List Building Diary to 3K subscribers [dedicated to Max]

Hey all!

This is my diary thread (hate the word: "journey") to reaching 3k email double opt in subscribers. I dedicate this thread to my dear friend Max, who has 0 faith in me, lol

My plan is simple - get 3k subscribers and create a great relationship with the list by offering good advice in my niche and then promote products every 3rd-4th email.

I will want to build a much bigger and higher quality list ofc in the long run but as I haven't done anything like this before, it's a start for now.

What I have:

• free ebook with my aff links in it to give away on the landing page in exchange for email
• landing page with getresponse
• 1 month getresponse subscription
• around $300 to invest in this method
• great knowledge in the niche I am in (the bad side is that my English is a bit shit)
• 10 forum accounts with around 15 posts each and aged for couple of months

My plan is to put my free ebook link in the signature in forums and then just post valuable advice on forums and get traffic via forum signatures. I will see how that works out and then I might also buy Bing ad coupons to get traffic via Bing ads. I have also 3rd method in my mind but it will take more work and I will test that out after the first 2 methods work or don't work.. anyways.. later

Ok, so today I put together the first 3 follow up emails, introduction email and the freebie email. Then I tested the different email providers. Hotmail sends my confirmation email and subsequent emails straight to spam folder. Whoopie fucking dooo. I talked with the support and he just gave me tons of posts and stuff to read so I will do that tomorrow. Gmail takes it sweet ass time to deliver the first email, like 6-10 min.

Also, the clicks are sometimes counted and sometimes not, so.. the stats for the campaigns will be probably really inaccurate. Though.. I guess I can still try to improve stats when I have enough subscribers as they would average out. The biggest problem though atm is the hotmail automatic spam folder thing.

I will try to sort that out tomorrow and change my thank you pages a bit.

Nice journey you got here, wish you the best of luck. Though i might add, since you have a budget you should try some paid methods such as FB Ads which will allow you to get targeted traffic and more opt ins. Also have you looking into something like Lead pages to split test different landers to see which converts best? This will help you get the highest CR and more subscribers.

Also about the emailing, you should try getting a domain name that is relevant to the offer you are giving away or promoting. This way you can use a top level domain email, which is more professional and helps a lot. So if the product is "skin care" get a domain such as "fixmy(skinconditionhere).com and etc, you get the point. I hope you get a ton of subscribers and sales!

Cheers

hateandbreak said:

Nice journey you got here, wish you the best of luck. Though i might add, since you have a budget you should try some paid methods such as FB Ads which will allow you to get targeted traffic and more opt ins. Also have you looking into something like Lead pages to split test different landers to see which converts best? This will help you get the highest CR and more subscribers.

Also about the emailing, you should try getting a domain name that is relevant to the offer you are giving away or promoting. This way you can use a top level domain email, which is more professional and helps a lot. So if the product is "skin care" get a domain such as "fixmy(skinconditionhere).com and etc, you get the point. I hope you get a ton of subscribers and sales!

Cheers

Click to expand...

Thank you!

The $300 is not a lot really. I'd better use it for bing ad coupons than put it under lead pages (I do want to use them later but atm it's too expensive). Getresponse offers also A/B split testing if you pay extra 12€ or smth/month. I have never dealt with FB ads but what I have heard is that noobies in PPC should stay away. I am not promoting a special offer. I am building a list around a niche, something like fat loss or dating etc. I want to promote lots of different offers. I thought about buying a domain for this project but atm there is really no need as I do not have a website anyways.

Tonight was not fruitful at all. I tried to set up my campaign with completely different set up and still my email went straight to hotmail "junk" folder. It can't be anything on my side (at least nothing I can think of). It must be getresponse server IP or smth.

If you want to add a new "from" email in getresponse then they send you a confirmation email. This is an email from their OWN system and as I used a completely new hotmail account for that, their OWN email went straight to "junk" folder.

This makes me think that getresponse emails just all go to hotmail "junk" folder.. which is really, really bad. I talked with the live support and she told she will forward my problem to other department and they will take contact with me via my account mail. It has been over 8 hours I think and I haven't heard anything back. I will take contact with live support tomorrow again.

I have already paid for 1 month of getresponse + they have a landing page also. I don't want to change to aweber but this hotmail straight to "junk" folder problem is pretty serious one (as hotmail is one of the most popular email service providers in the world).

Hi, do you intend to use Solo-ads or any paid traffic methods to build your list.
Also, are you going to only promote affiliate products, or are you going to offer your own products as well?

This journey looks interesting.

staycalm38 said:

Hi, do you intend to use Solo-ads or any paid traffic methods to build your list.
Also, are you going to only promote affiliate products, or are you going to offer your own products as well?

This journey looks interesting.

Click to expand...

I do not intend to use solo-ads for now but if I can't get subs then I might try it out. I do want to use Bing Ads if I get the coupons to work. I will promote affiliate products but never know what the future might hold, maybe one day I will create my own product.

Tonight was pretty much the same as yesterday. I was talking to live support and they said that my problem will be answered in 48 hours by other department..

I was testing my mail and now it even went to the spam folder of gmail. I changed absolutely everything I could, even the message content a bit. After that my mails hit the gmail inbox but still junk for hotmail.

I guess I just have to wait for the answer. I have written on my thank you page that people should check their spam box also and whitelist my email. I also added my link to 3 different forums signatures and made 3 posts there as well. Got 3 visitors from that, lol.

luck and safe journey.

Ok, so the past 3 days I haven't done anything as I was drinking one night and then hung over the next day and then just unmotivated. It has been like 5 days now and getresponse has yet to get back to me.

I also added my signature to other forums as well. I will now check if the accounts are still there (hope I didn't get banned). I also searched for bing coupons BST threads here. Seems that the one with pre-made accounts have only $50 and $300 accounts atm. I don't know about that, I will talk with the sellers though and see what I can get.

I am also listening the audiobook of: Think and Grow Rich - by Napoleon Hill. It's almost 11 hours long and I'm 1 hour in. It talks about 13 steps atm and the first is having a burning desire (also burning the ships). To be honest, all the methods I have done I have quit when I see it doesn't work but I rarely, if ever, try to push it as long till I MAKE it work. I think I haven't really gone all in. I think if there is a method to go all in then it's list building. It's honest, it provides value, it's long term, I don't depend on Google, I am interested in the topic I build my list around and it should be, in theory, a very good income source.

I'd much rather write an interesting email to my list every other day than build links to 10 sites in hopes that something works and wait for months for results (kinda what I am also doing atm but it doesn't take that much time but I don't want to waste so much time to see if anything ranks at all..).

So, today will be spent by writing tons and tons of useful forum posts and then seeing how much traffic I can get out of it and if my landing page converts any traffic to subs.

Ok, so.. I made 22 posts yesterday of forums. My po.st stats show that I had 7 visitors yesterday and 1 today because of that (I'm writing this post the next day). BUT.. my getresponse lander says I had 4 visitors yesterday and 6 today. That makes it total of 10 but po.st total would be 8. So I am confused, where did the extra 2 visitors came (all are unique visits). Anyways, I got my first subscriber, so that's awesome And.. it's an hotmail email so that all my emails went to his junk He has downloaded the free ebook but not opened the next follow up email because.. it's in the junk and people don't bother whitelisting emails.

Have I told that getresponse have not got back to me? Anyways, I will dive into Bing ads if and when I can get the coupons. I will probably create more posts on forums now though it seems that it's not that awesome traffic source.. will see.

Today I sent emails to the forums I am posting on and asked about advertising opportunities. Haven't gotten any responses.

Getresponse is being a bitch. I will fire them if they don't contact and help me in couple of days. This is ridiculous, 7 days and they can't get their shit together to take a look at my problem. Losing tickets in the system, not creating support ticket etc. Horrible.

Hi,

I find it sad the lack of answers here. Anyway good luck.
I hope you'll get a response from getresponse (funny huh) soon and i really hope you won't give up on that.

Thanks!

Naah, I will not give up on that. It pisses me off though that I will probably have to recreate the landing page again and a shittier version of it (self-hosted) because, as far as I know, aweber doesn't have landing page option and leadpages is too expensive for me atm. Will see.

Okay, so.. after 1 week of talking to live support and sending tickets.. I got a response that said:

I am contacting you regarding a task that has been created for our IT to
investigate the issue you reported. I just want to confirm the IT are still
working on the task, however this may take around 2 weeks to be sorted out.

Please accept our apologies for the situation.

If there's anything else we can help you with in the meantime, please let
us know.

Best regards

Click to expand...

As you can assume, I was pissed! Fck getresponse. I will create an Aweber account and today I spent the whole day searching for a way to create a good landing page (as aweber doesn't offer one like getresponse does). I found many that cost around $40+/month. I was about to buy funnelkit as it is only $27 for unlimited sites but their landing pages aren't mobile responsive (at least they did not mention it anywhere) and they don't provide A/B testing. I found wordpress lead plus. Its free version is kinda ok. It's nice that it is responsive and I managed to make an ok looking lander even though half the functionality is broken. No way am I gonna buy the pro version.

Anyways, I just finished mocking it up and now I need to connect it with aweber (hope nothing fcks up there, lol).

Ok, so I showed the middle finger to getresponse and moved over to aweber. Connected my landing page with Aweber, set up tracking that gives me an overview on how many people opt-in who land on my squeeze page and sent some test emails. So far everything has hit inbox (including outlook).

It took some time to understand the stats reporting for Aweber and everything else but I now have figured them out.

The next step is to copy all the followup emails over and then buy a Bing coupon and see how I can manage to get it work. The forum posting (the 20 or so posts I made) have brought me in 3 subs. I think it's still too little for that amount of work involved.

I'm mostly afraid that I can't get the Bing coupons to work and I need to use 100% own money to buy clicks. From the 10 or so forums I wrote to about advertising, only 2 have replied back and 1 said I can advertise through adwords and the other said they are too busy atm to deal with it.

I could buy solo ads but I am reluctant to do that because my niche is not MMO and as I have heard, most solo ads are around that topic and you can't really choose (?) your niche? Correct me if I am wrong. I have also heard that there are some bot lists or smth.. I guess it just depends how lucky you get with the provider.

OMFG, am I cursed or smth? I changed the confirmation email title and now my emails go to junk with aweber. Even after I changed the title back and created a new "from" email. This is just unbelievable..

karupoiss said:

OMFG, am I cursed or smth? I changed the confirmation email title and now my emails go to junk with aweber. Even after I changed the title back and created a new "from" email. This is just unbelievable..

Click to expand...

See it as gaining experience. You have not yet many subscribers, better now than later.

You're obviously doing something wrong. Could be the keywords you use in the content, could be your domain or another "red flag."

GetResponse is one of the most reliable emailing services out there, we have clients with 50k+ subscribers using the same thingm dozens of affiliates etc. Open rates are amazing, CTRs are nice and so on.

Check the words you are using on your email. For sure you are using one word or more that is not allowed.