How to Build an Email List from Scratch for Beginners

 

One of the best ways to make money online as an internet marketer, blogger or webmaster is to build an email list from scratch in your target niche market and monetize it in the best ways that suit you. Starting an email marketing campaign is not complicated at all and anybody can do it with the right online marketing tools which I’ll discuss shortly.

 

First and foremost, you’ve to understand that consistent list building confer a lot of responsibilities on you as an email marketer because you’ve to be on top of the game with your subscribers in order to be in their good books.

 

You may not know that generating a lead and/or closing a sale is not as easy as it sounds. It takes as many as seven times to expose a product or service to a potential prospect before he may decides to buy. So, understanding the buyer’s journey is important if you want to succeed big time. 

 

To this end, you’ve to find a way to consistently reach out to your target audience in order to have the opportunity to constantly promote products and services that they need to them. Beyond this, the onus is also on you to intersperse your promotions with high quality content, industry news, emerging trends, etc which will be of benefit to your subscribers so as to get the best results from your email marketing campaigns.

 

To do this effectively, you’ve to subscribe to reliable ESP (email service provider) who will be saddled with the collection and management of subscribers on your behalf using email marketing software specifically designed for this purpose.

 

List building is an integral part of digital marketing channels and it’s important you learn and master it inside out if you want to go far and make profits in your online business for the long term.

 

As it were, statistics have it that for every $1 you spend on email marketing campaigns, you should expect circa $36 ROI (return on investment) or even more. ROI from email marketing is the highest of all the digital marketing strategies used by internet marketers to reach out to their target markets.

 

Now, let’s quickly discuss the basic online tools and resources which you absolutely need to succeed with your email marketing strategy.

 

Email Marketing Tools and Resources

 

The following tools and resources are what you need to start email marketing business successfully and on a sound footing.

 

1. Domain name
2. Web hosting services
3. Blog website preferably WordPress blog
4. Email marketing software
5. High quality lead magnet
6. High impact but constant content for your blog and email autoresponder
7. Website traffic

 

Domain Name

 

The first step is to register a domain name to make it easy for you to build an email list of subscribers from your own website. This is the URL or virtual office address that you’ll be using to direct targeted traffic to your website and for branding purposes. For example, HustleVim.com is a domain name focusing on side hustle ideas. The domain URL will take you to a landing page when you type it on your browser.

 

For less than $10 for a year, you can buy a domain name from NameCheap and use it to start an online business successfully. Namecheap domain registration service is cheap and reliable. A lot of online business owners use Namecheap as their preferred domain registrar. But you’ve to get the .com extension because website visitors are wont to type it on their browsers as the common domain business TLD.

 

Preferably, you can get a keyword domain or EMD (exact match domain) to start your own business online as it will make it easy for you to embark on profitable search engine optimization (SEO) and favorably rank on the SERP, holding all other factors constant.

 

Also, it will help your potential customers to easily find your website online and know what your business is all about in advance without necessarily explaining it to them every time.

 

Web Hosting Services

 

Website hosting services is essential for you to host your files and website on someone else’s servers in order to make your website to be live and accessible 24/7. Without web hosting services, no prospect or customer will be able to find your web site on the World Wide Web and take action of buying any product or service from you.

 

There are companies whose businesses are to provide hosting services to webmasters and bloggers on the internet. HostGator web hosting services is one of them and they provide their hosting service at a cheap or affordable rate and they are very reliable. With an excellent customer support, you don’t have any problem starting an online business with them.

 

The icing on the cake is that HostGator supports WordPress hosting and offers free domain name registration for first time customers in their first year. For less than $100 for your web hosting fees for a whole year, you’ll get a free domain name to start your own business on the internet.

 

In addition, HostGator hosting company provides website builder to help you create websites without knowing a lot about HTML, coding or having website design skills.

 

Click here to sign up with HostGator website hosting services

 

Blog Website

 

When you purchase website hosting from HostGator as I explained above, you’ll get a domain name for free for the first year. And because HostGator supports WordPress hosting, you’ll be able to install self-hosted WordPress blog on your domain name for free. WordPress.org has functionalities that will make it simple and easy for you to build a website or create a blog for free to start your own online business.

 

Creating a blog website will provide you with a solid platform to build an email list from scratch in easy steps. You can also write and publish blog posts targeting long tail keyword phrases which you can easily rank for on the SERP or simply direct your subscribers to relevant content pages on your blog to read from your autoresponder email series.

 

Blogging for money is very profitable if you’re able to integrate an effective email marketing campaigns with it. With a reliable web hosting company, blogging is a breeze and any beginner can do it without being tech savvy. I started blogging when I couldn’t even differentiate between HTML and hot meal!

 

Creating a blog and integrating email newsletter with it will help you to stand out as an expert, brand your business, build trust and credibility with your target audience over time.

 

Email Marketing Software

 

Before you can seamlessly build an email list of subscribers, you’ve to sign up with an email marketing software provider. This service will be provided by an email service provider (ESP) like GetResponse’s autoresponder company. It’s an essential part of your online marketing system if you hope to build and grow your leads and increase sales.

 

GetResponse email marketing software has a 30-day free trial from this link and you can take advantage of that to start email marketing business successfully without paying a dime at the beginning. Besides, you’ll be able to learn the ropes of email marketing and how it works before jumping in with both feet.

 

With reliable ESP, you can create sign up forms, create autoresponder messages, send broadcast messages and automate your email marketing campaigns without breaking a sweat from your account dashboard.

 

High Quality Lead Magnet

 

A lead magnet is the incentive that will draw in would-be subscribers to your website where they will be willing to exchange their email addresses for your valuable content they need. In some quarters, some people call it “ethical bribe” because you’re using a valuable product or service to coax your web visitors to give you their email IDs for further communications in the future.

 

A lead magnet can be any valuable content in the form of free ebook PDF, video, audio, podcast, gated blog content, infographic, whitepaper, case studies, webinar, app, software, mini online course, one time offer, and so on.

 

But the best gift to give away should focus on answering questions your target audience is asking or providing the right solutions to problems or pain points they are grappling with.

 

You can learn about these questions from the comment sections of your blog posts, lurking around in online communities or forums and taking notes of questions being asked by members or making use of keyword research tools. Another good place to scoop content ideas for your lead magnet creation is questions and answers sites like Quora.com.

 

Constant Content for Your Blog Post and Email Autoresponder

 

When building an email list, you’ve to develop a system to constantly create high quality content to feed your subscribers. You can hire a freelance writer for this purpose or do it yourself. But the best way to learn and master list building is to sign up with email newsletters of successful email marketers in your chosen niche and reverse engineer their ideas and strategies.

 

Obviously, your subscribers look up to you as an expert and you’ve to prove it beyond every reasonable doubt for them to remain in your list. With this in mind, you’ve to be abreast of industry news, trends and information so that you can relate it to your list members before anyone else does.

 

This is why constant learning and studying are paramount to your email marketing success. It’s always easier to recommend and sell any product or service when your followers and fans perceive you as the go-to expert. I’ll be publishing an article later on how to generate content ideas for your email business newsletter and blog post ideas.

 

Content in this regard will include blog posts, videos, email series for your autoresponder and broadcast messages for product recommendations. Your constant interactions with your audience through surveys, blog comments, etc, will inform you of their content preferences.

 

Website Traffic

 

For your website to gain traction and get subscribers, you definitely need free targeted traffic from search engines as well as paid media if you’ve the budget and experience to do so.

 

However, you’ll not get instant website visitors from your SEO traffic efforts from day one like pay per click (PPC) advertising. But creating and publishing constant content through blogging can accelerate your online marketing campaigns by leaps and bounds.

 

Content marketing is a potent way to generate inbound leads and customers on a regular basis.  You can use any of these digital marketing channels to kick start your list building efforts.

 

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Social media marketing (SMM)
• List building
• Content marketing
• Blogging
• Online communities and forum marketing
• Etc

 

For any online business owner who wants to learn how to build an email list from scratch, the following outline will guide you on what to do.

 

1. Set clearly defined and measurable list building goals.
2. Know your target audience.
3. Know your brand and stuff.
4. Watch and analyze your competitors.
5. Analyze and measure your data or metrics.

 

In addition to the above, you’ve to understand the moving parts of building an email list of subscribers both the technical know-how and content marketing aspect of it. I will dive deep into how to build an email list of subscribers from scratch from subsequent blog posts. Just bookmark this blog so that you don’t miss out from any of the publications.

 

Writing Your First Blog Post Tips and Ideas to Help You to Rank

 

 

At this level of your newfound blogging career, I assume you’ve completed the following tasks already:

 

1. Registered a domain name to start your blog,
2. Bought website hosting services to host your blog,
3. Installed WordPress blog on your domain, and
4. Optimized your blog for SEO.

 

But if you’re still researching information on how to start a blog and make money blogging online, you should consider downloading and reading my complete blogging guide. But the free PDF ebook is only available to our readers who have used our partnership link to sign up for HostGator web hosting services from this link. The blogging ebook explains everything you need to know about blogging for money without breaking a sweat.  It’s a no brainer blogging blueprint to say the least!

 

Today’s blog article is focusing on tips for writing your first blog post and I’ll be giving you some examples where necessary. For you to become a successful blogger on the internet, you need a system and a plan to follow to a Tee. This will become your roadmap for writing and publishing content that resonates with your target audience all the time.

 

As a matter of fact, your first blog post is the foundation and pillar of your online business success and content strategy. In line with this, there is a lot of housekeeping details you’ve to consider and adhere to in order to create a great blog post that constantly draw in free targeted traffic from search engines especially the big Google.com.

 

Personally, my first blog post usually targets the most popular and competitive keyword or search query in my niche market. For example, if I’m in the “work from home” niche market, I’ll be very comfortable creating and publishing an SEO article targeting “work from home” or “working from home” keyword phrases. And this keyword will be the exact URL or slug of the post which I want Google to crawl and index for me ultimately.

 

Yes, I may never rank for this search term in the SERP (search engine results page) but I’ll be happy having a web page on my blog indexed for my target search query. However, I believe in the nearest future and with the right marketing strategy and back linking my first blog post will be indexed and optimally primed for ranking.

 

This means that as the authority of my blog increases with time, you’ll discover that the work from home post will begin to rank as well. Yes, from the analytics, you may be surprised that your blog post for that target search term will be ranking on page one of SERP in some countries depending on the web surfer’s choice of search queries contained in your published blog article.

 

But you must make sure that your article is a long-form blog post of about 3,000 words or more. Also, you’ve to include LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords in order to be sure you’ve covered all the bases as far as keyword optimization is concerned.

 

But you must make sure that your content fills the gap omitted on the same topic or the questions which were not answered by other bloggers who are ranking on pages one and two of Google search results or other search engines.  

 

With that said, let’s dive in to the anatomy of your first blog post.

 

1. Keyword research
2. Selection of keyword to target in your blog post
3. Blog topic content research
4. Note taking of content ideas
5. Create your content outline
6. Craft the blog title
7. Write the introduction
8. Create the body of the blog post
9. Write the conclusion

 

Let’s go through the above steps one by one.

 

Step #1: Conduct Keyword Research

 

Your knowledge and ability to conduct comprehensive keyword research is the foundation of writing a great and compelling content that is searchable and findable on the internet. Web surfers, online shoppers and information seekers usually make use of search engines to find products to buy, services to subscribe to, find specific information for learning or purely for entertainment.

 

You can also do this by typing a search query that best describes your intention into the search field of a search engine like Google.com and go through the results that will be returned to you. For example, I can go to Google and type “how to make money online for beginners.”

 

Now, knowing how to dig deep and conduct keyword research to discover these search queries will help you to focus on the relevant and helpful content to create when writing your first blog post.  First, you’ve to select a seed keyword and enter it into keyword software like Google Keyword Planner tool.

 

From the keyword ideas, you can tentatively select a list of some of these search queries to target that best describe your products and services.

 

Step #2: Select a Keyword to Target in Your Blog Post 

 

In this step, you’ve to evaluate the best keyword to write your first blog post from the list of keyword phrases which you’ve selected in step #1 above.  You should base your keyword selection on the average monthly search volume, relevance of a search term to your target readers and its difficulty for ranking.

 

For possible SERP ranking preferably on page one of search engines, you’ve to choose a long tail keyword phrase with high search volume, high keyword relevance but low difficulty. For you to complete this task seamlessly especially to determine the ranking difficulty of a keyword, you may have to use paid keyword research tools such as Ahrefs.com or Semrush.com.

 

The easiest way to rank on page one of Google is to pursue long tail keyword phrases with low competition. These are search terns with 3 or more words which will be relevant to your readers and website visitors if you write content about them.

 

One of the best writing your first blog post tips which I learned a long time ago was to target transactional keywords especially when I’m building niche websites.

 

Step #3: Content Research

 

As soon as you’ve concluded your keyword evaluation step, it’s time to do content research in order to learn what information and topics to include in your blog post and information gaps to fill. Your goal is to write your first blog post that will attract targeted website visitors in droves.

 

You’ve to take down notes when reading published content by other webmasters or bloggers who are actively targeting the same keyword you hope to pursue. The websites and blogs actively targeting the keyword will certainly have it on the blog title, Meta description, introduction, body of content, and conclusion of the blog article.

 

If you’re making use of WordPress blog and you’ve installed and activated SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, you’ll have the opportunity to type the search query in the focus keyword field available at the bottom of every blog post editor.

 

Step #4: Create Blog Post Outline

 

When you’ve gathered sufficient information to flesh out your article writing assignment, you need to create a blog post outline to guide you as your roadmap as you type your content on your computer or laptop. You want to capture all the ideas and points to include and discuss in your first blog post.

 

The template of your blog article outline should be similar to the one below:

 

• Blog title
• Introduction
• Body of article
• Conclusion

 

Blog Post Title

 

This is the headline of your article. This is what will be indexed by search engines along side with the information you have filled out for your Meta description before publishing your blog post. Blog title should be catchy and tersely conveying the major benefit for the potential reader to be compelled to click on it to visit your web page and read your content in full.

 

If you’re relying heavily on free website visitors from search engines, you’ve to learn and master the art and science of crafting irresistible headlines. This will help you to have a high CTR (click through rate) to your blog web page.

 

As much as your title is expected to include your target keyword, it should be readable by your website visitors.

 

Introduction

 

Your blog post introductory paragraph has to ignite the interest of your reader for him to continue perusing your content. In addition, you’ve to find a way to make use of your search query in the first few sentences of your blog post.

 

However, I’ve seen some of my blog posts ranking even if the first paragraph did not mention my target keyword phrases. The corollary of this is that creating stellar content is paramount to your web page ranking as you target a long tail keyword phrase.

 

As a blogger, you must understand that you’re writing blog post to serve two fronts, namely to appeal to human readers and search engines bots. Although keyword stuffing is no-go area, you still have to find a way to naturally weave it into your content so that the search engines bots will understand the topic of your post.

 

Body of Article

 

The body of your blog post is where the full course meal is expected to be served for your website visitors and readers. Here, you’ve to appropriately make use of relevant search terms, images, screenshots, bullet points, number list, references, quotes, and so on. 

 

Depending on the type of blog post (how to, step by step, ultimate guide, etc), you’ve to explain and discuss your topic in detail in order to demonstrate your expertise. If you’re doing email marketing as well, you need to go extra mile to please your prospects or leads who may eventually become your subscribers. 

 

Conclusion

 

The conclusion of your blog post is the last paragraph or section which will summarize and round up your content. If you’ve not done so before now, this is where you’ve to use clickable CTA (call to action) link to direct your blog readers to more information on another web page on your blog or to an external website.

 

In blogging, this is the best place to ask your readers some questions and encourage comments from them. It helps to ignite discussion among the blog owner and followers and I see this section as a perfect conversation starter.

 

In conclusion, there is lots of writing your first blog post tips to share here which include:

 

• Know your target readers and write your blog post to address their needs, solve their problems and answer their questions accordingly.
• You can import content from Google Documents, MS Word, notepad or type directly in the WordPress editor.
• Be original and conversational in your writing.
• Let your writing style, tone and voice resonate with your ideal audience.
• Make use of the right vocabulary, lexicon, jargons, etc which your readers will understand without scratching their heads for meaning and interpretation.
• Let your content meet the EAT (expertise, authority and trust) criteria.
• Write for your target readers without leaving any stone unturned.
• Write for search engines too because of SEO (search engine optimization) factor.
• Write in short sentences, paragraphs, and use bullet points for easy reading and scanning.
• Edit your permalink for the blog post to reflect your keyword target.
• Include keywords in your post both primary and secondary keywords.
• Include images with alt text where necessary.
• Size your images for speed loading on your blog website.
• Assign as many tags as possible for each blog post. Tags represent relevant keywords associated with your blog article.
• Create a category for your blog post. Categories group your similar blog posts in their related folders.
• Make relevant quotes, references, links, etc, where appropriate.
• Tell your story to educate, inform and entertain your readers.
• Hyperlink texts for both internal and external web pages and websites.
• Use CTA (call to action) to help you drive home your points and direct your readers to other places on the web for further reading and action taking.
• Build an email list to get the most from your published content.
• Ask questions to encourage conversation for your blog article.
• Ask your readers to comment on your blog post, make contributions, add their own ideas, etc, so as to make your active.
• Ask your readers to share the link to your post on social media with share buttons.
• Your blog post story line should be able to move your readers to CTA or solution you’re recommending.
• Preview your blog post before you finally hit the publish button.
• Publish your blog post.
• Promote your blog post.
• If there is any major update or revision you want to make in your article, simply revert to draft, edit and republish your blog post.

 

Go ahead and do so if you have any questions to ask or comments to make. You can also share the link to this blog post in your social media circles.