Email List Building: How to build an email list (A 3-Step Working Strategy)

How to build an email list? This is one of the commonest questions asked by bloggers!

Email list building is something that is permanently on every internet marketer’s to-do list.

Email marketing is not dead. It is golden.

It gives you a golden opportunity to land directly into your target customer’s inbox. If you don’t understand the importance of landing directly on someone’s inbox, think about this:

How many blogs are started every day (given that every Tom and Dick can start a free or a “reasonably expensive” blog now-a-days)? How many people put up Youtube videos? Publish guest posts?

Sure, all the above forms of content provide information (but I have to admit that most of it is crap, though!). But look at the noise. Will you be able to stand out, get noticed and be heard, among all this noise?

But what if when you land directly on someone’s inbox? That’s more personal. You cut out 99% of the noise and your chances of being heard and noticed are super high.

This can only be accomplished via email marketing.

So how do you start building an email list? After all, you need to have people’s email address if you need to reach out to them, right?

Let me share a 3 step strategy (that works always) to build your email list fast.

But before that, in order to capture and save one or multiple email lists and also to send bulk (manual or autoresponder) emails you will need an autoresponder service.

OK now let’s get to the meat of this post

List building weapon: Guest blogging

Nothing can beat guest blogging when it comes to building an email list. With guest blogging you get to perform on a stage which already has a very big crowd as audience.

Whenever you write a killer post you naturally will have the urge to publish it on your own blog.

But if you publish your best post on a blog that has a bigger audience than yours, then you can get more eyeballs on your blog post.

Not to mention, if your blog post is of great quality and has useful, practically applicable stuff, it will be naturally well received and shared by the people who read it.

PS: If you want help with creating killer content for your business, I highly recommend you to take up my course: How to create killer content for your business?

The trick is to get your excellent post in front of more eyeballs though! And that can be quite easily achieved through guest blogging.

In short, guest blogging helps you cross the number barrier – the number of people who get to “see” your post in the first place – and then the traffic and shares you get through those people automatically follows (if your content is good enough, that is).

Create landing pages

While you are at guest blogging, one of the most important benefits you can expect to receive is “traffic” (of course there are connections, popularity, links, etc.).

When your guest post gets published on a popular blog, there are so many people to share that post to their social circle.

There are lots of people who are waiting to get their first comment submitted on your guest post.

There are so many people who have added that popular blog’s RSS feeds to get it automatically shared on their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ stream (ya, the joy of being popular!).

Automatically, even if you want it or not, you *will* get loads of traffic. From my experience with guest blogging I can say that 10% of the traffic (the average daily visitors of that blog) will come to your blog.

What are you going to do with that traffic?

I mean, you should have a goal, right?

You may want to convert that traffic into your newsletter subscribers (the main goal of this post), sell your e-book, or anything like that.

If you get those people to land on your homepage, you are not going to convert them. Trust me.

Create landing pages or squeeze pages on your blog. Copyblogger is one such blog that has a lot of such landing/squeeze pages.

You can basically create two types of such pages

1. A hub page – A page on a particular focused topic. This page has awesome information (as a teaser) on the specified topic and also has additional links that point to your blog posts.

Plus an optin form that requires people to sign up if they want to receive additional information about that topic (of course make sure you have set your autoresponders right in order to deliver what you promise).

Example of hub/squeeze page:

How to start a blog?

2. An email-optin landing page – A page designed specifically with ONE purpose: getting people on your list.

This page should list the benefits of being on your list, highlight the importance of any freebie you are offering (like an e-book, video or an audio course, autoresponder based e-course, etc.).

And it should be enticing enough for people to join your list.

Example of my optin page

Can you really make money blogging?

While you guest blog you normally will have an opportunity to add a link or two to your blog in your author bio.

Use those links wisely and instead of merely linking to your home page, link to one of the converting pages.

Don’t be shy

Most internet marketers are pushy while some (but still a big number) are…. shy. They shy away to ask people to buy or to sign up.

With online marketing, if you don’t clearly tell people what they need to do, you can’t expect them to do anything.

Internet is a place where everyone is busy. The attention span is very short (they say its 3 seconds; too bad!).

So if you leave people confused for those 3 seconds they are just going to leave without taking any action.

So don’t be shy to tell clearly what you want people to do when they land on your page and when they are about to leave your page.

To build an email list fast, you should have a prominent call-to-action, above the fold, in your landing page (I am using the feature box optin). You should not stop at this, though, since one is not usually enough.

Throw your optin forms at the sidebar and also at the end of the post. This way people don’t miss to notice it.

In particular, insert your optin form at the end of the post.

This way, you are giving people a nice chance to take action as soon as they finish reading your post (and may be getting ready to leave).

I highly recommend one plugin to help you in this matter

Pop ups also work great if you use them in such a manner so that you don’t annoy your readers.

How to build an email list? Takeaway

This three step strategy surely does work. It works for me. Basically, guest blogging is a wonderful way to grab the attention of the crowd.

And the other two tips, that is, creating a landing page and putting up multiple optin forms (without annoying the readers, of course), are preparing your blog for better conversion of the traffic you get via guest blogging.

Are you into email list building?

Do you have a (better) list building strategy that works?

If not grab this strategy and start your email list building today!