Author Audience Affluence feat. Benjamin Hardy Ph.D

In June of 2015, I wrote my very first viral article on medium.com and immediately got picked up by Huffington Post, Business Insider, New York observer, all of those things. Within the first week, I had over 3 million views. It was the number one article on many of those platforms. My concern was that I only had 113 emails in my Infusionsoft account. And I was wondering, what's the problem? You know, with millions and millions of views, I should have tens of thousands of emails in my list because this is huge. So what was my problem? Well, it dawned on me after almost all my traffic was gone that I needed to go into my article and Medium and edit it.

Many of you have written and published articles on the Internet. On the day that your article was published, it was one of over 1.2 million published that day alone. That's how many articles are published on the Internet. That's why most entrepreneurs and content marketers only generate a couple thousand emails monthly based on their writing. Ben Hardy averages 20,000 new people to his email list monthly without spending a penny on advertising. That's why I've asked him to teach us how to use a blog as a powerful list building strategy. As you know, a blog is simply an article that you write and that you distribute it on the Internet. And it can be a powerful tool to build your email list. Ben is the number one writer out of several million writers on medium.com in the world, which is one of the biggest entrepreneurial platforms on the Internet. Ben is still in school, and yet his first book commanded a quarter million dollar advance. And Ben has gifted you a galley copy of that book. And here's the copy. It says willpower doesn't work. Discover the hidden keys to success. So it's available to all of you as part of your gift bag. It officially comes out in March. And so what I'd like you to do is read the pages that there will be a bookmark in the book. When you get it, you'll love the story of how he got on this stage. Today, Ben's second book will command over a million dollar advance. And remember, he's still in school. So Ben's title is Author audience, how you can add 20,000 people to your email list monthly. Please welcome Ben Hardy.

Thanks, Joe, and thank you all. Really excited to be here. First off, I just want to really thank Joe's team. They've gone above and beyond and so just thank you. Okay, so how to add 20,000 people to your email list monthly. Right now, what you're looking at is a picture of my infusionsoft account as of two days ago. And as you can see, I've gotten nearly 30,000 new emails in the last 30 days. And again, this is all organic traffic. Haven't paid a penny. And this has all happened through blogging. And basically what most of you know, a blog, just articles written on the Internet, distributed. The goal is to have them go viral. So I know that a lot of you obviously are entrepreneurs, business leaders, perhaps you don't think you have enough time to write articles, but by the end of this talk, I'm going to show you how simple it can be, how easy it can be. And really, this is a very important strategy for growing your list, growing your audience, growing your trust. So, yes, you do have time. Yes, you can do it. By the way, as said by Joe, there's a handout. It's actually in the copy of my book. And those galleys weren't in there yesterday. They're being put in there literally right now. So my story starts in June of 2015. This is when I wrote my very first. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong thing. So In June of 2015, I wrote my very first viral article on medium.com and immediately it got picked up by Huffington Post, Business Insider, New York observer, all of those things. Within the first week, I had over 3 million views. It was the number one article on many of those platforms. My concern was that I only had 113 emails in my Infusionsoft account. And I was wondering, what's the problem with millions and millions of views? I should have tens of thousands of emails in my list because this is huge. So what was my problem? Well, it dawned on me after almost all my traffic was gone that I needed to go into my article and Medium and edit it and basically just tell people, if you liked this article, please go to to my website and you can get my free ebook. And that's the cool part about writing on places like medium, Quora, LinkedIn, is that you can just directly market. And so I edited the end, and immediately I jumped up to 3,500 email subscribers. But most of the traffic was gone and my website looked pretty much like this. And so that was my strategy for the next several months, was send people to my website and have them get my free ebook. So with the same amount of traffic, just adding that little insertion, in the end, I started averaging 1500 emails a month, same amount of traffic, just telling people directly, go to my website. So that's strategy number one. That's something you can do. Then I decided after I got a little bit more fancy and smart to change my website, make it less distracting and just have it look like this as soon as people land on it. Yes, you could still scroll down. Yes, you can still get distracted and look at other things, but by just Simply making that one change. Same amount of traffic. I went up to 3000 emails a month just sending people from my blogs to my website to get my free ebook. Then last summer I read Russell Brunson's book. If any of you haven't read it, I think probably this is another signal read it. So I stopped sending people to my website and I've never sent anyone to my website since.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait until the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And so I changed basically at the end of my articles, now I just started sending them to this opt in page. You can't scroll up and down. The only thing you could do is give me your email or leave. And this page had a 50% conversion rate, meaning that 50% of the people who landed on this page gave me their email. That one change, same amount of traffic, I had 5,000 emails a month. Then I decided to change it up last year around September. And instead of giving a full ebook, I decided people have just read an article of mine, they maybe don't want a full ebook. That's a little high commitment. So instead I made a seven page checklist, Something really low friction, high value. And just by making that one change, way more people wanted it. So 60% of the people who land on that page give me their email. And that one change led me to now getting over 20,000 emails a month with the same amount of traffic that I was getting 1,000 emails a month. So small high value checklists, cheat sheets, things like that are a lot better than big free offers. So this is essentially what my monthly traffic looks like on medium. I'm getting about 800,000 to a million clicks. And this is what my call to action looks like at the bottom of every article I write. So at the bottom of every article it says call to action. And then where the line is underlined, that is where people can click the link and that link takes them back to this landing page. And 61% of people who go to that landing page give me their email. And so this is really all you need? You don't need websites anymore? Well, it depends on your business. But if you're just trying to build an email list through content is all you need is content, an optimized landing page, and then just start collecting the emails, I would say it's very optional. And I would actually highly suggest, if you're trying to build an email list quickly, don't send people to your website because there's too many distractions there. Build a long term relationship with those people. So in the last 60 days, I've also learned and developed a lot of new strategies. So I went to my very first small group meeting, Genius Network, back in September. That was less than 60 days ago. And I actually gave a 10 minute talk. So first I want to give some serious kudos to Joe Weldon. I would not be on this stage if it wasn't for Joe Weldon. In order to speak at any Genius Network meeting, you have to work with Joel. And he helped me give an amazing 10 minute talk. And I talked about a lot of these strategies I was teaching. And Dre Redfern, who was in the meeting, he asked me, ben, how are you monetizing all of these emails? And I have plenty of ways that I'm monetizing them, but he said, no, I mean automated, like, what's the first thing people do when they get into your email list? And so he helped me. And so after just talking to Dre, and this is literally in the last 60 days, we changed my thank you page because essentially what happened was when people opted in, as soon as they would give me their email list, I mean, their email, they would go to a thank you page that basically just said, your checklist is on its way. Go check your email. Well, we changed it. And now as soon as someone opts in, they get a video from me. And it's basically an offer to buy my $27 course. And 1% of the people who opt in bought the course. And so immediately, just doing that, and I made the course in like 2 days. Immediately I started getting $200 passive income. Then I joined. Because I was so blown away at what I had learned, I decided to join Joe's 100x group or 100k group. And at my first meeting, which was last month, Joe Dean and Jason, Jason, who you just heard all, literally coached me through how to make that video better and immediately jumped up 200% and so now, just by making those couple quick tweaks, I'm making like nearly $1,000 passive income on new subscribers. And so now my list is actually becoming a buyers list. And this is just a picture of, you know, the analytics. So here's the plan of action for you. Obviously I've thrown a lot at you, but I'm going to talk now about how you can start implementing these things. The first thing I want you to think about is I want you to reframe your whole idea about what content actually is. I think one of the big things that throws people off is the idea that they need to write an article every single day or two or three articles a week. For most people. That's unsustainable even for me. And this is like my full time job. I don't even do that. So basically what you want to do is you want to build a vault of amazing content that you can then republish over and over. So this is just one example. I wrote an article, how to overcome addiction and make lasting change in your life. This was last year. I republished the same article, no changes. Six months later got 22,000 views. And then six months later I published it again, but I just changed the title and it got 5x of views. And then I just republished it again all on the same website, literally republishing the same article over and over because the content's good. And so what you want to do is you want to get maybe 50 to 100amazing articles, and I'm going to talk about what that actually looks like, and then you can just republish them every four to six months, literally. I've probably written 15 articles this year and I've gotten almost 300,000 emails because I have a lot of content that I'm just recycling at this point now. And so here are the best practices for viral articles. Obviously headline is key. You need to get very good at that. Big numbers, big promise. Bold, short sentences. People consume content a lot faster now. Short sentences, short paragraphs, lots of subheadings. Numbers work best. So once people are in an article, the first thing they do is just look at the structure. And then you want to have interesting subheadings, obviously a really strong introduction. The first thing someone's going to do after they scan it is they're going to read the intro. You want to pique their interest, make arguments. And then this is kind of the sweet spot for getting long term subscribers. Your articles want to be long form, 2,000 to 5,000 words, and then how to write prolifically. Obviously, you need to become an expert at what you're doing. Read, listen to lots of stuff. Write in your journal, 15 minutes a day. This is going to help you become a better writer, become a better thinker. It's going to help you organize your thoughts. Write first thing in the morning. Just thought, dump your ideas. That's like when your brain is most creative. That's like when your subconscious is most primed to do it. Write while you're in a peak state. Do it right after a workout. Do it like right after this meeting. Write down just any ideas. Start with a headline, start refining that headline, and then think about the article in forms of lists. What are you trying to talk about? Just structure, like the top five, 10 things you want to say, and then write it in a very sophisticated way. You're all very much professional in here. You all know what you're talking about, but you need to talk about it in a human way, not like academics. So let's keep this very simple. Write it, optimize it, monetize it. Grow 20 per month. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here.

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