When you’re a start-up founder there are a lot of pressures on you to grow your company. This results in you looking for both short and long term ways to generate more customers and more revenue. One of the best ways to market to customers is to build an email list. Why? Because with email marketing you are able to continue marketing to your customers, vs having one opportunity to do so. This lets you approach them as many times as you want, and see what they respond to and what they don’t so that you can fine-tune your efforts and your lists. In short, it provides a valuable set of customer data.
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What is the Best Way and Why?
Knowing all that, you may be wondering what is the best way to build a list. Over the years I’ve been able to fine-tune that process and talk to many business owners who are doing the same. The best and most sustainable way to build a list for your startup is SEO, this isn’t just our advice, it’s based on the feedback of the experts at Frootful Marketing. This is because it provides a constant flow of traffic that is virtually free after the initial investment. This creates a marketers paradise for list building.
Let’s talk about how to do SEO and how to build that list.
List Building Through SEO
SEO is a lucrative channel when done right, let’s talk about building your list through organic search. Let’s dive in.
Pick Your Targets
Before you start, the most important thing to do is keyword research. This is because you don’t just want traffic coming your way, you want traffic that will turn into revenue. You want people to actually convert to sign up for those lists and that will respond to those emails. Therefore, you want people who are in your niche. You don’t want to get caught up in the number of traffic, but rather the number of sign-ups and converted emails.
Research the Opposition
Next, you want to research everyone ranking for the content opportunities you spotted. Look for strengths and weaknesses across the first ten results ranking for that keyword. Then take all of that and expand on it. Make the content the best piece of content out there. This will help you with search engines and converting the people that will be reading it into list signups.
Creating the Content
When writing the content, you want to do a few things right.
First, you want to make sure to only target one topic. Don’t try to stuff keywords but instead write about only one thing and dive into great depth about it. This is called the long tail approach and lets you zero in on your target rather than being vague and general. Search engines prefer specificity rather than broadness.
You also want to make sure that you break up the content into optimized H1, H2, and H3 headings to make it easier for the bots and the visitors to scan your content.
Link Outreach
To get the content to rank, you will need to reach out to other websites and earn links. This is best done by pitching free content in exchange that you can place a link within it. This has two benefits. On one end you have the ability to step in front of their audience, while on the other end you have the ability to raise the ranking of all the content you created.
Optimizing for Conversions
Lastly, you want to make sure you are building the lists appropriately. You want to take advantage of the visitors and convert as many as you can. To do that is best to have an email sign up forms in the sidebar, as well as in a modal that popups at a certain point of them consuming the content. This will give them multiple opportunities to sign up.
Build Your Traffic, Build Your List
In order to build your list, you will have to build your traffic, and that is done best with SEO. Take these tips and run a content campaign. With time and effort, you will be sure to succeed in scaling your startup.
About Carson Derrow
