Episode 148: 3 Strategies to Generate Your Next 100 Email Subscribers
Episode 148: 3 Strategies to Generate Your Next 100 Email Subscribers
In this episode, I am talking about growing your email list. So if you are trying to get more people signed up for your email list, this episode is for you.
I am really excited to talk about growing your email list. In this episode, I share three strategies to get your next 100 subscribers. Keep in mind these strategies are to attract the next 100 subscribers to your email list where 1-2 of them are going to become customers. We are going to talk about list building, but what we are really talking about is how to make sure when you are ready to sell something you have an audience.
3 Strategies to Generate Your Next 100 Email Subscribers
Show Notes:
[01:39] When you launch something new to an audience and you’re just getting started you are going to reach 1% conversion rates to start.
[03:46] The first thing you are going to do is make sure you have a really compelling freebie.
[04:21] You have to update your Instagram bio to link up to your freebie. It needs to be an actually really good piece of content that people can click and opt-in for.
[06:25] Update your Instagram bio to have a really compelling call to action.
[06:39] Start creating content regularly.
[07:11] He has Instagram work that he does every day that takes him about 15-20 minutes. He has committed to do it every day!
[08:13] The second part is to engage with your ideal customer. He recommends hashtags research to find hashtags your ideal client is using. Build genuine connections.
[09:17] Find relevant people in your own audience and engage with them also for about 5 minutes. He goes through his feed and comments on their stuff.
[09:50] The last step is to consume content. He scrolls through the explore page to consume educational and inspirational content.
[10:53] Instagram reels are short 15-30 videos where people use sounds, dances, and more to attract attention.
[12:09] Your first strategy for your next 100 subscribers is to update your Instagram bio with a strong CTA, create your content daily, engage on Instagram, and then consume for inspiration.
[12:23] The second strategy for generating high-quality leads to your email list is to leverage the power of epic shareable content.
[12:42] He recommends creating epic four thousand-word blog posts. He writes them from a place of service. His goal is that it is so good other people want to share it.
[14:17] Turn that epic blog post into a real incredible PDF and turn that post into your freebie. You can also create a content upgrade.
[16:26] Lead with service. Lead with wanting to help and incredible things will happen.
[17:30] The third strategy for generating your next 100 subscribers is running Facebook ads to your freebie.
[18:31] Your email list is the best way to promote what you are doing all around the internet. It is an incredible platform to grow in many ways.
[19:49] If you want to run Facebook ads super quick, spend $10-$20 a day, and you will generate 1-4 more customers. Run to cold audiences.
[21:02] Don’t spam other peoples’ platforms.
[21:49] Don’t go into other peoples’ Facebook groups, ask their biggest struggle, and drop your link. Don’t fish in someone else’s pond.
[22:50] If you really want to grow your audience from a group, you go in and answer other peoples’ questions and connect.
[23:05] Don’t DM people who have shown a vague interest in you. Don’t DM people that you don’t have a relationship with or are not building a relationship with right now.
3 Strategies to Generate Your Next 100 Email Subscribers
Full Transcript:
This is the Heart, Soul & Hustle podcast, episode number 148, and on this episode, we are talking about growing your email list, so if you're trying to get more people signed up for your email list, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey there. You're listening to the Heart, Soul & Hustle podcast. My name is Zach Spuckler, and on this show, we talk about how to go from passionate side hustler to full-time online business owner with tips, tricks, and interviews to help you take it to the next level. Let's do it.
What is up, hustlers? Welcome to another episode of the Heart, Soul & Hustle podcast. Now, I'm really excited to be coming to you today to talk about growing your email list. Now, I've been doing this for quite a while, this being podcasting, courses, content, agency work, services, but really, growing an online business for over six years now, and I've grown my email list to the point where I've had tens of thousands, and I've grown to the point where I have just a few thousand and it's really engaged, and what I can honestly tell you is that volume does make a difference, okay? I want to start by saying, look, the reality is people are people, and I don't want you to look at just, "Oh, I need this big number, and I need to get a lot of people signed up to my email list," but I have a good friend, Denise Duffield-Thomas, who talks about this in her book, Chillpreneur, which I'll link up in the show notes.
She talks about this concept of the 1%, and she says that when you launch something new to an audience and you're just getting started, you're going to reach 1% conversion rates to start. Yes, there's things we can do to improve that, and there's things that we can do to get more people signed up to our content, and get more people into our ecosystem, but I love the 1% rule because I think it kind of forces us to realize that when we're doing our marketing, whether it be launching to our email list, or doing a webinar, or doing a challenge, you're only going to get about 1% of the people in your ecosystem to buy your stuff, okay? I share that because I want to have this episode, the three strategies that you can use to get your next 100 subscribers to your email list, but I want you to think a step further and really be thinking this is a strategy to attract the next 100 people into your ecosystem, where one to two of them are going to become customers. While this episode is about list building, and we're going to talk about list building, what we're really talking about is how to make sure that when you have your offer, when you're ready to sell something, whether it's $30 or $3,000, you have an audience, okay? With all of that being said, let's dive into this week's episode and talk about three strategies for your next 100 subscribers.
Now, I want to start by giving you a really great strategy that I've been learning from a friend of mine, Jasmine Star. Now, Jasmine Star is the Founder of Social Curator, which is an incredible membership that teaches you how to engage on social media, how to create compelling content, how to create consistency. This girl is a hustler through and through. She crushes it out there in these internet streets. I don't believe Social Curator is open for enrollment right now, but I'll link that up in the show notes as well. I'd recommend that you check it out, because what I've been doing is really creating more content on Instagram, and that's been growing my audience, my podcast, my reach, and I want to talk you through how you can leverage Instagram to start growing your email list.
The first thing you're going to do is make sure that you have a really compelling freebie. Now, I have some episodes on how to create compelling freebie content, so in this episode, I'm not going to dive too deep into how to create a freebie, should you do a workbook, a lead magnet, that's an audio, a video, a mini course. Like what should my freebie be? We're going to operate on the assumption that you have a freebie, and in the show notes, I'll link up a show where I talk about how to create an epic freebie. It's a past episode. We'll link up to that, so if you're like, "I don't even know what to give away to grow my email list," I'll link up to another episode that helps with that, but for now, the first thing I want you to know is that you've got to update your Instagram bio to link to your freebie, okay, and not just like some random page on your website or a newsletter, but like an actual really good piece of content that people can click and opt in for.
The reason that we do this is because what I've found is that as I've been leveraging some of the strategies on Instagram that helped me grow, I'm finding that more and more people are clicking over to my website. What that really means is that people are clicking on the link in my bio, so as I'm recording this, I'm actually heading over to my insights, and I want you to know that over the last seven days, we've had about 11 people click to the link on my bio, and in the last 30 days, we've had almost 50 people click on the link in my bio. Now, what's nice is that my bio link right now just says, "Hey, new podcast episode." It's really not a great call to action. In fact, after this episode, I'm making myself a note right now to update my bio link to be something a little more compelling, but basically, I've got people who are coming to engage with my podcast simply because they're checking out my content. Now, I know what you're going to say, "Zach, I don't have a ton of followers," or, "I'm just getting started on Instagram," and that's okay, because what I'm going to teach you or share with you today is the strategy we've been using, because my Instagram account was really not doing that well.
I was creating content, but my posts were getting liked like 20 times, 30 times, and I didn't really have a great hashtag game and people weren't engaging with my content, and that's because in the past two years, prior to the last couple weeks, I only posted on Instagram 25 times in a year, and so my audience was cold to me, I didn't have a lot of engagement, so I just want you to know what I'm going to share with you today and what you can do to get more results with your Instagram game is something that you can implement, whether you got one follower or 100,000 followers, okay? First thing you're going to do is update your Instagram bio to have a really compelling call to action. You want people to head over to your bio and be like, "Yes, I need that. I'm going to click here. I'm going to get more," and they're going to do that, okay?
The next thing you're going to do is you're going to start creating content regularly, okay? Now, I have a little cycle that I go through to create content, and that is that I create content, I engage with other people's content, and then I consume content on Instagram for inspiration. Let's walk through each of those steps. First things first, I've made it a non-negotiable. If you listened to an episode I did a couple weeks ago, where I talk about habits and what habits I'm putting in place to be more productive, I actually have a little tracker, and every day, I just tick off if I've done my Instagram work for the day. It takes me about 15 to 20 minutes, but I commit that every day to my Instagram game.
What I'm doing is first thing, during that 20 minutes, I create a piece of content, okay? I simply go in, I create a piece of content, whether it be a post or a reel. We're going to talk about reels here as well, but I posted to my page, I used some relevant hashtags, and that's it. Once a day, I post content. No, I'm actually posting content twice a day because I'm also doing reels, and y'all, if you are not doing reels on Instagram, you really should consider it, because in four days, we have reached over 6,500 people with our reels, whereas our average post was reaching like three to 500 people, right? I went from reaching like three to 500 people per day on average, to reaching like almost 1,000 plus people a day on average. Actually, more than 1,000, okay?
I create content every single day now, and I've been doing it for just about a week, and the results have been incredible, because I don't just create content. The second thing that I do is I engage with my ideal customer. Now, you do need to have some sense of who your ideal customer is, what they're searching for, what they're looking for, but what I've done is I've done some hashtag research, and I've found hashtags that my ideal clients are using, so I work with a lot of people that are coaches, course creators, and so I know if I look up #coursecreator, or #onlinecourses, or #digitalmarketer, I can go through that hashtag, and I set a timer for about 15 to 20 minutes, and I engage with other people. Why? Because they're my ideal client.
It's not this big, "Oh my gosh, everybody," it's not the old-school like, "Like three photos, comment on one, follow and hope they follow back," It's more like, "Okay. Go build genuine connections. I've actually found people I want to work with, I found people I'm starting to follow, I found people who inspire me, and I'm just building a network," a network of connections, a network of relationships, and I do that via hashtags, okay? The second thing that I do is I find relevant people in my audience and I engage with them as well. That's as simple as setting a timer for about five minutes and just going through my feed and commenting on people's stuff.
Remember, it's called social media. People want you to be social with them, so don't forget to be social with your own audience. What happens is, as you're doing this, you're going to build connections, you're going to build relationships, people are going to click back over to your profile, and if you have a compelling headline in your bio, they're going to click on the link, check out your website, and potentially download your freebie. I create content, I engage, then I consume, okay? Now, this might be a little counterintuitive, I'm not saying go out there and listen to other people's reels or posts, and then rip them off, but what I am saying is I like to go through Instagram and scroll through my feed, and really scroll through the Explore page, which is the one you see when you hit the little magnifying glass, and I just see, "What sounds are people using?"
"What content are people posting? What can I do?" Okay? Now, I mentioned Social Curator, and one of the really nice things about Social Curator is that Jasmine actually gives you a daily prompt for your content, so I don't need as much inspiration, but sometimes I don't want to use the daily prompt or I want to do my own piece of content, so I consume educational content from Jasmine, and I consume social content from the platform, and then I just brainstorm ideas and take notes. One of the things that I've been doing is using the Explore feed to find reel content that I really like.
Instagram Reels, it's just like TickTok. If you've heard of TikTok, it's short 15 to 30-second videos, where people use sounds, use dances, use all kinds of stuff to just attract attention. What I do is I go through the reels feed, and I simply find a sound that I like, okay? Like today, I did this sound that was basically, "Do you like being hurt?" It's like from a song.
It basically says, "I don't understand you like being hurt," and I captioned it when someone says, "Just add friends on Facebook and DM them your pitch," don't worry about the thousands of bridges you're going to burn and the rejection. It's just me lip-syncing, so to speak, over the sound with a little caption. It took me two minutes to create it. It's low quality in terms of like there's no production, there's no ring light. It was just me on a walk, I was scrolling through the reels, I heard the sound, it triggered the idea in my brain, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to use this," and it worked really well.
We've been getting lots of engagement. That reel actually got featured on the Explore page, and as of the time I'm recording this, we posted it about an hour ago, and we reached 2,100 people in an hour, and I'm getting followers, and I'm getting website clicks, and I'm getting engagement, so I want you to think about also creating reels on Instagram, okay? Take a deep breath. I know that was a lot that I just covered, but basically, your first strategy for your next 100 subscribers is to update your Instagram bio with a strong CTA, and then create your content daily, engage on Instagram, and then consume for inspiration, okay? That's what I like to do.
Second strategy for generating high-quality leads to your email list is to leverage the power of epic shareable content. Now, I've talked about this on the show as well before, but I want to really bring it back to the forefront because what I've started doing is creating more frequently, these really epic blog posts, okay? These are blog posts ... My rule of thumb is a 4,000-word minimum, okay? I know that's a lot of words.
It does take time to write, it does take time to edit, it does take time to create, however, it works so stinking well. The reason it works so well is that I'm not just writing blogs for the sake of like, "Oh, I hope people like me," or, "I hope this content ranks in Google." I'm writing blogs from a place of service, and really giving people this incredible insight into what I'm doing and how I'm doing it in my business. Now, if you are a weight loss coach, it could be the complete guide to macros, it could be the complete guide to starting to lift weights at the gym, something that's like very high-level, but can get very granular at the same time. The second thing is, my goal with this content is to have it be so good that other people want to share it and think it's incredible.
Basically, I create content that's better than anybody thinks they're going to get for free or without giving away their name and email. I've got a couple examples. One was I wrote The Ultimate Guide to Your First 1,000 Email Subscribers. One was I wrote The Ultimate Guide to Building a Six-Figure Online Course Business. I wrote The Ultimate Guide to Launching your Digital Course with Facebook Ads in 2021.
We'll link all of those up in the show notes as well, but the second part of this is to either turn that epic blog post into a really incredible PDF. There's some great software that does that, Designrr.io. That's DE-S-I-N-R-R.io. It's a really cheap piece of software. You can plug in your blog URL.
It'll import all the content into a PDF, and then you download that PDF and turn it into the freebie, which if you wanted to, you could even post into your Instagram bio. I like to create these really epic blogs that attract traffic, that attract content, and then there's two ways you can leverage this into growth. If you're getting great social engagement and you've got a following that you want to scale, you can just turn that post into your freebie. If instead, you're using this post to attract new people and you're like, "Well, I don't just want them to read it, and then they won't need to opt in to it," or, "I don't want my opt-in to be the same piece of content," you can create what's called a content upgrade. For example, with my Ultimate Guide to Your First 1,000 Subscribers, I gave away a checklist that was like, "Here's a checklist to implement every step of this blog post," and that did really, really well for us.
We got hundreds of people signed up for that checklist, and that post still gets organic traffic to this day from Google, from people sharing it.
In the last 30 days, these guides on my website have gotten like hundreds of people visiting them organically, because I've been building it up over time, you get Google reach, you get shares, you get engagement, and what happens is those people opt in to the content upgrade because the content of the blog is so good. I truly believe that part of this process that makes it work is that the blog is so juicy, people are like, "Oh my gosh, I need more from this person," and so your goal is not to hold back. One of the little asterisk concerns, things that I hear from people is they say, "Well, if I give away all the good stuff in a blog, why would people buy my course or my training?" Because it's not a course, it's not videos, it's not workbooks, it's not downloads, it's not trainings, it's not coaching, it's just a really incredible piece of content that actually helps people. Like, I know, crazy, but lead with service.
Lead with wanting to help, and incredible things will happen. Quick recap on this is I write a really epic blog post, 4,000 words minimum, high quality, better than anybody expects to get for free on the internet, and then I flip it into a freebie by turning the actual post into a freebie that I'm going to put in my Instagram bio or run ads to, or if I'm just getting started and I want to use that to leverage more traffic, I will create a content upgrade for that blog post that's either a checklist, a workbook, a companion guide that's going to help people get even more results from the blog post and start letting me build that relationship with them via my email list, okay? Let's get into the third strategy for generating your next 100 subscribers. Now, listen. Let's keep it real.
I'm the Facebook ads guy. If I didn't talk Facebook ads on this training, you'd probably be a little surprised that I didn't talk Facebook ads on this training. I called it a training, not a podcast because we're really getting into the nitty-gritty of what to do, and so I forgot I was doing a podcast, but here's the thing. I recommend that you run ads to your freebie at 10 to $20 a day. Now, if that's totally outside of your range right now, that's okay, but we get leads between three and $4 to our freebie, and I just want to run through some numbers for you.
If you're trying to generate your next 100 leads, if you spent 10 to $20 a day, if you were getting leads for $3 a piece, you would have 100 people in 15 to 30 days. If you were spending $2 a lead, you'd have 100 people in the next 10 to 20 days, and if you were only paying $1 per lead, you'd have 100 leads in the next five to 10 days, and that's if you spent between 10 and $20 a day on lead generation. Now, one of the things that we've started doing in our business is we are now consistently driving traffic to our website with Facebook ads, we're consistently growing our email list with Facebook ads, and we're consistently promoting a low-ticket product with our Facebook ads, so we are always, always, always driving traffic to a freebie because we always want to be growing our list. The reason is because I want to be growing my podcast, I want to be growing my socials, and your email list is the best way to promote what you're doing all around the internet, right? It's almost like this incredible platform where you can grow your Instagram, you can grow your YouTube, you can grow your podcast, because when you create new content, you just email the people on your list and send them to that content, okay? Here's the thing.
Ideally, I would run that 10 to $20 a day to either cold audiences, meaning like people who like Zach Spuckler, people who like WordPress, people who like Weight Watchers, that kind of thing. If you have a warm audience already, create a look-alike, which is an audience that you can create in Facebook of people similar to an audience that you choose. You can tell Facebook, "Hey, if you're getting a lot of website traffic, create a look-alike audience of my website traffic." What Facebook will do is create an audience similar to people who are visiting your website. You can do the same thing with your Instagram engagement, your Facebook engagement, your email list if it's over 300 people.
There's all kinds of incredible stuff that you can do, so I recommend that if you want to run Facebook ads, super quick, I won't go into a crash course on how to run Facebook ads, if you want to learn more about how to run Facebook ads, I've got some really awesome resources on my website that you can check out, but I just wanted to really quickly say spend 10 to $20 a day, which is three to $600 a month, and you'll generate like one to four new customers, depending on your cost per lead in your next launch as a result of that, and run it to colder look-alike audiences. Attract new people to your audience, okay? Quick recap on the three strategies for your next 100 subscribers, number one, update your Instagram bio and go through the create, engage, consume cycle. Number two, create epic blog content, 4,000 words minimum, better than anyone would expect, and turn that into a freebie to promote, or create a content upgrade on that blog that people can opt in to. Then finally, spend 10 to $20 a day building your email list with Facebook ads.
You can run them to your freebie, which could be that ultimate guide that you put on your website, or it could be a completely different freebie, okay? Now, before we wrap this episode, I feel like these are really solid strategies. If you implemented all three of these, your email list would really start to grow. I truly believe that you will start to see incredible traction, okay, but there's three things that I don't want you to do to grow your email list. The first thing is spamming other people's platforms, okay?
Now, I'm not saying that you're doing any of these things, but this is stuff that I see people commonly talking about or recommending, and I don't recommend it for you. Spamming someone else's platform is like going on to someone's Facebook ad, or Instagram page, or Facebook page, they post something and you go, "Oh, I have this incredible resource about this. DM me to get it or drop a link," or ... I don't like that, because you're leveraging someone else's platform for your personal gain. Think about how hard you're working to build your platform.
How would you feel if you did this, create, engage, consume cycle on Instagram, and somebody came to your platform and started dropping their freebies or saying, "DM me if you want more." It just doesn't feel good, okay, so don't do it. The second thing I don't want you to do is go into other people's Facebook groups and say, "What's your biggest struggle with X, Y, Z," and then after a bunch of people comment, drop your link or say, "I've got a great resource. DM me." Why?
I call it finishing in someone else's pond, and I know that over the past years, this has been a really thoughtful strategy. I've even talked about it in my early days of internet marketing, where people would be like, "Just go into a Facebook group. Give lots of value, and people will naturally come follow you." Please know, I'm not saying you can't go into a Facebook group and be a valuable member, and as a byproduct, generate business. What I'm saying is don't go into someone else's Facebook group, post something vague or intentional to grab their audience into your ecosystem, and then take advantage of a sacred space, okay, because if everybody starts doing that, it lessens the quality of a group.
I find that the groups where if you really want to grow your audience from a group, you go in and you answer other people's questions. You connect more than you try to get people to connect with you. You're not just going in there saying, "How do I gain from this group?" You're saying, "How do I add to this community?" Okay?
The last thing I don't want you to do is DM people who have showed a vague interest in you, whether on Instagram, or Facebook, and just be like, "Hey, do you want my freebie?," or, "Do you want to buy my program?" Cold pitching is so 2000, and don't do it, okay? What I mean by this is let's say you are creating a really great value in this Facebook group, and let's say her name is Amber. Amber has been saying, "Thank you so much for your help." You have a full-on conversation.
Don't then go DM Amber and say, "Amber, I'm so glad that you found me helpful. Do you want my freebie?" It's like a relationship crusher, because the Facebook messages or Instagram DMs are like a sacred space for people to hold real conversation, and that's a promotional conversation. Now, another little asterisk, I'm not saying that you can't share your freebie in the DM. If somebody reaches out to you or you do a post on Instagram, and someone says, "DM me," or you say, "DM me for more information," and you start a conversation and you naturally see a synergy to help someone, that's different than cold pitching someone who you don't have a true relationship with, okay?
Just to recap, the three things I don't want you to do to grow your email list are value posts, fishing in someone else's ponds or Facebook groups, spamming other people's platforms, trying to get people to come to you, or using that DM game the wrong way, all right? Quick recap of everything that we covered today, we talked about three strategies for your next 100 subscribers, Instagram, epic content, and Facebook ads. We talked about the three no-nos for growing your next 100 subscribers, fishing in someone else's pond or Facebook group, spamming other people's pages or profiles, and DMing people who you don't have a relationship or aren't building a relationship with right now.
Now, I also referenced a ton resources in this episode, so if you want to get any of those resources, head over to heartsoulhustle.com/148.
Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/148. We'll have the show notes waiting for you, a full transcript of this episode, all of the links mentioned, and quick favor, if you've made it this far and you got value, please, please, please do me a favor, head over to heartsoulhustle.com/itunes and leave a review of the show.
It means the world to us. It helps us reach new people, and it tells me if you're enjoying the content. When we hear from you, we know that we're creating great content. If you leave a review or loved the episode, don't hesitate to take a screenshot and tag me on Instagram, @heartsoulhustle, and let me know what you thought of the episode there too. Whether you've reviewed us or not, don't hesitate to tag me on social.
I love hearing from listeners and hearing your biggest takeaways from the episode. That's this week's show. I hope you get lots of value. I can't wait to see you out there building your email list, and until next time, keep hustling.
3 Strategies to Generate Your Next 100 Email Subscribers
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Chillpreneur: The New Rules for Creating Success, Freedom, and Abundance on Your Terms
HSH 021: Creating Epic Offers & Challenges with Jadah Sellner of Simple Green Smoothies
The Ultimate Guide to Your First 1,000 Subscribers (in Just 90 Days)
The Ultimate Guide to Building a Six-Figure Digital Course Business
The Ultimate Guide to Launching Your Digital Course with Facebook Ads in 2021
