How I got the First 100 Subscribers For my Email List

I finally did it! I topped 100 subscribers today.

I'm all about celebrating small achievements with internet marketing and thought I'd share how I did it with my fellow Warriors. I hope this post will inspire you to keep working on your own email list.


And if there are any lead generation experts in the house, I welcome any tips that could improve my strategy even further.



I signed up for AWeber last September and had nothing but a homepage up from about September to November of '09 with a email list sign up box. It took me longer than it should have to get my blog up and content written for the website. I've been doing SEO consulting for a few years now, but I'm just getting into the holistic internet marketing scene that involves copy writing, sales funnels, USPs, and all that other marketing jargon so getting my website set up the way I wanted took more time than I expected.


It was tough to get any sign ups at first. I only had 5 or 6 after my first couple of months. I was going with the "Hey, Sign Up for Monthly Newsletter Filled With Amazing Tips and Tricks" ad copy. Pretty lame. I don't have much experience with lead generation.


Eventually, I started to get a bit more creative. Instead of offering a free tips and tricks newsletter to visitors, I gave away the same monthly report templates, billing invoices, and sales letter I used for my own consulting business. I spent months making these documents just right for my SEO clients and was very reluctant to give these away for free.


Fortunately, I started getting into Perry Marshall's work. His advice was to give away your best content free, then give away even more in an auto responder sequence. Reluctantly, I decided to give it a try since my strategy wasn't working so well. I decided to put up a new sign up page--with a monthly report, invoice and sales letter--and I noticed an immediate increase in sign ups. Instead of getting 3 or 4 sign ups a month, I was getting 3 or 4 sign ups a week. Still small potatoes, but I was pretty stoked.


Today, my traffic volume is still very low. Although, I am seeing a slow increase in traffic over time. I've been working hard to create regular blog posts, write guest posts for a couple other blogs, and stay semi-active on Twitter. I've also own a consulting business so depending on client needs on any given week I don't have much time for my pet project. But hey, everybody's strapped for time right?


With that being said, here are a few of a big take aways I learned from my first 100 sign ups. I hope my experience can help other Warriors build out their list:

• Google traffic converts much better than Twitter or Facebook. This makes sense based on the different type of traffic, but sign ups from these two traffic types are absolutely night and day for me. So far Twitter has is converting at 0% for me. Google, on the other hand, is converting at an exceptional 22.57%. I also do very well from the Warrior Forum where traffic signs up for my Fast Start Kit at a rate of 15%.

• The landing page also determines the odds of a sign up. Organic search traffic that lands on my homepage or my Fast Start Kit page sign up for my email list at about 18%. However, organic traffic that arrives on one of my blog posts rarely signs up. The sign up rate is about around 2% on my blog. I plan to do some testing with the sign up fields as I don't do a very good job explaining the benefits of a sign up on the blog.

• I've had a couple days with 50+ unique visitor days coming in via Twitter with no sign ups. Social media is another area of online marketing I'm still wrapping my head around.
  
• The more you blog, the more you get linked to, the more traffic you get. I check my back links regularly and have been surprised to see the websites that are linking to me. I plan to continue posting high quality content every week to build up my long tail organic traffic and create an even larger list.

Thanks for reading. If there's anything I left out in this post let me know and I'll be happy to share. Until then, happy list building!