I finally did it! I topped 100 subscribers today. I'm all about celebrating small achievements with internet marketing and thought I'd share how I did it with my fellow Warriors. I hope this post will inspire you to keep working on your own email list. And if there are any lead generation experts in the house, I welcome any tips that could improve my strategy even further. I signed up for AWeber last September and had nothing but a homepage up from about September to November of '09 with a email list sign up box. It took me longer than it should have to get my blog up and content written for the website. I've been doing SEO consulting for a few years now, but I'm just getting into the holistic internet marketing scene that involves copy writing, sales funnels, USPs, and all that other marketing jargon so getting my website set up the way I wanted took more time than I expected It was tough to get any sign ups at first. I only had 5 or 6 after my first couple of months. I was going with the “Hey, Sign Up for Monthly Newsletter Filled With Amazing Tips and Tricks†ad copy. Pretty lame. I don't have much experience with lead generation. Eventually, I started to get a bit more creative. Instead of offering a free tips and tricks newsletter to visitors, I gave away the same monthly report templates, billing invoices, and sales letter I used for my own consulting business. I spent months making these documents just right for my SEO clients and was very reluctant to give these away for free. Fortunately, I started getting into Perry Marshall's work. His advice was to give away your best content free, then give away even more in an auto responder sequence. Reluctantly, I decided to give it a try since my strategy wasn't working so well. I decided to put up a new sign up page--with a monthly report, invoice and sales letter—and I noticed an immediate increase in sign ups. Instead of getting 3 or 4 sign ups a month, I was getting 3 or 4 sign ups a week. Still small potatoes, but I was pretty stoked. Today, my traffic volume is still very low. Although, I am seeing a slow increase in traffic over time. I've been working hard to create regular blog posts, write guest posts for a couple other blogs, and stay semi-active on Twitter. I've also own a consulting business so depending on client needs on any given week I don't have much time for my pet project. But hey, everybody's strapped for time right? With that being said, here are a few of a big take aways I learned from my first 100 sign ups. I hope my experience can help other Warriors build out their list: * Google traffic converts much better than Twitter or Facebook. This makes sense based on the different type of traffic, but sign ups from these two traffic types are absolutely night and day for me. So far Twitter has is converting at 0% for me. Google, on the other hand, is converting at an exceptional 22.57%. I also do very well from the Warrior Forum where traffic signs up for my Fast Start Kit at a rate of 15%. * The landing page also determines the odds of a sign up. Organic search traffic that lands on my homepage or my Fast Start Kit page sign up for my email list at about 18%. However, organic traffic that arrives on one of my blog posts rarely signs up. The sign up rate is about around 2% on my blog. I plan to do some testing with the sign up fields as I don't do a very good job explaining the benefits of a sign up on the blog. * I've had a couple days with 50+ unique visitor days coming in via Twitter with no sign ups. Social media is another area of online marketing I'm still wrapping my head around. * The more you blog, the more you get linked to, the more traffic you get. I check my back links regularly and have been surprised to see the websites that are linking to me. I plan to continue posting high quality content every week to build up my long tail organic traffic and create an even larger list. Thanks for reading. If there's anything I left out in this post let me know and I'll be happy to share. Until then, happy list building!
Wow...Congratulations! I've also recently started 3 lists on some affiliate websites that I've got....the biggest list has now 54 subscribers so I'm about half way Anyway, what I've learned is that you have to send people to a squeeze page where they only have the option to sign up to your list and get the free bonus or to leave the page if they don't want to do that. If you put your sign-up form somewhere in your site with other stuff around it, people will get distracted and the sign-up rate will fall. See you at 300
Great to read an article that is so honest. Good information for anyone wanting to get into internet marketing. Write and submit articles will help to increase your traffic.
Its inspiring a lot. You have shared your experience and it motivate to others to build innovative strategy.
McBrett, I enjoyed your writeup. That is inspirational. It lets me know that I am not the only one that is realizing that this is a long term project that requires plenty of hard work. I would be honored if you would submit a link and an article. Mark
Well done on your first 100. For me I got a large boast in traffic when an article I wrote got on the most viewed section on EZA. Once on there it seemed to spread like crazy, and there are now over 7,000 links to that article, which links to 2 websites. This really converted me on article marketing as a good method of getting traffic. Thanks for the info on your experiences with twitter - that was going to be my next area of research! Your mailing list = power in this game. Are you going to do any ad-swaps? You know what I found the hardest, and actually still do? Writing the autoresponder series! Something you don't (well most people?) actually think that much about - I was to excited about getting traffic and building the list!
Thanks for all the great feed back and advice on this one everyone. I'm glad I decided to post my experiences. @MrSparrow I can totally see a squeeze page with only one option converting better. That's pretty much what my homepage is at the moment, although it wasn't really on purpose. The only action you can take above the fold is to sign up for my list or add me on Twitter. You've got to scroll down to visit my blog, about me page, etc. Elizabeth-Mary I agree. Article writing is something I need to dedicate some additional hours for. I'm also trying to dedicate time to guest posting. But unfortunatley, I'm kind of a slow writer. @bitbotdotcom: Link submitted! I can always use more of those. @Frankstar: By EZA are you referring to Ezine Articles? I haven't posted any of my content there yet. But since my website is about SEO/Internet marketing/business, it's probably a good audience to put my content in front of. As for the Twitter thing. I'd still test it out. You might be able to develop a better strategy around it than me. I haven't done any ad swaps yet either. As for the auto responder content, it's been hard for me too. I'm giving away a lot of good SEO business info, but sometimes I wonder if I'm writing about the topics people want to right about. ------------ My adventures in list building continue. I've got an opinion question as well... I'm starting to create an SEO business product. How large should my list be before making it available for order?
Congrats and thanks for the tips! I am looking to setup a newsletter for my site(s) but I have always struggled with getting signups. Thanks again!
I checked out your blog. I have visited it before. I actually recognized it from a Google search query...congrats...that's our goal...
@TextGalore What's your website with the newsletter signup? Maybe we can brainstorm some ways to get more people to sign up. @thebitbot.com Thanks. I love links! How did you go about setting up your directory? I've considered creating a local one before, but I'm not a programmer so I don't really know how to make one fast.