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“Write what you know.”
Mark Twain said that, and I can’t argue with him. The advice is so elegantly simple that it is at the same time both graceful and profound.
Over these next five parts (or days, however you’d like to think of it), I’m going to help you build an email list. Before we begin, though, I need you to accept a couple of things as truth.
Truth #1: An email list is the most important thing you can have online. It should be your top priority. Building an email list is not just a part of your online business, it is the heart of your online business.
In fact, without an email list, having a sustainable online business is infinitely harder, far more expensive, and essentially just less efficient in all ways. It’s a fact.
Truth #2: Your success will be defined by your action. It seems pretty obvious, but it’s good to be reminded and it’s absolutely true. If you don’t take action on these daily tasks, then you will not succeed with this challenge.
I can show you the way, but you must decide to commit to this process alone. No one can force you. It’s a fact.
If you follow these three specific actions, you WILL have an email list at the end, and you will be that much closer to your goal of online success. It’s not a possibility, it’s a fact. So get excited and let’s get started.
Action 1: Your Task Is To Prepare
Now that we have those two simple truths, let’s build upon that solid foundation.
The first thing we need to do is prepare. This is your foundational task. Every new venture begins with some preparation, and this is no different.
Here are the 3 things you will need for this challenge:
1. A name and email address to go with it.
All good online businesses and projects have names. Yours can be anything. I only have two strong recommendations.
First, don’t give your business a name that would make people think of something completely unrelated to your business.
For example, If you are selling weight loss products, don’t name your business “Dog Training R Us.”
It’s ok for them not to know what your business is based on the name, you just don’t want them to make assumptions that aren’t true.
And the second thing is, don’t make it too long. The 4 word rule man, if it’s longer than 4 words it’s probably too long to remember. You want people to be able to find you and remember you easily. So in the spirit of brand awareness, keep it short and sweet.
You don’t need to register the name with the small business association or anything. You don’t need to form an LLC. You just need to have that name in your mind. Make sure nobody else is already using it.
Once you have the name, open a simple Gmail account for your business. This is important.
If you called your business Super Smash Leads, you could open up a Gmail account called “supersmashleadssupport@gmail.com”
Now, that email will come into play later, but for now it’s enough just to have it.
Easy enough right?
Once you have it, let’s get to the second thing you need…
2. An autoresponder!
If you can accept the truth that email is the heart of online business, then you must understand that the autoresponder is the tool that drives email. It is the most important thing you can have when working online.
This is the tool that is going to collect emails for you, it’s going to let you send out 1 email to thousands of people on your list, and it’s even going to allow you to set up entire sequences of emails to go out to people automatically when they sign up to be on your list.
There are a lot of different options when it comes to autoresponders. From industry leaders like Sendinblue, Aweber, and Mailchimp to lesser known solutions (I personally recommend MailerLite or SendBird), it can be overwhelming to select one.
Most of them cost money, and most of them offer some kind of free or trial start up option to soften that blow.
With your autoresponder, it’s better to go with an option that is economically viable for you, but that has also been around for a while.
Autoresponders that have been around for a long time tend to be more reliable and offer better deliverability with the emails that you are sending out.
For example, Aweber is pretty economical at around 20 bucks a month to start out, and they have been around since 1998. You don’t get to be an autoresponder company for over 20 years by not doing a good job.
They aren’t the only good option, but just one example.
Anyway, the autoresponder is critical. Don’t bother doing anything I’m teaching you here without one.
Moving on…
3. A website!
And that brings us to the third thing, a website. Yes, the third thing I want you to acquire, is a website.
Can you build a list without a website? Sure (but don’t). But that’s not how we are going to do it here.
There is a method to our madness. The website is going to offer us a few things that we will be getting into in upcoming emails. But for now, it’s enough that you get one.
If it’s not in your budget to pick up hosting and registering a website, you can use a free option like WIX if you need to. Obviously, you have a little more control if you own the site and pay for the hosting, but you can make this work with a free site.
Okay…
So that’s the homework.
To reiterate, you need these 3 things to take action on right now:
1) A name for your online business/project and an email
2) An autoresponder
3) A website
Alright, now go get those things together, don’t worry, I’ll wait, and we’ll get started on the next major action step as soon as you’re done. Go ahead and leave this tab open in your browser while you get your email, set up an autoresponder, and sign up for a website.
Action 2: Get Educated On Lead Types
At this point you should have the three things necessary to get started; a name for your business or project, an autoresponder, and a website. Those are nonnegotiable!
If you don’t have those 3 things, go back and get them together before proceeding.
Now, this section is all about lead education. I’m going to be showing you how to get some leads on your list, and put you in a position to make money with that list.
To do that, though, you need to understand what you’re looking at.
You see, email leads are not created equal and for all intents and purposes there are 3 main types. Let’s learn what they are…
Type 1: The buyer lead – This is a person who is on your email list because they bought something from you. This is the most responsive kind of email lead, and the kind that will be the most receptive to immediate sales pitches. They are the most valuable kind of lead you can have.
Type 2: Warm Organic – This type of lead hasn’t bought anything from you yet, but they have been exposed to your marketing or your content before they ended up on your list. For this reason, they are a little more receptive to your emails and your offers.
They aren’t as eager to buy as your customer (buyer) leads, but they know who you are, and you have developed a little more rapport with them than just a stranger.
An example of this kind of lead would be someone who was exposed to you through YouTube or some other form of social media and found their way to your free offer (more on that later) and joined your mailing list.
Type 3: Cold – Cold leads are people who don’t know you at all. They have no trust or rapport with you. They very well could see your emails as a nuisance in their inbox, and they will require more work to build rapport with them. Many email marketers call this “warming up the leads.”
These leads are the least valuable, but it’s important that you understand why.
The reason they are the least valuable is that they will require the most time and effort, and it’s a two-way street when it comes to not knowing. They might not know you, but you don’t know them either.
Depending on how you acquired the leads, they could be completely wrong for your list. However, cold leads still have an important part to play. Less value does not mean NO value. It just means a little more work is required.
Throughout this three-part series (feel free to think of it as a challenge, if you’d prefer), I’ll be showing you how to build 3 distinct lists. One list for each style of lead, respectively.
We will be building a list for warm organic traffic. Then we will move into cold list building and finally towards the end of this, I’ll show you how to build your buyer’s list.
As soon as you’ve familiarized yourself with these three styles of email leads, we’re going to get started with the foundation of list building.
Action 3: Create Your First Asset (The Lead Magnet) in 5 Steps
Alright, you’re a champion. You have your business name, your autoresponder, and your website together (nothing on it yet, but don’t worry about that, having it is enough right now.)
Great work.
In the previous section, I was teaching you about lead types. We had buyer leads, warm organic leads, and cold leads. Not all weighed equally for sure, but are still all valuable in their own right, and all have a place in your online ventures.
Now, we’re starting on the path to getting warm organic leads. To do this, we are going to be creating something that we can give away in exchange for an email.
Remember, this thing you will be creating is an asset. Even though you might be using it as a giveaway for now, in the future you might use it differently. It can be positioned and repositioned in multiple ways once you create it.
A couple of things to keep in mind here.
First, free never goes out of style. Don’t let people tell you differently. It’s always popular. What DOES go out of style is the offer. That can get old, outdated, or just not great to begin with, and people won’t care about it.
Second, when you are creating a free offer, there are 3 things that you absolutely need:
- It needs to be easy and quick to consume.
- It needs to offer quick results
- It needs to extend the invitation to continue the conversation
Now that you know you need those 3 things in your offer, I have 1 additional rule for you, and it is of the utmost importance that you follow this one. What is it?
My one additional rule: This is a 1-day project. Don’t spend days and days, or even weeks putting this together.
Money loves speed and so does success, so we are going to be moving this forward quickly.
But how do you do it? How can you get this asset created in just 1 day?
We are going to be creating a simple one-page cheat sheet.
Not only will it come together quickly, but it also satisfies one of the 3 things we need, it is easy and quick to consume.
So let’s take this step by step and get our cheatsheet created:
1. Pick a problem with a few minutes of research.
I’m not going to waste paragraphs on this. It’s a simple process and anyone who tells you otherwise, is either not successful or trying to sell you some push-button lead magnet generator that will not work.
Just research your niche for common problems and topics of interest that keep coming up over and over again.
Check the forums, the Facebook groups, the niche related YouTube channel comment sections.
An example for the internet marketing niche would be “how do I get traffic?”
2. Solve the problem.
Now I want you to either draw from your experience in the niche, or do some research for a solution or for a few solutions to this problem.
You can always use ChatGPT to help you brainstorm solutions.
3. Make it 10 steps or less!
Next, I want you to bullet point out a 10 steps or less approach to solving this problem.
If you have 22 steps, you have too many steps. Simplify it. If you want to offer multiple simple solutions to the problem, then keep it to no more than 10.
An example would be coming up with 5 simple ways to drive traffic, or a 7-step action plan for getting more traffic.
4. Word the offer.
This step is very important. It is the thing that will make people opt-in. So what I want you to do is head over to title-generator.com and enter the keyword that represents the problem you are solving.
For example, I’ll use traffic. This generator is going to spit out about 700 title ideas for me. I just need to adapt one to my purposes.
Here are the top three it gave me:
1) Quick and Easy Fix For Your TRAFFIC
2) What You Should Have Asked Your Teachers About TRAFFIC
3) Who Else Wants To Know The Mystery Behind TRAFFIC?
So if I have a 7-step action plan for getting more traffic, I can easily adapt that first headline from:
Quick and Easy Fix For Your TRAFFIC
To:
This 7 Step Action Plan is a Quick and Easy Fix For Your TRAFFIC!
If I was creating a cheat sheet that is going to give them 5 easy ways to get more traffic, I could take that 3rd one and change it from:
Who Else Wants To Know The Mystery Behind TRAFFIC?
To:
5 Mysteries of TRAFFIC Revealed (For quick results!)
You essentially use the generator for inspiration and ideas, and you adapt it to the problem you are solving.
5. Create the asset.
The next step is to open up a simple Word document (or a Google Doc, or whatever word processing program you like) and create this thing.
DO NOT overthink this step. Just do it! Follow my quick bullet points below and do it!
- Put the headline at the top.
- Write a simple intro explaining who you are, and what this cheat sheet is. 3 to 5 sentences here. Don’t write a novel. It’s quick.
- Give the actual content that solves the problem
- Extend the invitation to continue the conversation. By this I mean to let them know that if they got value out of this simple cheat sheet, be sure to check their inbox because you put out weekly emails with more awesome content to help them in your niche.
- Make sure you add a footer with a copyright notice that will have the name of your business. It should be a clickable link to your website. This is for brand awareness.
- Save the one page as a PDF document.
This simple one page is perfect.
It’s quick and easy to consume, it offers a quick resolution to the problem, and it extends the invitation to continue the conversation.
In addition, it builds a small amount of rapport with that intro, and it builds a small amount of brand awareness with that footer copyright.
All that in a simple one-page cheat sheet.
Remember, above all else… action is the key.
Even if you are taking longer than a day to get these tasks done, as long as you are moving your project forward every day, you will succeed. So make sure you are keeping it moving forward, no matter what. After all, consistency is everything!
Okay, get this knocked out, make it happen and then head over to the next article in this five-part series to get your lead capture pages set up and awesome.
