3 Off-Beat Ways to Build Your Email List for Free

In my last post, I told you what I learned from watching 50 videos on how to build an email list for free.

If you haven’t read it yet, click the link or go back to the last post. In it, I reveal the most popular email marketing strategy as well as all the other ways Internet gurus are using email marketing.

It was most revealing because most of the methods that were in those videos were very similar to each other.

This proves that there really isn’t anything new under the sun in marketing, just newer means of delivery.

via GIPHY

I did uncover a few ideas on how to build your email marketing list for free.

They aren’t new ideas, but I had never heard these before so I’ve decided to write about them.

Before You Get Too Excited…

I just read my tenth Guerilla Marketing book and I would like to kindly reflect on the words of the author, Conrad Levinson.

“Marketing is not going to save your butt or hand you a million bucks overnight. Marketing of any kind TAKES TIME — on average 2 to 4 years before you start seeing results.”

…Or something like that.

I personally would like to add to that statement — “online businesses are usually harder than that.”

Why would I say such a horrible thing?

Personally, I’ve had several businesses over the last 20 years that I’ve run online.

The first business I started back in 2001 was an online embroidery business called Ellistrations.

I will tell you it was not easy but for a start-up, I did really well.

Yeah, I was making decent money with it, but it burned me out. So I cashed-out my business and started something else.

This goes along with that old saying, “If it were easy to make millions of dollars online…everyone would be doing it.”

That’s so true.

However, I know you want to know how to build your email list for free, not to hear me give you a lesson in business reality.

So, let’s get to it.

It’s Easy to Build Large Email List for Free if You’re Selling This…

This is actually a very easy email marketing strategy that doesn’t require much thought.

Years ago when I had my own eCommerce site, I got a lot of email addresses from eBay. Customers were paying me through PayPal which requires an email address.

So I was collecting tons of email addresses every day. Then I would add them to my Aweber email services account.

As wonderful as that sounds, it was a real chore to migrate all of those email addresses.

Plus, I had to send out emails to these individuals to ask them if it was OK to put them on my email list. (Most of these companies are concerned about if you’re going to be spamming people.)

If you’re selling digital products like ebooks or sound files, it will be harder to get a mailing list. If you have a good niche, you can sell physical products, and start getting email addresses overnight.

All you have to do is ask your purchasers to give you their email addresses as a part of the purchase process.

Well established businesses that have been around for a while will be able to get traffic and build a list pretty fast.

However, informative blogs and sites that are just trying to sell digital items will take much longer. (At least, that’s been my experience.)

Email Marketing Strategy 1 Build Your Email List for Free with Amazon

This is an email marketing strategy that is usually overlooked. But with just a few simple steps, you can get collect email addresses automatically.

Amazon is not just an online store, it’s a search engine.

Why?

Because it functions just like a sophisticated search engine for the products that you buy and sell.

If you know what you’re doing on Amazon, you can easily reroute the people who look at your books to your site and get their email addresses.

If you are just selling books on Amazon as an author, you’ll have a rough time selling books and information at a profit. There are so many authors on Amazon that are already well established, it may be difficult.

However, you can still promote your business or services with Amazon.

paintshop pro course case — I’ve created and sold my own courses while using them to build my email lists. A very simple process.

My method is to create my own video courses and sell them on Amazon. You don’t have to just create ebooks or published books to sell on there. You could create videos and have them printed onto DVD’s very cheaply and sell them as well. (Actually, you could sell stuff on eBay and any other site you so desire, too.)

You could also create audio CDs as well.

Basically, there are hoards of physical items you can produce and sell on Amazon. Once you’ve sold your items, you can easily get the email addresses of the individuals who buy your stuff.

How is this done?

Amazon has a messaging service that is run by them. Sometimes you can request the seller to contact you by email if they have any questions or need further information about sending the package. (Of course, you can send an email address to the seller.)

Amazon tries to discourage this, but I’ve sent my email to the buyers and I’ve never gotten into trouble…so far. Of course, if the buyer emails me through their personal email address, I always ask the buyer if it’s OK to put them on my newsletter list.

Guess what? They almost always say “Yes”.

When I send my video courses out by the USPS priority mail, I always include a newsletter with a way to join my Facebook page and tell them they can get a free newsletter sent to them if they go to my page and sign up.

This gets responses at least 1/4 of the time but, hey these are easy to obtain, so why not?

Email Marketing Strategy 2 – Yes, Make eBooks

Another great way of building your email list quickly is to create great eBooks and spread them everywhere.

(Notice I didn’t say, “crappy eBooks”.)

The good news? You don’t have to create large 300+ page eBooks to get the job done. Just super-high quality eBooks that people will be happy to get their hands on.

To show you what I mean by high-quality, here are a few examples:

Jon Morrow’s 52 Headline Hacks

Patel & Aaragon’s Content Marketing Strategy

John Nemo’s Headline Hero

I highly recommend that you download these eBooks and use them as a quality guide. Once you do that, you’ll see these that these successful eBooks are rather short.

(Honestly, do you want to read a 300+ page eBook? I didn’t think so.)

One easy way to get ideas for writing eBooks is to take other people’s ideas and make them even better.

Here’s how we do that…

Step 1 – Research Popular Subjects in Your Niche

Go onto Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest and type in your niche topic.

In this case, I want to write an eBook on how to write a blog post introduction.

Let’s see if this will be a worthy subject…

Type in “blog post introduction”

Wow, it looks like a lot of people are really interested in this subject! So you could possibly write about this idea and probably be safe.

Step 2 – Find Source Information and Use it to Make Your Ebook

Ubersuggest makes this process very easy too. Scroll down your results page on Ubersuggest (past the keyword results) and look at the

content results. Some of the results don’t pertain to the exact subject we’re writing our ebook about. However, 2 of them do…so far.

See

See the button under the content ideas? Click on that.

Yep, you guessed it. Neil Patel will tell you that in order to view the rest of the results, you’ll have to give him your email address. (I guess that’s just another way you can build your email list. Ha -ha!)

Now that you’ve given Mr. Patel your email and then scrolled down some more, you have a lot of posts you can use for your ebook research.

However, there were only 3 or 4 results under this search.

So I decided to do a new one. This time while I was still on the content ideas page, I typed in, “blog post intro“.

I’m glad I did a secondary search for this topic. It shows that sometimes while doing research like this you have to think outside the box and try out a few different things.

So I wound up with an entire page of results that were good.

You can see that not only are there better choices but these posts have more views, backlinks, and shares.

Now you have a whole bunch of great posts to use for ideas and extracting tips. If you’re really serious about writing a great ebook on this subject, you’ll read all of them.

Step 3 – Write the Ebook

Now that you’ve got all of these great posts with ideas at your disposal, you can now start the task of writing your ebook. As I mentioned before, you’ll need to extract the best ideas from all of these posts you can.

Not only that, you’ll want to create the best graphics, infographics, text effects, and anything else you think will make your ebook stand out.

Make sure you brand your ebook. Put your email address, business phone number, or anything else in there that will make communication between you and your prospects easy. Show them how to take the next step, whether it’s going to your website to leave their email or whatever.

Step 4 – Build Your Email List By Giving Away Your Stuff

Now, comes the fun stuff. Most people would tell you to create an opt-in box and an offer to get it on your website. Yeah, you should definitely do that.

However, you want to get your ebook into as many hands as you can.

There are tons of websites that will allow you to either sell your ebook or give them away for free. I like the give-it-away-for-free idea because there are so many ebooks online being handed out, you don’t want to make someone dig out their wallet to get your eBook.

Here’s a list of the websites you can put your ebook up for free, for anyone that wants a free copy.

Email Marketing Strategy 3 Use LinkedIn

Here’s a way to build your email list for free that I thought up on my own.

Let’s say you’ve now produced an ebook or something to give away. Well if you get a LinkedIn account, you can also connect with people. When I connect with people, I usually ask them if they want a free copy of my eBook.

I tell them that my ebook is too large to send to them by LinkedIn messaging and I ask them if it would be OK to send it by email. I then tell them that I need their email address to do so. ( My ebook is over 200 pages and it really won’t go through LinkedIn’s messaging service.)

I’ve got to tell you, almost everyone I’ve asked on LinkedIn wants a copy and has given me their email addresses. I also ask them if they want me to put them on my newsletter list.

They almost always say, “yes”.

The Conclusion to Building Your Email List for Free

If you take some of these ideas and really run with them, you’ll get a good leg up on building your email list for free. Like any other type of marketing, it takes time to build your email list. The best thing I can recommend to you is to keep at it, no matter how long it takes you.

By the way, most of these methods of building your email list are online methods. If you have a regular brick and mortar business, you can easily collect email addresses from people you do business with. As a matter of fact, I’m totally dismayed when a business owner tells me they do not collect email addresses from customers or prospects.

I’m sure there’s another email marketing strategy out there, somewhere. It would be awesome if you could share your own ideas on how to build your email list.

Please leave a comment below and tell us how you build your email list for your business.

2 thoughts on “3 Off-Beat Ways to Build Your Email List for Free”

Emenike Emmanuel December 30, 2016 at 12:01 pm

Hi El

Thanks for sharing. I so much appreciate this lesson. What I normally do is to convert most of my long posts to ebooks. By that they would want to know more and I grab their email address.
elmo January 3, 2017 at 8:58 pm

Yeah, Emenike! That’s an excellent idea. Thanks so much for sharing.