- Become Known as Someone Who Helps ➞
- Showcase Your Insight as an Example of Your Expertise ➞
- Have Multiple Lead Magnet Offers ➞
- Create a Product of Your Own ➞
- Have Shareable Freebies for Affiliates and Customers ➞
(Photo by Content Pixie/Unsplash)
Many people are intimidated at the thought of building a subscriber list. Having your prospective customers’ names and email addresses allows you to not only earn sales and commissions, but also serve their needs, too.
This is a mutually beneficial arrangement if you can honestly say that you will be taking care of the people who hand over their contact information. You may have tried to build an email list before, but failed to see anyone subscribe.
If this has happened to you, there are a few simple and effective things you can do to increase the odds that people will trust you enough to sign up for your list. These are not complicated or extremely time-consuming tasks to do, but they will yield positive results.
You can take the following five ideas and implement them exactly as described, or put your own spin on them to try out to see if your list begins to grow. Over time, you may see your brand grow and notice that some methods will be more effective than others with the audience you are trying to reach.
Become Known as Someone Who Helps
One of the greatest strategies that gets the ball rolling with your list building efforts is word-of-mouth. As a newbie, this may feel overwhelming to you, but it may actually be in your favor to be unknown.
When someone new comes into a niche marketplace, the eyes and ears of consumers perk up and take notice. They are always looking for fresh voices and different insights that they may want to consider.
It works the same way in corporate offices. A team of co-workers will usually only have the same old stale advice to contribute, but when a new person comes onboard, it injects some life into the conversation and offers new perspective and a different range of experiences for everyone to learn from.
It’s no different for your niche consumers who might already be familiar with leading experts in your field. The best way you can become known as a valuable contributor who truly cares about your audience is to look for opportunities to share your personalized guidance.
You can do this in online forums where people are asking questions and discussing their problems, or on social networking sites in relevant groups or on posts where people are engaging with the original author, or you can create your own content and make sure that you are publicly engaging with those who comment or interact with your posts.
Even on your own blog, you want to make sure that you keep track of new comments with notifications so that you can respond in a timely and appropriate manner. If you don’t have notifications set up and you aren’t blogging frequently, you might log in one day and suddenly realize people have been coming to you for advice, only to leave with no answers.
When you step up to serve your audience and help them with their needs, they will be sure to offer you as a recommendation in the future when someone else asks who can help them with something.
Instead of recommending hands-off marketers who are only out for a money grab, a satisfied audience will direct others to your site to get the help they need. If you have a lead magnet that is a solution to a common problem in your niche, people seeking help can be directed straight to your sign-up page.
When you’re giving out free advice to some degree, it builds a rapport and good will with prospective customers and subscribers.
Showcase Your Insight as an Example of Your Expertise
Becoming known as someone who helps your audience is one thing. You will be helping to alleviate their concerns and give them some peace of mind, often when they have struggled to find the right advice.
We’ve talked a little about where you can do this, including social networking sites, your own blog, and online forums. But how do you showcase your insight without having to rely on someone asking questions for you to answer?
Sometimes a niche audience doesn’t know what they need to ask. You can help guide them on these platforms by sharing good information for them to absorb.
First of all, make sure that your lead magnet page is up and running and that it is linked from all of your profiles. When you share information with people, they will often click on your profile to find out more about you. They want to see if you have a website they can visit, books they can read, etc.
Start by looking for common themes in your niche that people continually struggle with. You want to put a unique slant on a solution that they may have already tried and failed with or not yet considered.
Before you post a rehash of the same old advice, add some personalized perspective of your own. For example, you might talk about a case study situation where you helped someone else in the past with the same problem, or even overcame the problem yourself.
Talk about the struggles involved in order to show empathy, and then present a solution. Follow up with the results of what you have advised and how it impacted your life or the life of someone else.
Don’t be blatant about pushing people to get on your subscriber list. Just sharing information with others will be enough to have people looking for ways they can learn more from you.
If you have the ability to add a signature file on a forum, then you might be able to hyperlink some text to direct people to a free guide on your site. If you are posting on a blog to help others and showcase your expertise, make sure your sign-up form is both in the side bar as well as below each post.
When posting on social media, make sure to have some content that is easily shareable to a wider audience than just your immediate followers. Even if you have a private group for some of your customers, create another one that is public where you openly provide information that people will find useful and inspiring enough to share with others.
If you are posting videos, make sure that you brand yourself and your lead magnet in the video at the beginning and end, and allow the video to be downloaded or embedded on other people’s pages.
Have Multiple Lead Magnet Offers
On thing you have to keep in mind is that enticing people to subscribe to your email list is not like having a prix-fixe menu. Not everyone will be looking for the same information or have a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution.
To accommodate this, you want to have multiple lead magnets that you can present as a buffet of options to choose from. Not only do you want to have a variety of topics for your visitors to choose from, but you also want to cater to the media preferences of individuals as well.
Not everyone likes to read information. In fact, many people can’t stand it. So instead of only offering a report or a guide to download, you may want to offer additional formats such as infographics, slideshows, videos, or audio.
You also want to make sure that you test and tweak your lead magnet offers from time to time, to keep track of what is working best.
Create a Product of Your Own
Building an email list is not only dependent on the use of a lead magnet offer where you are presenting a freebie to your audience. It also comes through the sale of your own products.
Whenever you sell a product to someone online, they not only get a notice in their email inbox that their product is shipping or their download is ready, but if you have it set up, they can also get a subscription confirmation request from your email autoresponder system.
Creating a product is not only a good way to build your list through sales, but it also lends credibility to you as having niche expertise. If you have a product for sale, many people will sign up for your email list first in order to see what you have to offer before they are convinced to spend money with you.
You want to make sure that visitors to your blog as well as your social networking sites know that you have a product for sale. Even if you just create something very small and inexpensive like a seven-dollar report, it can be enough to encourage people to subscribe to sample your insight. It doesn’t have to be an entire library of expertise.
If you can get affiliates onboard for launching your product, this will allow you to build a list based off the subscribers of your affiliates. However, this will require more work, and you need to treat your affiliates very well because they will essentially be sharing their own hard-earned subscriber list with you.
If you decide to have a low-cost product as your front-end offer, make sure your affiliates get 100% commission on that, as well as at least 50% commission on the follow-up funnel.
While you don’t necessarily need to create a multi-product sales funnel for your own personal marketing campaign if your main goal is just to gain new subscribers, it will be a necessity if you want to recruit affiliate marketers to help promote your offer, because it has to be a profitable situation for them for them to consider.
Always remember that other marketers have already expended a considerable amount of time and resources in building and maintaining their own subscriber lists, so it would be unreasonable to expect access to their subscribers for free.
You also want to make sure that if you bring affiliates onboard and they promote for you, that you treat any new subscribers that come from their efforts with care. If you lose the trust of your affiliates, word can spread about your behavior and they will not only stop promoting you, but also warn people behind the scenes not to deal with you.
Have Shareable Freebies for Affiliates and Customers
For your affiliates, or even for your customers who want to share your insights with their personal networks, you can create shareable freebies that are branded with the link to your lead magnet page. These are considered a sample of what you have to offer, and they should be chock-full of value.
Some newbie marketers hold back on the information they provide because they’re giving it away for free. This is a big mistake, because it makes you appear to be less knowledgeable than the competition. If all you can offer is surface-level, regurgitated facts, that won’t be enough to encourage potential subscribers to give you a try.
Think about what kind of information people pass along to others. For example, people often form friendships and bonds with others who are going through similar experiences as they are. Whether it’s a good friend they met on the internet, a family member, or a co-worker, if they find good information that can help someone, they will share it with them. You want to make it clear to people that they have your permission to freely share what you are offering.
If these are normal consumers who are part of your target audience, then you can simply brand the published file with your lead magnet link and direct people how to download and share it.
However, you can also allow your affiliates to share the freebie, too. Although there has to be some expectation of being able to profit in some way from promoting you, affiliates like to use shareable freebies as part of their promotion process, because being able to give their readers a gift makes them look good, too. You can even set up a zero-cost front-end offer with the freebie linking to additional upgrade offers that the affiliate can earn more commission from, in order to further incentivize them to share as broadly as possible.