Building an Email List for Online Course Creators

I've talked about this many times but your email list is the most important asset that you have in your business specifically an online business and even more specifically as an online course creator now why is it so important well because it's your insurance it's your security blanket and it's what you own inside of your business you don't own social platforms you don't own Instagram Tick Tock Facebook any platform YouTube for example and they can change the algorithms at any minute which affects your reach and be able to impact the people who need you whereas on an email list you are in control of how you reach people and who you're actually inviting onto that list which makes it one of the most profitable assets in your business I recently heard from a study that said that 30 to 40 of your Revenue in your business should be coming from your email list now I hear a lot of people talking about having to build a landing page an opt-in page of freebie and all these things and all this Tech and you don't have to there are very Grassroots ways to start building an email list that I've tested with my own clients throughout the years and they are much easier to get started to validate and to really prove your messaging before you go to all the effort of wasting time building out some technical complicated opt-in so we're going to talk about those today and a whole lot more if you're excited give this video a like be sure to subscribe for new videos every week I talk about building a peaceful purposeful and profitable online education business you can make an impact on the people who need you while smashing the income ceiling at the same time and I actually have a free guide that if you haven't downloaded yet I don't know what you're waiting for it is so in-depth it's the 10 steps to smash the income and impact ceiling while also detaching your time from your income by building an online program that impacts the people that you want to impact the most and it gives real examples of exactly how to do just that so be sure to grab that at the link in the description below and let's dig into the details for today's video and before I even do that I did want to share with you a personal stat for myself inside of our business I have grown my email list to multiple hundreds of thousands of people to be totally transparent with you and I've learned a lot of lessons and to be fair if I look at you know our list size in comparison to our impact and our business stats when it comes to the finances having a smaller more targeted list has actually been the most fruitful so I really need you to hear me when I say this is about quality and the quality of the people you have on your list for so many reasons but I'm going to share the stats behind that shortly rather than having quantity you don't need a ton of people on your list to have a wildly profitable business so what are the six steps that we're going to dig into today okay well first identifying the right email subscribers number two the research strategy that grows a targeted email list number three three creative and quick ways to grow your list without a freebie and four build a relevant exchange of value five create the tech and six do the math and drive traffic now most importantly you need to start with the end goal in mind when you're creating an email list and that is knowing exactly who you're looking to attract which we're going to dig into in a second but generally you're building an email list for business purposes when you're building an email list for business purposes ultimately you're looking to sell something so whether you have something to sell right now or you're going to build something to sell later you need to know who you're serving and ultimately what you're going to be selling in order to make your email strategy to grow your list as effective as possible so always start with the end goal in mind and work backwards from there so let's get into step number one so number one is identifying the right email subscribers why is this so important okay so there are three key metrics when it comes to building an email list that are crucial to your success when it comes to that email list and actually being able to generate revenue from it and really nurture the relationship with your ideal client they are things like CTR and open rates and the final piece is really domain reputation what that means is your open rate is ultimately looking at okay when you send out an email to your email list how many of the people on that list are actually opening it and anything above you know 15 20 is actually fairly decent I know it doesn't sound very high but it's actually fairly decent anything below that you're getting into a danger zone and it's telling your email list provider that most of the people on your list are really interested and it's going to start filtering you more into spam and making your emails more undeliverable than they should be the second piece is CTR so it means okay you send out the email and then you have maybe a call to action inside of your email or something that people can click on whether that's to go buy something or check something out on your website obviously seeing that CTR at a higher rate is really important because if people are clicking it means they're engaged and you're attracting the right people to your list which again supports the health of your overall email list and the final piece is domain reputation if you sent start sending out emails and you have the wrong people on your list people will actually start reporting you and what happens when people start reporting you they receive your emails is that it does affect your domain reputation so whatever your website domain is that you're sending your emails from it can start to have a negative impact on it which means that it's making your emails again even more undeliverable to your subscribers on your list so it hurts your reach it hurts your impact and it hurts the effectiveness of your list so I hope that makes sense as to why it's so important to know exactly who you want on your list and to send appropriately rather than just trying to mass Market to everybody and what this comes back to is something that we call the three factors so when you're identifying who you want on your list you want to think about who is my ideal client where are they at on their Journey when they need my help the most and what I have to offer the most and what's the outcome that they're seeking and making sure every email that you send is reflective of that so it actually lands and resonates with those people so it supports really healthy statistics for your email list number two the research method that grows a targeted email list now I'm going to talk about three quick and creative ways to grow your email list without a freebie in the next step and this is one of those ways but I really wanted to go in depth on this so you truly understand it so this is a process that we Implement with our clients and it allows them to grow a targeted list of 50 people who are their ideal clients right off the bat this is without using any tech building any funnels building any sort of opt-in page or any landing page it's just by simply building relationships and that is what's most important in any kind of business is think about pre-social media you didn't need tech to generate clients you didn't need websites to generate clients you didn't need social media to generate clients so this is based around if all else fails how do you build relationships and build a really targeted list okay so before I get into how you do this I wanted to share an example of one of our clients recently she built a list from scratch for her business of 61 people 61 okay keep that number in mind those 61 people were perfect ideal clients for her as we talked about before they were a match for all three factors and she ended up selling her program the Prototype version of her program and she generated over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and two and a half weeks from using this method with a list of 61 people out of those 61 33 people enrolled into her program wild right so this is the value of doing this in a very Grassroots way she didn't have any Tech any funnel set up she had just simply followed this process and the topic of her program no it's not about making money or getting rich quick or any of those things we help people in all different niches and the topic of her program is was actually in the health and wellness space so the beauty of this process is that it's not about selling it's about research as I mentioned so what you're doing is you're ultimately identifying where are my ideal clients hanging out whether it's offline or online and how can I start building relationships and conversations with them so that we can provide value and also learn from them what they actually need because the biggest mistake people make when they start building an online business or an email list is they start providing things that aren't actually going to resonate with their ideal client and they just start guessing so you need to know exactly what people need before you can create it so I'm going to talk about where to find them in a second but the first thing you need to understand is the process if you have an existing audience you can start testing this with your existing audience whatever platform that might be on if you have no audience at all this works and you can build a list from scratch as I just mentioned and many of our clients have all you're going to do is you're going to build a simple spreadsheet and that spreadsheet is going to have their first name last name it's going to have a column for their social media handle that you found them through and it's going to have a column for whether or not this person was a great match for your three factors of your ideal client and then it's going to have a column as to whether or not they want to receive updates from you or any sort of value from you by an email list and what you're going to do when you find these people is you're going to actually set up interviews with them on Zoom yes I said interviews on Zoom the basic way of doing this which does not work nearly as well because you miss out on so much nuance and actual Intel from people because you send out a survey that's not something we recommend we actually want you to speak to these people you set up interviews with them you have build a relationship with them you ask them specific questions and some of the questions you can ask to really understand what they do need from you are number one what is your biggest frustration with blank so whatever you want to help people with make that the point what's your biggest fear about blank the next question if you were to search for a solution for this on Google or YouTube What Would you type into the search bar that's going to give you the exact Intel of what they're looking for so you can create content and resources for them that are exactly what they need without having to guess the next question is understanding what it is that they're seeking in terms of the transformation so you want them to fill in the blanks of I want to go from blank to blank so that I can't blank you want to know where they are now where they want to go and ultimately why that outcome is so important to them and again that's going to help you build really valuable really targeted assets just for them that they're actually going to want so that they will be long time loyal followers and clients of yours so when you do this purely for research purposes it means that you are doing such an amazing job at building a reciprocity relationship and an exchange of value because you actually are taking the time to listen to people who need your help and then you're just creating the thing that they need so you're essentially you're not reading their minds but it feels like you're reading their minds and it creates that list of people who's going to be so engaged in whatever it is that you do moving forward and what you sell moving forward so how do you find these people how do you find what we call the ICA so this is called our ICA process it's a signature process inside of our Authority accelerator program it's different than what most people do when it comes to market research and it's extremely effective and it comes from my background in journalism because I know that the more you can understand the person that you're trying to reach and serve the more you can actually create the thing they need and want so how you find them number one offline so for example in the health and wellness space for that client that I was speaking of she's talking to therapists she's calling psychology schools and universities she's talking to doctors in her local area she is finding people offline and in her network who actually need the thing that she's going to create to set up these interviews online she is going to Facebook communities that are focused on the topic that she's speaking about and she's providing value she's sharing her story she's sharing her expertise she's not having a call to action to say but good call with me but whoever engages with her content she's then building a relationship by friending them and then starting a private message conversation with them and if they are open to speaking to her about doing this research because she's not selling anything yet then she's going to get on a call with them and ask those questions so she can really understand what to build for them the other places you can look are Instagram hashtags that are related to what you want to help people with LinkedIn profiles searching out profiles that have the keywords that you're interested in supporting people with and also YouTube videos and YouTube comment sections are so right with information of how you can help people and finding right people that you can't help and this brings us to step three of the three creative and quick ways to build your email list without a freebie so number one is what I just mentioned which is simply the research process of building relationships really listening to people and understanding how you can serve them and once you have those calls and you notice okay this person is actually perfect for what I'm creating you simply can ask them you know I'm working on something that would really be helpful to you would you be interested in getting updates on it are you okay if I add you to my email list and then you just add them to that spreadsheet and that is your initial email list number two we're all about testing first right because you don't want to spend a ton of time making something that you don't even know is going to work so a whiteboard or a live training is a quick and creative way for you to build an email list all you're going to do is pick a topic that you know is super relevant to your ideal client and you're gonna promote it and tell people that this is how you are going to help them solve whatever problem is that they need to solve and you can do this on your existing platforms if you have them if you don't have them you can start sharing this with the people that you did these research calls with that would be step number one if you don't have a list and they will say yes I'm super interested and then you can say okay I'm going to send you reminders about this via email and they'll be on your list and another really simple way to do this is on social media if you have an existing audience you can say hey I'm doing a training on X topic if you want in comment with yes and I'll direct messaging the details via direct message you would say hey the date of the training is going to be this and I'm going to be sending out details by email is it okay if I grab your email so I can send the details to you again easy way for you to describe their email address and it'll add it onto your spreadsheet and that's going to build your preliminary list and further to that if you have people in your network or people you know who have an audience of Ideal clients that would be great for this that would be a match for who you want to attract to your email list have them partner with you on it and share it out on their networks With Their audience and it's going to be a great exchange of value for Their audience because it's going to be helpful to them ultimately you just let them know hey I'm going to be doing this training on this date if you want to tell your audience about it I'd be so grateful and you can just send them over to this post and they can comment yes and I'll send them the details by a direct message this works really really well and it's super impactful and attracting even more people over to what you're doing now because you're going to do this this in a live training setting you can do it on Zoom you can do it on a social media platform you can do it wherever you feel is most appropriate and then you can take that recording and package it and that can become your first freebie and I'm going to talk about how to actually build that in a second but that becomes your first freebie you're not having to build it up front you're actually going to test it and validate the messaging to make sure it works and it's something that people want you're going to have some proof behind it because people will have attended and checked it out and the other bonus of this is you can actually create another opt-in out of this which would be a PDF or a guide that you can then share with these Partners who have helped promote it or even with your existing audience and that's going to get even more people on your list you can simply say hey I have this guide all about solving X Y and Z it's just a transcription reformatted of that live training and if people want it they comment yes you send them a DM you say hey I'd love to send this to you by email so you can have a copy of it they give you their email address you add them to the spreadsheet and boom goes the dynamite you've got a very basic email list growing without having to do a whole bunch bunch of technical work behind it so you can prove it validate it and start impacting people so you have the research process and then you have the training option which is super easy to set up and then you have the third one which is if you do have any kind of existing audience to start building an email list from scratch just say hey I'm going to start sending out really valuable resources on solving X problem is this something you're interested in if it's on Instagram you can do a poll in your story anybody who votes yes on that poll send them a DM same process say hey and be sending out these emails uh you know regularly can I grab your email address so I can add you to the list they will send that over to you the other thing that you can do is on Facebook set up a poll as well if you have any sort of group or page and do the same thing and anyone who votes yes or comments below that poll add them to the list and you can also do this just via comments themselves say yes add me to the list in the comments below I will DM you I'll get your email address and I will add you to the list all simple ways to do this number four build a relevant exchange of value focus on the word relevance because again it's important that you're only attracting the right people onto your email list for the health and the long-term sustainability of your email list so I'll give you an example I have a client who helps women of color create online Ministries and she knows specifically what they're after and what their ultimate outcome is of their business they're creating so a bad opt-in for her would be a training or a guide or a checklist around building an online business in 90 days that'd be bad because that's going to attract anyone trying to create any kind of business whether that be e-commerce a coaching business a course business whatever it may be so her opt-in instead is called 10 steps to build your part-time prophetic Christian coaching business to consistent five thousand dollar months in 90 days you know who that's going to attract the right people that's gonna attract the people who are so excited for what she has to offer because it's exactly for them so we've talked about creating a Bare Bones version of your opt-in and that's where this can start and again you want to make sure it's hyper relevant to your audience and to who it needs you the most and who you want to attract the list and one opt-in is good enough it can be a checklist a cheat sheet a guide whatever you want to create it can also be a video recording of a training you've done as we talked about earlier creating a bunch of different freebies is one a lot of work for you and number two it's also going to fragment your list to 10 to all these different segments that may not actually need what you ultimately have to offer now the software to actually create this once you've tested it is you can use canva to create really beautiful guides PDFs checklists Etc you can use PowerPoint or keynote to also create them and then the software to actually deliver it and to build out your email list once you've collected a certain amount whatever that amount is for you in your spreadsheet of email lists and you've built out a really solvable start to it you can import that list into a place like activecampaign or MailChimp MailChimp is probably the easiest to get started with it's what I started with and you can always migrate your list later on to something more robust like an active campaign now that brings us to step number five which is create the tech so what I mean by this is okay you have this proven opt-in something that people want you've got the beginning stages of an email list and a spreadsheet you're not moving that into and migrating that into a MailChimp for example or whatever platform is of your choice to host your email list and from there you're ultimately going to need to build out the pages required to get people to sign up for the email list so you're not having to send DMS anymore to get people to sign up for it so and doing it in a very sort of organic way so now you're going to build out a landing page and a thank you page those are the two keys to getting people to download on the landing page so enter their email address and their information their first name last name email address so that you can send it to the them and then on the thank you page it would just be a confirmation of their their receiving whatever it is that they're signing up for and then it would go directly to their email inbox so that is done through an email hosting platform like MailChimp can be done through click funnels it can be done through a whole bunch of things but the whole point is you test it in a way that is non-techy first to prove it and then you can upload that list once it started to build on your spreadsheet into a place like MailChimp now one thing that's really important is that in the beginning when you're building out your list you are going to be super intentional about it so it's going to be really targeted but as it grows you do want to use things like tagging and segmenting so that you know exactly who is there for what so let's say you do create for whatever reason multiple opt-ins or multiple vehicles to get on your list you want to make sure that you're tagging people with whatever they actually downloaded to get on the list so that you know okay this person is interested in dog tutorials and this person is interested in cat tutorials so that you can segment and you're sending your emails to the right people because if you're sending a dog tutorial to a cat person they're gonna probably support you and your emails they're probably not going to open it which is going to hurt your reputation and also your open rates and the health of your email list and they're definitely not going to click so that goes back to those metrics earlier you want to segment the list and take the list but that doesn't really come into play until you start really growing the list and any email provider is going to have that ability for you to do that now step number six is do the math and drive traffic so in order to grow your email list obviously you can do it in the very Grassroots way that we mentioned earlier just by setting up those one-to-one conversations and interviews which works really effectively in the beginning but then also you want to start driving more and more traffic to it so there's so many vehicles that you can do that through YouTube is a great one once you have validated messaging and you know you know exactly you're serving and all these things Instagram Facebook Tick Tock whatever you might use but here's a really important thing you need to identify how many leads you actually need on your list so let's say you want to generate two clients a month and those two clients you're going to be charging five thousand dollars for whatever it is that you're selling let's say it's an online program and based on an average industry standard of a 20 conversion rate you would need to attract 10 10 leads per month to convert to clients so that's not a ton to hate your targets and goals you do want to think about okay how many people do I need on my list for this to actually be something that is going to sustain and support the business because you don't need hundreds of thousands believe me I've been there in order to really make this a profitable and revenue driving asset in your business and the final piece is just remember to continue to drive traffic to it so if you're creating YouTube content and you are making a video that will be relevant to the person who would like to have that opt-in at their fingertips mention it promote it put it in any bio that you might have on a social media platform make short form content if you're using a short form platform and make videos that drive traffic to that opt-in specifically and let people know that you have that as a resource to download that's going to start building up your list in a much more rapid pace and again focus on the numbers you need because you don't need everyone on the list you need the right people on the list and if you're struggling with how to create that kind of content simple little script struggling with X I've created a free guide to help you solve x Problem download it at the link in my bio or download put it below very simple problem solution give them what they need so I want to know from you in the most Bare Bones way what is the first thing you can do to build your email list and what's the topic gonna be I want to know in the comments below now right on cue I have created a free guide for you on the 10 steps to smash your income and impact ceiling and the process to follow to package your skill set and expertise into a highly scalable online education business be sure to grab that right now at the link in the description now I hope this was helpful for you be sure to like And subscribe for new videos every week on how to build a peaceful purposeful and profitable and most importantly super impactful on that education business and I have so many videos on how to build an online education business from scratch without an audience and I feel like that might be really helpful for you check out next so check out this video next and I will see you in the next one bye

I&#39;ve talked about this many times but your email list is the most important asset that you have in your business specifically an online business and even more specifically as an online course creator now why is it so important well because it&#39;s your insurance it&#39;s your security blanket and it&#39;s what you own inside of your business you don&#39;t own social platforms you don&#39;t own Instagram Tick Tock Facebook any platform YouTube for example and they can change the algorithms at any minute which affects your reach and be able to impact the people who need you whereas on an email list you are in control of how you reach people and who you&#39;re actually inviting onto that list which makes it one of the most profitable assets in your business I recently heard from a study that said that 30 to 40 of your Revenue in your business should be coming from your email list now I hear a lot of people talking about having to build a landing page an opt-in page of freebie and all these things and all this Tech and you don&#39;t have to there are very Grassroots ways to start building an email list that I&#39;ve tested with my own clients throughout the years and they are much easier to get started to validate and to really prove your messaging before you go to all the effort of wasting time building out some technical complicated opt-in so we&#39;re going to talk about those today and a whole lot more if you&#39;re excited give this video a like be sure to subscribe for new videos every week I talk about building a peaceful purposeful and profitable online education business you can make an impact on the people who need you while smashing the income ceiling at the same time and I actually have a free guide that if you haven&#39;t downloaded yet I don&#39;t know what you&#39;re waiting for it is so in-depth it&#39;s the 10 steps to smash the income and impact ceiling while also detaching your time from your income by building an online program that impacts the people that you want to impact the most and it gives real examples of exactly how to do just that so be sure to grab that at the link in the description below and let&#39;s dig into the details for today&#39;s video and before I even do that I did want to share with you a personal stat for myself inside of our business I have grown my email list to multiple hundreds of thousands of people to be totally transparent with you and I&#39;ve learned a lot of lessons and to be fair if I look at you know our list size in comparison to our impact and our business stats when it comes to the finances having a smaller more targeted list has actually been the most fruitful so I really need you to hear me when I say this is about quality and the quality of the people you have on your list for so many reasons but I&#39;m going to share the stats behind that shortly rather than having quantity you don&#39;t need a ton of people on your list to have a wildly profitable business so what are the six steps that we&#39;re going to dig into today okay well first identifying the right email subscribers number two the research strategy that grows a targeted email list number three three creative and quick ways to grow your list without a freebie and four build a relevant exchange of value five create the tech and six do the math and drive traffic now most importantly you need to start with the end goal in mind when you&#39;re creating an email list and that is knowing exactly who you&#39;re looking to attract which we&#39;re going to dig into in a second but generally you&#39;re building an email list for business purposes when you&#39;re building an email list for business purposes ultimately you&#39;re looking to sell something so whether you have something to sell right now or you&#39;re going to build something to sell later you need to know who you&#39;re serving and ultimately what you&#39;re going to be selling in order to make your email strategy to grow your list as effective as possible so always start with the end goal in mind and work backwards from there so let&#39;s get into step number one so number one is identifying the right email subscribers why is this so important okay so there are three key metrics when it comes to building an email list that are crucial to your success when it comes to that email list and actually being able to generate revenue from it and really nurture the relationship with your ideal client they are things like CTR and open rates and the final piece is really domain reputation what that means is your open rate is ultimately looking at okay when you send out an email to your email list how many of the people on that list are actually opening it and anything above you know 15 20 is actually fairly decent I know it doesn&#39;t sound very high but it&#39;s actually fairly decent anything below that you&#39;re getting into a danger zone and it&#39;s telling your email list provider that most of the people on your list are really interested and it&#39;s going to start filtering you more into spam and making your emails more undeliverable than they should be the second piece is CTR so it means okay you send out the email and then you have maybe a call to action inside of your email or something that people can click on whether that&#39;s to go buy something or check something out on your website obviously seeing that CTR at a higher rate is really important because if people are clicking it means they&#39;re engaged and you&#39;re attracting the right people to your list which again supports the health of your overall email list and the final piece is domain reputation if you sent start sending out emails and you have the wrong people on your list people will actually start reporting you and what happens when people start reporting you they receive your emails is that it does affect your domain reputation so whatever your website domain is that you&#39;re sending your emails from it can start to have a negative impact on it which means that it&#39;s making your emails again even more undeliverable to your subscribers on your list so it hurts your reach it hurts your impact and it hurts the effectiveness of your list so I hope that makes sense as to why it&#39;s so important to know exactly who you want on your list and to send appropriately rather than just trying to mass Market to everybody and what this comes back to is something that we call the three factors so when you&#39;re identifying who you want on your list you want to think about who is my ideal client where are they at on their Journey when they need my help the most and what I have to offer the most and what&#39;s the outcome that they&#39;re seeking and making sure every email that you send is reflective of that so it actually lands and resonates with those people so it supports really healthy statistics for your email list number two the research method that grows a targeted email list now I&#39;m going to talk about three quick and creative ways to grow your email list without a freebie in the next step and this is one of those ways but I really wanted to go in depth on this so you truly understand it so this is a process that we Implement with our clients and it allows them to grow a targeted list of 50 people who are their ideal clients right off the bat this is without using any tech building any funnels building any sort of opt-in page or any landing page it&#39;s just by simply building relationships and that is what&#39;s most important in any kind of business is think about pre-social media you didn&#39;t need tech to generate clients you didn&#39;t need websites to generate clients you didn&#39;t need social media to generate clients so this is based around if all else fails how do you build relationships and build a really targeted list okay so before I get into how you do this I wanted to share an example of one of our clients recently she built a list from scratch for her business of 61 people 61 okay keep that number in mind those 61 people were perfect ideal clients for her as we talked about before they were a match for all three factors and she ended up selling her program the Prototype version of her program and she generated over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and two and a half weeks from using this method with a list of 61 people out of those 61 33 people enrolled into her program wild right so this is the value of doing this in a very Grassroots way she didn&#39;t have any Tech any funnel set up she had just simply followed this process and the topic of her program no it&#39;s not about making money or getting rich quick or any of those things we help people in all different niches and the topic of her program is was actually in the health and wellness space so the beauty of this process is that it&#39;s not about selling it&#39;s about research as I mentioned so what you&#39;re doing is you&#39;re ultimately identifying where are my ideal clients hanging out whether it&#39;s offline or online and how can I start building relationships and conversations with them so that we can provide value and also learn from them what they actually need because the biggest mistake people make when they start building an online business or an email list is they start providing things that aren&#39;t actually going to resonate with their ideal client and they just start guessing so you need to know exactly what people need before you can create it so I&#39;m going to talk about where to find them in a second but the first thing you need to understand is the process if you have an existing audience you can start testing this with your existing audience whatever platform that might be on if you have no audience at all this works and you can build a list from scratch as I just mentioned and many of our clients have all you&#39;re going to do is you&#39;re going to build a simple spreadsheet and that spreadsheet is going to have their first name last name it&#39;s going to have a column for their social media handle that you found them through and it&#39;s going to have a column for whether or not this person was a great match for your three factors of your ideal client and then it&#39;s going to have a column as to whether or not they want to receive updates from you or any sort of value from you by an email list and what you&#39;re going to do when you find these people is you&#39;re going to actually set up interviews with them on Zoom yes I said interviews on Zoom the basic way of doing this which does not work nearly as well because you miss out on so much nuance and actual Intel from people because you send out a survey that&#39;s not something we recommend we actually want you to speak to these people you set up interviews with them you have build a relationship with them you ask them specific questions and some of the questions you can ask to really understand what they do need from you are number one what is your biggest frustration with blank so whatever you want to help people with make that the point what&#39;s your biggest fear about blank the next question if you were to search for a solution for this on Google or YouTube What Would you type into the search bar that&#39;s going to give you the exact Intel of what they&#39;re looking for so you can create content and resources for them that are exactly what they need without having to guess the next question is understanding what it is that they&#39;re seeking in terms of the transformation so you want them to fill in the blanks of I want to go from blank to blank so that I can&#39;t blank you want to know where they are now where they want to go and ultimately why that outcome is so important to them and again that&#39;s going to help you build really valuable really targeted assets just for them that they&#39;re actually going to want so that they will be long time loyal followers and clients of yours so when you do this purely for research purposes it means that you are doing such an amazing job at building a reciprocity relationship and an exchange of value because you actually are taking the time to listen to people who need your help and then you&#39;re just creating the thing that they need so you&#39;re essentially you&#39;re not reading their minds but it feels like you&#39;re reading their minds and it creates that list of people who&#39;s going to be so engaged in whatever it is that you do moving forward and what you sell moving forward so how do you find these people how do you find what we call the ICA so this is called our ICA process it&#39;s a signature process inside of our Authority accelerator program it&#39;s different than what most people do when it comes to market research and it&#39;s extremely effective and it comes from my background in journalism because I know that the more you can understand the person that you&#39;re trying to reach and serve the more you can actually create the thing they need and want so how you find them number one offline so for example in the health and wellness space for that client that I was speaking of she&#39;s talking to therapists she&#39;s calling psychology schools and universities she&#39;s talking to doctors in her local area she is finding people offline and in her network who actually need the thing that she&#39;s going to create to set up these interviews online she is going to Facebook communities that are focused on the topic that she&#39;s speaking about and she&#39;s providing value she&#39;s sharing her story she&#39;s sharing her expertise she&#39;s not having a call to action to say but good call with me but whoever engages with her content she&#39;s then building a relationship by friending them and then starting a private message conversation with them and if they are open to speaking to her about doing this research because she&#39;s not selling anything yet then she&#39;s going to get on a call with them and ask those questions so she can really understand what to build for them the other places you can look are Instagram hashtags that are related to what you want to help people with LinkedIn profiles searching out profiles that have the keywords that you&#39;re interested in supporting people with and also YouTube videos and YouTube comment sections are so right with information of how you can help people and finding right people that you can&#39;t help and this brings us to step three of the three creative and quick ways to build your email list without a freebie so number one is what I just mentioned which is simply the research process of building relationships really listening to people and understanding how you can serve them and once you have those calls and you notice okay this person is actually perfect for what I&#39;m creating you simply can ask them you know I&#39;m working on something that would really be helpful to you would you be interested in getting updates on it are you okay if I add you to my email list and then you just add them to that spreadsheet and that is your initial email list number two we&#39;re all about testing first right because you don&#39;t want to spend a ton of time making something that you don&#39;t even know is going to work so a whiteboard or a live training is a quick and creative way for you to build an email list all you&#39;re going to do is pick a topic that you know is super relevant to your ideal client and you&#39;re gonna promote it and tell people that this is how you are going to help them solve whatever problem is that they need to solve and you can do this on your existing platforms if you have them if you don&#39;t have them you can start sharing this with the people that you did these research calls with that would be step number one if you don&#39;t have a list and they will say yes I&#39;m super interested and then you can say okay I&#39;m going to send you reminders about this via email and they&#39;ll be on your list and another really simple way to do this is on social media if you have an existing audience you can say hey I&#39;m doing a training on X topic if you want in comment with yes and I&#39;ll direct messaging the details via direct message you would say hey the date of the training is going to be this and I&#39;m going to be sending out details by email is it okay if I grab your email so I can send the details to you again easy way for you to describe their email address and it&#39;ll add it onto your spreadsheet and that&#39;s going to build your preliminary list and further to that if you have people in your network or people you know who have an audience of Ideal clients that would be great for this that would be a match for who you want to attract to your email list have them partner with you on it and share it out on their networks With Their audience and it&#39;s going to be a great exchange of value for Their audience because it&#39;s going to be helpful to them ultimately you just let them know hey I&#39;m going to be doing this training on this date if you want to tell your audience about it I&#39;d be so grateful and you can just send them over to this post and they can comment yes and I&#39;ll send them the details by a direct message this works really really well and it&#39;s super impactful and attracting even more people over to what you&#39;re doing now because you&#39;re going to do this this in a live training setting you can do it on Zoom you can do it on a social media platform you can do it wherever you feel is most appropriate and then you can take that recording and package it and that can become your first freebie and I&#39;m going to talk about how to actually build that in a second but that becomes your first freebie you&#39;re not having to build it up front you&#39;re actually going to test it and validate the messaging to make sure it works and it&#39;s something that people want you&#39;re going to have some proof behind it because people will have attended and checked it out and the other bonus of this is you can actually create another opt-in out of this which would be a PDF or a guide that you can then share with these Partners who have helped promote it or even with your existing audience and that&#39;s going to get even more people on your list you can simply say hey I have this guide all about solving X Y and Z it&#39;s just a transcription reformatted of that live training and if people want it they comment yes you send them a DM you say hey I&#39;d love to send this to you by email so you can have a copy of it they give you their email address you add them to the spreadsheet and boom goes the dynamite you&#39;ve got a very basic email list growing without having to do a whole bunch bunch of technical work behind it so you can prove it validate it and start impacting people so you have the research process and then you have the training option which is super easy to set up and then you have the third one which is if you do have any kind of existing audience to start building an email list from scratch just say hey I&#39;m going to start sending out really valuable resources on solving X problem is this something you&#39;re interested in if it&#39;s on Instagram you can do a poll in your story anybody who votes yes on that poll send them a DM same process say hey and be sending out these emails uh you know regularly can I grab your email address so I can add you to the list they will send that over to you the other thing that you can do is on Facebook set up a poll as well if you have any sort of group or page and do the same thing and anyone who votes yes or comments below that poll add them to the list and you can also do this just via comments themselves say yes add me to the list in the comments below I will DM you I&#39;ll get your email address and I will add you to the list all simple ways to do this number four build a relevant exchange of value focus on the word relevance because again it&#39;s important that you&#39;re only attracting the right people onto your email list for the health and the long-term sustainability of your email list so I&#39;ll give you an example I have a client who helps women of color create online Ministries and she knows specifically what they&#39;re after and what their ultimate outcome is of their business they&#39;re creating so a bad opt-in for her would be a training or a guide or a checklist around building an online business in 90 days that&#39;d be bad because that&#39;s going to attract anyone trying to create any kind of business whether that be e-commerce a coaching business a course business whatever it may be so her opt-in instead is called 10 steps to build your part-time prophetic Christian coaching business to consistent five thousand dollar months in 90 days you know who that&#39;s going to attract the right people that&#39;s gonna attract the people who are so excited for what she has to offer because it&#39;s exactly for them so we&#39;ve talked about creating a Bare Bones version of your opt-in and that&#39;s where this can start and again you want to make sure it&#39;s hyper relevant to your audience and to who it needs you the most and who you want to attract the list and one opt-in is good enough it can be a checklist a cheat sheet a guide whatever you want to create it can also be a video recording of a training you&#39;ve done as we talked about earlier creating a bunch of different freebies is one a lot of work for you and number two it&#39;s also going to fragment your list to 10 to all these different segments that may not actually need what you ultimately have to offer now the software to actually create this once you&#39;ve tested it is you can use canva to create really beautiful guides PDFs checklists Etc you can use PowerPoint or keynote to also create them and then the software to actually deliver it and to build out your email list once you&#39;ve collected a certain amount whatever that amount is for you in your spreadsheet of email lists and you&#39;ve built out a really solvable start to it you can import that list into a place like activecampaign or MailChimp MailChimp is probably the easiest to get started with it&#39;s what I started with and you can always migrate your list later on to something more robust like an active campaign now that brings us to step number five which is create the tech so what I mean by this is okay you have this proven opt-in something that people want you&#39;ve got the beginning stages of an email list and a spreadsheet you&#39;re not moving that into and migrating that into a MailChimp for example or whatever platform is of your choice to host your email list and from there you&#39;re ultimately going to need to build out the pages required to get people to sign up for the email list so you&#39;re not having to send DMS anymore to get people to sign up for it so and doing it in a very sort of organic way so now you&#39;re going to build out a landing page and a thank you page those are the two keys to getting people to download on the landing page so enter their email address and their information their first name last name email address so that you can send it to the them and then on the thank you page it would just be a confirmation of their their receiving whatever it is that they&#39;re signing up for and then it would go directly to their email inbox so that is done through an email hosting platform like MailChimp can be done through click funnels it can be done through a whole bunch of things but the whole point is you test it in a way that is non-techy first to prove it and then you can upload that list once it started to build on your spreadsheet into a place like MailChimp now one thing that&#39;s really important is that in the beginning when you&#39;re building out your list you are going to be super intentional about it so it&#39;s going to be really targeted but as it grows you do want to use things like tagging and segmenting so that you know exactly who is there for what so let&#39;s say you do create for whatever reason multiple opt-ins or multiple vehicles to get on your list you want to make sure that you&#39;re tagging people with whatever they actually downloaded to get on the list so that you know okay this person is interested in dog tutorials and this person is interested in cat tutorials so that you can segment and you&#39;re sending your emails to the right people because if you&#39;re sending a dog tutorial to a cat person they&#39;re gonna probably support you and your emails they&#39;re probably not going to open it which is going to hurt your reputation and also your open rates and the health of your email list and they&#39;re definitely not going to click so that goes back to those metrics earlier you want to segment the list and take the list but that doesn&#39;t really come into play until you start really growing the list and any email provider is going to have that ability for you to do that now step number six is do the math and drive traffic so in order to grow your email list obviously you can do it in the very Grassroots way that we mentioned earlier just by setting up those one-to-one conversations and interviews which works really effectively in the beginning but then also you want to start driving more and more traffic to it so there&#39;s so many vehicles that you can do that through YouTube is a great one once you have validated messaging and you know you know exactly you&#39;re serving and all these things Instagram Facebook Tick Tock whatever you might use but here&#39;s a really important thing you need to identify how many leads you actually need on your list so let&#39;s say you want to generate two clients a month and those two clients you&#39;re going to be charging five thousand dollars for whatever it is that you&#39;re selling let&#39;s say it&#39;s an online program and based on an average industry standard of a 20 conversion rate you would need to attract 10 10 leads per month to convert to clients so that&#39;s not a ton to hate your targets and goals you do want to think about okay how many people do I need on my list for this to actually be something that is going to sustain and support the business because you don&#39;t need hundreds of thousands believe me I&#39;ve been there in order to really make this a profitable and revenue driving asset in your business and the final piece is just remember to continue to drive traffic to it so if you&#39;re creating YouTube content and you are making a video that will be relevant to the person who would like to have that opt-in at their fingertips mention it promote it put it in any bio that you might have on a social media platform make short form content if you&#39;re using a short form platform and make videos that drive traffic to that opt-in specifically and let people know that you have that as a resource to download that&#39;s going to start building up your list in a much more rapid pace and again focus on the numbers you need because you don&#39;t need everyone on the list you need the right people on the list and if you&#39;re struggling with how to create that kind of content simple little script struggling with X I&#39;ve created a free guide to help you solve x Problem download it at the link in my bio or download put it below very simple problem solution give them what they need so I want to know from you in the most Bare Bones way what is the first thing you can do to build your email list and what&#39;s the topic gonna be I want to know in the comments below now right on cue I have created a free guide for you on the 10 steps to smash your income and impact ceiling and the process to follow to package your skill set and expertise into a highly scalable online education business be sure to grab that right now at the link in the description now I hope this was helpful for you be sure to like And subscribe for new videos every week on how to build a peaceful purposeful and profitable and most importantly super impactful on that education business and I have so many videos on how to build an online education business from scratch without an audience and I feel like that might be really helpful for you check out next so check out this video next and I will see you in the next one bye

Transcript for:Building an Email List for Online Course Creators

Transcript for:
Building an Email List for Online Course Creators