Build Up Fans and Customers Through Email List Building

THIS FROM ENTREPRENEURS JOURNEY - LOTS OF GREAT TIPS!

My blog had over 1,000 RSS subscribers when I launched my list, and roughly 500 to 1,000 unique visitors dropping by each day as well. This translated into 10 to 20 newsletter opt-ins a day, which I considered pretty good, though at the time I hadn’t optimized the opt-in area of my blog with good copy or video like I have today.

I continued to write my blog posts and started to write one email newsletter a week as well.

Slowly but surely my list grew. At the start of 2007, about a year later after adding the newsletter to my blog, I had 3,000 email subscribers. It was a good start, and I had a platform to grow my business from.

Ramp Up Lead Generation

I don’t like the term “lead generation” because it dehumanizes the relationship between you and your subscriber.

People who join your list can be considered leads, and when you talk business talk with business folk, this is the language people understand. However I believe it’s much better if you look at each of your subscribers as a real person who has stuck up their hand as interested in forming a relationship of mutual benefit with you. These people are “members” of your community, not leads.

Regardless of the terminology, you’re going to need to figure out ways to increase the number of people who join your list. This was the challenge I faced, though at the time I was happy that I could simply keep blogging and people will continue to find me and join my list.

Enter Social Media

In 2007 Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook wasn’t on my radar. Social media as a marketing force didn’t come into play for another year or two. From my perspective I was content simply writing blog posts and leveraging my free report to bring in new subscribers.

Over the next few years the online marketing landscape, and the blogosphere, became a whole lot more crowded. Facebook and Twitter became significant new sources of email subscribers, not to mention LinkedIn and other niche specific social community sites. Social recommendation tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious, which have the power to send hundreds of thousands of eyeballs at websites in a matter of hours, surfaced as powerful exposure tools.

And let’s not forget the mother of all social media sites – YouTube. Video wasn’t common when I started building my newsletter, but today it’s almost a mandatory requirement for every blogger and internet marketer to make use of. In fact it’s so powerful, you can leverage just exposure on YouTube, by publishing a consistent stream of videos and driving the viewers back to your blog to opt-in to your email list, as your main lead generation method.

Did You Read Between The Lines?

It’s now four years since I started my first email newsletter. Today I have almost 70,000 email subscribers and I continue to attract an average of 100 new subscribers every day.

These people come to me by conducting a google search, coming across one of my blog articles and then opting-in for my report and newsletter. Or maybe they get referred by one of my affiliates. Perhaps a friend recommends my blog or report in real life in the traditional word of mouth fashion. Maybe they watch one of my videos on YouTube at my Yaro.TV channel and then come to my blog. Perhaps they read one of my tweets spread by my followers, or stumbleupon my content, or follow a facebook share, or read about my work in a forum.

Online lead generation – or list relationship building – is a very holistic process today. This is a good thing, as there are countless channels of traffic you can get in front of if you’re willing to do the legwork. There are fundamentals you have to lay in place in order for the machine to work, but there’s never a shortage of audience if you’re in a niche people care about.

You truly can diversify your exposure points and construct a very stable source of new subscribers that requires very little effort to maintain. I’m living proof of this concept, as our countless other bloggers who have followed similar content and marketing strategies.

If you read between the lines in this article (actually I made it blatantly obvious), I’ve talked about 14 methods to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter. In case you can’t figure it out, I’ve listed the methods for you below.

14 Methods To Grow Your Email List

1. Register an AWeber account and start your first email list
2. Add an opt-in box to your blog
3. Create a dedicated landing page for your newsletter
4. Giveaway a free report
5. Create a product and promote it using a launch process
6. Recruit affiliates to promote your resources
7. Create a Facebook fan page with an opt-in landing page
8. Build a Twitter following and release great content to encouraging retweets
9. Create a LinkedIn profile and interact in the community to build your network
10. Become a quality user of Digg, Stumpleupon or Delicious to build your reputation power
11. Start a YouTube video marketing campaign to drive traffic back to your blog and newsletter
12. Buy a specific domain name just for branding your videos (like Yaro.TV)
13. Encourage word of mouth and viral distribution by creating content that changes your industry
14. Participate in on-topic conversations in leading forums in your industry