327 – The gold is really in the list: Tom talks List Building

Episode 327 – List Building
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody. It's Tom here with episode three hundred and twenty seven of Screw the Commute Podcast. We're going to talk about list building today. Folks, no matter what you hear, I'm telling you, this is where the money is. People at my level make the bulk of their money with email. Yeah, they may be collecting money from many different places, but the goal is to get people on an email list so you can build a relationship with them and market to them over and over again.

[00:00:56] We'll get to that in a minute. And also, I've got a new book coming out on this topic. And when it's done, it'll be at screwthecommute.com/listbuilding. So watch for it. And at the very end of this episode, I'm going to give you the way that I bring in hundreds and sometimes thousands of new targeted subscribers very quickly. OK, hope you didn't miss Episode 326 is the title was Online Customer Service, but many of the principles and techniques work in any kind of customer interaction. What it can tell you is that I've taken enormous amounts of business away from other marketers who don't do the things that I do that I talk about in this episode. So check that out if you missed it. Episode 326. And of course, to find an episode, you go to screwthecommute.com and put the episode number 326. And how would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it.

[00:02:04] Visit Screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it and talk into your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you and also put your website in there so you can get a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. It'll do all kinds of fun things and fancy things on your cell phone or tablet when you're on the road. All right. People are still freaking out from the pandemic. Well, I'm not I'm still selling stuff around the world, just like I have been for the past twenty six years. And I can teach you how to do it, too. And I can teach your kids how to do it because I'm sick of this paying millions of dollars, a trillion dollar debt for student debt.

[00:02:59] And these kids have no skills, no marketable skills. They come back and live in your basement because they can't get a job, a reasonable job anyway. They're certainly can compete for a job at Starbucks. But is that what you're the future you want for them? No. Get them a real skill that they'll take to like, you know, ducks to water because it's Internet related. They can get skills that are in high demand in every single business, small and large on earth has to have these kinds of skills email, marketing, blogging, shopping cart stuff, product production. All these things are the nuts and bolts skills that we teach in my school. IMTCVA.org, so get in touch with me. Let me tell you about it. It's a great legacy gift for your kids, grandchildren's nephews and nieces, far more valuable than anything. Money you could give them, that's for sure, because they'll have a marketable skill.

[00:04:02] All right, let's get to the main event. List building. The old saying is that gold is in the list and I couldn't agree more. I pretty much lived the last twenty four years, at least because of my email list. I mean, it's not a very complicated concept, I give something away sometimes it's called a lead magnet or ethical bribe in exchange for your email address, then I send you good information that helps you along with offers for things that I've either checked out to be good or offers for my own products and services when I do a percentage of the people on the list by what I'm offering, that's the whole thing right there. So this episode's over. No, I'm just kidding. But in this episode, I am going to give you a bunch of ways to reach people so they see that you have a list. First of all, you have to be ready to have a place to send them and create a landing page, sometimes called a squeeze page and various other places on your site that make it easy for people to sign up. There is a lot of intricacies to how to do this, but this episode is going to concentrate on some of the main ways you need to master. And then my book, when it comes out, will expand to a bunch of advanced ways to gain subscribers. But just if you do what I say today, you can start bringing in subscribers. All right, you at least need a website with at least one page. I have various other episodes that talk about WordPress, and I have an inexpensive course on how to build world class websites really cheap.

[00:05:50] You can check it out at screwthecommute.com/WordPressecourse. And of course, all this stuff will be in the show notes. Now, you got to put a theme on your WordPress site, and I like to explain themes and all this website stuff in terms of cars. See, WordPress itself is like the engine of a car. It's what makes everything work. A theme is like the paint job on a car or what the car looks like. Now you can find free WordPress themes to do this, but we happen to use the very inexpensive thrive architect themes that gives you tons of WordPress themes to pick from and a really high quality website builder that all of my students use. C And you also must make sure your theme is responsive. Responsive means your site will look good and operate properly on a cell phone or tablet that would thrive. Themes you can make world class websites for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to have someone do it for you. Now you can search for free and other paid builders, but I got to tell you, you know, we've checked out lots of them and you'll get the best results if you use a premium builder such as thrive.

[00:07:09] But it doesn't cost that much. I think it's like nineteen dollars a month. And you have all these themes to pick from builders and all these other widget kind of things that I'll do crazy all kinds of stuff for you. That's why after all the years I've been doing this, we settled on this one because it has the best value.

[00:07:29] Plus if you buy it through my affiliate link, which will be in the show notes, you get my team's help when you need it. Nobody else will do that for you. So check out the link in the show notes. And Thrive also has individual page templates, so if you want a squeeze page, you just pick from the many templates they have available and then change the sample text to fit your offer. Now, I covered cheap websites in Episode four, so if you want to look in deeper into that, go to screwthecommute.com/4. Right now, you have to have a page to send people to to sign up for your list. Now, you also need a list management autoresponder company to collect the emails and respond to the person who just signed up. The autoresponder sends them a welcome message immediately and helps deliver the lead magnet or ethical bribe or whatever you promise them to get them to sign up. Now we use and promote you've heard me talk about this before, kickstartcart.com for several reasons. One, a mere mortal can operate it to it's reasonably priced. Three, it runs on its own server. So you have no complicated installation and that allows you to have multiple websites run through it. Now, if you're new to the online marketing game, that's a big deal. Now, it also prevents duplicate emails being sent to customers and subscribers if you try to use separate systems for your shopping cart and list management, because Kick Start Cart also acts as your shopping cart.

[00:09:18] In other words, all your subscribers and customers are in one place instead of having separate lists all over the place. And I suffer from this. Still, I had one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers before Kickstartcart was even invented. But you won't have this problem of having multiple lists and duplicates and people complaining about too many emails from you. If you have a good system like this, OK, now you have a place to send people and you have a way to handle their email addresses and deliver their lete magnet when they do sign up. Now, without the next part of this episode, you'd be like having a beautiful house that's empty. OK, you have to drive traffic to your sign up form. So now I'm going to give you a bunch of ways to do that. And I'll give you a free ways first and then some paid ways later. You have to have just the right situation to make money with paid subscribers. And some of them I want you to avoid like crazy because it'll get you in trouble. But paid ads, they can be expensive and you might not be able to make enough money from the subscribers to justify the cost of the ads. OK, let's get into some of the basic ways you can start getting subscribers or add to the ones you already have.

[00:10:38] I might add here that you want targeted subscribers, that is, you know, good to have a large list of random people because you won't know what to sell them. You want to make sure your lead magnet only attracts the right kind of people to your topic. For instance, I gave out a lead magnet for one of my lists called the Top Ten Ways to Earn Money, speaking now, if you don't like public speaking, you aren't going to sign up for my list, which is fine. I don't want you to. But if you do like public speaking and the idea of making money doing it, then you will sign up for my list. And I know to send you offers and tips about speaking. Like I said, it's a very simple concept here. All right, let's get into ways to build your list now, the first thing I tell my students is to get serious about it. That means your sign-up up area should be more than just one page on a Web site. Every prominent page on your site should have a sign up area, maybe with the exception of sales pages, you don't want to distract people with freebies when you're look when they're looking to buy your product. You can use entry and exit popup boxes, and I'm going to do an episode about that, I think first the next week, and they do work, but you have to use them judiciously.

[00:12:05] You want to put the notice of your sign up and your signature file of your emails and on your written correspondence.

[00:12:13] Another concept to keep in mind is that you must show the benefits of signing up. When I first started, people would sign up for anything. Nowadays, you pretty much have to pay them to sign up. I see so many people. They got it. It says, just sign up for our newsletter. Well, they don't mention any benefits at all of signing up, so they get very few and sometimes zero sign ups. I have one pop up box that has like 11 or 12 benefits to signing up.

[00:12:47] I also have a link to my privacy policy and a statement that says we hate spam as much as you do so that they know I'm not going to abuse their address by sending them to many worthless emails or even worse, selling their address to others.

[00:13:05] Mention your list on phone calls and have an easy to say domain name to send people to not only from phone calls, but if you get publicity, like on the radio or TV or if you're speaking on stage or conversing with people at a networking event. All of this is getting serious about your lispenard. All right, now let's get into driving online traffic to your various sign-up forms and what your you'll hear now, it won't cost you anything. Now, one more thing, one more thing, wait a minute before I get into traffic techniques, make your sign up form visible and prominent on your website. Don't hide it in a bunch of other busy looking graphics and text. Make it stand out. All right, the first thing you do is get the ball rolling with your social media post and tweet about your new list, make sure you use relevant keywords so people that don't know you have a chance of finding you. You can trade shout outs with other blogs and websites. You mentioned them on your site and they mention them on your site or or they mention you on their site. I mean, this one form of what we call cross promotion.

[00:14:23] And it's a very powerful way to build your last. You can create PDF files about your topic, you can put them on file sharing sites like SlideShare.net, but better yet, make it high quality and give it to another marketer. This is a really cool tip to add as a bonus, when they are selling a product. Now, to make it even more enticing for the marketer that's more advanced than you is to embed their affiliate link in the bonus. That way, not only do they get the bonus to give away to help their own product sell, if someone buys something from you through your PDF bonus that you've given them, they get a commission. Now you have to have affiliate tracking mechanism in place. And that's just another reason to use Kickstartcart.com because the pro version includes an affiliate tracking module. And by the way, I covered shopping cart systems thoroughly in Episode 10, screwthecommute.com/10. Another thing you can do is right, quality guest postings on other people's blogs with a link back to your sign up form.

[00:15:43] And this is another situation where you can offer to use your affiliate link instead of a direct link. This gives more incentive for the blog owner to use your material. Now, you can expand on this idea by I think I mentioned it just a minute ago, trading shout outs and guest postings with other blogs and websites. You mentioned them on your site and they mentioned you on their site or you post on their site and they post on yours.

[00:16:13] This is one form of what we call this is cross promotion, and it's a very powerful way to build your list. I mentioned this just a minute ago, but it's so powerful. I want to really hammer it in on you that you're taking advantage of their market, they're taking advantage of yours, and it's equitable. Now, you can't go to somebody that's got a million subscribers and you've got to it's not equitable that way. So you have to grow this over time.

[00:16:42] Now, just one warning about this is just make sure you are getting a quality and unique posting from them to put on your site. You don't want Google to see a blog posting on your site that it's already been seen all over the Internet. That's not good. It's duplicate content and just makes you look like you're just copying crap. Try to get a unique posting.

[00:17:06] All right, another idea is sharing is caring. You can ask your current subscribers or people in your social media to share your PDF or information about your list to others on their list. You want to put sign up forms. Listen to this in the middle of blog postings and articles on your site. That way, people trip on the sign up as they read through your good quality content.

[00:17:34] I'm going to have a lot more ways for you to build your list when my new book comes out shortly. Remember, check back at screwthecommute.com/listbuilding.

[00:17:43] But now let's talk about paid ways to get subscribers. Now, you have to be careful with this. As both a waste of money and you could get accused of spamming, I mean, literally, you can go to fiverr.com and for a few dollars get 10000 people to sign a page and some or even promise to get you loads of subscribers or whatever. You hear big numbers like this for cheap and fast. You got to resist the temptation and just run away, turn your back on it. It's all fake and worthless people. If they're people at all, they could be just robots. Or even worse, it could be a stolen list of people who are going to complain of spam the minute they get an email from you and get you kicked off your list management company, and you could even get kicked off your website hosting service. So just don't try to buy these crazy and fraudulent deals. Now, if you're going to spend money, put the money into legitimate ads on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or wherever, makes sense for your topic. I must say, though, this is risky business financially, because you may not make enough money from the people that do subscribe to pay for the cost of your ads. Now, this brings up the topic of self-financing lists, say a lot of people will tell you if you can just break even and I agree with this, too, on the cost of getting someone on your list. You win because the offer you made immediately to the people made you enough money to pay for your add. You make your profit when those people stick with you and buy stuff over time. Be honest with you, I would get some experience first before I tried this method because you could lose your shirt in the meantime. All right, now, if you want help learning all this stuff and remember, I've got I'm going to tell you in a minute the way I can get hundreds or even thousands of subscribers with a certain method.

[00:19:59] You've all seen these. You've probably participated in some them. I'll tell you that in a minute. But I want to tell you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing has been running over twenty years. Seventeen hundred students, no lawsuits, no refunds, no chargebacks, nobody complaining. Now, it doesn't mean everybody was successful because it's a lot of work. But the thing is, what makes this so unique is that we work with you one on one. Nobody at my level. You even talk to you, let alone work with you one on one. Plus, all the people I've trained will work for you one on one. You can even have your assistant.

[00:20:45] Talk to us and help you with your stuff while you're doing your main work. This is just a crazy, successful program and it's unique in that alone that it's one on one. And the other thing is, as you have an immersion weekend at the retreat center, of course, after the pandemic is gone, you have access to our TV studio where we shoot you. And I mean one guy prepared in advance.

[00:21:14] I helped him prepare an advance shot, 43 videos. Another couple came shot over 50 videos that we edited them all, put the graphics on and gave you high quality videos to use on all over the place for your Web site, YouTube, everywhere else each. I've been at an event where just one of those videos, one cost seven hundred dollars.

[00:21:37] I think the left here with 43 time and 50 say so the value is is massive here.

[00:21:45] I triple dare you to get the bring anybody to me with their program and I will blow them off of the face of the earth with the value that we provide.

[00:21:54] So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And there's one other unique thing that I've been holding back to tell you. People at my level were charging 50 or a hundred thousand bucks up front to teach you this stuff, and I thought that's that's not fair. And these people, half of them are rip offs and they'll just run away with the money and heck with you. So I switched that turned the world on its head, basically to the guru world on its head back 20 years ago when I said I'm going to charge an entry fee and then I'm going to take a percentage of their profits, that's capped.

[00:22:32] So for me to get my big money or my fifty thousand, you have to make two hundred thousand. Well, people love this and just flocked to this program and it's still going strong many years later.

[00:22:44] I'm a fanatic. I work with you day, night, weekends, holidays. I'm just a crazy fanatic.

[00:22:51] And guess what? If you want success hooking up with a fanatic that's had success and be willing to teach you is way better than somebody that says, oh, yeah, maybe I'll talk to you once a week. If you're lucky once a month, check in with me. No, I'm fanatic about this because for one thing, you got to understand, I won't get my 50 grand unless you're successful. So I'm going to do whatever I can to help you out. All right. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And it also includes a scholarship to my school, which you can give to a loved one or use yourself whatever you want to do with it. All right. Lots of value here. Give me a call. I'm accessible and we'll talk about it with no high pressure. All right. So let's get to the way that you can bring in hundreds or even thousands of subscribers with one kind of method called contests.

[00:23:51] And I got a super tip if you're going to run some kind of contest, by the way, I got two episodes that cover this, Episodes 46 is on viral marketing and episode 112 is all about contests. But, the super tip is, is whatever your prize is for your contest. Don't make it general, don't make it like cash or an iPhone or something, because people will join like crazy, but then they'll immediately unsubscribe from your list.

[00:24:26] So don't do that. Make sure your prize is targeted towards who you're trying to attract because you don't want them joining. If they're just going to unsubscribe, you're just wasting everybody's time and they might win the prize and then leave. And then all the people that do stick with you and care didn't get a chance at the prize really, because all these other people were bothered to sign up. So don't do that. And then also, especially in those episodes, I talk about contest law. Make sure you don't accidentally turn into a lottery and get the feds after you. Ok, so we cover that in Episode 112 and episode 46.

[00:25:07] Ok, if you start doing just the things you heard here, you will start getting targeted subscribers and you'll start heading toward the goal I referenced in the beginning of this episode.

[00:25:20] All right. Go out there and build that list and I'll catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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