Welcome to my article about how to build an email list from scratch.
I did some research online and found many articles about how to build an email list but did not really find anything about what are the steps to start building your list before you even start.
I find this step to be the most important one in my opinion because what is your final end goal?
I mean yeah, show me how the tools to get start capturing leads but don’t show me the before steps?
I found there is a lot of missing pieces that I will cover below, so let’s start out with the steps you need to do before actually start building your list.
The Pre-Steps To Building Your Email List
There are many ways to actually start building your email list like:
- PPC Marketing
- Facebook Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Blogging
- Safelists
- Solo Ads
- and more on that I will cover later on…
…and I will eventually get into the many ways in my future articles and updates, so stay updated by subscribing. (it’s like having a free membership to a high-priced marketing course!)
But in this article, I am going to explain the ways that Many internet marketers use to capture email leads that will automatically populate into an email auto-responder.
So now I am going to break it down for you are into steps because I feel that would be a great way to follow along.
Steps To Start Capturing Email Leads
You really want to have a game plan before you start to capture leads and have an entire game plan when starting.
Think about it, if you don’t have a game plan and you simply start capturing everyone in different markets then the chances of that list that you are building purchase something that you promote are very slim, or the percentages will be very low.
Wouldn’t it make sense to generate an email list of people already interested in something that you want to promote?
Another problem that one runs into is the number of people in a particular market that you will be able to promote to.
For example… let’s say that you have an affiliate product to promote that deals with snail farming!
I mean how big do you think that market really is?
That market is very exclusive, and very small compared to something like weight loss.
So you see why doing a bit of research in a market can really pay off.
So here are some good steps to get you started.
But before we get started with the steps, you will need one vital piece to the puzzle which is…
The Autoresponder
Without a reliable autoresponder, you are pretty much dead in the water.
You do not want to take short-cuts or go with any of the free options that are out there because they simply will not provide you with the deliverability or power that a good and trusted autoresponder will provide.
The autoresponder that I would recommend is Aweber.
Aweber has been around longer than most other autoresponders on the market today and has been a staple in many of the top internet marketing gurus toolboxes for years.
Why?
Because it delivers the results that they want!
Good deliverability, great customer support, reliability, and trust.
If you do not have an autoresponder then get Aweber here through my link:
You can get started for $1 through the link above.
With that said, let’s move on to the first step.
Step 1. What Do You Want To Promote?
A good rule of thumb is to get into a market that interests you.
Like for me, making money from home was and is still a market that I am very interested in, and guess what, there is an endless supply of affiliate products, and interest in this subject that I can profit from for a heck of a long time.
How do I know this?
I did some research.
I looked at where some of the most popular products for making money online are hosted and watched out for how often new releases of these products are released.
And guess what, new offers are getting released almost every day!
Step 2. Do Some Research!
The way that I did my research is I joined some of the most popular sites that host offers that help people by teaching on the subject, ” How to make money online”.
Some of the most popular sites are:
- JVZoo
- WarriorPlus
- ClickBank
What I did is I simply joined and kept an eye out for how often new products were popping up.
These particular sites are where I went, but maybe this is not the market you want to tackle, and maybe you want to promote physical products like weight loss products or even home appliances.
So what I would do if you want to promote something like weight loss, I would go to a site like OfferVault and look for products that deal with weight loss.
And in OfferVault, they will give you information about the products, and actually give you the information about what companies host these products that you can become an affiliate for, then simply sign up to those companies so that you can promote those products.
If it’s a toaster oven, I would go to probably Amazon and become an affiliate for them to promote their products.
Step 3. Build A Website!
Now let me be the first one to say that you don’t necessarily need a website to start building an email list, but what I can tell you it really helps in the long run.
Building out a website around the subjects that your products are based on is extremely important in my opinion and I will explain why.
- The long-term value of building out a related website will bring in long-term traffic, which will result in free leads.
- It will set you apart from your competition when you provide value on and around the topics you are promoting.
- It will build trust by providing that value to your target market and in turn result in a higher percentage of sales.
- It will establish you as an expert in the field of your target market by providing value and consistent updates that will also result in more sales.
These are the facts, and this is why I would highly recommend you start building your website but do it correctly!
I’m not going to go into how to build a website in this article because…
I put out an entire course on how to get started making money online and one of the first topics that I cover is how to build your website the right way, and do it correctly that covers research, the layout of your site, the security of your site, and even how to start generating traffic and leads and sales.
You will want to click on one of the banners on this page to take you there, but don’t go there until you read this article.
Step 4. Join A Reliable and Trusted Auto Responder!
So when you’re ready to start building your list you will want a safe, trusted, and reliable auto-responder that will grow with you, and give you good email inbox deliverability.
So the one auto-responder I would recommend you get started with would be Aweber!
You can get into Aweber with a first-month trial offer for $1 and then $20 a month by clicking here.
Now with Aweber or any other autoresponder service, I would recommend you respect their terms and use policies.
What I mean is don’t go spamming people offers through emails that they will hate you for, and start complaining and clicking on that dreaded spam button in all our email providers like Gmail or Yahoo.
This is another big reason for building a targeted list of people that are interested in your target market.
Again, for those that don’t quite understand what I mean when I say “your target market”, I simply mean if you want to promote weight loss, then build your list around people interested in losing weight.
Don’t build your list and compile a list of people interested in weight loss, snail farming, make money from home, carpentry… and so on.
Because when you send out an email you will only get a percentage of your list interested and you WILL get a high spam complaint rate that WILL flag your autoresponder account which will get you a warning.
And you will only get so many warnings!
Luckily, Aweber will let you separate your lists as you start building your email list for other markets but, I will highly recommend finding a market or “niche” that you are interested in, and also do some research to find if this is a big enough market that you can earn a long term, “worthwhile income with”.
If you don’t have Aweber yet get it by clicking here for only $1 for the first month.
Step 3. Providing a “FREE Gift” or Giveaway
One of the keys to grab leads is to offer something of value for free.
And I don’t just mean give them a free crappy ebook of some crappy tutorial from 1995 that has no relevance whatsoever.
What I mean is to give away something that is:
- Relevant to your market
- Of value that people will find very interesting (this is where some research really pays off)
- That is relevant for what is working now or relevant in the present year. (PLR will work for this, but I would def. re-purpose the content to make it original to your style)
Get some cheap eBox images made from a place like a fiver for $5 or if you got the graphical chops for it, make it yourself if you can so you can present it at your opt-in page.
Keep it simple, but provide value, and do some research!
That little extra you put into putting your free gift together will really pay off.
Step 4. How To Build An Email List
You will want to start capturing leads now that you have everything you need.
You have your market, your auto-responder, and a website, but the question is “How do I start building my list?”, Right?
I will cover one of the easiest ways to help you start capturing leads that will work flawlessly with the tools that you already have set up.
Again, I want to mention that if you want the full explanation with the option for video tutorials on how to set up EVERYTHING you will need then I will highly suggest you take advantage of my course by clicking on one of the banners on this page but wait till after you read this article.
With that said I will go ahead and touch on this subject here with a great tool that will cut out a ton of the frustrations of setting up your capturing pages and boxes.
The tool I am talking about that I will cover here is called…
Thrive Leads is a powerful WordPress plugin that has beautiful pre-designed lead capture templates that offer popups, stand-alone capture pages, widget area opt-ins, ribbons, 2-step opt-in pages, and more!
I would suggest getting Thrive Leads as soon as you can.
You can purchase Thrive leads at the link below.
I want to first say that there is a TON of lead building plugins that you can get for free to the premium cost and trust me that I have tried most of them, but this particular plugin is the best in my opinion.
It offers the best training and best support in the industry and is designed for the marketing.
I feel that it is the best lead capture software that is on the market.
You will want to get this lead capture WordPress plugin as soon as possible.
With Thrive Leads you can create highly customized beautiful lead capture boxes, widgets, top bars, bottom bars, slide-ins… YEAH, it’s that good!
I will be creating an article that specifically goes over the feature of this plugin soon that will cover all of the amazing features and benefits you get with it, but for now, just get it.
With this plugin, you can capture leads with the traffic you generate with ease.
Step 5. Start Generating Traffic!
Like I mentioned above there are plenty of ways to start generating traffic.
Using Blogging to Build an Email List
One of the best ways to get started that you don’t need any money to start with would be is blogging.
I created a complete guide on how to set-up a powerful blog that gets traffic and leads that you can get here.
When done right you can generate traffic for years without much work after the initial article.
A post that I made a few years ago consistently earned me a couple of thousand dollars per month about bitcoin training for over a year, and I still earn from that same post even today!
It only took me a few hours to put it together and get some SEO magic to it, but that was it!
The only thing I do now sends some internal links to it from time to time to maintain rankings and maybe a backlink or 2 that only takes me 3 minutes to do.
Not bad right?
But it is not all positive, what you have to take into consideration that it takes time to rank these articles that you create.
Sometimes a TON of time!
And that is why many people do not care about blogging that much, and some have a love-hate relationship as well.
And that is what leads me into another form of traffic called paid traffic.
Paid Traffic to Build an Email List
There is simply a ton of ways to get traffic instantly by simply paying for it but the drawback can be catastrophic.
Think about it, you spend $100 – $500 on some traffic that you “think” will work, and after the ad spends runs out, you’re left with a couple of leads and no traffic.
Then your out $500 bucks!
You can also look at it in a way that you now know that the way that you drove that traffic did not convert so don’t do that again.
There are a ton of metrics that you can get by having a failing campaign but that will be left for another article.
Using Social Media Platforms To Build an Email List
This is the rage right now, and many people are flocking to it because of its ease, and with some results, sometimes very good results.
The main social media platform that many people like to use to generate email leads and traffic from is Facebook although there are others worth noting like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to name the other top platforms, Facebook is truly the king of the giants right now.
With Facebook, they also have an ad platform that you can pay for ad placements through the news feed and sidebar that is extremely powerful for generating a HUGE email list when used correctly.
Step #6 Rinse and Repeat
Once you learn how to build an email list from everything I’ve listed above you simply want to drive more traffic to your capture pages or blog posts which will turn into email leads.
So keep driving traffic and continue to do your research on topics related to your target market and create articles that you know generate traffic.
Keep repeating the process and before you know it you will start driving a ton of traffic that will add a ton of leads to your email list daily and consistently even when you decide to take a day or 2 off.
Final Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed my article on how to generate an email list from scratch, and I hope you can take some of my experience and apply it to your own business to get some awesome results.
If you enjoyed this article please like and share it by clicking on one of the social media links listed on this page, it really helps.
Thank you.
