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How to Build and Treat Your Email List

Published on: 15th February, 2015

My today's guest is Tim Paige. Tim is proud to be the Conversion Educator at LeadPages. An experienced marketer in all forms of media, Tim spends his days speaking to the most successful marketers across multiple industries, and sharing his findings with business owners who want to increase their marketing results.

In this interview Tim provides practical advice about where to start building audience, how to drive traffic to your site and how to build, grow and treat your e mail list.

Where to Start?

It's one thing to be a fantastic writer and artist and it's another thing entirely to get people to actually experience your fantastic art.

Start by building your e mail list cause it's an asset you own.

Fist place Tim recommends to start is get the "title of your book".com domain and link that to a landing page.

What is a landing page? It is a webpage, that's designed for people to take an action. And typically that action is to opt in - i.e. give their e mail address.

Many people give a free chapter of their book, which is good IF people already know who you are or if people already know your writing. If you are a first time writer, instead of the free chapter of your book you better come up with a resource that will appeal to potential readers of your book. It should appeal to major pain or interest of the audience.

In terms of conversion it is better to provide a 1 page pdf as lead magnet than an online course or anything else requiring time to digest

How to Drive Traffic?

To drive traffic to your landing page you have 2 options, you have to have money or time. If you have money, you can save yourself time by paying for the traffic. If you don't have the money (which happens more often :) you need to spend time to generate traffic. There is no fast solution with no money.

If you want to drive traffic efficiently one of the best ways to do it is through content marketing. The good news is that as an author you already know how to create great content.

You have to write quality blog posts that not only speak to your particular audience but also include relevant keywords for your books. You can get useful resources on keywords at Content Marketing Institute and Orbit Media Studio.

You can write a blog post and then create different content out of it. Using Voice Bunny services you can get the audio version of the blog post. You can make a video based on that post and pit it on YouTube. That way you will be able to be everywhere. Later on, you will already have ready content + social proof and can pitch to guest post on other blogs.

How to Treat Your Email List?

The biggest mistake you can make with your email list is to NOT e mail them.

You wanna keep in regular contact with your audience.

Once they get in your e mail list set up an autoresponder sequence for every 3 days for minimum 6 e mails (maybe a course or entertainment series, your book chapters, etc.).

When you're e mailing your list promoting your blog post make sure that you have a clever subject line they would immediately want to open. Also the copy of that e mail should have only one goal and that's to click to go to your website and read your blog. Do not include your entire post in your e mail because like that you will be losing traffic, comments, shares and similar SEO juice.

Once or twice a month you can send something exclusive (content or free resource) that is only for your e mail list subscribers. It will make them feel special + when you promote your list you can mention that you provide special content for free.

Don't e mail too much but e mail enough so your subscribers don't forget about you.

You can treat your e mails very much like social media. Tim recommends that your e mails are as personal as they can possibly be. Remember that your e mails are going to people and they read them in the middle of their lives. So show them that you are real person too and treat them like people.

Don't be afraid to sell, just make sure that you have earned your right to sell.