of offering great value and I don’t want you to worry about selling before you focus more on building these relationships. That’s what list building is all about.
I’m excited to see what you create. Keep me updated on your progress. Find me online and I want to hear about how you are growing your email list if you’re going to give yourself this challenge of 75 new leads a week. I want to remind you that the way you get to 75 new leads a week is by having the signature freebie, the secondary freebies, and finding your core social media platform where you can talk about them again and again.
Run Facebook ads, do guest blog posting. All of that together, when you’re consistent, will help you easily get to 75 new leads a week. But you have to work at it. That’s why list building has to be a priority. It just doesn’t operate in the background, especially not when you are starting out.
For me, I work hard on it on my podcast. But that’s really the main focus; and, then I do webinars. It’s not something I stress about anymore but it sure as heck was something I stressed about when I first started because I had to kind of figure it out. My goal in these last two episodes was to help you figure it out more so that you can start getting comfortable with the idea.
That’s my hope for you in terms of the success you’re going to have with list building. Before we sign off, a quick word from our sponsor.
Finally, I want to thank our sponsor, 99Designs. You know when you market online it is really difficult to stand out from all of that online noise clutter. How do you do it? I think you do it through impeccable branding. That includes your logo, your social media cover images, your website, and everything in between. At 99Designs you can get anything designed in just a week for a startup-friendly price.
To give you a little something extra, when you go to www.99designs.com/amy you will get a $99 upgrade for free. That upgrade makes your design contest stand out from all of the others and bumps you to the top of the list so more designers can see your contest. So make sure to check out www.99designs.com/amy.
Thank you once again for being here. It is truly my pleasure to be able to connect with you in this way. I know you have a lot of options for podcast episodes. The fact that you tuned in to mine today means everything to me. I can’t wait to connect with you again soon. In the meantime, have an amazing week. Bye for now.
