5 Essential Steps to Increasing Your List and Making More Money
Step 1: Mindset: List Building is Always First
I was recently talking to a coaching client who has built incredible traffic to her website. But she wasn’t focused on list building. She was focused on making sales.
But then her traffic dried up and so did her sales.
Luckily, we were able to get her into a list building mindset quickly, but honestly, it never should have happened. But I understand it because I had a bad mindset around list building too. It was an afterthought.
To why I waited so long to start building our lists, let’s do a quick synopsis of the situation and then I'll go into specific detail about how we solved the problem.
From 2008 to 2015, I ran the NAMS Workshop - a very successful two-times-a-year marketing workshop unlike any other with 300-400 people in attendance.
After 6 years, we stopped the workshops to focus on the community, membership, and training that is known as the MyNAMS Insiders Club.
My list was less than 7,000 people which was abysmal because of all the promotions and connections we'd made.
If I were focused on list building during that time, we would have been easily over 100,000 people on the list.
So, that was my mistake - ignoring the fact that list building is always first.
Since we changed our priorities - list building is first - we've solved that problem.
Social media is the gift that keeps on giving in many ways when it comes to marketing online, but usually, you have to spend a lot of money to get conversions.
And that's becoming more and more costly. I’ll tell you about a tool at the end of this post to make it so much easier and more natural.
So, how did we grow our list from 7,000 to 50,000 twice in 3 years and why twice?
That's a long story. And I'll reveal most of the details in this post including our list building strategy.
But first, it starts with goals - specifically list building goals.
- What’s your goal? Make it easy.
- What’s your goal by the end of August?
- Then by the end of this quarter?
- Then by the end of the year?
It’s much easier to accomplish your goals when they’re broken down into smaller chunks.
Let’s say you want to add 1000 people over the next 5 months. That’s doable. That’s just 200 people per month.
But don’t make it hard on yourself. Shoot for 100 people in your first month.
Remember, list building is a cumulative effort that builds with consistency.
One list building effort enhances the next and so on.
Our goal was to double our revenue when we had a list of 7,000 people - mostly buyers.
The easiest way to do that, we decided, was to double our list. And over the next few months, we did exactly that by getting more traffic and focusing on delivering more value.
Step 2: Fix your list building problem fast?
You may not know it but you have a list building problem.
Fortunately, they’re simple to solve. The two problems are:
- Bogus email signups to get your freebie and then they’re gone. As many as 85% of subscribers online (in general) have admitted to using bogus emails.
- New subscribers - if any - dribble in a little bit at a time.
There are many other problems you’ll encounter AFTER getting people on your list, but today we’re only going to deal with these issues.
My first online mentor many years ago always talked about having enough lines in the water.
“If you want to catch a lot of fish, you’ve got to have a lot of lines in the water.”
Fishing is a really good analogy for list building.
And if done well, your many, many lines in the water will bring you more subscribers automatically…
If you have the two problems we listed above (and who doesn’t?), you have to fix it fast because bogus emails and the slow trickle of signups will drain your pocketbook fast. And it will frustrate the heck out of you.
Remember, earlier we talked about setting realistic list building daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual goals. We did that too. Our goal was to build our list from 7,000 REAL people to 50,000.
We achieved that in about 6 months.
The trick was to have a lot of lines in the water.
We used as many techniques and tools to snag targeted subscribers as possible such as:
What if you don’t have any list building activities working for you right now?
Most people are afraid of list building when they start because they don’t want to do it wrong. Let’s kick that to the curb and focus on doing it the easy way.
Ask a few questions, and then take some action based on the answers:
Where’s your market?
Enter description text here.Do they hangout on Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? Others? Find the hot niche so you can drop a line in the water.
What’s their problem that you can solve?
Ask questions. Read comments. Pay attention. They will give you lots of hints.
Can you start a conversation?
In Facebook groups or other social media, you can talk to many or one, but make sure you’re offering value.
Do you have a valuable gift to offer people?
When they express an interest, tell them you happen to have a report (checklist, template, ebook, podcast, video or friend) with that exact information.
Do you have a link handy?
By clicking the link, they’ve taken the first step to signing up, but this is where it gets tricky.
Instead of making your new friends jump through a lot of hoops, let’s make it as easy as possible to provide a real, verified email address and their full name - without sending them to a webpage or away from your conversation. (We’ll show you exactly how to do that in a bit.)
How do you reduce the bogus email addresses?
We use a technique that is a bit cumbersome and unconventional. We never give the prospect the gift except by email.
But that requires a lot of infrastructure. And you have to be prepared to answer a lot of questions in the support desk about why they didn’t get the thing they signed up for.
There’s another way to get direct access to the verified email address and full names without requiring them to input that into a form and going through the entire cumbersome process we mentioned earlier. And we’ll talk about that tool in a minute.
But next, you need to focus on creating a GOOD list, a responsive list because that’s where the money is.
Step 3: What’s your list worth?
Just to prove my point about the value of your list, we’re going to talk about the richest man in the world for a minute. Of course, you may be thinking, “How can I relate to Jeff Bezos who has been the reigning Richest Man in the World since 2017 with a net worth 187 billion?”
Amazon was on the ropes and the brink of bankruptcy in 2004 when Bezos had the idea to create an exclusive membership (against everyone else’s advice) and that became Amazon Prime.
That membership created a mountain of cash, 100 million members (on his LIST) loyal to Amazon, and a base business that would be worth more than $10 billion if it were broken out separately.
His list - Amazon Prime - is worth a lot of money.
Bezos gambled and it paid off.
More importantly, he understood the value of his list.
If you have a list, business revenue is predictable.
I’d like to introduce you to Joe and Jane. Joe has a list already and Jane is just building hers. Both of them would love to have a more predictable income.
Meet Joe
Joe knows that each of his 1000 customers spend about $100 each year. And he knows that from past history. That’s why our numbers are so important.
So, his current predictable revenue is: 1000 x 100 = $100,000 annually
But Joe has a goal. He wants to double his revenue.
And because he has sales history, we now know the simplest way to do it is to double his customer list to 2000. Of course, there are other ways to do it like raising prices, selling more volume, but the SIMPLEST method is to increase your list.
Meet Jane
She’s just starting her list building efforts. She doesn’t know the value of your subscribers yet. She hasn’t sold them anything. So, what’s her number?
Whatever she wants it to be. Based on industry averages, she can guess fairly accurately what her customer value should be. Just make it up.
Really! That doesn’t seem very scientific at all, but the truth is she has to start somewhere. So, pick a number. Fortunately, that’s fairly simple too. Most folks say that a good rule of thumb in the information business is $1 per subscriber per month.
Now, how much money does she want to make in a year?
Since she’s just starting out with no list, no product and no capital, we’ll ease into it with $25 thousand for the first year. Now, we can begin to plan. We start with simple math.
$25,000 / $12 = 2083
To earn 25k in the first full year with each subscriber earning about $12 per year, she’ll need 2083 people on her list.
That’s almost 174 new subscribers per month or almost 6 subscribers per day.
Do you believe that’s doable? Of course it is.
Leverage the right tools to make list building simple, easy and inexpensive. The key in the beginning is to avoid complex infrastructure, high-priced advertising or bad data collection.
(We’re going to talk about a tool to help with that a little later.)
Step 4: Is traffic the answer to all your problems?
Yes, list building and traffic to your site are two links in the business chain that have to be connected. Business will not survive without either. And it doesn’t matter what the size of your business is.
McDonald’s focuses on traffic first, not hamburgers. And they don’t build a store if there’s little traffic or no easy access. Their goal is to have the drive thru stacked with cars at every franchise. If the drive thru is idle, the store is not making any money.
Each customer pulling up to the drive thru window gets in and out fast, predictably and conveniently. And they get exactly what they expect.
Placing an order at McDonald’s is EXACTLY the same selling process that you’re using on your website. Prospects pull up to your window (get your lead magnet), place an order (move through your funnel) and become a customer.
When building your list, it’s not enough to have a great lead magnet. You must also put it in front of the right traffic. You want to make sure your drive thru window always is busy, never idle.
The more prospects getting your lead magnet 24/7, the more money you’ll make as you sign up new leads.
Your goal now is to get your prospects “in and out fast, predictably and conveniently” and give them exactly what they expect.
Don’t make signing up difficult.
It’s probably time I tell you about this tool called LeadPal.
This new software makes signing up for your lead magnets incredibly simple. By clicking the link, getting your lead magnet, become a simple one-click approval that transfers the prospect’s verified email address and full name to your autoresponder using the social network’s native API - that’s a communication / integration software built by the networks for this exact purpose.
It’s deceptively simple.
Step 5: Make list building dead simple!
If you’ve hung in here this long, you’ve noticed we’ve revealed some key list building elements:
- Building the right list building mindset and setting goals
- Filling the pipeline with multiple lead magnets driving confirmed email addresses
- Understanding the sales value of each prospect
- Focusing on targeted traffic to get as many prospects as possible
Now, let’s bring this 5-step process to a close with a little extra secret sauce.
Optimize your prospect-to-buyer funnel.
Prospects are great. And we want as many as possible, but the sooner they become buyers, the faster you build a real business relationship with them turning them into repeat buyers with a higher customer value.
The good news is that this is an automated process if you think it through and build it the right way. The key, of course, is getting prospects in the front door.
Remember, in Step 1, we talked about taking our list of 7000 to 50,000 - twice!
What I’ve taught you in the first 4 steps is EXACTLY how we did it. We got focused on two things:
- Driving as much traffic as possible to fill our pipeline so that we got our lead magnets in front of as many people as possible.
- Converting them from prospects to buyers in about 30-seconds.
We started with the standard optin funnel. It’s tried and true and we still use it a lot.
It looks like this:
That’s a lot of infrastructure, but it works. And it’s been taught this way since long before I got into online marketing in 2005. But now there’s an easier way.
Using LeadPal, we can knock the process down to 2 or 3 steps.
First thing you’ll notice is that the prospect is not asked to input their information in a form.
And since the information being shared is the email address and full name they used to register the social media account, it’s verified with their best email address one time (solving your step 2 list building problems by eliminating bogus email addresses and driving a flood of optins simply.)
One time. They never see the approval app again. The process is even more simple after the first time. Give them a gift; show them a sales page.
So now, every time you post with a LeadPal link to a blog post, ebook, video, pdf, podcast or any other piece of content, you can send the link to them via email and put the subscriber on any page of your choice.
That’s getting to the cash fast, as one of my mentors used to say. I love it.
Truly, it doesn’t get much simpler than this.
And using LeadPal to drive sales after the optin is the next logical step. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your product or an affiliate product.
- Dead simple list building
- Simple sales after the optin
- Affiliate marketing solution
- Flood of traffic from social media
- Easy setup
I just can’t say enough about LeadPal.
And because we believe in this so much, if you sign up for LeadPal, we’ll send you to our special training walking through the entire process (which is very simple) and demonstrating additional ways you can use LeadPal to drive faster optins to your list AND make more money.
I know what you're thinking: How is this legal?
It uses the approved APIs provided by the social media companies - 8 of them right now with more to come - to access the data feeds. It's legit because the prospect clicks "Approve" using the platform’s native API built exactly for that purpose.
Then, the magic happens.
What does this mean for you?
First, list building on social media just got dead simple.
Second, you don't need a ton of web pages to do this. This tool allows you to bypass the traditional landing page (squeeze page or opt-in page - whatever you want to call it) and capture the lead directly from the social platform.
Third, a fast easy way to use ALL of the content you’ve got on your hard drive.
I know you’ve got it. Videos, reports, checklists, and tons more all about 80% complete. Just waiting on you to build a funnel.
And when you double your current list or build your first subscriber list, you’re in the game. The Numbers Game. Leadpal helps you get control over easy list growth which translates to income.
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