How To Quickly Build a Big Subscriber List

This is about email subscribers, not RSS subscribers.  RSS is nice, but it will be awhile before it hits critical mass for most markets.  While bloggers like me can build a big RSS subscriber list because of our RSS savvy markets, for someone blogging in the scrapbooking niche, it’s not so easy yet.  People, in general, just don’t know how to use RSS.

The fact is, even if you are in a niche where your readership is savvy enough to understand and use RSS, you still need an email list.  Otherwise you are missing out on opportunities galore to make more money and keep in touch with the majority of your readers proactively, rather than just through blog post email updates (if you offer email subscription to your blog).

Quickly Building A Great Big List of Email Subscribers

This is a time-tested and well proven strategy for building a list fast.  It is based on my own example of releasing the Authority Black Book for free, but also on the success of the many people who have implemented the same strategy before (and after) the Black Book campaign.

Step 1: Build a product as if you were going to charge money for it when it was done.  Isolate the #1 problem, question, or issue your market deals with and write, or have written, the best guide ever written on the topic.  Produce it like a paid product with fine graphics, navigation, and all the bells and whistles of professionally produced ebooks.  (Everything here works with a service as well, like a free piece of software people can use online.)

Fill it with information people are charging for elsewhere, if possible, but at least fill it with information people would expect to pay for elsewhere.  If people are charging for consulting or courses and sharing this information on a paid basis, you give the info away in your guide.  Additionally, make it better than what people are charging for.  And don’t rip anyone off or plagiarize.  The name of the game is new, fresh, quality, useful, highly-desired content people will be surprised is being given away for free.

(If I had to start all over, this is exactly how I would launch my business on the web today!)

Step 2: Set up an autoresponder series and load it into AWEBER, the only list management service I recommend for deliverability, up time, and range of great services.  Your followup series, of course, should further inform and/or entertain your list members, but also sell something around the 3rd or 4th email that goes out.  Do at least 7 autoresponder messages.

Step 3: After you’ve set up your new list for this campaign, and you’ve set up your autoresponder messages, it’s time to set up your opt in landing page.  This is where people will learn about your guide and be encouraged to download it in exchange for their first name and email address.

This rather outdated design for our Authority Black Book  landing page still brings in 50-100 subscribers per day, two years after it first launched!  (All told, the book has been downloaded over 50,000 times.)  It’s a video and a tiny amount of copy.  We don’t actively promote this page any more.  It hit critical mass in links from reviews, affiliates, social sites and hundreds of other websites, and the traffic comes daily from those sources.

If the offer is good, the product is good, you can be a pretty poor landing page designer and still build a massive list.  Of course, I won’t let you get away with just slapping any old landing page up, so I have an assignment.  The next time you opt in to anything, pay attention to the way they did their landing page.  Especially if it was done by an expert you know would pay a lot of attention to detail on such a thing.

Click on opt in offers instead of ignoring them and see what that person has set up.  Look at the design, the copy, and calls to action.  Start your landing page with this type of information in your back pocket and you’ll have very decent opt in rates and can move on with testing new copy and layouts from there.

Step 4: Tactics for building buzz…

Affiliate Program

One of the things that made our guide take off is that it could be promoted by affiliates.  If someone who read the guide and signed up for our product, which was lightly promoted in the guide, the affiliate who sent them to the freebie would get the credit.  This resulted in a lot of affiliates promoting the book, doing reviews, and posting in social sites about it.

Blog Reviews

There are surely bigger bloggers in your niche than you.  Otherwise, why would you be here learning what you’d already figured out?  So get to them.  Make sure they know about your new guide, get a copy attached in your email, and that you’d like their feedback.  All bloggers are desperate for GOOD things to write about.

Give them ideas on how they (or you) could write a piece on some key points in the full guide.  Offer to guest post for them now what they see you are clearly a serious player with something valuable to pass on to their readers.  Provide them with an offer they cannot refuse.  Make it juicy, too good to pass up, and laden with value to them up to and including bribing them with traffic by offering to market the heck out of their resulting review post.

And remember, “No” is just the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of one!

Instant Social Gratification

Luckily for you, you’ve been building up your Twitter following and other social profiles, right?  Here’s why all that work is about to pay off.  You are going to announce your new free guide to the world.  Your Twitter followers will “retweet” your announcement and it will spread all over the social web like a virus.  Once people are talking about this killer free guide and how they can’t believe you are not charging for it, everyone will want to talk about it and download it in your niche.  This I guarantee!

Not connected yet?  Well now you know just how much it is worth it to be respected and followed by groups all over the social spectrum.  All is not lost.  One week of hard Twittering, Facebooking, StumblUponing, and other nose-to-the-grindstone social media work can do wonders with your following.

For instance: the biggest people in your market probably use Twitter.  Find them, follow them, and message them directly about your guide.  Ask them to retweet or tweet about it for you.  They want news to report to keep their own Twitter followers actively following them.  They have an obligation to their followers to provide cool resources 90% of the time.  That’s a lot of Tweeting they need to get done.  Give them a reason to get a Tweet out of the way without even having to think by sending them a link to your guide and a nudge to mention it if it so moves them.

This works.  Fact is, most people just won’t try it.  You get in front of THEIR followers, and not only will you get a mega ton of subscribers downloading your guide, but your Twitter followers will go up as well!

Again, the reason this doesn’t work for more people is simply that most people assume it doesn’t work, so they don’t do it.  Believe me, Guy Kawasaki and people like him have a strong desire to Tweet as much as possible.  Give them a great free guide to brag about and make themselves look good for sharing, and many of them will pick it up.

Step 5:  Seriously Launch It!

The tactics above need to become part of a serious strategy.  You need to hit the web hard and all at once with this to make the biggest impact.  Everyone in your niche needs to be talking about it at the same time, before the fire dies down and people start assuming everyone has already heard about your guide and decide not to promote it.

The worst thing you can do is “trickle” this thing out the door.  Whatever you decide you are going to do to promote, set a window of time for the launch and focus on that exclusively the whole time.  The more people you can get talking in the beginning greatly determines the initial number of subscribers you get, and also whether or not you hit “critical mass” in links from other sites to keep subscriptions coming in for a long time to come.

Recap

1. Create a product with a real market value and plan on giving it away to people who opt in.
2. Set up your list exclusively for this giveaway promotion with effective, helpful, monetized followup sequences ready to go.
3. Create a great landing page that is low on copy but high in value proposition and impact.
4. Design the campaign for launch just like you would for a paid product.  Have a launch window and hit the market hard and from every possible angle so the majority of your market hears about your guide through the tactics shared here in the shortest possible time.

Depending on the size of your market and how well you implement the key tactics above, you can expect to watch hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of subscribers joining your list in a short time period, loving your giveaway, praising you publicly for it, and ready to hear what else you have to share with them.

Tagged as: building a list, email marketing strategy, getting subscribers, list building