MBA2215 Q&A Wednesday: How do I grow an email list on a budget?

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show Business Insights on a silver platter 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 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar100,mba.net Today's question is from Charlie and Charlie asks. I'm just getting started with my online business. It's my second month. I don't have much money to spend on marketing, but I know I need to grow my email list. How do I grow my email list on a budget? Any tips would be super awesome. Thanks Charlie. Great question Charlie. And you're totally right. Growing your email list is really important when you're getting started because if you don't have an email list, you don't have leads, you don't have anybody to sell to. But when you're getting started, many of us don't have a lot of money to just drop on ads. To grow our email list aggressively, I know, because when I got started online, I didn't have a lot of money. I had spent no money on marketing. I had to be really innovative and creative on how to grow my email list with limited cash. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you those exact strategies, as well as some new ones that I've used recently that are really cost efficient. We got a lot in store today, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Charlie asks on today's Q and A Wednesday how to grow his email list on a budget. He's got a limited amount of cash to spend on marketing. What can he do? So let's just break this down for a moment. The first thing I want to say is money is one resource you have in your business, but the other resource you have, especially when you're getting started, is time. Another one is effort. You see what money buys is time and effort. But when you don't have money, you can use your own time and effort instead of having the cash. So we're going to roll up our sleeves to try to grow our email list in organic ways, which I'll show you, as well as getting creative about how we spend our money to build our email list. Now, before we get into the strategies, a note on the quality of the leads. We want to make sure that we get high quality leads. I rather have 100 high quality leads that are ready to buy than 10,000 dud leads that are tire kickers. The quality matters. So if you're trying to grow your list, keep this in mind. When you're adding these people to your list, are they going to open your emails? Are they going to click on your links? Are they going to be interested in what you have to offer? Are they your target audience? This is really what we care about. What? Because if you can keep the quality high, our conversion rates will be high as well. So with all that in mind, let me give Charlie and you, who's listening, some great strategies when it comes to growing your email list on a budget. So the first category of strategies is called leveraging other people's audiences. Now, when you're first starting out, you don't have a large audience, you don't have a big list. You might not have a huge following on YouTube or a podcast that's pretty popular or following on social media. So what you got to do is just get in front of an array existing audience, an audience that is large. And there's many ways to do this. And I'm Going to share those strategies. Some of these are bigger, longer projects, and others are daily, small, little activities. Let's start with a daily small activity first. One of the easiest ways to start growing your email list and start growing your following is through Twitter. I know that a lot of people might be hating on Twitter these days, but in my opinion, for an entrepreneur, Twitter is probably the best social media platform to be active on. Why? Because it's easy to get in front of large audiences. What do I mean? Well, one of the first activities I would recommend anybody who's trying to grow on Twitter and then therefore grow their email list is to follow the right people. Follow people that have an audience that you want to have, that you want to get in front of. They don't necessarily need to be your competitors, but it could just be somebody who's serving an audience that'd be interested in what you have. So, for example, I sell webinar software. I sell live course software with course ninja as well. So I want to get in front of creators, people that want to sell their knowledge. So somebody that I follow is Nathan Barry, who is the founder of ConvertKit. He has an email marketing software that is built for, you guessed it, online creators. So people that follow Nathan are most likely going to be people that I want to get in front of, people that I want on my email list. So I'm going to follow Nathan Barry and everybody else just like Nathan Barry that have audiences that I want to get in front of. Now, the cool thing about Twitter is on the mobile app, when you follow somebody, it will suggest other people to follow that are similar to their topic, their niche, what they talk about, and you can just follow those people as well. So spend about, I would say a week or two, investing the time to follow the right people that have the audience already you want to speak to. Now, these people have a huge audience and people see their tweets and they read the comments and you can jump right into that conversation and you can add value. They might ask questions, they might give advice. You might give your perspective on things. And people read it and they say, wow, that's interesting. What that person said. I do this all the time. And then they, like, they comment on my post and they eventually follow me on Twitter. Now, in your bio, you can have a link to join your newsletter, join your email list, or to opt in for your lead magnet, your freebie, your guide, your ebook, your template, your whatever. And if you don't have a freebie, you can use one of our lead magnet templates that we offer for free on our website. Just go to 100 MBA net and you'll see it on our homepage. We actually do Canva templates for checklists, for ebooks, for cheat sheets. Things that you can create in a few minutes and offer as a lead magnet. So now every time you comment on a thread, in a discussion of a big popular person on Twitter, you get exposure. People find you interesting, they start to check you out, and they subscribe to your newsletter. This is a very easy and organic way, but it requires you to have consistency. It means that every day you need to go in and check out all the conversations of the people that you follow, contribute to those conversations. Even if you just say, hey, I want to contribute to five different conversations a day, that's going to be enough for you to move the needle in the long run. So this is quite simple. Easy, low investment here. Let's go a little bit heavier. Heavier on effort, heavier on time. One of the great strategies I've used over the years that is very underutilized even till today, because it's a lot of work and I like to go where it's not crowded. I like to do things that people are not willing to do because it's less competitive. And one of the strategies that has worked for me over the years is guest posting. This means I write a blog post as a guest writer on somebody else's blog, a site that has a lot of traffic. I go to a site called SimilarWeb.com and I type in the site that I might be thinking about, guest posting. And it tells me on average how much traffic they get every month. If that blog or that website gets over 200,000 visitors a month, I am happy to run them a blog post because that's a lot of traffic and a lot of exposure for me to be able to get in front of an audience. Again, I'm using the same strategy. I find blogs, I find websites that have an audience that want to get in front of. If you want a little bit of an extra strategy, go to an audience that's underserved. So, for example, I have guest posted several times on a site called Digital Photography School. It's a site teaching people who love photography how to take better pictures, how to buy the right equipment, how to be a better photographer. Now, many people that visit the site, and it's a huge site, millions of visitors every single month are hobbyists. But there is a niche within that audience that that want to go pro, that actually want to use this skill as their profession to start a photography business. And I noticed that on their site they don't have a lot of blog posts about how to monetize the skill, how to build a portfolio, how to set your prices, how to come up with a contract, how to get new gigs. So I wrote a guest post for them. I reached out to them and I actually reached out to them with the guest post already written, it's easier to say yes to that kind of request. Hey, go to the attached file. I've written the whole blog post. If you like it, go ahead and publish it. That's an easy way to get a yes, but it really makes it easy for the website to say yes because they see the quality of the post, they think it's great information and it's a win win. Now what I do is at the end of the blog post, and this is a major epic post. We're talking about 2,500 to 5,000 words and it's basically like a mini book on how to go pro as a photographer in my case. And at the bottom of the post what I say is, hey, it looks like you're very interested in this topic and you want to learn more if you made it to the end of the post. If you do, click the button below for my free workshop. And this could be an automated webinar where they can go ahead, give their name and email address and register and watch the automated webinars. It's absolutely free, but it grows my email list and for the most part the blog that I'm guest posting on has no problem with this because it's free content, I'm not selling anything and it's relevant to the blog post. So it's a win win. Now this does take work. It takes time and effort and you're studying the blog and you're figuring out what is a good article and you're pre writing it and you're adding images and all that kind of stuff. But boy is it amazing. Why? Because I still reap the benefits of that blog post or all the blog posts I've guest posted on till today. Because it's evergreen. People find that blog post via Google searches all the and they read the post and they get to the bottom and they opt into my automated webinar and they join my email list and I get evergreen growth till the end of time. So it's a really good investment. Now the third no cost organic way I recommend you grow your email lists on a budget is to guest on other people's Podcasts Most podcasts are interview podcasts. They heavily rely on guests. They need guests to have a show. So even if you can't get on the top of the top podcasts in your nich, you can probably get on the podcasts that are maybe the top 300 podcasts or between 300 and 200 and you can find where they rank and all about all the different podcasts available in the different niches and categories by just going to your podcast app, going to Apple Podcasts or going to Spotify. Apple Podcasts has more of an extensive library and their categories are better organized. So I'd recommend that you can just reach out to the podcast. Most podcasts have a website and you can go to their contact form and say, hey, I'd love to be a guest. This is how I want to add value to your guests on the show. These are the topics I talk about and this is some of the things I would like to share with them. Here are some of the strategies I like to share. This is a strategy I've been doing for a very long time. I still do it to today. Every week I'm on two to three different podcasts as a guest. So I'm on around 12 to 15 podcasts a month on average. I do between 150 to 200 podcasts every single year. When I get on these podcasts, I try to give as much value as possible. I give as many great stories and experiences and strategies and tips. At the end of the podcast they always ask you the same question as a guest. How can people learn more about you? Where can they go to learn more or to connect with you? I just send them straight to one of our freebies, one of our opt ins to grow our email list. You can send them to your automated webinar, you can send them to your next live webinar, whatever it is or that lead magnet that you just created with one of our templates. The point here is that these podcasts rely on guests. They need guests. If you're interesting, if you're good on the mic, if you have something valuable to share, you'll be a great guest and they're going to want to learn more and they want to grab something for free to continue their learning. Now pro tip if you want to really get good at this, what I like to do is I like to focus on certain topics. So when I go and approach a show I state here are the three topics I really talk about when I'm on podcasts. These are my topics, these are Kind of the areas I can add the most value. And if you'd like, you can actually create a lead magnet for each topic so that they can continue the learning, like a worksheet or a cheat sheet. And then when you talk about that topic, you can send them to that specific lead magnet. Pretty cool. And often the host of the podcast will then link it up in the show notes so that you get a backlink as well. As you can see, all these strategies didn't cost me a dime. But if you do have a bit of cash and you want to use it wisely, I do have a strategy that I want to recommend to you. To grow your email list with paid advertising.

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Alright? You got a bit of cash, you want to spend it wisely and you want to get some leads. In my opinion, the best way to grow leads with paid ads is with Facebook lead ads. What is a lead ad? Well, it's an ad on Facebook where you capture the email of the person that is looking at the ad. Often Facebook makes this easy and gives you the email that they already use for Facebook, which is pretty valuable email because it's the one that they usually check. It's a primary email. Now the reason why I recommend this type of ad is because Facebook actually runs the ad, captures the lead, meaning gives you the email address, all while not leaving Facebook. This allows you to track conversions easily, regardless of where they are or if they're on iOS device or not. You know, there's no reason why they can't track that activity because they're on Facebook now and it's fast and seamless for the actual lead. I've seen some of our students get leads as low as $0.30 per lead, which is pretty inexpensive. That means if you have like $100, you can get like 300 leads. That's pretty amazing. So what do you offer? Well, you would offer one of your lead magnets something that they can get Instant access to and with the Facebook lead ad, it's pretty easy to set up. And Facebook has a tutorial so you can just watch it. And there are a ton of videos, tutorials on YouTube you can just watch for free, walking you through how to create the creative, the imaging. Hook it up so that you actually deliver on the lead magnet. Now what Facebook does is that it just loads up all the emails in a CSV file, like an Excel file or a spreadsheet file, I should say. And you can then take that file and add it to your email marketing or your email list. You can also use a tool like Zapier that can move those contacts automatically. But in my opinion, FBE lead ads are the best way to grow leads. So you don't leave the platform, they don't go to your website where they can get lost and may not opt in. You don't have to worry about the conversion rate because if they're clicking on the ad, the likelihood of conversion is much higher because it's so quick and easy for them to opt in right on Facebook. Well, there you go. That wraps up today's Q and A Wednesdays episode. That's my advice to Charlie and everybody who's listening who's on a budget but want to grow their email list. If you love today's episode and you want to support the show to say thanks, just hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a rating and review. If you're on Apple Podcasts, it's pretty simple. If you're on Spotify, just click Follow so that you can give us a star rating. Thank you in advance for supporting the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why I recommended things like guest posting and being a guest on podcasts is that again, this is evergreen, meaning that people can find your guest post. People can find the show notes of that podcast episode later on in after it's published. It's not like an ad where when you stop running it, you stop getting leads. You will continue to get leads because people will find these posts, these website pages via Google searches or people sharing it. So it is a bit of work. It is a bit of investment, but you'll reap the benefits for days to come. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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