 Hey, welcome back to the channel. So in this video, I'm going to talk about how I grew my email list from scratch, from zero subscribers to today, 13,854 subscribers. And I did this mostly using free methods, which I'll talk about today. So if you are watching this video, if you've seen any of my content, you probably know how much I love email. It's a huge part of my business. It's the centerpiece of my business. And that's what I want to talk about today is how I grew my email list, which is the most valuable asset in my business. So before we jump into this, if you are new here, my name is Sean. On this channel, I talk about how to make money from writing online. So if you want more content around that, make sure you hit the like and subscribe button so that you don't miss any of my future videos. So let's hop into my screen here and I'm just going to walk you through exactly what I did. It's a four step system or four step strategy. And this is actually an entry in my Friday fire newsletter. It's a weekly newsletter. I send out obviously every Friday, but I know that not everyone's on my email list, so I do want to walk over this strategy and cover it with you so that you can see how if you are looking to grow your email list from scratch, how I've done it and how I got it to 13,000 plus subscribers today. So first thing is I want to talk about why you would want an email list and why it's so important. So an email list, the reason I love it, it's an owned asset that no one can take away from you. So think of it like your house, right? In your own house, you can throw your own parties. You can say what you want. You can do what you want. Decorate your house the way you want. Invite any of the people that you want over at your house. And so it's your house, right? So it's an owned asset. That's what your email list is. Now, if you are someone famous like Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling or any of those famous movie stars, it is pretty easy to get someone to come over to your house. All you got to do is basically give out your address and people are going to want to come over. But if you are like me, someone who's just a regular person who nobody knows, you need to give people a really good reason to come over to your house. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today is how I got 13,854 people who didn't know me before to come over to my house. And I've done this since 2020. So that's what the four step strategy is. I'm going to cover today. So step number one is you need to first determine who you want in your house. What I mean by that is you need to get it clear on who you can help and who you want on your email list. So let's say I'm hosting a barbecue and I have some juicy steaks and burgers that I'm serving up. I'm not going to invite a bunch of vegans over. I'm going to invite meat lovers because if I invite a bunch of vegans, they're going to get pissed off, right? So if I'm cooking steak and burgers, I want steak and burger lovers. And so that's what determining your who is, who do you want in your house? If you are cooking steaks and burgers or whatever your thing is, you want to invite those types of people over to your house. And you want to figure out who that is. So nowadays I have a few different segments of my audience. I have people who are just getting started learning a money making skill like writing emails that sell. And then I have other people who are experts who are looking to package up their expertise and create and sell digital products and programs. And so I have different segments. So it's kind of like having different friend groups, but I always started with one. So don't worry about targeting many different types of people all at once. Start with one main who, one main ideal client that you want in your house. And you can tailor your positioning, your messaging and your offers around that to get those people onto your email list. So this is step one, determine who you want in your house so that you can position your positioning, your messaging and your offers for that specific person. Step number two is to create a bait. So if you're fishing for Marlin, you can't just expect to throw out a hook and catch a Marlin, right? You have to put some kind of bait on it, right? A piece of squid or a piece of fish. And it's the same thing with your email list. You need to give people something that will get them wanting to join your list, happy to join your list. So what bait can you offer to get people happy to join your list? I have done everything from a one page PDF to a single video training to short ebooks and 70 email courses. And so the delivery method doesn't really matter too much. What matters is that you are offering a bait that your person in step one wants. So if you are trying to attract, for example, I want to work with experts who want to build a lean six figure business, selling their advice and creating digital products. So I'm going to create a bait that will attract that type of person. So I have this course here. It's called the one K a day offer buffet course. And this breaks down my business model, my one person business model and how someone can take the strategy and use it and build a business like that for themselves. So if someone wants to build this a business similar to mine, a lean one person business where they're selling their expertise and their advice, they're going to be attracted to a course like this. So if you go to Sean Anthony.co, by the way, you're going to see this on the homepage and someone can put in their first name and email address. And once they do, boom, they're on my email list. So this is my free bait in this case. I have multiple different free baits. I like I've said, I've done PDFs and ebooks. And if you join my Facebook group, email marketing rain makers, there's a different date there, but this is for an expert type. So whatever your who is or whoever your who is, you want to create a bait that's going to attract that specific type of person. And once you have your bait, all you got to do is create a simple opt-in page just like this, right? And opt-in page is somewhere where someone can put their first name and their email so they get put onto your list. So you attract people to your bait, your ideal person. They give you their email address and congrats. They're on your email list now. Okay, so real simple. This is mine right here or one of my opt-in pages is just, this is my main website, Sean Anthony.co. So you can see it and this is the opt-in form right here. Step three is to pretty up and optimize your social profiles. Now, whether we admit it or not, we are all judgmental or all human beings and if we see something, we're going to feel or think a certain type of way. So if I go to your Facebook profile, for example, and you got a cartoon picture of Pikachu or something, I'm going to think or feel a certain way about you. That's just how it is, right? That's just how our minds work. So I use social media to get all of my email subscribers. And because I do that, I want to make sure that I have a good first impression when someone clicks over to my social profile. So I want to pretty it up, optimize it so that when my ideal person lands on it, it looks good and it attracts them to wanting to work more with me. So let's take a look at my LinkedIn profile as an example. I actually have separate videos on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. So I'll link to those below. But real quick, what are we doing here? We have the cover photo. So you can see this email Rainmaker helping you make more money with email. It has a website link, a call to action, which is this homepage right here so that they can opt in for this free bait. That's one area you can see my picture. It's just a professional looking headshot with a green background. And we have my headline. So within seconds, someone can land on my profile. They know exactly what I do, building a $1 million a year, one person business, writing one email a day and helping people make more money from writing online. So in two seconds that it takes you to read that. You know exactly what I do and who I help and how I can help you. And also I have this handy little link here. So it says build your one person business. This just links. It's a benefit link that links to my bait. So this goes to the homepage as well. Other sections are my featured section here. So if I go down, you can see this links to my email list as well. If I click here, boom, we've got the same link. And then also if I go to my about section, it gives a little background and a little story about who I am and my journey and what I'm working on now. And you can of course opt into my email list and different social profiles here. So this LinkedIn profile, this is a social media profile. I'm optimizing it for my ideal person. And when they land here, there's multiple different ways for them to join my email list and get my free bait. So you want your profile to do the same thing. If someone lands on mine, it has a cover photo with a clear message and a call to action. My headline tells you in one to two sentences what I do. There's a link that drives people to my bait and it's benefit driven, right? Build your one person business. There's a featured section that links to my bait as well. And if you look at my Twitter, my Facebook, my YouTube profiles, they're all optimized very similarly. So if I go to my Facebook real quick, you can see here. Got a picture, my cover photo is just me and my family. You can see in the intro or the bio here, it has that same headline and it links to a way to join my email list here. And then I also have all my content here. So all of your social profiles that you're active on, you want to make sure that it's prettied up and optimized so that when someone lands on it, they're not judging you in a negative way, right? They're saying, how can I work more with this person here? So once our profiles are prettied up, what we want to do next is step four, which is to generate attention. So at this point, you should already know who you want on your email list, who you want in your house. You should have some kind of bait to give people a reason to join your email list. You should have an opt-in page to collect email addresses, something simple like this. You should have also optimized your active social profiles, just like I showed you with my LinkedIn here and my Facebook profile. Now, all you have to do is generate attention so that people can find you and we do this through social media. I say that like it's super simple, like it's super easy. It is simple. It's not easy. It takes consistency over a long period of time. So like I mentioned in the last step, I use social media to generate attention, but social, the difference with email is it's a borrowed asset. So if someone on social media who's reviewing your profile or maybe your followers report you because they don't like something you said, you can be booted or canceled at any time. Right? They can kick you off of the platform and tap in many times. I've been kicked off of platforms before off of Facebook. So it's not like an owned asset. Your email list, which is one of the biggest reasons why we want to have an email list for safety. You can get booted, right? Because it's not your house. You're borrowing an asset. The upside reason why we use social media is our who is hanging out there. So if I'm targeting experts and coaches and consultants, most of them aren't on my email list already. I have to go and find them. So you can see here on the side here, I already see a bunch of coaches and consultants and freelancers. So all of the people that I want on my email list are on social media. So we have to generate attention on social to drive them to our owned asset or email list. So how do we do that? Well, we make posts. All we have to do is make sure that the posts are relevant, useful and valuable to our specific person. Now, as you make posts on social and you do this every day or whatever your cadence is, you're going to start as long as it's relevant, useful and valuable stuff. You're going to start attracting people. They're going to start checking out your profile. So they're going to start to say things like, oh, I like this post that Sean's made here, right? How I grew my email list. I'm going to check him out. I'm going to click over to his profile. What does he have going on? Oh, he has an email list. Oh, he has a free video around email. He has a product here that I can buy. So the natural behavior of people is if you are relevant, useful and valuable to them and you're showing up on a consistent basis, you're going to have people clicking over to check out your profile. And you can see here, I have 28,727 post impressions in the last seven days, which is actually a bit down from the last previous weeks and 4,467 profile views. That means 4,467 people clicked over to my profile because they wanted to see more after seeing my content. So that's generating attention. That's what I mean by that. Now, once they do check out your profile and let's say that they click around, right? They see this. I want to see more about what Sean has to say about one person businesses they opt in. That's how we get people on to our email list. And that's how I've gotten 13,854 subscribers on my email list for the most part is I generate attention using social media. I have links that lead to different bates and ways to opt into my list. And you can see one example of that here. So all I'm doing on a daily basis is I am making posts. I'm generating attention. I'm making sure that it's relevant, useful and valuable. Just like this video, I'm hoping it's valuable and useful to you. And I'm driving people to my email list from there. Now, real quick, I don't recommend that you try and tackle four platforms at once. If you do, you're probably going to end up overwhelmed. You're probably not going to post any content at all. And you're going to end up giving up. So what I recommend is choosing one platform, one main platform, maybe two, if you can handle it and do it for six to eight months before adding any other platform. So me personally, I started with my YouTube channel. And then I started driving people to my Facebook group. And from Facebook, I started building my email list right after that. So I started sending people from YouTube to Facebook group to my email list. I have a Twitter account, but I didn't start that until February 2021. Over a year after I started on YouTube and Facebook, and I added LinkedIn just a few months ago in May 2022. The goal with all these platforms is the same, though, is to drive people to my email list to generate attention, drive them to my email list. So I am publishing posts on a daily basis. I'm sending out a daily email and I'm using that to drive more and more people to my email list for free. Now, if you want to see a live case study of how I do this and generate attention, all you have to do is go to my LinkedIn profile here. You can follow me so you can see this on a daily basis. I usually post one to two times a day. If you go to posts, you can see all of my different posts. Here, these are my attention-generating posts. Now, if you want more around creating content and building an audience, make sure that you're on my email list. Go to www.SeanAnthony.co, like I just showed you right here, opt-in. And I'm going to be having a product that's coming out. It's going to be $100 or less around creating content and building an audience. I don't have an exact release date yet, but it is coming. I'm working on it right now. So keep your eyes peeled on that. I'm going to announce it first to my email list. So make sure that you're on my list if you want to hear more about that. I'll probably get a discount code as well. But anyway, I hope that helps. This is the exact strategy I used to get 13,854 subscribers from scratch, from zero subscribers. We all start somewhere, don't be intimidated, actually go out and do this, and you're going to start building your email list as well. So hope this helps. Remember, if you want the next Friday Fire issue and you want to be notified about this product that I have in the future around building your audience and content creation, make sure that you opt-in at my site, www.SeanAnthony.co, and you will be the first to hear about that. So anyway, I hope this was valuable and useful. If it was, give it a like. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and I'll see you in the next video. Take it easy.