681: 15 List Building Tactics that Actually Work

26:31And they kind of like, hey, I'd love to host this free educational workshop on how to rewrite your cart abandonment sequence, like something really, really specific and niche. And it's like, I'm going to teach you the DIY version, but a lot of the attendees are busy CEOs or marketing directors. Can we just pay you to do this? There was no specific pitch or ask or, you know, sign up here to book a consultation call. Just by virtue of skipping the line, like they've kind of vouched for you as the expert. Just it was a really cool shortcut strategy to get in front of segment, large groups of your target customer in a hurry.

27:04Yeah. And all right, let's give people like a normal example because these are all business ones. So I'm just thinking, you were mentioning the microgreens farmer guy, right? So he could go to a company like Bootstrap Farmer. They sell these seed trays that you actually can grow microgreens in. He can go to them and say like, hey, I want to share my 10 biggest mistakes of growing microgreens or something for beginners. and like at the bottom, they sign up for his email list. And so it doesn't have to be like a business oriented thing. It could be, I don't know, growing microgreens. Like how much more B2C does that get?

27:37Yeah, that's great. But like kind of that same question, well, who are my target customers already doing business with? Who would benefit from my newsletter? And where can I get in front of, you know, big chunks of them all at once? And it's a really interesting one, both the virtual workshops and the paid guest posts, getting paid to create content for other other companies i'm just like my mind is spinning on who else could i go and and pitch this to one that is in a similar vein is this is from from years ago would be like the virtual summit strategy which full caveat like this is a ton of work to put together pre-record a bunch of videos and i'm gonna drip them out over this like live three-day virtual event and the goal is everybody you recorded videos with promotes it to their audience It's the three-day brand building summit.

28:23It's the three-day build your freelance business summit. And super, super effective if you can get this. I mean, we talked to Chandler Bolt, like booked some obscene, like probably a million dollars in sales, like from the self-publishing summit back in the day. But one thing that you can do is reach out to companies that might also want to reach this audience. Somebody had the example of like the freelancer summit, like grow your freelancing business. Hey, FreshBooks, would you mind sponsoring our event? You can be the title sponsor. I don't even know if they charged for it. Maybe they could have.

28:55But the price of admission was invite your email list, invite your own customer base to it. And all of a sudden, boom, 20 ,000 registrations. It was like, oh, this is great. So I'm trying to sell sponsorships or even free sponsorships to the virtual summit. So done right can be absolutely effective, but you're going to be dedicating some time to pulling this off. This reminds me of what I just went through with the 30 days of growth. It was like not a summit, but similar. It's still coordinating with 30 different people, but you didn't have to do like a live video or anything. So that was interesting.

29:26That was a good one. I think that's actually something that can be replicated for quite a few people and netted out like 1 ,750 new subscribers for me in the last 30 days. So I'll take that. Yeah. And you called it like a pop-up newsletter. Pop-up newsletter, yeah. It's similar to a summit in certain ways, but essentially I went out, found 30 different creators, including Nick, and I was like, hey, you want to share one growth tactic you've used to grow your email list? A lot of them I already knew ahead of time. I had figured out what they had done. And I was like, do you want to share this one tactic?

29:57And then so everybody got one of those tips every day for 30 days. And now it's over. So it's not like I have to keep writing this daily newsletter every day, but it's a heck of a lead magnet I have now of like, here's 30 tips to grow your newsletter. Yeah. And everybody who is featured shares it with their audience as a little snippet, as a little blurb. Hey, make sure you go check out the 30 days of growth. Okay. Yeah. And I did have some software tools giving away free licenses, but I did not do the smart thing of being like, can you share this with your email list? I should have done that.

30:26That was the missed opportunity there. It's taking the, you know, the old vertical roundup style post and just making it horizontal. We're going to drip this out instead of say, you know, 30 creators on their number one marketing tip. Okay, we can have that same content and that same amount of outreach and back and forth, but just structured in a different way and kind of have a similar promotion engine where everybody kind of bands together to share it. Yeah, I like that. Totally. That vertical thing used to work really well, but I think it's a little tired now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More with Chanel in just a moment, including the simple LinkedIn post that generated 650 new subscribers in just two posts and why bundle sales might be your secret weapon for going to your list right after this.

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33:01And the best part? Plans start at just$15 per month. Are you ready to say yes to saying no? Join me in making the switch at mintmobile.com slash side hustle. That's mintmobile.com slash side hustle. Upfront payment of$45 required, equivalent to$15 per month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. These are awesome. I've taken a ton of notes. I get some good ideas from this. What else? Anything else on the list? Yeah, I like the one. It's a little more simple instead of like 30 days of content.

33:40So Tom Orbach, who runs marketingideas.com, marketing ideas newsletter, but he knows his marketing stuff. So on LinkedIn, he just wrote, drop your website URL below. I'll reply with a specific growth hack for your company. First come, first serve. And then within this, so he's giving people like custom ideas for growth for their companies. and then underneath each one that he replies to, he'll give them the idea and then he'll say, if you enjoyed this, I share a bunch of tips like this over at marketingideas.com. He said that LinkedIn post got him 250 new subscribers and when he did it on Substack, it got him 400 subscribers.

34:15Wow. So yeah, 650 just from two posts and sharing some time. The brilliance of this though is like he can take some of these ideas and expand on them in his newsletter. So it's like not even just a one-time use case. Yeah, it feels like I'm giving my time, but I'm also getting future content out of this deal. Yeah. And he said a lot of the people who joined the newsletter actually weren't even commenting. They just saw all of the value he was providing and were like, okay, I'm going to sign up for this guy's newsletter because he clearly knows what he's talking about. What do you think, like, if you don't have much of a following on LinkedIn, if you don't have much of a following on Substack or X and you post this stuff, hey, you know, first 10 people, it's like crickets.

34:54You're like, well, now this is awkward because now nobody even commented. Yeah. Well, you can always delete it if you don't get comments within the first 30 minutes or something. But I mean, you could also like seed it with a friend. I could be like, hey, Nick, can you go comment on this thing so I can at least start sharing? And then as people see the comments, they'll probably share their own URL. Okay. So what would you call this one? Kind of like almost a social proof giveaway type of thing, like, you know, office hours type of thing. Yeah. You could do it as an ask me anything too. And this works for practically any industry.

35:24So if we continue with the micro greens examples, Like, give me your biggest issue with microgreens or what's a recent issue you've encountered? Like, maybe they were overwatered or something. It might not work on LinkedIn, but somewhere else, like a forum or something. Yeah. And if the first one doesn't work, don't get discouraged. I remember this was from talking with Dickie Bush years ago when he was first getting started on Twitter. And he put something out. It was like, I wrote a thread. I forget his cadence. It was either every day or every week. and nine of those over the course of the year nine of those ended up going viral and getting him in his 100 000 subscribers or whatever his number was that turned into ship 30 for 30 like this whole business built on the back of building that following but it was like most of them didn't do anything most of them didn't hit and his line was like it's the ultimate you know idea proving ground it's like if if it doesn't resonate in the first little bit like the algorithm is just going to bury it.

36:18You're like, well, back to the drawing board. That wasn't the right hook. That wasn't the right idea. And you kind of refine this process. I don't know if the hit rate improved over time, but it's almost this numbers game of, you know, don't get discouraged if your first two posts don't deliver the results you want. Like it's kind of a game of iteration and trying to find the right thing that does hit and that does take off. Yeah. I think he posted online like every day for nine months. He got to like 2000 followers after nine months. Like most people to quit. Yeah, it's kind of discouraging. But then you see his trajectory now and you're like, whoa, it's so cool that he didn't quit.

36:53Yeah, it's hard to stick with it in those early, early days, sometimes early years. You're like, one of the, it's hard when the, you know, step one, create, create good content. Step two, you know, hopefully go viral. It's like that wild card of it is, is a little bit challenging, but maybe you can seed it if you have a handful of connections. Maybe you ask them to be the first commenters or to reshare it and hopefully give the algorithm a little bit of a nudge. Yeah. Like even Sam Parr from The Hustle, he had the trends community on Facebook. He actually said that in the beginning he was seeding posts.

37:28So he would write up a whole piece for people and share it to them in their DMs. And so like if someone like Sam Parr had to do that in the beginning, it's okay if you do that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For growth in reverse, anything else that you found like in the early days to try and get, you know, get those first 1 ,000 or 10 ,000 subscribers? It was a lot of Twitter threads. And also I think the content was just so unique that people were like, I'm gonna share this with other people. Okay. That's a huge unlock. And it's probably the underlying piece of all of these is like, if you have really good stuff, it's just gonna make everything we just talked about work so much better because people are gonna wanna recommend you.

38:06They're gonna wanna share your content. They're going to want to pay you to promote it. Yeah. What you've become known for, what growth in reverse has become known for is like these really in-depth, deep dive case studies that say, okay, look at Sahil Bloom now and then let's rewind. Let's go back five years and see what that trajectory looked like and the specific tactics that worked and didn't work. And you're right. It's unique content. It's something you won't find anywhere else. And it was effective. So the question is, could I reverse engineer something similar for my own niche? If you're listening in and I don't know if there's any shortcuts here, but you're doing that kind of analysis that people aren't going to find anywhere else makes it compelling.

38:49Yeah. Or like you just go out and find the most unique stories about side hustles and share them. Like you're not the one actually doing the side hustle necessarily, but you're sharing all of those tips and things that you've learned from doing your own. Again, it's just like a different way to do unique content. Yeah, that's a good point. And those are the episodes where you hang up and you're like, and I got to go tell the neighbors, you're not going to believe who I talked to today. You know, could you believe she makes money organizing people's photos in their attic? Right. Oh, that's$100 an hour job.

39:16Cool. I didn't know that. So good. I have another one that has added probably several thousand subscribers over the course of the last three or four years, and that is participating in bundle sales. And so this is going to be more of a B to C or maybe like B to small B type of play where a bundle wholesale organizer, like Ultimate Bundles is one. BC Stack is the one that I'm referring to. I've been a participant in many times, but there's a few different companies that put these together. So that may be a side hustle on its own, being the host, the organizer, the aggregator, because there's some benefits to being that central hub as well.

39:51But as a contributor, how it works is everybody kind of donates a product to this bundle and say, hey, for a limited time, for one week only, you're going to get access to 30, 40, 50 of these digital products on a specific niche, maybe it's how to grow your traffic. And you get it for$49, whatever it is, you know, low price, sticker price on all these resources are$5 ,000. It's like, okay, that might be inflated. But it's still a good deal. And you know, you never know, it's it only takes one good idea to make back the $49. And then some sort of like, I'm a fan of these, as a consumer, and I'm a fan of these as a contributor because how it works is all of these contributors, the 30, 40, 50 people who contributed products, plus the bundle sale has recruited additional affiliates who their audience might find value in this.

40:36They all promote it to their audience. And when people go to go and claim those products, they go register with Teachable or they go order the thing through your Thrivecart link or however it is, or they sign up on your email. And so they have to enter their email to go and claim the product. And now they're a part of your ecosystem. So it's a way to gather subscribers from a ton of different places all at once. And it's been a really effective one over the last few years. That's so interesting. Are those like high quality email subscribers too? Yeah, I was kind of surprised. So the unsubscribe rate, the open rate has been pretty similar to the broader list.

41:14And I guess I expected it to be a little lower, but people tend to stick around about the same rate as everybody else. That's interesting. So you get the entire list, even if they don't download your thing necessarily? No, only if they claim your thing. Oh, okay. I was going to say. Yeah. So you got to come up with a compelling product. Interesting. Yeah. I've never done one of those, but I've seen them all over the place. Yeah. It's a very interesting one. And kind of financially, how it works, if anybody is curious, somebody buys the stack, the individual creators get$0, unless you referred them as an affiliate, then you get your 40 % affiliate commission or whatever it is.

41:50But the play is access to this broader audience. And hopefully some people come back and claim your product and become a part of your world. And a lot of people will throw on order bumps and upsells and stuff, you know, to the back end of their cart to try and recoup some of that. But it's more of a marketing play than a money-making play. Interesting. Yeah, you've been doing that for years now, right? Yeah, it's pretty effective. And it's like, otherwise, I'd be very content to just kind of sit and do my normal thing and like be in maintenance mode and record some episodes. It's like, oh, there's this deadline coming up.

42:21I got to come up with a product that would hopefully be compelling. Like the podcast growth playbook came out of that. The little get gigs mini course came out of that. There was like an easy traffic makeover course that came out of that. where it's like, okay, I got to come up with something that would be beneficial, that would be on brand, that would be comfortable with this price tag. And here's a good excuse to launch it. Interesting. I like that one. Cool. All right. What else? I think a broader category of things that I like to recommend to people are collaborations. Now, this could look like a cross promotion.

42:55So I will shout Nick out in my newsletter. He does the same on his end. But that's the basic one. There's a guy named Alex Garcia. He runs a newsletter called marketingexamined.com. And he did a cross promotion with Pat Walls, who has Starter Story, which is a great one. If you haven't talked to Pat, you probably should. He's got a ton of great case studies as well. But they did a cross promotion. So Pat had this YouTube channel that he was starting to build. I think at the time, he probably had like 10 or 15 ,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube. And Alex was like, okay, well, I have 30 ,000 email subscribers.

43:29like let's just swap things. So Pat came out, filmed the video of Alex, like talking about his business and his newsletter. And Alex just shouted him out as like a full page cross promotion, essentially, like sharing Pat's stuff. And so it looked similar on like the outside, but now Pat's channel has like, I think he has like over 500 ,000 subscribers on YouTube. And so like that video has gotten shared all over the place. About three or four months after, I believe, Alex shared that he had gotten like 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 subscribers from that video. I don't know how many Pat got, but that's a really, that's a lot of subscribers from one collaboration.

44:09Yeah. I mean, you see this on YouTube all the time and just even in the whole channel some kids watch. Dude Perfect is collaborating with Mark Rober to build battle robots, you know, but it makes sense because it kind of lifts a rising tide, lifts all boats, it gets exposure to a different audience. Yeah. And so you don't have to have these huge audiences. That's just like an outlier example, but you can write a guest post together, like go to the writer of a newsletter and like you guys co-write a piece. I've seen this happen all over Substack. The beauty of Substack is like people can click right through and subscribe very easily.

44:41Even if you don't have Substack though, you can do something like this and just like co-write a guest post or actually write a guest post for their audience that they don't have to write anything for. Summits are kind of a version of collaborations. Even that bundle is probably something similar. But you could do this on social media as well. So it's not like it has to live in one channel or the other. Right. And it's trying to find people of a similar size maybe when you're starting out. This was a similar strategy on podcast shoutouts. I mean, years ago it was Instagram takeovers, Instagram shoutouts.

45:12It's nothing new here. Could you get included in somebody else's newsletter as a recommended resource in exchange for shouting them out? It's a similar idea here and it can work really no matter what scale. If you're starting out, it's like, okay, maybe it's five to 10 subscribers instead of five to 10 ,000, but the principles are still the same. Yeah. There's a woman on Substack. Her name's Maya Voye. She's in the product space. So she writes about like product marketing, product strategy. And she went out to some of the other bigger people with Substacks and started doing this. Like she would co-write pieces with them or she would write a piece for them.

45:45And when I found her, she had like 3 ,000 subscribers. And now at this point, I think she's pushing like 20K. And this was like eight months ago, maybe. So like it happens pretty quick if your content's good and you're able to collaborate with some of these people. And she didn't have an audience at that point. And she was partnering with people. One guy, Akash Gupta had like 140 ,000 subscribers. So like, because she was giving him such a valuable piece of content, he was like, yeah, I'll share it. Yeah. Step one, make sure your content is good before you ask anybody to to vouch for you to share it but there's it's like a diverging path right like i could focus heads down just doing my thing and hope somebody notices it's like you gotta kind of be vocal and be proactive about promoting this stuff or going after these collaborations and promo swaps otherwise like the odds of somebody just finding it on their own are so low yeah it's very low especially if it's like a new venture or you've never been online before doing something like this.

46:43Yeah. You had an interesting one to move on to the next one from Cody Sanchez, where she was apparently actually buying up newsletters for contrarian thinking early on. It's like, how can I shortcut this even faster? Oh, this guy already has 13 ,000 subscribers. I'll just go buy the newsletter. It was like, you don't want to run it anymore. Like, is this how it happened? Yeah. This is actually funny. I was doing research and I came across this one podcast episode and I had not heard her talk about this. And I think I listened to like 25 other podcast episodes. Yes, I go deep. And so I listened to this and she said she bought a newsletter.

47:18And so typically when you buy a newsletter, you might send an email and say like, hey, we just acquired blah, blah, blah newsletter. You're now going to be on this list. And you just like import all those people, delete the old list and move on. But what Cody did was she actually positioned Contrarian Thinking as a guest post author or a sponsor for weeks, if not months. She didn't go too far into detail. And I don't know which newsletter she bought because she has never talked about this again. Okay. But she did do this from her words and she would build this audience on the same time. So she would just send out these emails, keep writing the content like nothing ever happened.

47:56And then she would turn around when she figured out like, I probably got all the subscribers I'm going to get from this, she would turn around and sell that back to someone else. So she nowhere in this actually lost money. She probably made money because she was still growing the newsletter at this point. Okay. And so talk about like leverage. Yeah, very savvy. Yeah, I'm going to buy this asset, milk it as much as I can, but still continue its founding mission and then, you know, flip it to the next person. Yeah. She's like so on brand for her. One thing that she mentioned in our earlier interview was a lot of manual outreach for the first 1 ,000 to 10 ,000 people where it was, would you mind shouting this out?

48:37You know, reaching out to friends who already had email lists, doing a ton of guest podcasting, podcast guesting rather, where it was sharing this idea about buying businesses versus building businesses. like, okay, that's a unique angle and building the newsletter that way by borrowing other people's audiences, either through email promo swaps or email shout outs or through podcast guesting. Yeah. She's a hustler for sure. I created a visual actually showing all of the podcasts she was on and like her growth of her newsletter. And it was like so in line. It's just amazing. I'll share that with you if you want to put it in the show notes.

49:12Yeah. It was pretty insane. All right. Well, I could say I knew her before she was super, super famous, only medium famous. Yeah. I remember listening to your episode with her for that research. Yes. You know, millions of followers ago. What are we doing wrong, Nick? Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? This was depressing. Like I remember specifically showing up at FinCon 2021 in Austin. And in my mind, this was like the year of TikTok. So many young creators were there. oh i started six months ago i've got a quarter million followers and it was just like huh this is this is a different path like this is this is unique this is interesting and one of the episodes that we recorded around that time or maybe a little bit before was with tori dunlap and it was one video she said one video went super viral and her funnel was like take your money personality quiz i don't know if it's changed since then and one video was like we added a hundred thousand subscribers in a week.

50:12So maybe you can't control going viral, but you can control what Tori did was having the ecosystem and like the lead capture funnel and process in place for when that viral moment happens. And so that was kind of what impressed me from our call. Yeah, I think she still has that quiz. It's actually she does. I just went to it. 1.16 million people have taken that quiz and all of them enter their email address. So that's wild. Yeah. So if you're going to play the short form game, make sure you got something to lead people back to. That's my, that's my, that's my takeaway. Tori's got an incredible business too.

50:44Well, this has been awesome. I don't know how many we can count these up, but probably 10 or 12 different ideas here. Anything else before we wrap? No, I think that's, that's it. I mean, I have a million of them on my site. So if you want more, if anybody really wants more than that, you can go find it. Absolutely. Well, yeah, there's growthinreverse.com. There's the Growth in Reverse podcast. What's next for you? Where are you taking this thing? Going to put out a course slash vault of these ideas here soon with some videos and step-by-step of how to do each one because people are telling me there's too many question marks.

51:15So I'm like, okay, fine, I'll help. Yeah, it's almost like a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. Or you need the quiz funnel to be like, well, which one works for me? Totally. I should put a quiz on there. That's a good idea. So I think that's the next thing, but I'm still just trying to wrap my head around 30 days of growth. Well, stay tuned for the Growth in Reverse course. We'll be happy to link that up when it is live. growthinreverse.com. In the meantime, Chanel, this has been great. Thank you so much for stopping by. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.

51:44Just try stuff. Experiment. Start somewhere. We have all had those failed posts like Nick was talking about with Dickie Bush. Some things will get zero views, but some things might get 10 views, and those 10 people might end up becoming raving fans of your newsletter. So don't look at the small numbers and think you're failing. Just keep going. Yeah. So we'll always remember this talk from Cliff Ravenscraft at Podcast Movement, I want to say 2016. And a question from the audience comes in, well, I've been doing this for five months and I only have 200 subscribers. And he's like, time out. I want you to remove the word only from your vocabulary.

52:19Look around this room. There's not 200 people in this room, but you're still thinking like you have some unique advantages here. You know them by name. You can know their exact pains and problems, something that a Tim Ferris can't do. You've got a unique advantage here. Don't say only, right? You got 200 people paying attention to you, investing their time and energy, putting you in their earbuds. You're doing something right if you got 200 people to pay attention to you. So yeah, don't sweat the small numbers and experiment with some different of these growth tactics along the way. Now, I wouldn't be doing my job as a host in an episode about list building if I didn't have a listener bonus, a content upgrade for you.

52:53So I built a list building cheat sheet with a couple dozen different ways to grow your email list so you can pick and choose the tactics that appeal most to you along with some tools and additional resources to help you do it. You can grab that for free in the show notes for this episode. Just follow the link in the episode description. I'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Chanel for sharing her insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. The latest offers and deals from those sponsors are at sidehustlenation.com slash deals. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

53:25That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. So fire off that text message for somebody who needs a little kickstart in their list building efforts. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.