I’m going to how you 1 special method of building an email list fast, from scratch. This 1 method has consistently produced results for me because it follows a very proven strategy and if you mimic it, you too, will be able to grow your email list quickly.
Now building an email list (stage 1) and making money off it (stage 2) are 2 very different skill sets and while this article shows you how to become successful during the first stage of it, the second one will require that you have some good marketing experience in turning subscribers into clients and customers.
My advice if you’re not good at stage 2 is to get training from places like Wealthy Affiliate and do regular affiliate marketing in general first.
Here’s how I stumbled onto this awesome list building method (why it works):
I’m currently involved in setting up webinar tutorials where I teach people the art of getting low cost paid ads on a specific network, that being Bing Ads.
I have numerous success stories there but for this particular program I’m setting up, I wanted to show people how I could quickly set up projects, get sales and email lists set up fast.
During that process, I filtered and narrowed down the method which I will be showing you here today. This strategy allows me to set up extremely low cost ads, get extremely high value traffic audiences and turn them into subscribers or sales.
While this method is going to be a little bit broad, the program I will be releasing on this subject is going to be far more detailed and there will be an announcement on this site once it’s ready. You’re going to want to get that if you’re serious about paid ads on Bing Ads.
But anyway, allow me to give you enough info to start and replicate this strategy on your own (I will also give you a great example to copy so you can try this out yourself if you want):
Here’s an example of this list building strategy working:
Project 1:
- I targeted a super specific niche audience (people with knee problems).
- I created a simple ad targeting this group of people and offering them help to solve that problem.
- I received 1,595 clicks on an ad I set up.
- The ad went to a very simple opt in page (literally just a single page).
- It collected over 300 subscribers.
- I set the bids VERY low so I was getting a small trickle of traffic during this time, but the list grew on auto pilot. So yes, single landing pages WORK if you drive the right traffic to it.
It was from this example, that I was able to create this article and realize that by simply reusing this same formula, you could also get the same results.
What is this 1 method of collecting emails every time anyway?
I’ve broken it down into a few steps:
1) First, you MUST target very specific niches.
Take my knee example above. That totally qualifies. And here are a few examples of which niches you can use as well:
They have to be hungry, super specific and laser targeted (this is the best one). And the thing is, you can find plenty of niche examples where you can actually have one or more of these types of niches together. See a list of over 50 niches for reference.
The goal is this: It’s a specific audience which needs a solution to a problem ASAP. Now for specific examples, besides the list of niches above, I have a list of hungry niches here, but here’s other quick examples you can use for your own reference:
In each, notice the urgency factor and the specific problem going on. If you’re going to build an email list fast, you need to target these audiences.
Do NOT get lazy and go for broader audiences, you will only punish yourself with higher costs, lower subscription rates and less sales in the long run, trust me on this.
2) Next, create a single landing page.
It could honestly be on an existing site you have (just make a new page) or create a free blog on a subdomain if you don’t have a website (here’s a free option of build your own website).
On that landing page you will want to keep it very simple and follow specific instructions on improving your email list sign up rates. In doing so, you are going to ensure that when the proper audience lands on that page, that they will almost be “forced” to want to sign up to get on your newsletter to get their answers.
This is what you want.
3) Get yourself a paid autoresponder.
Start with something cheap, like Aweber, I still use it and love it. People nowadays love to go with Mailchimp or Clickfunnels, but you should only upgrade to this when you have the money and the experience, until then, stick to Aweber.
Once you get it, set it up on your 1 page site (here’s instructions on building a successful email list).
4) Getting targeted traffic time (I’m using Bing Ads for this example).
As long as you follow the 1st step to the hungry, specific niche advice I gave, you WILL be getting traffic to this landing page you set up and you WILL be getting conversions and signs up. I’ve consistently seen this strategy work because it’s very narrow and focused on getting the most in need audience what they want: Solutions.
We’re just using Bing Ads because it’s one of the cheapest and fastest ways to get that traffic to your simple landing page and onto what could potentially become a huge and hopefully profitable email list.
Here’s what you need to do: Read this pay per click guide and apply one of the above hungry niche audiences to it when you set up your first ad.
Everything after this point is stage 2.
Now I don’t want to leave you guessing if you’re building a profitable list or not, but what I can tell you is that the niche audiences I told you to pick out here are the ones who are looking to buy things, so generally speaking, you should have an easier time to sell to them, but you shouldn’t do it right away.
Read this tip on email list building which will show you how to profit off those subscribers once they sign up and enter stage 2.
What should happen if you do all of this:
You’re basically going to get the same results I did and you can re-apply them across any niche market, so long as it’s hungry and specific.
Examples of this method in action:
Now comes the moment where I will give you a sample framework to use this strategy with. I will select one of the niches above and basically summarize how I would run them through the method you just read:
First, I will pick the “Get ex girlfriend back”. We know my audience now is men who want their girl back. We know this audience is desperate for an answer.
Side note: You can use this strategy for affiliate marketing, not just list building. In this case, I could right away promote some sort of Clickbank product on getting an ex back (there happens to be one called Magic of Making up). But you could also choose to collect that list first, then pitch that program later on.
I’ll set up the landing page and Aweber to collect the subscribers. On the landing page (read that guide above), I will say something very enticing like “Do this an increase the odds of getting your ex girlfriend back by 700%“.
Then to get that tip, the people will need to sign up (they’ll want to, trust me).
Then I’ll set up the Bing Ads exactly the right way to pay very little and get those specific guys to the landing page.
Then I’ll run them through a series of great tips and YouTube videos on this matter and then send them over to buy Magic of Making up. It pays about $30 per sale.
I’ll make the commission and keep this page/project running so long as the profits keep coming.
That is how you should also do it, but:
Please remember, list building is HARD and the 2 stages are often hard to align together and get right, so if you have ANY uncertainty about this method, start from a less “bootcamp” like course and get into making money online with less risk, which is through an awesome program called Wealthy Affiliate.
As much as I love my method, I fully understand that it carries it’s own risks. If it didn’t, I’d just rinse and repeat this strategy for any and all hungry niche markets I could find and retire by now.
But the hard part for me and most people in reality is the second stage. Most people believe it’s the first, but that’s the easy part.
With the Wealthy Affiliate program, you learn all of this stuff too, but you execute it differently by creating a blog to get all that traffic. I personally advise (and practice) that method over the one I’ve shown you here, even though mine works (just remember, stage 2 is what makes it tough to work EVERY time).
Thanks for these tips you shared. It is now clear to me how I can make money quickly with a squeeze page and Aweber. And maybe instead of doing it by buying solo ads, I should do it with PPC ads like you did.
Maybe with Google Adwords or Facebook ads, what do you think?
By the way, I noticed that you did not elaborate much explaining about the product you’ve used as an example, the Magic of Making Up. Is it a digital product sold in Clickbank?
The magic of making up was on Clickbank years ago, but I’m not sure if it’s there Gomer, but the point is to find the laser audience, and then worry about the product. Plus this method I used will get you the targeted audience, but as for making money quickly, you will have to optimize your emails and give it sometime, as well as test to see how the conversion is working.
If you see consistent sales coming in, increase the amount of money you spend on ads, to drive more of the same traffic to the site, to raise the sign up rates and then improve the sales on the back end.
As for the question on which networks to use. I’d only use Bing Ads for this. For Facebook Ads, I’m not sure yet, as I’m still learning that, but I would NOT recommend this be used with Google Adwords. They would likely disapprove your campaign because it’s just a 1 page site and likely tell you it’s a bridge page. With Bing Ads, you can still do this.
Great tips throughout this post! I’m the person that goes full throttle, joins a bunch of programs and wastes time and money. Then I have to reverse my course and correct my over zealousness.
You are absolutely right: Engagement with your audience is huge. A list without engagement is like dating without talking to the person (I lived that with my list).
I also like to use Aweber because it’s affordable and I can stay in contact with my people with broadcast emails.
What landing page service do you use? Do you know of any free landing pages?
Thanks for your help.
Hi General, great analogy about list building and dating! As for landing pages, I don’t use any service, and have tested out regular, blank WP pages. Like I said, I had double digit people signing up because the traffic was laser targeted and the message on the squeeze page was catered to them.
This experiment was meant to show that you don’t need fancy looking landing pages to collect a list. A targeted audience that visits even an ugly looking page will still focus mostly on the content there and if that is correctly written up or displayed, it WILL convert, at HIGH numbers.
The fastest way to build an email list is in making use of landing pages. I think building it with a blog is not as fast as this. Also, you were right about building a list with a targeted audience as that way is faster than when the audience is too broad.
I personally make use of iResponse and think it is a great service though I have not made use of Aweber and I am not entirely sure if there is any difference between those two services. If you have made use of both services have you noticed any major difference between both of them?
Hi Jay, I’ve never used any autoresponder other than Aweber. I don’t really do a lot of list building, but in the past I have and collected 10,000’s of emails. In all the scenarios I had doing this, including the types of tests I ran in this particular topic, Aweber was perfect for me. I think this autoresponder, the one you mentioned and other paid ones are fine to use.
But I’d like to clarify a few of your points (I understood them) because some people may not really understand the full context:
1) You mentioned making use of landing pages. I just want to say that works if you are able to utilize paid traffic methods to send the traffic to the landing page, otherwise, the landing page itself is useless and you will never be able to rank a one page site on Google, and it will only be able to get good traffic through PPC.
2) Building a list through a blog is not immediate, but it is safer because if you get organic, targeted traffic to the blog, then you can collect the list without investing in PPC. You can also do both if you’re skilled with SEO and PPC.
3) When you say building the list is faster with a targeted audience, I would say that’s only true when it comes to making money off the list. You can actually gather an email list very quickly with broad audiences, but the problem is that because they aren’t targeted, on the back end, conversions WILL suffer, so while my method involves getting an email list that’s laser targeted, I will get a lower volume of them signing up, but I don’t care, because the quality of that targeted visitor is VERY high and that’s what leads to the money being made.
Hi Vitaliy,
I was planning on building my email list and I think the mail chimp platform is very easy for it. In the beginning, I want to go with that. I had a query before where I asked you about going to other paid autoresponders. So I’ll ask it here.
Is it possible to move all of those lists to the new paid platform from the previous platform? Please reply to me on this query. However, I want to increase traffic and to build my email list together. Thanks for writing this helpful post.
Mailchimp is one of the best autoresponder programs to go with from what I’ve heard. I only use Aweber and it’s fine for me, so for saving money, I’d start there.
However, if you have a website with very little traffic, I would save your money and ONLY focus on building up the traffic first, otherwise you will just waste your money every month on an autoresponder that won’t collect emails due to a lack of traffic. Get a lot of traffic first.
On the question of importing email lists from one autoresponder to another, yes, most of them allow this, but you don’t need to worry so much about switching autoresponders. For beginners and intermediates, Aweber is more than fine, and if you go beyond that, then consider Mail chimp.
This article is well defined Vitaliy. I have always developed cold feet when it comes to building an email list, simply because I don’t think my landing page at the moment will be able to convert that much. I say this because I have it as a guide (MMO Guide) on my website that I direct people to but at the end of the day, it doesn’t receive as much views as I expect it to nor does it convert that much.
Now I believe I am at that stage That I want to really try this email list building stuff, as my site is beginning to gain more organic traffic. Though the visitor count is still low at the moment and due to other commitments, I am only able to post just about twice a week.
My questions now are:
1. At this stage, do you think it will be wise for me to start with a paid autoresponder and ads (given that the site isn’t making any money yet) or start with something free?
2. Will it be wise using this same guide I already have as my landing page or do you think it’s better to maybe create another landing page, I know you talked about narrowing to a specific audience, but when it comes to the MMO niche, my target audience is making money from home. So would it be better to create another landing page that is focused on only the stay at home audience? I hope I am making sense with all this…
Your response will be highly appreciated.
Cheers
Hi there Queen, here is what I would do:
1) Forget any autoresponders for now, focus on getting more and more organic traffic and posting like you are doing now. You are relying (and hoping) for the existing small traffic to convert and pay for the autoresponder you’ll be getting and that is a risky bet right now.
Get to at least 50 organic visitors a day and then think about getting an autoresponder. Also consider promoting programs for now instead of collecting an email list. Something like Wealthy Affiliate is a good promotion for the make money online niche.
2) You said a very smart thing in this question regarding how your make money online site specifically deals with people wanting to make money from home. And this itself can be a number of different things…
It can be people wanting to start an online business, an affiliate marketing business, a regular job, dropshipping, paid surveys, MLMs, those sorts of things.
It is because there’s so many different audiences in this MMO topic that your existing guide might not be applicable to them. For example, people who like paid surveys generally only care about which survey sites pay best so your guide might not be relevant to them.
Here is what I recommend:
Write more content but organize it into different categories:
Do reviews on paid online survey sites, but recommend a good one.
Do reviews on MLMs but recommend Wealthy Affiliate.
Do articles on drop shipping and recommend Wealthy Affiliate an affiliate marketing.
Do articles on affiliate marketing and programs and products in this business, but also recommend Wealthy Affiliate.
That way when audiences land on each of the landing pages you make, the thing you promote to them will be relevant to what they are looking for and you will be able to make more sales this way.
And notice that this idea actually goes back to my advice for your first question on writing more content to get more traffic. This strategy should work but it will take time to build it up, yet whether its this approach or list building, you will still need to make more content and get more traffic to make any of this work, but at least now, the idea is far more narrowed down.
Thanks for these wonderful guidelines. Creating an email list is one thing but then getting an committed audience is the difficult part. I tried creating an email list teaching people simple DIY generators maintenance like changing of spark plugs and the likes but I received very few subscribers. I will employ your methods and let’s see how far we’ll go.
Thanks again.
Hi Mikay, you know a long time ago, I considered making a niche site on emergency supplies (I actually discussed it here) and one of the things in that niche topic I wanted to promote were emergency generators.
I am mentioning this because I think if you rearrange your sales funnel, you may get a lot more subscribers and even sales and here’s what I would consider:
1) Start a niche site on emergency supplies.
2) Blog about different ways to prepare for emergencies, such as when blackouts happen, disasters strike and how to prep for them.
3) Give away a free eBook on something like 10 things every household needs to have to be ready for any emergency event and in the newsletter, talk about generators and sell them.
This may produce a much more enthusiastic crowd.
But if you can’t do this, start blogging about different generators and start seeing accessories for them. Make sure the maintenance tips you provide promote necessary products people need to get to maintain their generators. This should also produce better sales.
Hi Vitaliy.I have a small email list that I have managed to create with a popup on my website and a sign-up page to get a free e-book. I did not consider using any of the paid ads methods yet since, first of all, my website is only a year old and I am only starting to rank organically now.
Also, I never studied how paid ads work yet as I thought that they were so expensive that only the elite marketer was able to afford them. From what I learned in your article, my niche (which is MMO) is way too broad to use this method.
Unless I am not looking at it the right way, and you know of a breakdown of the MMO niche that I could use, the hungry and specific customers are not really existing. They are looking for something, but nothing specific.
The only narrow and focused niche I can come up with right now would be a specific program/platform and/or system. Maybe I could use a system I believe in and create a campaign around one specific system?
What is your opinion on paid ads and the MMO niche?
Hi Dennis, you definitely listed some awesome questions here, so let me break down each point I wanted to make in response to the things you said:
1) Being that you already have a site that’s starting to get organic traffic, I would NOT worry about using paid ads for now since you’ll get the traffic for free. The method I listed in this article is for fresh sites that have 0 organic traffic and authority.
You can however use the laser targeted niche techniques within this article and that leads me into explaining the answers to your MMO questions…
2) Yes, the MMO niche is HARD to advertise through because it can be quite broad. I find that even on Bing Ads, targeting the general MMO audience can get expensive, so the way around that is to target specific laser targeted audiences within the MMO niche.
What I like to do is review MMO products and services and then run paid ads to people who know about these services. Then I get the laser targeted crowd to my page and this makes it easier to promote the service, product or even another product to them.
So basically instead of targeting the overall tree which is MMO, I target the branches, aka the products within the MMO niche and this produces better rankings for me and when I run paid ads to these product reviews, they are extremely cheap and convert very well, and all of that fits in with the thesis of this article about laser targeted niches, since each product I review and then run ads for ONLY attracts the audiences that KNOW about the said product, which is in fact the laser targeted niche crowd I want to come to the site.
Hello and thank you once again for a very informative article on email list building. I thought about trying this technique as well to one of my free siterubix sites, but never quite went through with it. I guess it could work if I just connected a privacy policy and disclaimer to the page.
You have some very interesting techniques and other informative articles on the subject as well. I am interested to hear more about your new digital program when it comes out.
It looks like you have figured out several ways of making money with Clickbank and other affiliate networks. Those other networks probably pay better commissions than Clickbank.
I will employ these strategies as you have suggested and try to create more laser-targeted email lists. My only question is how often do you follow up with these leads? And do you ever transfer them over to any other lists for similar programs?
I don’t know if that is allowed or not. I appreciate all of the information that you have given here and I look forward to your future suggestions and guides.
Daniel hi, there’s a lot for me to unpack with your comment and respond to, but I’ll do my best:
1) I actually also create free site rubix sites for this method when I’m testing a niche market and I could literally have a sales funnel running for me in under an hour that way.
For anyone who is reading this other than us who doesn’t know about siterubix sites, they are free sites offered through Wealthy Affiliate and you can get 2 of them.
I wouldn’t even worry about the privacy policy or disclaimer, if you’re doing a simple 1 page site for testing purposes, then generate a privacy policy through WA (they have default ones you can use).
The point is, you can start testing this stuff out VERY quickly because you already have WA’s free sites and this tutorial to help you. Put in about $10-$20 in testing the ads just so you can see this stuff working.
2) I promote both Clickbank products and services from Wealthy Affiliate too. It’s not that I choose one over the other, it’s just that depending on the promotion and niche audience, some will be better off suited with Clickbank products and others with WA’s services.
I’ve made a lot of money through Clickbank before, but for me, on this site, it’s preferable to MAINLY promote WA because the target audience best benefits from it, but I DO absolutely still promote a few Clickbank products on this site too.
3) Regarding moving people from list to list, yes it’s fine, as long as you don’t sell the list to other people. Most people who collect lists promise never to give them out and then go ahead and do it anyway, but if it’s within your own list network, I say why not?
You can basically create one targeted list, then take the most hot leads and move them over to a new list and sell them stuff there. Alex Becker does this for example.
Hi Vitaliy, this is awesome and overwhelming at the same time. I have a site that is now a year old and I make about 2 posts a week.
The posts are high quality but honestly, I’m not seeing much traffic. I use a free form builder and at the moment that is just a side widget. I have a grand total of 3 people who have signed up 🙂
My posts don’t encourage people to sign up, it’s just there if they want to, which clearly isn’t a good strategy but email marketing has not been my focus yet. At what point would you recommend getting Aweber?
I don’t want to waste money that I don’t have, but I also need to do something.
Thanks Vitaliy.
Melissa hi, let me ask you a few questions about the site:
You say it’s a year old and that there’s 2 posts a week being made…
How long are those posts?
Are ALL of the posts targeting keywords that are low competition?
Are the keywords in the title of your posts?
By my math if you write twice a week and the site is a year, do you currently have over a 100 posts on the site? If not, how many do you have?
In regards to Aweber, I would ONLY get it once your site has at least 50 or more visitors daily. But you have to understand that even if this occurs, there has to be an incentive and reason for people to visit your site, let alone get on an email list.
What is the niche topic of the site? Remember, the more laser targeted it is + the bigger the problem, the better it’ll be and the easier it’ll be to build your email list.
Thank you that was really interesting. I’ve been thinking about doing more with email lists for a while now and this post has got me all fired up to give it a go! How do you find this strategy works in other search engines? I was thinking about trying Yahoo.
If you’re talking about paid ads on Yahoo, then don’t worry because this strategy (Bing Ads) actually has the same ads pop up on Yahoo. Both these search engines merged years ago so the advertising you do on Bing, also shows up on Yahoo.
Wow, Vitaliy, I am at that place in my online business where I need to build my email list, so this is right on time. I have never seen the steps (and warnings) set out so clearly. I also pursued the link and the diagrams and explanations are all there. Thanks for the reference to Bing which I never even paid attention to. I intend to make my landing page the first page of my website, but I see I would have to do some work on it to make the call to action more urgent. Thank you.
Hi JJ, I would consider experimenting with this strategy first. See the results of using Bing and building a list, take note of that experience and then adjust the landing page, ads, whatever you’re using to drive traffic to the landing page to make it convert better.
I followed some of your links for more information. It is interesting that you had such an increase in subscribers after changing to a very short squeeze page.
I have seen case studies by others that had the opposite results – they had a similar increase when changing from short squeeze page to an advertorial style squeeze page. Perhaps it might have been due to differences in products. Maybe differences in where the potential customers are in the buying cycle. But I guess it all boils down to testing.
You answered the question on the last sentence, it really is all about the testing. In the context of the squeeze page I was talking about, I was actually getting pretty good opt ins with the first version, but the shorter one in this case provided a better result, at least for the actual opt in rates.
However, that was on the front end and I did say there is more to list building. Sometimes you may find that a longer squeeze page that preps the audience for a sale later on converts better, even though you get less leads, than a simple one that doesn’t let them know about it.
Again, it really is the testing of all of this that provides the best answer. However, one thing that never fails is targeting a great, laser niche. That will always produce an evergreen source of traffic. Then how you try to monetize through that niche can be up to you and that’s where the testing can be applied.
Hello Vitaliy,
I’m about to start building an email list and your article has provided me with the most valuable information as I had no clue at all about this. Thank you for laying out the procedure.
Secondly, l never thought that advertising on Bing can produce such great results. Further, l agree that converting prospects into end buyers is the toughest part in the sale process. It requires a lot of time and effort.
By the way, what is the difference between a Landing Page and Lead Magnet? Lastly, thank you again for this informative article.
Nax
Hi Nax, a lead magnet is simply stuff you add to a squeeze page to incentivize people to subscribe. For an example, see this opt in form I made that got a pretty good subscription rate.
And a landing page is just a site people go to from any link, on a search engine, on an ad, through an email, ect…