In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about expanding a small subscriber list for an SEO business. He advises against buying cold, over‑used lists because they yield low‑quality leads and waste marketing effort. Instead, he recommends growing the list through strategic partnerships with businesses that serve the same target audience but offer complementary, non‑competing services. He outlines several partnership tactics: offering joint promotions with revenue sharing, having partners review your product, writing guest posts on each other’s sites, and co‑creating joint products to market to both audiences. Evan stresses the importance of targeting partners who have loyal, engaged subscriber bases, arguing that a smaller, highly‑qualified list outperforms a large, disengaged one. He concludes with a typical call‑to‑action, encouraging viewers to like, comment, and engage with future content.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today's question comes from Steve, who's from my forums, and he was asking about getting a subscriber list. So he wrote in saying, "I have a base of customers from an SEO business, but only around 120 subscribed names. Is there a way of getting a larger list of targeted people?" Without buying a list that's been hit so many times, they're cold leads. Thanks, Steve. So Steve, great question. I'm not a huge fan of targeting lists that have been bought. Usually again, you know, they have been hit so many times that they're cold leads and they're not really qualified people. So you spend a lot of time creating your messaging and the content and, you know, getting the list and you're talking to people who are not, you know, really prospective customers for your business. So I do a little bit more work at the beginning to find the targeted people, that way all all the work that you do on the backend with your content and your promotion is going after people who are potential customers for you, which is at the end of the day what you want for your business. I think the best way to be able to grow that business, grow that lead, you know, that list, that number, is to be able to partner up with people. So look for people who are already targeting your audience. So not a direct competitor, but people who have complementary services, and see if there's a way you can partner together. And it could be a number of different ways. It could be them you know, making an offer to their subscriber base and them getting some kind of cut out of it. It could be them doing a review of your product or service. It could be you writing a guest post for their website. It could be you guys creating a joint product together and going to market together to both of your lists. Find creative ways. You know, start talking to people who, again, who are targeting the same audience that you are but sell complementary services and not competitive services. Talk about what you're doing in your business. See if there's a way you might be able to partner up together And you know, if you do that with enough people, if they have a good list, each of them, then you're able to target each of those lists individually and be able to build your name. So that's one of the best ways. Ideally, they already have some kind of relationship. So for example, people on my list, they're used to getting emails from me on a weekly basis with content and videos and helpful information to help them grow their business. So I don't really do promotional offers, but if I talk about something, then the people who are on my list are, you know, loyal followers, they're used to getting content from me, so they're likely to take whatever action, you know, I recommend them doing if they trust and like my advice. So you want to find partners who have a loyal following, have a list of people who are used to hearing from that person and they trust what that person is saying so that when they say, hey, this is a great product you gotta try out, or here's a review of something that I checked out and I really like, then they're gonna pay attention and they're gonna hopefully take action. So it's better to have a smaller list of highly targeted people who are really loyal to that person and are likely to take action than some massive list of people who are not engaged, don't take any action, and are really cold leads and are not targeted to the type of people that you wanna target. So hopefully that helps. I hope that can kinda gear your thinking towards finding the right partners. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes me happy seeing the thumbs ups come in, so I appreciate that. And if you have a thought, if you wanna add to this video, or if you have a question for me, I always read the comments below, so please leave a comment underneath. And we'll see you on the next episode.
