How to Build an Email List Fast and for Free — 5 List Building Tips

How to Build an Email List Fast and for Free — 5 List Building Tips

- So one of the biggest keys for building a successful business is building an email list, but it can be challenging. So in this video, I'm gonna be sharing my five biggest tips for building an email list fast using YouTube. Coming up. (camera shutters) Hey what's up guys, Sean here with THiNK Media bringing you the best tips and tools for building your influence with online video and on this channel we do a lot of tech gear reviews, but also tips and strategy videos just like this one. So if you're new here, consider subscribing.

And hey, at any point during the video check out a show summary and show notes in the YouTube description below. Let's jump into the tips. So one of the big mistakes that I see a lot of people making is actually not focusing on building their email list. I think there's a misconception that goes around that thinks, oh it's not important and a lot of focus and attention is on getting more followers on social media, getting more subscribers on YouTube, but there's a huge problem with that and that is this.

You don't own those communication channels.

We've seen it happen on Facebook. Organic reach at one time was really good there, but then as time went one, less and less people are seeing your posts, even if they've subscribed, even if they're a fan of yours that doesn't even mean that you can get your message to them. And even here on YouTube, most channels have less than 10% of their subscribers even seeing their videos in their main subscription feed. And that's a huge problem, right, because just because someone subscribed to you or following you on social media does not mean you're reaching them with your message or your content.

And so that's why I always encourage entrepreneurs, creatives and video influencers to be building an email list cause it gives you an opportunity to get in front of the community that you're building, the tribe you're building, despite what happens with social media platforms, algorithms, or even if a platform was to disappear tomorrow.

Essentially any of your social media presence is on rented land, but your email list is something that you can own and then a group of people that you're able to communicate with in a deeper way over the long haul. And currently here on YouTube between 100 to 200 new people are signing up for our various email lists across the various brands that I'm working with.

And this is organic. These are people who are interested in the niche that I'm in and the message that we're communicating. And that's not from paid traffic.

We'll do that too. We'll do ads sometimes places and we can even drive those numbers up, but that is literally just from YouTube so I really believe that YouTube is one of the best ways to build a thriving email list. And to illustrate the power of this even further a recent THiNK Media newsletter that we sent out got an open rate of 35.96%. That's a pretty good open rate in the email marketing space, but that's also pretty incredible because I'll tell you this.

A Facebook post that we put up a lot of times might have a reach of 150 people, even though I have thousands of Facebook likes. Instagram has an algorithm, even Twitter does now too. That doesn't mean that just because you have a certain number of followers that your content is getting in front of them, but out of our email list, 30% of people saw the content and was able to read through and open that email.

You can't get close to that on any other social platform. There's no social network that comes close to that kind of attention that still exists in email.

And the click through rate on that same email was almost 3%. That means that of everybody that opened it, 3% of people clicked through to go watch a video, to go check out a piece of content, to see a live stream and that again, click through rates on social media don't come close to that let alone someone even seeing it in the first place to being able to click it. And so I really want to encourage you to be thinking about building an email list as part of your overall strategy online. But how do you actually do it? Let's jump in to these five tips.

Tip number one is you need to pick an email service provider. This is also known as a CRM and these are services like MailChimp, Aweber, Infusionsoft, ConvertKit, I currently use GetResponse and I want to encourage you, you can do a lot of research here, but don't get stuck here.

It does matter, but the important thing is just to get started. But one power tip is if you start with a certain email provider make sure ahead of time that you're able to export the email list and the contact information that you get from them. And that way you can switch at any time.

For me, I actually started with MailChimp a few years ago because I was able to use just the free version for quite a while before needing to switch to the paid version, however I eventually learned that they weren't very favorable to affiliate marketing and I think that affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to generate income online so I switched to GetResponse. And since that time I've absolutely loved them. It's been amazing. They not only have a good basic model, but eventually you can move into some advanced automation so whether you're a beginner or whether you're even more of an advanced marketer, GetResponse has been pretty incredible. And so I'll list some resources below so you can research this a little bit and even check those out.

And what's cool is you can also of course always do free trials with things like GetResponse to just test it out, see if it works for you, how you like it and things like that. Tip number two is create something cool to give away in exchange for a person's contact information for their email list. And so in our space this is called either freemium or a freebee or a lead magnet and there is where if you've been around THiNK Media for very long you know that at the end of the video I'm like hey if you want to download the free THiNK Media TV video gear buyers guide I'll link it up in the description below. That's a free gift and instead of just saying hey jump on our newsletter it's saying hey here's something actually cool that's actually valuable and you can download that in exchange for signing up for the email list. And so a couple power tips here.

The first one is make it really valuable.

Like you actually want it to be cool and it doesn't have to be a PDF. It can be an audio file. It can be a video that is only available privately. It's not a public YouTube video or it's embedded on a page somewhere.

It could be a checklist, it could be just something quick and cool that's gonna get results for the people that want those results in your space and in your niche. And then the second quick tip is you want to make sure that it also is specific. And what I mean is when you have a specific free gift for people you want to be able to know why they signed up for that list so that you can talk to them based on that interest.

For example, on my channel Sean Cannell I actually have a free download that's about productivity and high performance in life and so people who sign up for that email list, what are they interested in? High performance, productivity in life.

The people who sign up for a download of the best video gear for every budget for YouTube, what are they interested in? Well cameras, maybe YouTube tips, maybe not even YouTube tips, maybe just video gear like hey I want to save money on lenses, I don't know all about cameras so help me, give me the shortcut.

 

So then inside of my email list provider GetResponse those are segments and I can talk to just this group of people and just that group of people in different ways. If I talk to the high performance group and I was like hey guys you know a new camera came out. What are they gonna do?

Unsubscribe. That's not why we signed up. That's not what we were interested in, don't bother us with that. And then on the flip side, if I was like I know you downloaded a free gear guide, but I'd love to tell you about how to be more productive, what are they gonna do? Unsubscribe because it's not why they signed up in the first place.

So I encourage you to strategically think about the free gift that you get and the tribe of people and community of people that are signing up for that. It gives you how to talk to them, but it also clarifies for you what they would be interested in and what they wouldn't be interested in so that you can add consistent value over time and not have people unsubscribe because you're random and all over the place. The third tip and the next step is to then set up a landing page or this is a lead capture page or a squeeze page. And you've seen these before and here's a couple examples of various ones that we have for our brands and this is just a place where now you can say here's the free gift that you're gonna get, whether it's a free video, whether it's a free download and if you enter your name and email or just your email then I'm gonna send you this and that gives people a way to actually sign up so they can get on your email list.

What's cool here is that most of the email service providers actually allow you to create landing pages right inside.

So there are other services for this, but then maybe you need to sign up for something else. That might even cost more money. So when you're getting started you can definitely use the landing pages or capture pages or squeeze pages that are just a part of your current email service provider. Okay so you've picked an email service provider, you've created a free gift, you've set up a landing page, now you're ready for tip number four and that is to give call to actions for people to sign up and download your free gift and join your list in your YouTube videos. And I encourage you can do this in every video.

Typically at the end and always tie it in to the content of your video. And so if you had a video with five tips on how to meal prep for the week, by the end of the video you could say hey if you want to actually download my grocery shopping list checklist you can grab that as well and it ties into the content of your YouTube video and it gives people the next step to go to another level with you, to download something with you and then to also join your inner circle.

And again, even that person maybe watched the video, maybe they didn't subscribe on YouTube or maybe they subscribe on YouTube, but your videos aren't showing up on their feed. The cool thing is if they've signed up for your email list then you can send out a weekly newsletter and have another way to drive views, to drive traffic to your content, to your video, to whatever it is you're promoting and so what we've done on video influencers on THiNK Media is just consistently video after video we've put these videos out and at the end of every video we give call to actions to different free gifts that we have depending on what the topic is, what the niche is.

- And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to this channel.

Please share this video with someone that you think would benefit from our content. - And we also have a guide with 19 things to do every time you upload a YouTube video. So if you haven't downloaded that, we'll link it up in the description below as well as on the YouTube cart. It's free and then you'll also get weekly tips just like this one in your email inbox. And that is exactly now have between 100 to 200 new people joining our email list everyday because we've put out a library of videos that are getting views on YouTube, whether we work or not and as we talk to people for a while some people say yeah, I'd love to go to the next level, I'd love to be a part of the inner circle, I'd love to join the tribe and join the community and download whatever the free gift is and they're able to go to the next level.

And then tip number five is to actually repeat this process over and over again.

And so here's a couple actionable tips here. The first one is again you can repeatably talk about it in consistent videos. Maybe you post a video a week on YouTube. Every video you can talk about your free gift and joining your inner circle or your newsletter or whatever it is.

But then you can eventually expand into creating more freemiums, more lead magnets, whatever you want to call them that can also serve different micro tribes of your overall niche and your overall community. And so if you never set this up before I encourage you to only focus on one free gift, building one segmented audience and just building up one thing at a time. But eventually you can expand like we've done. And so we have some free gifts that are related to free video trainings about product reviews. We've got free gifts related to just smart phone accessories or just video gear accessories.

YouTube tips over on video influencers. So this takes times to build and I don't encourage you to do five at once. Just focus on one, but if you repeat this process over and over and over again that is how you can build a sizable email list. So I hope that you can see the value in building an email list and that these five tips were helpful, but I realize that I didn't spend a lot of time actually talking about how to get views and get a ton of traffic on your YouTube videos so that they can watch your video and then join your email list. And so if you want to learn more about that probably the best resource that I have is at learnyoutubetoday.com and that's actually a 45 minute master class that breaks down how to get views, how to get more exposure and how to get views even when you're not working, how to get your videos showing up in search results so that way your email list and your audience can grow on autopilot whether you work that day or not.

So again link to that in the description below or on the YouTube cart. Question of the day, have you started building your email list yet? Do you see the value in building an email list and what are some of your best tips? Let me know in the comment section below and remember that some of the best tips and feedback come from you, the THiNK Media TV community so definitely connect with everybody in the comment section.

So thanks so much for checking out this video. Definitely subscribe for videos just like this. Hit the like button if you got value out of this video.

There's a link on the screen if you want to check out that free YouTube master class. And until next time, THiNK Media is bringing you the best tips and tools for building your influence with online video.

Keep crushing it and we will talk soon.

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Amazon Self-Publishing ✍️ How Make $2,137 Passive Income Every Month

Amazon Self-Publishing ✍️ How I Make $2,137 Passive Income Every Month

Self-publishing is easy! I’ve got 12 books published on Amazon and make over two grand a month. Now publishing is easy but making that money passive income every month, that’s where more than four million authors on Amazon fail. In this video, I’m revealing the three hacks that will keep your books ranked and making money every single month! We’re talking Amazon self-publishing and passive income today on Let’s Talk Money!

Beat debt. Make money. Make your money work for you. Creating the financial future you deserve. Let's Talk Money!

Joseph Hogue with the Let’s Talk Money channel here on YouTube. I want to send a special shout out to everyone in the community, thank you for taking a little of your time to be here today. If you’re not part of the community yet, just click that little red subscribe button. It’s free and you’ll never miss an episode. Self-publishing on Amazon is by far my favorite passive income source and easier to start than most people know.

In the last four years, I’ve published 11 books, making almost $108,000 and averaging over $2,100 a month in the last year. In this video, I’ll show you exactly how much I make on each book self-publishing on Amazon from my most profitable books to the least. I’m then going to reveal three secrets to make self-publishing passive income you collect every single month. That’s the real trick to self-publishing a book. Anyone can write and publish a book on Amazon.

The real secret is following these three steps to make your book a source of passive income, generating cash flow every month. If you’re just starting out, I’ve got a free handout on nine tips that will help you write your book and publish as fast as possible. You’ll find everything you need in these nine tips to get your book done and publish within two months.

Now I want to get to those three secrets to passive income publishing so I’ll leave a link to that handout in the video description below. So self-publishing was one of my first income sources when starting my blogs in 2014 and this is a natural fit for anyone with a blog or YouTube channel.

You’re already creating content, it takes almost no work to repurpose it into a book and self-publish. And the income has been astonishing over these last four years. I started with just one book in 2015 and have built it to a library of 12 books including one on how to self-publish that I just launched. I added another full-length book and a series of four guides in 2015.

I followed that with another book in 2016, three in 2017 and two this year.

If I hadn’t taken my focus off publishing to do other things, I could easily have another four books published and be making even more a month. I sell around 670 books a month on Amazon Kindle, print paperback and audio version. Over the last 54 months, I’ve collected almost $108,000 in book sales with my oldest book making almost twenty grand so far. Now you can see that not every book is going to be a huge success. I’ve got five books that have made over $10,000 so far and three that have made less than $1,500 so there’s a bit of a numbers game going on.

Publish at least a few books and you’re going to have some big money makers as well as a few on which you don’t make as much but look at this average. I average $200 a month on each of the 11 books here, almost $2,200 a month and what I’m going to show you next will make this almost completely passive income.

Honestly, I do almost nothing to keep these books ranked on Amazon and making money every month. It’s a check I know will be in my bank account on the 29th and 30th of every single month, money I can rely on. Now I want to share three tips to getting started self-publishing, three ideas that will guarantee you make that passive income every month.

But first, I want to get your feedback on this. What is your biggest roadblock, that one thing that’s keeping you from self-publishing a book. Scroll down and let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure I create a few videos out that can help. So I’m going to give you three steps to make your self-publishing income totally passive and this is more important that most new authors know.

A lot start out thinking writing and publishing the book is the hardest part but then wonder why they don’t make money after that first month.

There are millions of books on Amazon and a lot of them have put tens of thousands in marketing dollars behind the launch. Writing your book is the easy part, keeping it ranked every month to generate cash flow, that’s the hard part. We’ll cover these three tricks but understand the idea is to get enough sales each month to jumpstart the Amazon sales machine, right? Amazon is a sales machine. Millions of people search on the platform for their next book every day.

If you can drive a handful of sales each month, your book is going to show up higher on the search results and capture more of those readers.

The first step here is to use Amazon Marketing Services for sponsored ads on your books. I spend about $20 a month on each book here and this works on two levels. Not only is the advertising profitable, you see here I’ve spent just over ten grand to produce almost $25,000 in sales, not only is it a positive return on my investment but those sales help keep the books ranked. If we scroll down you can see I’ve got quite a few ads going, usually two or three per book, and I’ll show you how to set one up here.

The Amazon dashboard here is really helpful in showing your ad spend on each campaign as well as the sales and your average cost, so how much you’re spending for every dollar earned. We can click through one and so I’ve spent just over $2,600 on this ad to generate $6,100 in sales for a return of about 134% which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Up here in the menu you can see for which book this is, so my book on the nine source of income I use for my blogs, and the keywords I’ve targeted on the ad. This is really helpful after you’ve started your ad, you can come back in here and see which keywords are driving sales, which you want to increase or decrease the bid. So let’s run through real quick on how to create an ad.

So I’ll go back to the main dashboard and click Create Campaign and then click on this sponsored products on the next page.

 

Name your campaign and make sure you include the book name here so you can tell it apart from other campaigns when you have more than one book. I would just leave this end date open to let the ad run continuously. You can put just about anything in on this daily budget because you won’t use it any day anyway. I set mine at $15 but have never spent more than $10 in a single day and that was across all my ads.

There just isn’t the number of impressions and clicks to use the whole budget. Next you’ll either let Amazon pick the keywords with this automatic targeting or you can pick your own. I usually pick my own and you can get a list of good targets by using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to just download a list of related keywords. This bidding strategy is fairly new and just let’s Amazon adjust your bid up or down to help it rank better. It will mean spending a little more money but will also mean more sales so I usually allow both up and down bidding.

Next you pick the book you want to advertise and this will automatically populate with the books you have claimed in your Amazon Author Central account. Now while you’ll go in later and adjust individual bids on keywords, you start out with a default bid on all your keywords. Amazon likes to suggest a bid but I usually start with something like $0.32 or so and will adjust when I start seeing how the keywords are doing. Finally here, you’re going to put in the text for your ad.

If you’re not used to writing ad copy, I’d look around Amazon at some examples to get a feel for what to write. Anytime you search, the ads will say “Sponsored Ad” by the book so you can check out what they’re writing and kind of model your text after that. Now you just hit launch campaign and you’re all set. It will usually take about four to 12 hours to get reviewed and start serving up ads. On my 12 books and spending about $20 each per month, that’s enough to drive about 130 in book sales each month.

Now that alone is going to give you an advantage against millions of other books that don’t use this ad strategy but I want you to use these other two tricks as well. Another really powerful way to drive those few sales you need to stay ranked is by leveraging a blog or a YouTube channel.

Now I know, running a blog or YouTube channel doesn’t sound much like passive income and it’s not. These are legit online businesses and I make six-figures a year on four blogs and my channel, but it does take some work each week. If you can spend five or ten hours a week though, you’ll have a great place to advertise your books and you’ll make money from other income sources.

And while running that blog might not be passive income, it will be a passive source of marketing for your books. So if you go to one of my blogs, here we see MyWorkfromHomeMoney.com which is where I share everything I do to make money online, you’ll see my books advertised in multiple places. I usually have a banner here at the top advertising a book or one of my courses. You can scroll down and I usually have a few books shown in the side bar as well.

These images are all linked directly to my Amazon sales page so again, driving that handful of sales from the blogs to keep each book ranked and producing more sales on Amazon.

If you click through to a post, you’ll see that a lot of the individual articles have a callout and link to a book as well if it relates to the topic. Here in this article about how to make money on YouTube, I’ve linked my new book Crushing YouTube along with a discount. Finally here, another good place is to create a page of book recommendations highlighted in the top menu and add your books in there. On a YouTube channel, you can do videos covering specific parts of the book or anything related to the topic.

Then you just mention the book and refer to a link in the video description. Even if someone doesn’t click on the link but looks for your book the next time they’re on Amazon, it’s a great source of brand building for your business. I’d say the blogs and channel probably drive another 60 copies sold each month and it’s hard to tell because you’ve got so many other things going on but it’s a good chunk for each book.

Again, you don’t need to be getting hundreds of sales from any one of these sources but put them all together and it’s enough to juice that Amazon ranking algorithm. I probably sell around 200, maybe 220 copies of my books through these three hacks I’m sharing including the next one but that’s enough to keep the books ranked and sell another 400+ copies through Amazon without having to do anything else.

This next self-publishing trick is just to build a list of friends, family and other authors that you can use strategically to boost your book sales. Now I know everyone puts on their Facebook page when they launch a book. The post on there about their new book and say pretty please for the support…and then crickets chirping. The problem is, we’re all blind to these kinds of social media requests. We see dozens of them every day from hundreds of our “friends” and we ignore them all.

This kind of passive plea for support, even with your closest friends and family, isn’t going to do much for book sales. Instead, what you need to do is be strategic and direct about it.

Every month, reach out to 10 people in your contact list and ask them directly through a direct message to buy your book. You can drop the price to maybe $1.99 for a few days or just offer to pay them back.

You just need those few more sales to help that Amazon algorithm keep humming. Don’t be afraid to be direct here, reach out with a private message and tell them how much it means to you and you’d be happy to return the favor when they need it.

This is a great source for those initial book sales and reviews but you have to be direct. Click to the right here for that free download, nine tips anyone can use to write and publish a book. This handout is going to make it easy to get your book finished, get it on Amazon and start making money with the self-publishing hacks in this video.

Don’t forget to join the Let’s Talk Money community by tapping that subscribe button and clicking the bell notification..

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