Turning your subscribers into buyers

One thing I’ve learned is the importance of having a large, loyal audience. To view this email as a web page, [click here]() {NAME}, One thing I’ve learned is the importance of having a large, loyal audience. [Ramit] Of course, online businesses need audiences, but so do authors, speakers, and anyone who has a message to spread. It doesn’t matter if you’re new or if you’ve been around for awhile — you need traffic. Here’s a question from one of my students, Navid: “What are your top three list-building strategies that are generating subscribers for you today?” List-building is the process of getting subscribers on your email list. And it’s the lifeblood of many online businesses. If you have 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, or 500,000 subscribers, it means you have a really healthy list. These are all people who want to hear from you. It’s almost like walking into an auditorium where there’s 5,000 people raising their hands saying, “I want to hear from you.” That’s exciting. It’s really important to get new people into your audience. You can share some of the things you’ve learned with them. And if they’re interested, they can buy your products. They can read your stuff for free. They can share it. There are a million things these people can do. That’s why list-building is the lifeblood of online business. Now I’m going to tell you what worked for IWT in the past when we were starting out. I’m also going to tell you what’s working for us now. And then I’ll make a couple of recommendations on which strategies you should use. 1. List-building beginner strategy: Build your loyal fans Early on, I did a lot of guest posting. This is basically going to a blog or a site in your niche that has more traffic than you do and saying, “Hey, I really love what you’re doing. I’d love to contribute a post.” Then you write an amazing post. It gets published. And at the bottom, you say, “Hey, if you’d like to learn more, you can come to my site where I have more cool stuff” and you link to your site. Good things happen with this simple strategy. First, you’ve put your material in front of other people who don’t know about you. Second, you’ve gone to a site that’s bigger than you, so you’re getting more exposure. And third, you’ve given people a way to come to your site. What happens? Those people who make it to the end of your post and like what you have to say click through. They love what they see and subscribe. Boom, you now have new subscribers. [Student and Ramit] Meeting and interacting with students during my book tour I know some of you are thinking, “Oh, Ramit, that’s so obvious. Give me something cool!” Well, guess what? I still do guest posts today. Here’s an example: A couple years ago, I did a guest post on [Tim Ferriss’s site](). From that one post, I got a huge amount of people who subscribed to this newsletter. So don’t think you’re too advanced to use the fundamentals. Every pro basketball player still gets out there and practices the basics. Same thing in business. You’re never too advanced. We still do it. 2. List-building mid-level strategy: Automatically drive more traffic to your site When your site starts getting a steady stream of traffic, SEO is the next strategy to look into. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of writing content that’s going to get search traffic. So if somebody Googles “how to make more money,” they’re going to come across your material pretty high up in the search rankings. Now, I want to warn you about a couple of things. Lots of people talk about SEO, but very few people actually know what they’re doing. They talk about SEO like it’s some magic bullet: “Oh, just SEO it.” Somehow Google will send you 10 million visitors a day. That’s not how it works. You should always be writing material that people want to read. What does that mean? It means stuff that people are going to engage with and maybe even share. They’re not just going to click once and then bounce. SEO is something that’s a little bit more advanced. We didn’t do it for about six or seven years. So I wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it in the early days. Just create material that people want to read. Make sure they’re reading it and hopefully sharing it. 3. List-building pro strategy: Pay for customers This one drives me nuts. It’s called paid acquisition, PPC, or pay-per-click. These are the ads you see people running on Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t believe how many people I know who run companies doing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in revenue this way. And they brag about getting customers at $0.25 a click. They say to me, “It’s so good, Ramit. I have a scalable engine.” What they’re talking about is going to Facebook or Google, spending $1, and making $2. That’s the dream. That’s when paid advertising really works. Now, some businesses have cracked the code and done it beautifully. But it’s difficult. It takes a lot of sophistication to know if it’s actually working. I have friends who spend $5,000 to $25,000 a month on paid ads. And many of them don’t even know if they are making a profit. How’s that possible? Because they spend $25,000 and then they make $40,000 — but they’re not sure if it’s from people who came through paid ads or from something else. They don’t have the tracking in place. Before you do paid acquisition, you really need to know two things: - Your lifetime value, or LTV for short - Your cost of acquisition If you don’t know what those are, you’re not ready to do paid advertising. Paid acquisition can work. But the key for you as a business owner is knowing which of these strategies to apply, and when. For example, if you start off from day one spending $5,000 a month on paid, you’re dead. You don’t know your numbers yet. You’re just throwing away money and burning it. It’s better to start off with guest posts — build relationships and create material that is so good that you can publish on the biggest players in your market. I spent years and years doing guest posts before we even thought about SEO or paid. Follow my lead and remember: Timing is everything. Don’t be in a rush. Coming next week: My exact system to turn traffic into subscribers, and subscribers into buyers In addition to the strategies I described in this email, I have an entire system that I use to drive and convert traffic. Starting next week, I’m going to share it with you. [Signature] P.S. What would your business — and life — be like if you didn’t have to worry about how to get more customers? I’m going to show you my proven system to generate traffic and turn subscribers into buyers. Stay tuned. WHAT TO DO NEXT Watch your inbox. Next week, you’ll learn about my proven system to get traffic to your site, gain subscribers, and make these subscribers want to buy from you. 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