Building Your Email List From Paid Traffic
List building is crucial. Your email list is one of, if not THE, most important asset you own in your business.
You build your list by paying to do so.
Paying either with cash (by doing things like buying solo ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, etc.). Or paying with time (such as doing SEO to get your page ranked, or creating videos on YouTube or TikTok, or using other social platforms without paying cash). Or paying with barter (getting affiliates to send their list to build yours, by giving them hefty commissions for promoting some asset you own).
Buying traffic to send to your squeeze page (where the user signs up to your list), is possibly the most expensive method, but possibly the best, which might not make sense at first.
It’s best because you have control. Of the 3 methods above, the latter 2 rely on others. Paying for traffic to your squeeze page means you can send as little or as much traffic as you can afford.
So it’s scalable. If you are buying from a source that sends you traffic that becomes profitable in a reasonable amount of time, you can reinvest those profits for more and more and more.
The key is finding someone that will send good traffic to your squeeze page, and getting your squeeze page to convert well.
First of all, a good source is Udimi.com
How much you pay per click to your squeeze page varies from vendor to vendor there.
The thing is, you won’t get every click to opt into your list.
Many veteran solo ad buyers are happy to get a 30% conversion rate, meaning if they buy 100 clicks, they’ll end up with 30 new email subscribers.
So if you pay $50 for 100 clicks, you’re paying $50 for 30 subscribers, which is $1.67 each.
If you aren’t a veteran solo ad buyer, let’s say you do fairly well and we’ll say you pay an even $2.00 per email subscriber.
Then your work begins
You need to present offers to your new subscribers so that they spend on average $2.00 each, or $50 in total, to pay for your solo ad buy.
Once that happens, your investment has been returned, and profits begin. Yay!
Not everyone will buy anything.
Hopefully at least one person will buy something at a price of $50, or 3 people at a price of $17, or one person might join a membership site and pay $17 per month for at least 3 months.
That’s the simple math.
Yes, you could buy lots of traffic, but until you find out if your new subscribers are buying YOUR offers, it’s gambling.
So I recommend starting with a single ad buy, and tracking the results until that buy has been paid for.
If you have a 30-day email campaign, that every new subscriber will receive (if they open your emails), that always succeeds in getting at least $50 worth of revenue from every 25 to 30 new subscribers, then it’s a beautiful business.
But…
Some solo ad buys will flop because every batch of 30 subscribers is different.
And some solo ad buys will bring a customer that will buy everything you have to offer, many 100s or 1000s of dollars worth.
The opening emails in your 30-day campaign should be content that gets the readers to know, like, and trust you, interesting enough that they will look forward to opening your future emails.
Ideally we would like to liquidate our cost in the first 30 days, and then anything that comes in after that is profit.
Then you make another ad buy or two.
If you can do that, you can grow your list and scale your business in a huge way.
That doesn’t always happen. Maybe one batch of subscribers will totally flop. But maybe the next one will bring in 10 times your ad spend. You can’t quit after one bad campaign, but if it happens regularly, you need to look at things very closely and tweak something. Some tips follow later on this page.
Where to get solo ad traffic
Using Udimi is a great way to get solo ad traffic. Another source is TrafficZest. I haven’t used TrafficZest yet, but have heard good things. I do believe you need to spend at least $100 minimum per time.
So here’s the magic route to building a big profitable list, and scaling your profits.
- Buy traffic from somewhere (solo ads, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc.)
- Track your conversions and tweak your optin page(s) to get better conversions.
- Track your subscribers and what they purchase to see how quickly they make your ad purchase pay for itself.
- Lather. Rinse. Repeat
There are some variables that are important.
- Cost per click
- Conversion rate (% of clicks that end up on your list)
- How quickly can you recoup your ad buy cost
That’s it! Get the first and third lower, and the second higher, and you’ll reach you lofty income goals quicker.
For cost per click, you want to find reliable sellers that will send good traffic to you, if you’re buying solo ads. Most (but not all) are honest, and many will send you more clicks than you pay for.
Which ad seller to use totally depends on your niche. On Udimi, especially, you can see what the seller specializes in.
To improve your conversion rate, you should invest in learning as much as you can about this art.
Where can I learn more?
I highly recommend MyPeeps 2.0, a list building master class from Travis Speegle and Ryan Lee.
You’ll learn about solo ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and get access to lots of templates that should improve your conversion rates.
You might even learn enough from the training and the use of Travis’ templates, to get your subscriber cost down from a normal $2.00 to as low as .50 to $1.00.
If you build a 10,000 person list eventually, saving a dollar per subscriber will save you $10,000!
As far as recouping your costs quickly, you need (NEED!) to give your new subscribers opportunities to spend money with you.
That means mailing them, ideally daily or at least 4 times per week.
And it means having offers that are higher than low-ticket (at least $27 or a monthly continuity site).
You might think that selling lower priced products will get you the most sales, and usually it will, but will it get you the most income?
Your autoresponder campaign, the one that runs for at least the first 30 days a subscriber gets after joining, should have a mixture of low-ticket, medium-ticket, higher-ticket.
If you don’t have enough products of your own yet, you can promote affiliate products. The problem with that is, you generally don’t know who bought what, so tracking the income is tougher. To combat that, you might have affiliate offers that are only sent to new subscribers.