How to get started growing your email list

1. Introduction: Okay, everybody, and welcome to the course how to get started growing your email list. My name is Seth Haynes. I'll introduce myself a little bit more in just a moment, but I just wanna hop right in here and talk about who this course is for. So this course is a really quick craft course introduction of building your email list for people that are entrepreneurs. Maybe they're bloggers that are trying to build a full list podcasters that air, trying to engage with their audience individual creators that air that have products or something that they're looking to sell a line and really anyone that has any kind of product or service they want to promote, um, using the Internet and engaging with customers online. So in this course, you're gonna learn how I grew my list over 1100 active subscribers without spending any money. Why, most often offers are just terrible and don't work and why everything you need's an and everything you need to know to get started growing your own list. And before we move on, I just want to give a quick disclaimer that if you are someone that already has a pre existing list of Ah, a good size. This is probably not the course for you, However, if you're so one that's interested in building your list, Maybe you've heard that you should be doing it and you've been thinking about it, but you're not sure why or if it's worth it. Ah, this is the course for you. I want to take you through exactly how I got started. Building a list started actually making money from my website and online. That was all based on the list, and this is gonna take you step by step there. How to get started to build your first you know, your 1st 50 subscribers or 100 or 250 or 500 or 1000 subscribers. So this is the course for you, if that's where you're at. So here's how this works. It's broken down into four lessons. Lesson one is why building a list matters lesson to is the anatomy of a good email. Often, Lesson three is often offers that anyone can use to grow their list when she really examples from my own experiments and also some really successful folks online and break down why they're offering offers work versus other people's and last, but not least unless a four gonna talk about how to put it all together. This is a very quick course that's going to get you up and running with building your email list in no time. So long way I'm also gonna offer plenty of examples from my own experience of building an audience and actually monetizing my sight and my list. So hey there, I'm Seth Haynes. If at any point you have questions about the material in this course, or you just want to say how low you could reach me any time. My email address is just Seth at Seth Haynes dot com, or I'm on pretty much any social channel just at Seth Haynes. So a little bit about me case you're wondering, Who the heck is this guy? Why is he talking about this? Is he legit? So I have a digital marketing consultant. I've been working with clients that range from cultural institutions to authors launching books, so I've worked with lawyers and personal trainers, and I've coached people in the real estate industry on digital marketing. Eso I do a lot of consulting work. I run my own blawg over a musician's guy, the hustling dot com, which I'll talk a little bit about as we go through this course together. I'm also the author of a book called Break into the Scene, and I'm also the creator of the course called the Freelancing Formula, where I helped musicians get started getting more freelance work. I have a background as a musician, so I am musicians. Got a hustling dot com. My book and my course are all geared towards helping musicians earn more money. 2. Lesson 1 - Why building a list matters: so let's just jump right in. So lesson one is why building a list matters. So first off, unlike Social Media email list, give you direct access to your customer without having to necessarily pay to reach them. So as of as of right now, the kind of socials landscape is that is one where people are building large audiences. But the whenever you just post something on your Facebook page or your tweeted out or you post on instagram, you're not getting near the engagement that you had. A lot of people think they are, so people will build these big followings on Facebook, and then we'll go start posting on their page and we'll see that they're not even reaching 10% of their audience, or 20% or sometimes even 5%. It could be really low engagement. It could be very difficult to reach your audience there without having to go into the advertising to reach them. So email list give you direct access to your customers people often to your list, and you can reach them any time. It's also a great way to build a relationship with your audience and scale it so you can actually engage with people in a much more intimate way, right in their inbox at scale, which is something that you it's harder to do with social media. That's definitely possible, but this is this is focusing all on how to build your email list. So let's take a look at a quick case study of how powerful with email Iskan be. So this is from whenever I launched my book back in October 2016 and this is all about how hell how building an email list, Help me launch my book. So when I got started building when I got started working my book, I had an email list of my blog's about 400 subscribers, which you know is a respectable number for someone that was just getting started with it and had been building a list for a little while. But not really actively building list, and I never sold anything. So by the time that the book launched, I had built the list to about 900 subscribers, which is a huge difference for anyone that's ever built a list and try to monetize it. 400 versus 900 is a huge difference I eventually got the list up over 1100 whenever I lost my course, but I spent $0 on doting my list. I spent all this and I spent actually spent literally no money marketing my book, Um, and the entire lunch was based around my email list. So here's some of the results. So I actually reached number one in three Amazon categories on the day of launch, and I beat out a New York Times bestseller for the top spot for almost an entire week. So this was pretty amazing to do because this book of the number two, called Powerhouse, was a New York Times bestseller. Been on the list for several weeks on it had been just dominating that top spot. It had a huge publicity campaign behind it, launching this book, and I was able to outsell it for an entire week and beat it for the top spot as an individual guy working for a Mac book in South Philly where I live. I was able to do all of this by using my email list, so the reason it was so powerful is because the email list gave me a chance to scale my relationship with readers, but so instead of just randomly tweeting out in people reading it, I was actually able to directly engage with musicians literally all over the world. I hear from people in Nigeria and Australia and in Canada and all over Europe, Germany and just in London, in the UK and just all over the place. And that was all possible with an email list, because I could directly engage them in the process of the book. So when I needed feedback on the cover design, I could ask my email list for their opinions, their thoughts. I could engage with them when I was doing, editing and needed beta readers, and eventually I think they were people that were the first folks to start sharing the book because they were they were part of the process. I was able to directly engage them and create relationships with people that I've never met in person. I have at this point my site has been read by just tens of thousands of musicians all over the world here for people all the time. Ah, you know, I've got a pretty good size email list at this point and this is. And whenever I launched my book, I had a list of people that was ready to buy my product they were in. They were emotionally invested in the process. I had added a ton of value to them, and by building this email list, I was a basically building an audience that whenever my product was ready to launch, they were ready to buy. So in the next lesson will talk specifically about how you can start getting the same results for yourself, and I will see you there. 3. Lesson 2 - The anatomy of a good opt-in offer: everyone Welcome back toe How to get started growing your email list? I am Seth pains. And today and fuck Hey, everyone, this is how to get started growing your email list mining a Seth pains and this video we're gonna review lesson to, which is the anatomy of a good often offer. So this is how to start exponentially growing your email list. The challenge that a lot of people have when they go to start building an email list and it doesn't really work. Maybe they put a pop ups. Maybe they put up often forms in their blawg post or at the end of videos, whatever. I be ah, lot of the drink challenge a lot of people have is that they do this stuff. What? People don't actually sign up. So I want to talk about today. How, like what? The anatomy of a good offer that people actually want to sign up for. Looks like So the first question you should start with is what problems can I solve for my giants? No matter who you are, what your business is based around. You want to make sure that you're focusing on solving the problems of your audience. You you're so often see these often forms where it's like sign up now to stay in touch, and that's fine and dandy. But that's not very compelling for the user. They don't want to necessarily stay in touch. What they want is someone to solve a problem that they have so always focus on what problems you can be solving for your audience. So let's talk about what the anatomy of a good often offer actually looks like. That helps people that helps you get drive people to sign up for your email list. So the number one you want to offer a carrot and let's talk about all these in advance along these in more detail. Excuse me, but a carrot is basically something that's going to draw their interest and get them wanting to actually sign up for your list. It's a little bonus little something that you can offer them of value. Next, you want to make sure you have a clear call to action. You want it to be the crystal clear what they should do in order to get that carrot so you don't want it to be buried in your often very only often form buried in your blowing poster at the middle of videos, interrupting people. Ah, you want to make sure it's a very clear called action. And if it's a carrot that people actually want, they will sign up. And the last thing is making it easy for them to sign up again. We don't wanna have these things buried in. Ah, you know the bottom of blogging post necessarily. You don't wanna have it. Ah, hidden and some like far corner of your website. You don't want to just pass. We have in the sidebar, you will make it super easy for them to sign up. So let's talk about each of these in depth, the number one offering a carrot. So this has to be something that is of value to your audience. If you are serving, let's say that you're ah, digital marketer, for example, and you're building a list and you want to teach you how to do digital marketing. So think about what are the things that people there trying to learn digital marketing care about? Maybe if they want to learn how to run Facebook ads, maybe they won't learn how to set up retargeting ads. Maybe they need help with their copy. There often forms. You need to figure out what it is the person actually cares about, so that often for your email list is something of value to them, something that they actually care about because the best carrots provide a very direct solution to a problem their customers have. And I'll talk about a little bit more about examples of this. But one of my very first things I did is I bought an email course when I was trying to build my list up for my book launch. And so I surveyed my existing audience, which is pretty small. I asked around and tried to figure out. All right, what are the problems people actually have? So I found out that people have a couple of problems, and one of the big ones they have is that they don't know how to network so musicians or curious about how to network. So what I did is I actually created an email course, which we'll talk a little bit more about in the next lesson about how to get started growing your network, even if you don't think you know anyone. So I created this carrot that I knew would be valuable to my customers and potential potential customers. My audience, because I asked around and just a little bit of research to figure out what it is they actually care about. And I created a course that gives a step by step solutions to those problems and addresses all of those mental barriers people have around the idea of networking and less than three is gonna highlight all different types of carrots you can use. I talkto I mentioned email list, which will talk about their. But there's a bunch of different types of these carers you can use when it's e books or a webinar or something else will talk about all of those things in Lesson three. So the next thing the anatomy of a good, often offer, is having a clear call to action. So you want to focus on getting the customer to sign up for the list. Nothing else. You don't have anything else distracting them from what they need to do to sign up for your list. Your audience is busy, so make it really clear what they need to do and remember, you're providing value. You're finding something of value to your audience, so they will want it. But it has to be clear how they can get it and I'll talk. We'll show you the examples of this in the next lesson as well, about how to create really crystal clear called actions. So a quick story about this, whatever I fart, started my very first blawg. It was just a simple blawg set upon blogger. It was called Thoughts from the Back Row, and I wrote on this blog's for over a year, and then not a lot of people reading it, but it people reading it, and I was trying to build an email list, and I wasn't like, actually trying that hard. But I put a pit opt in. I wanted to get started building an email list so you could see over here. I actually wrote with 13 posted 2012 21 post and 3 2014 So I wrote a solid 35 40 posts, give or take. So I wrote a fair amount. This was over the course of almost three years, and you know how many people signed up for this email list. Zero. Not a single person ever signed up for my email list, and the reason why is because I had it buried over here in the corner. In the sidebar. There was nothing there to make it clear for people to sign up. That called action was extremely weak. There's no carrot here. There's no reason people sign up. There's no solutions being offered their problems, and it was a miserable failure. I got zero sign ups for over over two years of work, so the third thing is you want to make it easy for them to sign up. So you have to make you have to have a somewhere for people to sign up, and you want to make it obvious, so obvious that it's really easy for them. So you want to make sure that whenever you are going to this often, don't do what I did and bury it in the sidebar of your site or at the bottom of like, blawg post or whatever is you want to make sure that it's so obvious for people because look, you could see what I did here. It was on the side. It did not. It did not have a strong call to action, didn't have a care, and it was buried on the side so people pride didn't even know was there. So you have to have floor feel sign up. You have to make it obvious. And to do this you can use tools like sumo dot com or hello bar dot com, etcetera. So I recommend that you check out sumo dot com. It's super simple. This is what the landing page looks like when you get there. All you have to do is type in your u. R L. I've talked in one here. Click. Try it now, and it tells you exactly how to install it on your websites, where you have a WordPress site, a squarespace side, a Shopify site, we believe whatever it is, it gives you step by step instructions, and you can install it installs on your site in like a minute. It's so simple. You just copy and paste this and it walks you through exactly what you need to do. So here are a few ways to do this. Using sumo dot com only use that as an example here. I'm not affiliated with them. Ah, but you can use it as an example here. So it So let me show you a couple examples. Excuse me. So I like to put away the current Blawg called Musicians. Got a hostile dot com. I actually put up what's called a welcome mat, and this is huge for conversions. Whenever a new visitor comes in my sight, this welcome mat pops up and it says need help planning more gigs. Sign up below, enjoying over 1000 other musicians who are learning to hustle. So this is huge for conversions. It's responsible for a vast number of science that I've had on my email list. It takes literally a couple of minutes to install this and get it set up on your site. And by doing this with a really strong Kona action, a great carrot and making it really obvious you will start to see results in your sight. Another thing I did is I installed what they call a smart bar. This is a very soft reminder for people that have come to the site, and maybe maybe they saw the initial opt in and they decided, not Teoh that sign up but they still came to the site. It's just a really simple thing up there at the top of the site that just stays there and people can sign up there and it stays there with every page they scroll to. And the last one that I use is called a scroll box. And this just reminds people as they scroll through the site that if they with their need, if they want to sign up, they conduce. So there you could set this toe where it on. Lee pops up when people scroll through your site so that people that are actually spending time on your site you can engage with them after the fact. So it's a really simple to set up all of these tools the welcome mat, the smart bar or the scroll box. They have a couple of other options you can use. Those are the ones that I decided to use. But didn't you figured out what makes says most sense for your site so just quickly to review here, The anatomy of a good opt in offer is one offer a care you have to offer something of value to your customer in order for them to sign up. You want to have a clear call to action, A very easy way for the Messiah up. And you want to make it easy for them assignment by making a pop up something on your site that makes it really clear how to sign up for your list if you bury it in your sight in a in a landing page, like further into your site or the sidebar in the footer. Ah, the chances of people signing up we're gonna drastically go down. So you want to make sure it's really easy to set up for the SUV for them to sign up. We want to make sure that you offering care, and it has a clear called action and in less than three, or to talk about all the different kinds of carrots that you can use to start growing your list 4. Lesson 3 - Opt-in offers that anyone can use to grow their list: Okay, this is how to get started growing your email list. My name is Seth Haynes, and we are in lesson three opt ins that can build anyone's list. So let's talk about some specific carrots and types of carrots that you can use to grow your list. So just a quick recap here before we would get into this. First, we talked about why building the list matters because it gives you direct access to your audience. And also it's an opportunity to build relationships at scale with your audience. So then also, we talked about the anatomy of a good option offer. It offers a carrot, something of value that the person signs up for and gives you their email address. Foreign exchange has a clear call to action, and it has to be easy for them to sign up. So now let's talk about what these types of carrots can be. So there are 1,000,000 different types of carrots out there, and it to be quite honest, it could be anything as long as it's valuable to your customer. But here are a few examples of things that you'll see out on out on the web of people that are very successful doting lists. So the first half of care on talk About is like E books or PDF guides. So this is an example from a guy named Neville Man Hora. He writes at his a site called Copyrighting Course, where he teaches people how to write sales copy. So here, he says, learn how to write like you speak and sell like hell. So Neville is promising a guide and t to teach you how to write copy that sells this guy. Noah Kegan Rights is a website called okay dork dot com. He's actually the founder of sumo dot com, which we talked about earlier and on his site. The often is get 85% of the hottest business hacks. You see, it just says injury email Drudged. Here it's super straightforward. It's a clear coat action. It's a carrot that people want because people that follow his work know that he has done tremendous things with building businesses you could see here, it says you're exactly how I started to multi $1,000,000 businesses, grew a list of 700,000 plus, and for him he likes tacos. So where to find the best tacos in the world. Very good. Opt in. It's got a great care. It's clear called Action, and we land on the page. There's literally nothing else you can do except sign up for his email list and the last one. This is a little bit more of a complex example of a guide from raw meat. Settee it. I will teach you the rich dot com. This is just one of many guides that he has, and this one's, well, the art of social skills. And this is actually a full website where there are tons of places where you can opt in. You can watch full interviews. You can get download PDF scripts in this guide. If you go, I'll teaching your rich dot com. You'll see a lot of great examples, but this is a little bit more complex guide. But there are tons of examples of this throughout his guides and these other guys where that guys, where they are building, report with you by offering you a carrot. There's a clear Kona action, and it's really obvious where to sign up. So another type of care you could use if your online business like you're selling products . Ah, they use a discount code. So this is one quick example from a site called Happy Banjo. Dude, he sells banjo, tablature and E books, how to learn to play the banjo. And whenever you're on his site, you get a your scrolling around your checking out things and you'll see this e book. Pop up or excuse me and you see that you'll see this discount code to purchase one of his e books pop up so it pops up because you clear carrot, you're getting a 10% discount, and all you have to do is click on that and sign up to get that coupon. It's really simple way, and it probably drives a lot of traffic to his sales pages, where he sells his E books and another example you could uses videos or webinars. Any kind of longer form or kind of exclusive video content is a really great carrot. So this guy is Ah, this is from a site from a guy named Russell Bronson. It's called high ticket secrets where he teach you how to instantly adds high ticket sales to any final without personally talking to anyone on the phone ever. So he has this what he calls a Web class. It starts. It is on a cycle that starts enters and all, he says. Reserve your straightest to your seat. Now it's a very clear call to action. It's a big orange button on the page. He tells you exactly how you're gonna add high ticket sales to your funnel, and it's got a nice little bit of Ah, um, like urgency to it with this timer that he has here and again. This the only thing you can do on this page is signed up for his webinar. It's a great call to action. It's super clear and builds his email list. Another one we could you could do. We talk to us a little bit, will talk about her Now is email courses. Ah, friend of My and David Cata V, who runs a site called Design for Hackers, where whatever you go to his site, the only thing you see again is an often box for his evil course. And so he promises six shortcuts to great design. Sign up for a free email course called Design Pitfalls is what he calls it and you also get an extra little bonus here where, he says, you'll get the famous all the thoughts you ever need. Pdf instantly. So again, we have a great care these air for people that are interested in design, particularly programmers, developer types, entrepreneurs. It's got a clear call to action. Joined now learn design. And again, he used his urgency as well with a little timer. And it's a great example of something where it's a longer form piece of content that has a little bit higher proceed value. Because it's a full course, It's over the course of several days that he does this. So this is a great example. And I actually borrowed his strategy with doting email courses when I launched my own called Musicians Guy to building a network of free email course. So here I basically tell people, This is a This is your eye research. This and I found out the musicians want to know how to build their networks there. Don't know what to say. They're not sure who to talk to her, how to approach them. So I came up with a four week course that shows them how why are seeding. Why knowing people doesn't matter. Ah, the secret to building real relationships versus networking with people. And I said, almost everyone does this wrong. Kind of teasing them a little bit exact strategy. I had a research identify who you wish you should be connecting with and how to reach out to anyone in an authentic way and then at the bottom, just has signed me up. So again there is a clear carrot here, showing them how to do something that is of value to them. There's a clear call to action, the bread button at the bottom. And again, there's nothing you can do on this page except four collect email addresses. And when I did this, remember, I lost my book and I went from basically having 400 subscribers the getting a project to having 900 subscribers of the lunch, which got me to number one in my categories on Amazon. And I did this without spending any money at all this entire losses, based on the email list that I was ever built using an email course. So the point of this is that it doesn't matter what the carrot is as long as it is something that is a valuable to your customer. Remember these carrots there on Lee going to be compelling to get people to sign up and get people to give you their email address if it's actually something they want, so this could be something for different. This is going to be something different for everyone's business. Maybe for you. It makes sense to have an e book. Maybe for maybe if you're doing ah like an online store, some kind of e commerce site. A discount code is a great way to do it any. You'll see that on a lot of fashion sites, like a J crew dot com or Banana Republic or things like that. You know, if you're doing something where it's like, really tactic tactical training, maybe email courses or videos or webinars, they're going to make sense. It's all about what works for you and what resonates with your audience. 5. Lesson 4 - Putting it all together: Okay, All right. This is the final lesson of how to get started growing your email list. It's been a real pleasure to be with everyone. This is lesson for putting it all together. So we talked about all these various things. Now, this is all about how to implement it on your own site so you can start building your email list. So again, real quick recap we talked about why building a list matters even. Let's give you direct access to your audience versus platforms like social media channels or YouTube channels or septet, whatever it is. Instagram, Facebook. All of these things. Um, they're not necessarily allowing you to get direct access to your audience whenever you want to do so, even lists. They give you their info and you could reach them whenever you want. And also they give you an opportunity to build relationships at scale in a really easy way . We talked about the anatomy of good opt in offer where you start with offering a carrot, something people actually care about. Have a clear coat action, encouraging them to sign up and take your carrot and also making it easy for them to sign it by making really obvious how they decided, whether that's a pop up, a landing page, whatever it is. And the last thing we talked about. A lesson three is often that could build anybody's email list. So these could be E books or PDF guides. Maybe they are webinars. Maybe it's some kind of video content or an email course. Or if you're again like an online retailer E commerce site. Maybe it's an offer made me that offer for a discount code. Whatever is, and as long as a sudden that's valuable to your customer, it's a good way to get going. So to finish this up, this is your checklist that you could take with you. First. Ask yourself, what problems can I solve my audience? If you need to survey people, ask around, do it. Talk to your audience. Figure out what their problems are, how you can provide solutions to those. Then you want to make sure you install a service to collect email addresses again. I recommend sumo dot com, but there several of them out there. It doesn't really matter what service you decide to use. What matters is that you get started today as soon as possible. You wanna make sure you create an often offer that people actually want if you need. Ah, you wanna review that, Go back to Lessons two and three and also make sure that your email list is set up to deliver the carrots when people actually signed up for whether using mail, chimp or constant contact or a Weber, make sure the responder when they sign up for your list, delivers them the carrot so that you fulfill your promise. And last but certainly not least tested out. Try it out to make sure all of these things work. So whenever you go to the website, do the pop ups come up when you sign up with an email address, do you get the actual carrot? All of these things? Test it out. This is your checklist. It's super simple. You can have this up and running today. If you decide to focus and get these items checked off, you'll be up and running before we finish this stuff. I want to offer some final thoughts. First, there's no one size fits all approach to doting an email list. It's completely different for every single site audience, customer base, everything. There's no thing. There's nothing you can do that's gonna work for everyone. Every audience is unique. And what you and the more you get to know yours, the better you'll be at figuring out what is going to be the thing that resonates with them . Ah, you're gonna need traffic to your site in order to grow your list. Ah, good general ballpark rate. If you were getting a 2010% conversion rate of email sign ups, that's a pretty solid number where Tim So 100 people come to your site 10% of them sign off your list. That's a pretty good number. So but you need to have traffic to your site in order for the the relist to grow, experiment with different often and strategies, and to find something that resonates with your audience. If you find something that you set up a carrot and it just doesn't work, no one signing up where you have like let's say you have 500 visitors to your site one day and you got zero of them on your list. Ah, that's probably a good indication that that carrot doesn't really work and doesn't resonate with your audience. Tinker Relative Experiment with different often and different strategies until you find something that works for you and your audience. There is no one size fits all again, but if you're adding value to them whenever you find that right thing, you'll notice, because people will start signing up for your list. And remember, focus, focus, focus. Always focus on solving your audiences problems. So again, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. You can reach me any time it set that Seth pains dot com or on any social channels. Say hello at Seth Haines. Thanks so much for being here. Guys, I'm really psyched to share this with you. I'd love to hear if you with any questions, and I look forward to hear those questions, and I I hope this is helpful for you guys. Thanks so much