MBA1845 Q&A Wednesday: Been in business for over a year but my email list is still under 1K. Why?

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Hey oh welcome to the Hunter $100 MBA Show. No fluff, just the good stuff. Every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Vlad and Vlad asks, hey Omar, I started my online business a little over a year but my email list is still under a thousand subscribers. Why am I growing too slowly? What can I do to increase my email list? Thanks for all the goodies on the podcast. Appreciate your help Vlad. Thanks for that question Vlad. Personally, I think going from zero to a thousand email subscribers is a whole lot harder than going from 1,000 to 5 or 10,000. I'll explain why in today's lesson and how you can speed that process up. How you can help yourself to grow your email list to a thousand and beyond. What are your options? How can you do it fast? How you can do it slow? How you can do it expensively and how can you do it cheaply? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today'S question from Vlad is super solid because growing your email list is essential to growing your online business. But often growing that first thousand emails in your email subscription list is very slow. It's tedious, it's hard. I'm going to tell you it took me over a year to get my first thousand subscribers and I'm going to tell you some of the mistakes I made and if I had to do it all over again, how I would do it differently. First, let's talk about what is the fastest way to grow your email list. Well, I'll tell you right now. Paid advertisement I can grow your email list in a week to 1,000 subscribers if you give me enough money. This is the power of paid advertising. Whether you're using Facebook ads or Instagram ads or Google Ads, the point here is that you're paying to drive traffic to a landing page where people can sign up for your freebie, your free course, your free ebook, your free whatever. But that's an easy way for you to lose a lot of money. I do recommend going with paid ads, but being very smart. Most people don't have a growth problem. They have a conversion problem. If you just optimize your conversions on your pages or what you're offering your audience, you can often find your email list grow exponentially very quickly. What do I mean by this? Well, a lot of people, they say, well, my email list is not growing. I'm not sure what Vlad is doing or what his actual opt in is, but by changing what you're offering in exchange for somebody's email, this can often improve your growth tremendously. Not only do I recommend you improving what you're offering, but how you offer it, the actual words on the page, how you convince people to sign up to your email list. This is why I'm a big, big believer and supporter of webinars, webinars are great value. A lot of people sign up for webina webinars because they want to learn something whether it's live or recorded. There's just so much perceived value with it. And this helps you grow your email list very quickly. But even with webinars on that registration page, your job is to treat it like a sales page. To sell the free thing, the free course, the free workshop, the free challenge. What's in it for them? What are they going to learn? What are they going to get? Why should they sign up and never miss this opportunity? Most people don't put the effort in selling their opt in selling why they should join their email list. A lot of people, the maximum effort they do, and I've seen this all over the Internet, is join my newsletter, get weekly updates, get more blog posts like this one. This is not compelling. This is incredibly boring. This is an easy way for you to be ignored. You want to stand out from the crowd by offering exceptional value for your opt in. When I started doing this, I saw my email list growth triple. I started offering webinars live and recorded. I started offering full length seven part video courses. I just went above and beyond what other people were offering in my niche. In my marketplace I was offering valuable downloadables, not white pages and ebooks that they'll never read just because they just never make the time for it. No one said that your book is not valuable, just that people just don't have the time for it. So I started creating downloadables that are fast acting templates, scripts, things they can download and use immediately. So increasing the value of what you're offering in exchange for email is the easiest way for you to start growing email lists faster. And of course if you throw fuel on that by running ads, that's going to make it even faster. So I wouldn't recommend you running ads until you actually improve the actual opt in and the actual page you are offering that opt in on so you have higher conversions. I can send 100 people to a page, but if one person signs up, that's a horrible conversion. 1% for a free opt in. I want to get that up to 20, 30% so I can get more bang for my advertising dollars. Now if you're not using paid ads, then you're going to have to use some sweat and some effort and some relationships, do some partnerships with other crowds, whether that's offering a free workshop for them, giving them great content, writing a guest post, and then at the bottom of the guest post you have, you know, a place where they can sign up for your next webinar or for your ultimate, ultimate guide on something that is on the same topic or your free course. The point here is that you gotta leverage somebody else's audience, somebody who already has the people that you want, and get them to go on your email list. Partnerships is a big way. We really saw our email list just absolutely explode because I'm coming in vouched. I'm coming in from somebody saying, hey, this is my buddy Omar. He's great value. You're my audience, I trust him. Listen to what he's got to say. Sign up to his webinar, his thing. And it's so simple because I've already gained a lot of credibility from the partner and they have already introduced me to their audience. So I already have a huge, huge chance of getting a high conversion there on whatever I offer them. Now, of course, it has to be something of value. Now you might be saying, hey, how do I get these partners? Who do I meet? Why would they do this for me? If this is pure value? If you're like, hey, I want to give them a workshop on this. I'm an expert at this. I want to give them some great content. No sales pitch, no nothing. Often people will be happy with that because it's a value add to their community. It's something that they are giving to their community as an extra. And a lot of people like that. Another way is you can literally pay people for, hey, I want to run a free workshop. I'm not going to sell anything. I just want to give great value. Would you mind emailing your list? You know this webinar registration page invite and for your efforts, happy to throw you $500 or $1,000. Trust me, if that email list that this partner has is big enough for and the right audience for you is going to be tremendous value. It's going to be a whole lot more valuable than running ads. My last strategy is actually one of the most powerful strategies and it's called word of mouth marketing. Now people are actually going to talk about you by accident. You have to create what' a bubble, right? You gotta create a niched bubble. And the way you do this is in a certain niche, you become a household name. You become kind of like the talk of the town. Because everybody in that niche knows everybody and they have heard of you. Because in that world, it's a small world. So let me give you an example. Let's say I wanted to grow my email list for webinar Ninja, my webinar software company. Instead of trying to target the world, I'm going to target a very niche audience, A niche community. People that teach photography, but not just any kind of photography, pet photography, photography for pets. Their whole world is all about how to take great photos of people's pets. I'm going to find every single blog, every single online community, every single thought leader in this area and I'm going to build a relationship with them. I'm going to run webinars for them, I'm going to do workshops, all for free. I'm going to write guest posts for them, I'm going to get on their podcast. And within about six to 12 months, I become the talk of the town. Everybody in that community feels like you're everywhere, like you are a celebrity in their world. And people start talking about you because they see you in all the places they frequent. This is equivalent to being on like 50 billboards in a small town. Everybody in that community just sees you everywhere and they're like, okay, this person must be huge and credible because everywhere I go I see their face, I see their message. You're creating the same effect, but in a small niche. And guess what? They start telling other people outside that niche, their friends and family, their other friends in business, other friends in different markets, and you start expanding outside of that niche. You'll master that niche and move on to another niche. And you do that over and over and over until you create this snowball effect. This is a very strategic and effective long term strategy. And this is how anybody takes over a market takes over large markets. McDonald's started with one branch, then two, then three, then four different locations in key places. They didn't just say, hey, we're going to open 2,000 branches at once. No, you could do the same with your online business, guys.

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Welcome back. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 BA Show. I love this question about growing your email list because it's really an Art. It's really that you have to dedicate yourself to getting better and better at at the end of the day. Why do you sign up for anybody's newsletter? Sign up for anybody's opt in, get on anybody's list because you find that person valuable, you find that brand valuable. You like to receive emails, you're delighted to be on their list. If you become that for anybody, you will see your list grow. Try to think a little bit bigger than just tips and tactics. Think about how can I be more valuable to my potential custom? So they're dying to get my next piece of content. They're telling other people, they're referring other people to my blog. You know what I'm talking about. There are certain companies, certain brands that when you see their name in your inbox, you open that email, you read it, you can't wait. Be that for your customers. Thanks so much for listening and thanks for the great question, Vlad. If you got a question you wanna ask on Q and A Wednesdays, just go ahead and email me at omar100mba.net before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sell getting somebody on your email list like you're selling a product. See it like that. See it like you're buying a contact. You're buying something. In order to buy something, you have to give something in exchange. And for you, that's value. That's something valuable to them, valuable information, valuable tools, something. You got to sell that something of value to them to say, hey, you know what it's worth me giving my name and email. If you take it in that perspective, if you see it in that way, you'll start to prioritize growing your email list over your actual product. Actually, you're like, hey, if I grow my email list big enough with the right people, when I do launch a product or service, it's going to be easy to sell because that crowd loves me and I have a big enough crowd to sell to. Thanks so much for being a listener of the $100 MBA show. I will check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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