MBA2229 How To Get Your First 1,000 Email Subscribers
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
Omar Zenhom breaks down the "one, one, one" method: create one lead magnet for one product, promote it on one channel, and commit for 90 days to hit 1,000 subscribers. Facebook lead ads can cost $0.50 to $2 per subscriber and bring in buyers ready to convert.
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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product 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 O welcome to the Hundred Doll, the place to be to build a business you want 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 in today's lesson you will learn how to get your first 1,000 email subscribers. This lesson is so important for any new entrepreneur because I believe the first thousand is the hardest, but it's the most important. Why? If you have a strong email list, even if it's just a thousand people, it can mean a full time income for you and your business. If those thousand people are hungry for what you have and are pretty primed to buy through your nurturing sequence and you can get a 10% conversion rate meaning 10% of the people on your email list convert into a customer, meaning they buy your products or services, that's 100 customers. With 100 customers you can make a good living. At the very least a start. If you're ARPU, your annual revenue per customer is $1,000. You got yourself a $100,000 business in your first year. That's why I think it's so important to get your email list to 1000 strong subscribers as soon as possible. In today's lesson, I'm going to show you how we're going to focus on speed, but we're also going to focus on quality. Want to make sure that these people are actually primed buyers, people that are very interested in what you offer. We're going to be very specific about how we actually entice them to join our email list in a highly valuable way and how to get new subscribers every single day. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Support for today's show comes from virtual gurus. Many business owners get stuck. They can't scale their business anymore because they've run out of all the time they have. They're working, they're hustling, but it's just not enough. The key to scaling your business is offloading work you shouldn't be doing. You need to start building a team of people doing tasks that are sucking your time but not really your secret sauce, your superpower that you love doing every day. How do you start building that team? Well, that's where virtual gurus come in. They help you build a team around you to get the support you need without breaking the bank. They match you with skilled, remote administrative talent and you pay only for the hours you need. With an affordable subscription plan with no long term commitments or recruiting costs, you can build the support team you need while keeping your operation lean, saving you up to 40% compared to traditional hiring costs. And virtual gurus can help you find great people with great skill sets in all kinds of areas like bookkeeping and data entry, sales and marketing support, email and calendar management, and a whole lot more. They can connect you with one general assistant or multiple specialized assistants. But one of my favorite things about virtual gurus is that they're on a mission to provide meaningful work opportunities for underrepresented communities. So you'll benefit from an incredibly diverse talent pool. Book a free consult@thevirtualgurus.com MBA that's thevirtualgurus.com MBA and get the support you need. Let's get you your first or next thousand email subscribers to your list. Now remember, we're looking for high quality subscribers, people that are one, interested in what you have for sale and two, have the ability to buy it. So if you want high quality subscribers, we need to create high quality content. We're going to use that content to attract them to sign up for our email list. Now, many people try to attract people with some pretty cookie cutter lead magnets things like join my newsletter or get updates or here's my 300 page ebook. Here's the reality. If your potential email list subscriber does not see an immediate benefit to signing up, they're just not going to sign up. Join my newsletter doesn't really tell them much. Doesn't really entice them to say, oh, I got to sign up right now for that. I'm dying to get more emails in my inbox about content I have no idea is going to be about. I know that sounds absolutely silly, but there are plenty of people that are trying to grow their email list this way. So instead we're going to give them something that they actually want, something that they would probably pay if they had to, and we're going to give it away for free in exchange for them signing up to our newsletter. So what do we give them? Well, you got to look at what you sell and you want to make sure that whatever you give them is closely aligned to that. For example, I sell a course called the Automated Webinar challenge. It's a 30 day course on how to build your own automated webinars to gain leads and sales. This is the product. What's a good lead magnet for this? Well, it's actually something similar to the product meaning great content. So I offer them as my lead magnet to lead to this product. A masterclass. This is an in depth workshop, about 30 to 40 minutes that gives them a ton of value. They may not build enough trust with me because I'm a stranger to buy my course yet. So let me give them a taste of what the course is all about. This is super high value because they're getting it instantly and they're getting a bunch of valuable information and content and strategies for nothing. A lot of people pay money for these types of masterclasses, these types of workshops, these types of mini courses. I put a lot of effort into this actual masterclass. I script the whole thing. I have beautiful looking slides. I have a good setup for my video and my screen sharing, you know, making sure I capture my screen and my video. It's edited properly, it's in great quality and I put it on a page that's highly professional and well designed. I also create a video again to promote the video. This is like my sales video. I pretend like my masterclass that I'm giving away for free is a product that I'm selling, except I'm just asking them to put their name and email address in a box so that I can send them access. Now you might be saying this is a bit of effort, this is a bit of work. And my answer to you is, you're correct, you're 100% correct. And this is what makes it valuable, is that you're actually putting more time, attention in what you're giving away so you can attract the right people. Now most people don't do this and therefore you stand out and you build a lot more credibility in the process. Now the good news is that you're not going to do this more than once, especially if you're just growing your email list to a thousand subscribers. If you're just starting out, you're going to use the one, one, one method. That's three ones. What's that? Well, we're gonna create one lead magnet that is gonna allow us to sell one product. So one lead magnet that is aligned to one product. But this is just the first one, that one lead magnet. What's the second one in this equation? Well, we're gonna choose one marketing channel to promote this lead magnet so that we can grow our email so we can get people to the page to sign up. You need to find the best option for you to promote this lead magnet. Now this is in addition to obviously having it on your website, on your homepage, on a home banner and pop ups on the, you know, right or left column of your blog, in the bottom of your blog post. You want to put it everywhere possible on your website. But external marketing, you need to choose a channel, one channel. So if you're a big YouTuber, make sure you promote it on your YouTube channel. If you love Twitter, then make sure it's a pinned post on your Twitter feed as well as in your B and that you're periodically creating content to drive traffic to it. Again, pretend the opt in is an actual product that you're promoting. Choose one channel and go all in. So one channel is the second one. The third one is you're going to do this for one quarter, right? Three months. You're going to focus on just getting people to sign up for your email list because you're giving them great value with this piece of content. You're going to promote it on your one channel and you're going to do it for three months, one quarter. So that's around 90 days. So if you do the math, 1,000 subscribers over 90 days, that's around 11 subscribers a day. That's your goal. Every day you want to get on average 11 subscribers. Some days will be more, some days a bit less. In the beginning it's going to be a lot less because you're gaining momentum. But now you have a goal. You know what you have to do. The job here is to focus, okay? Focus on creating one great piece of content. One great opt in, one marketing channel. You're going to go all in and dominate and you're going to do for one quarter. Now what if you want to fast track your results? Well, we're going to get into that in a moment. But before that, let me show love to today's sponsor, the Virtual Gurus. Support for today's show comes from Virtual Gurus. The biggest lesson I've learned in the last 10 years as an entrepreneur is that my time and what I spend my time on is the single thing that will determine my success. If you want to drive your business forward, you gotta find the discipline to focus on the key priorities you need to tackle while getting the right support for the things others can do for you. How do you find these people that can do this work for you? Well, that's where virtual gurus comes in. You can get the support you need to outsource the tasks you shouldn't be doing without breaking the bank. They match you with skilled, remote administrative talent and you only pay for the hours you need through an affordable subscription plan with no long term commitments or recruiting costs. That means you can build the support team you need while keeping your operations lean, saving you up to 40% compared to traditional hiring costs. Virtual Gurus can match you with remote assistants who have a range of skill sets including bookkeeping and data entry, sales and marketing support, email and calendar management, and more. Book a free consult@thevirtualgurus.com MBA that's thevirtualgurus.com MBA and get the support you need.
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Solved AI's biggest problem, and it's saving 4 million teams from productivity loss every day. Unlike ChatGPT and other AI tools, ClickUp converges all your work into one platform so your AI super agents have full context to prioritize tasks, execute workflows and draft documents instantly. Teams using ClickUp finish work 30% faster and cut meetings in Half. Try ClickUp for free today and get 15% off AI upgrades@ClickUp.com podcast. That's C-L-C-Kashup.com podcast. Alright, you want to pour some gas on the fire and you want to grow this email list as fast as possible? Well, the answer is paid ads. Paid ads are basically a way for you to borrow somebody else's audience so that you can be able to grow yours faster. If you're running Facebook ads, then you're borrowing Facebook's audience. Now, every market, every niche will differ in terms of how low they can go when it comes to cost per lead. But generally speaking, I found that Facebook lead ads are generally the best paid ad option when it comes to growing your email list. Why? Because they don't actually leave Facebook. You are capturing the lead right in Facebook. So it's fast, it's easy, it's convenient for the subscriber. But also it's easy for you to track your results and get higher conversions because you don't have to worry about people blocking cookies or pixels not being tracked because of, you know, Apple, iOS 14.5, none of those shenanigans. Everything happens very quickly right on Facebook. And basically it's you're creating the opt in right on Facebook. People give their name or email address or they just use their Facebook email, which is probably a pretty high quality one. And Facebook just saves all these names and email addresses in a spreadsheet file that you can download or you can use something like Zapier to have them migrate to your email list or your CRM. I've had various results with lead ads, but the range is I've gotten leads as low as $0.50 to two doll. Pretty impressive. Let's say you're paying a dollar per lead, $500 for 500 email addresses. A pretty good investment actually given the fact if they are strong leads, and again 10% of them buy from you within a year, that's 50 customers. Depending on how much your average customer spends in a year, that's pretty, pretty good. $500 is a drop in the bucket. So I definitely would go down this route. If you were looking to do paid ads to speed up this situation or speed up your list growth, I'd highly recommend this, especially if you're a brand new website that has very little SEO. It's not really well indexed on Google, you're not getting a lot of word of mouth traffic. You need to buy your traffic and buy your leads through a borrowed audience like Facebook. And there you have it very, very simple. But it's a bit of work and it's an investment. Create one strong lead magnet that's aligned with your product. Create a beautiful experience for them to opt in. Focus on one marketing channel for 1/4 for 3 months. So you want to go all in on Twitter or you want to go all in on Facebook? Lead ads. That's your mission. 11 new subscribers a day. There you have it. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. It's actually called Follow on most apps these days. If you go to the triple dots in the top right hand corner of Apple Podcast or or Stitcher Radio or Spotify, you'll see the link for Follow. Click Follow and that way you'll get our next episodes automatically and you'll get access to our over 2,200 episodes in our back catalog. Before I go, I want to leave you with this in my over 20 years of online business experience, my biggest regret is not starting to build my email list earlier. The more I focused on email growth, the bigger and faster my business has grown. It's just that straight up an equation. And with people's attention spans being split between TikTok and YouTube and all the different social media platforms and all the distractions, email is still a very sacred place where you can communicate with people, your potential customers, and close more sales. If you want to learn more about how to create an offer via email, then tune in on Friday where we talk about that in that lesson. Thanks so much for listening. Until tomorrow. Take care.
ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.
