Building Your List
There is 1 tried and true method I've consistently used, FOR YEARS to drive laser targeted, real human eyeballs to my websites, and successfully scale that up no matter the niche. And it's all based around leeching traffic off of other more successful websites. Sounds dirty or black hat doesn't it? It isn't. No you're going to be giving out high quality clicky content which will encourage people to find out more on your blog. You'll be pulling down TONS of traffic from other established websites traffic to your already built quality website. What I like to do is first get my content together that I'll be allowing blog owners to post, then "selling" them on that content (don't worry it's not hard, blog owners LOVE free quality content ! ) You want compelling interesting pieces of content because frankly, that's what gets clicks and eyeballs, and the more eyeballs on the content on their website, the more traffic YOU'LL receive. How do you know what good clicky content to get? Borrow some ideas from Buzzfeed and other content networks. Buzzfeed is the king of clickbaiting (or getting people to click on links.) While they typically cater to more fun and goofy content, other networks like Taboola and Outbrain are a marketing haven and jackpot of content ideas. I'm sure you've seen them on some of them being used on some of the biggest sites on the web, you'll see things like "Similar Content" or "Related Content" on the sidebar or at the end of articles: Look at the above examples, see how much they entice you to click? Or you can go on Buzzfeed and find similar examples - or notice the type of shared content going out on Facebook. That's the kind of content titles you want to have for your content because it will entice people to click and read that content, which then gets them to your site, which then captures their email, which then brings you MONEY. The breakdown goes like this: Reader Enjoys Favorite Blog -> Reader See's Your Content On That Blog -> Reader Loves Your Content -> Reader Goes To Your Blog -> Reader Subscribes To Your List Because Of All The Great Content And Incentives -> You Profit From Subscriber Over & Over And once it's setup, it's all on autopilot and every piece of content you add to other blogs means more traffic (and money) for you. It telescopes indefinitely. Now that you have an idea of the type of content you want title wise head back to iWriter and outsource ! If you're particularly interested in the niche you can write the content yourself. I leverage my time with writers though. This content doesn't need to be as long as the content on your webpage, I recommend around 800 words. BUT IT DOES... Have to be just as high quality. No rubbish poorly written content here. It needs to be 100% quality, engaging content a blog owner would be proud to display. And now you've got a list of clickbait type titles, you can use those as examples in your iWriter listing, or even come up with a few pieces of content you want written and use those as your keywords (I prefer the later as it ensures you get what you want.) At this point I try and get at least 5 pieces of content together. Frankly when I do this I usually get around 30 but if this is your first go-around, get 5 or so, build and test your particular system, then scale accordingly. More content means more subscribers. Now that you have 5 pieces of high quality, engaging content it's time to figure out where to pull traffic from by finding other sites in your niche. There are some very important factors to keep in mind in regards to which sites you want to be giving content. If you give content to the wrong type of site then you'll be wasting time energy and money as you won't get anything in return (targeted traffic to your site.) If the site doesn't have traffic, there won't be any traffic for you. Seems obvious but people mess this up constantly. Aside from traffic, you also want to ensure that the site is in your niche and the visitors of thatr site will be interested in your content, otherwise, why would they opt-in to your list? They wouldn't. Here are some clear signs that a site gets consistent quality traffic: Comments - Do people leave comments on the content? If so this is an excellent sign as it means people actually care about and engage with the content and its creators. Social Engagement - Check out their social profiles, do they have lots of likes and, more importantly, do lots of people comments and share their content? Alexa Ranking - This is a ranking based on people who use the Alexa toolbar. It skews more heavily to tech sites but is still a good baseline, anything under 100k and the site gets decent traffic. Not the greatest baseline as it can be skewed and manipulated BUT still a decent metric. So first harvest plenty of sites to choose from then narrow them down to sites to submit to. I use a variety of tools to harvest sites. If you purchased the upsell, you will have a my rolodex of sites to tap into directly. I've been building out my list for quite some time and recommend you starting or adding to mine as well. Having a quality reference sheet for your niche will allow you to easily tap into and grow your traffic with ease. There are tons of references you can use for finding sites in your niche. I like the following: StumbleUpon SimilarWeb Technorati Each has the ability to pick a niche and look for sites. For example with Reddit, you can find a subreddit that is your niche and look for popular content. Those sites are generally well trafficked because they're on Reddit, (not always true, but most of the time this is the case.) StumbleUpon will allow you to find TONS of viable websites in just about any niche. You can also see the number of stumbles each site has, giving it validation as being a site with traffic. Technorati is a blog aggregator ranking sites in a multitude of niches. Same thing here. SimilarWeb is actually a great tool if you already know a few websites in your niche. Pop in the urls then scroll down to Similar Sites. You'll see other sites that users of one site also frequent. Start compiling sites in your niche. You're doing a surface glance at the sites that appear to fit the parameters above. Quickly browsing for social engagement and other traffic indicators. Also pay attention to frequency of postings. While it doesn't necessarily mean a site does or doesn't have traffic, it's something to consider (will your post be competing with 10 other post in 1 day or will it be the only post?) That can mean a lot to your bottom line when it comes to traffic. I would recommend compiling a list of AT LEAST 50 sites in your niche. This will give you a great starting point. And consider, you don't even know if any of these sites accept guest posting. Setup an excel file with each of the url's of the sites and then go through and find out if they accept guest posting opportunities. Generally speaking you'll be able to tell in the "About" page, "Contact" page or sometimes many blogs will have a "Write For Us" page. Find these pages for the sites that allow guest posting and make a note of the URL and/or contact email to send posts. For the sites that don't allow guest post, delete them from your Excel file. The upsell I provided is my personal rolodex of sites that DO accept guest posting if you want to save time. At this point you should have a list of contacts for sites that are in your niche, get traffic and accept post from other sites... Excellent ! Now it's time to start emailing or filling out those contact forms ! But don't just send generic copy and paste request, they get these request constantly. Try and be a bit more personal, tell them a bit about what your goals are on your site and mention aspects of their site that you like. This doesn't have to be a long drawn out email. Just a quick hello, introduction, compliment and then ask them if they're currently accepting guest post. Mention that you have only the highest quality standards for your content and would love to share some content pieces with them so they can decide for themselves (this is always great - giving them options makes blog owners very happy.) This may seem like a daunting task, but really its not. You can contact about 1 blog per minute once you get in the swing of things. Contact these blog owners from your "good" email - the email associated with you blog. Not your personal Gmail account. That email you used to sign up for your autoresponder? That's the one you want to contact them with. It looks much more professional. Now it's time to wait. Many times blog owners will email you back with guidelines for post, sometimes you won't hear anything back. I recommend sending them all 5 headlines of your content (remember how we have such killer headlines?) and letting them pick one. This will really get them excited about your content and wanting it up on their site. They're usually used to seeing bland content but we have written content that is engaging and interesting with very interesting titles. Once they decide, send over the full piece of content AND very importantly.. Send them your author bio ! This is how to actually GET the traffic to your site. Their viewers read the content and then at the end see a (usually 50 word) bio of the guest author. In this bio you want to entice them to come to your site. Don't write a boring little cookie-cutter description. Write something that pops. Spend time thinking about it because this could be the difference between people clicking through and not. Make sure you also include your url for the blog owner so they will include it in your bio. At this point once you've got your first 5 pieces of content associated with a blog and queued to post, I like to ramp up quickly. Sometimes blog owners will take weeks to get the content live because of editorial schedules. Not all the time but it happens. I like to continuously be soliciting new pieces of content, so I'd recommend getting at least another 5-10 pieces of content and have those queued up with blog owners as well. This will create a steady stream of visitors hitting your site over the coming weeks. Like I said before, I start with 30 pieces and grow from there to expedite the process, but you may want to get some bankroll coming in before doing so. And no, you DO NOT need to always be setting up post on other people's sites. You will naturally establish credibility in your site as being a top dog in its niche. I'd recommend spending time going through and setting up fresh content on your sites blog, not only will this give you fodder for your email marketing tactics later, it will encourage visitors to subscribe to YOUR site, bringing in repeat visitors that are then sharing and engaging in your content. Having the email list is the golden ticket, but having a quality website that is frequented daily is also a huge asset in your business. It gives you flexibility. It allows you to pivot. You'll be surprised at how much traffic and how quickly you can grow an authority site simply by using these tactics. The goal is to siphon off visitors from those other sites and have them become repeat visitors on your site as well. Consistently add guest post to other sites. Many times you'll be asked if you'd like to submit multiple pieces to a site. ALWAYS DO IT ! People have different browsing habits and resubmitting to multiple sites over a period of time is great, it will expose your content to new eyeballs every time. Guaranteed ! Making a note of successful guest post opportunities and reaching out to those blog owners consistently is a great way to build a core audience, without the hassle of you vetting a site, or the blog owner vetting your content. It's a win-win. Power Tip: You want to monitor in your web analytics which sites are driving the most traffic and make a note of those in your excel file. If a site doesn't drive much traffic, don't contact them again in the future (leave a column open for notes in your Excel file for just this thing ! ) Building relationships with blog owners and giving them a steady stream of high quality content is great for them and you. Nourish those relationships with the quality sites, you're helping them with great content, and they're driving traffic and subscribers to your site. You don't always have to be submitting post to drive traffic, many times the content then gets passed around on social networks and other sources, driving more and more traffic to YOUR post (which drives traffic to YOUR site...) Another thing to consider is these post get archived and will continuously receive traffic down the road (albeit not as much as when they're first posted) but a steady stream of content going up means residual traffic for months, sometimes years to come. Again, this is why you constantly should be submitting fresh content. Even if you stop receiving traffic, if you've got your list built (and have been working with your list) you're already profitable. You can (and should) always be growing that list because it means more money ! But we're not talking about what to do once you grow your list, that's the next section. Again, build out lots of different sources of traffic and make sure you're tracking everything. Experiment with different bio's after your post, try different headlines for your landing pages, experiment with different delays for your popup, try out other themes and fonts for your opt-in box. These things are all trackable. Here for instance is one with a 90% opt-in rate on form displays (which is INSANE)
And this one has a 48% opt-in rate (which is still good - but not 90%)
Remember, this could be due to your bonus you're providing, the copy in your opt-in box or a variety of other things. Having quality analytics for your site means you can trace where exactly people are dropping off. I recommend setting up advanced goals in Google Analytics to track goal conversions and funnel visualizations. I won't get into that here as it's a bit technical (yet still easy to do.) If you're interested in setting up goal conversions there are tons of tutorials on the web. My goal conversion is, obviously, when a user reaches my thank you page with the bonus. Tracking where people bounce (and after how long) is a good metric to gauge what isn't working (if they aren't staying long, maybe your title or intro to your content is poor.) If they're staying and clearly reading through the content but bounce when the opt-in form pops up, maybe you should try different styles of opt-in boxes or bonuses you're giving away. Just increasing that a few percentage points can mean turning 100 visitors into 90 subscribers or 100 visitors into 20 subscribers. Work smarter not harder. Continuously tweak until you can tweak no more and you're at your highest opt-in rates you can achieve. Another advanced tactic which you can do after you get the hang ofeverything is to setup split test for multiple pages and have visitors directed to one or another then measuring the opt-in rates for each, making adjustments to the losing page (after a good deal of control traffic has gone through) and tweaking until you can no longer make it better. There are countless resources for things like this a short Google search away. I'm an analytics junkie, I love split testing everything from the sites I post on to the headlines of my content. If you do the same you will get twice as much out of this method than most others. Don't get to wrapped up in your conversions and analytics and forget to be adding more post on other blogs to increase traffic. The next section is all about what to do with those subscribers to build a business and MAKE MONEY but don't just focus on that. Keep a bit of time dedicated to continuously driving new subscribers to your list to keep your list fresh because you can always expect a certain amount to drop off. Having fresh blood on that list means a healthy business. Remember, work smarter not harder. As you start to build up your revenue streams in the next chapter, you can then start outsourcing certain elements (aside from content creation, having a dedicated manager to harvest, vet and send content to blog owners is critical - set goals for them such as get content up on 10 sites a week and you'll REALLY be driving in large amounts of fresh subscribers daily.) Now it's time to learn what to do with that list you're building. In the next chapter we go over how to make money and grow your business. Always keep in mind that you're growing a business. Don't take the easy cheap way out. If you want to build something that LASTS then you will have to put in some leg work - but never forget about constantly driving new subscribers to your list, even when you start making money, you want to always be adding subscribers! Actionable Steps To Complete This Section:
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