RYB895: What Are The Best Tools For Email List Building and WHY? Jam Session

00:01 Guess what time it is? Friday jam. Hey. Hey. Hey, what's up everyone. Welcome to the Rocky brand podcast. I'm your host, Scott. Bowker a serial entrepreneur on a mission

00:12 To help you. This show is designed to teach you to inspire you, to motivate you, to take massive action and build a future proof business. So whether you're just starting out or taking your existing business to the next level, this is your home. Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's rock your brand. What's up.

00:37 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Friday jam session. Super excited. You're here. And if you haven't heard me say it before, I'm going to say it right now. This is probably one of the highlights of my week because I get to hang out with some cool people every single Friday and answer some really awesome questions. Now you might be asking Scott, how do I get my question answered? Well, all you need to do is become part of our take action crew. How do you do that? Very easy head on over to take action, crew.com. It's totally free. And we do it every single Friday and it is a blast. So what you're about to listen to is one that we did last week. So this way here, even if you can't attend, you can always show up here to the rock, your brand podcast, and listen to our live jam session.

01:25 All right, guys. So sit back, relax and let's jam. All right, guys. Welcome back to another Friday jam session. As you guys know, this is one of the highlights of my week because I get to hang out with some really cool people here live. If you are here live, then that's you. If you're listening to this on the podcast, you're still cool, but we want you to come on over and hang out with us for our Friday jam sessions. This is where I get to answer your questions live. Or you can just come here and listen to them on the podcast. If you want to hang out with us, all you need to do is head on over to take action crew.com and you can do it over there. Uh, and what you'll do is you'll go to our Facebook page, which, or our group, I should say, it's our rock, your brand Facebook group, a private group, fairly new group.

02:09 And, uh, we are, uh, we're in there talking about brand building and all of that stuff. And that's where this coffee talk, uh, originates from. So make sure that you're part of that group. If you're not all you need to do is request access, answer a few questions, make sure you have a profile picture. And from there, we'll let you in. Alright, so definitely, definitely do that. All right. So today's topic is a pretty good one because once we start talking about like email list building and all that stuff, people want to know Scott, what are the best tools to build your list? Like, what do I need to build my list? There's one main thing. One main thing. When we're talking about like the tech side of things, there's one main thing that you really must have. And I'm a big believer in this because when you're building an email list, you know, we can go down the free route, right?

03:00 We can go, Oh, where there's some free, uh, you know, there's some free services out there. There's problems with those as you start to grow your list. And one of the big problems is deliverability. So we don't want to start building our email list on a, on shaky ground, right? We don't want to build our email list on a tool just because it's free. Now, a lot of the bigger, uh, tools out there, um, they do have a free plan and the one that I liked the most, and I'll tell you why here. And I've tried them all. I've tried them all. Um, but the, my favorite right now, and probably will be for a very long time is convert kit. They actually came out with a free plan recently, actually a free trial. And, uh, it's worth just getting in there and building your list up to a thousand.

03:49 I think it allows you to have a thousand subscribers. It does limit what you can do for certain things like automation, uh, like an autoresponder. You're not able to do that. You can send broadcast messages, um, but there are some limitations to it, but I would start building. It's like a house. If you're going to build a house, you don't want to build it on like bad foundation or bad, you know, dirt, right? You want to go there where there's good dirt. You're on Virgin ground. You have a nice footing. And then we build a nice foundation and then we build our house, right. We don't want to, we don't want to start on something and then go, Oh, we're just going to export our list eventually. And then upload it. Just take it from me when you export a list and then import it into another tool.

04:30 You're always going to see a drop in deliverability until you prove yourself again with that provider. So again, I would recommend, and I'll tell you more of the reasons why here in a minute, but the one that I am going to recommend here is convert kit. If you want to try it out. And if you want to go through my affiliate link and buy me a cup of Bulletproof coffee here, uh, all you need to do is head on over to brand creators.com forward slash convert kit. All right, if you go there, you'll sign up. You can sign up for the free account. And if you do go through my link, I'll also send you some, some bonuses, some good, some goodies, and all you need to do is just send me an email. Okay. Scott, at brand creators.com and you can just put in the subject line convert kit.

05:17 And then from there, let me know that you went through my link and I'll send you some goodies. Okay. So that's what I got for you there now again, why, why have I chosen that one? Well, let me kind of take you through the story. Okay. When I first started building an email list, like legit building email list, I was building an email list with, uh, people writing their names on a piece of paper and putting it in a fishbowl. No joke. Okay. My first ever attempt at building an email list was taking a fishbowl, putting it. I was actually a, my wife and I were promoting our photography business. And we had a giveaway where we were giving away a family portrait session, which was valued at $250. And all you had to do, it was at like one of these school gala's and, um, it was a fundraiser.

06:09 And all you had to do is just write your name and email address, fold it and put it into a fishbowl. And then we would take those afterwards. And we would put those into our address book inside of a Yahoo at the time. Right? And so in order to send emails, I had to send like only, I think I could only send 50 at a time and you had a blind copy, everybody, you know, you had to do all that stuff. That was my first attempt at building a list. And it worked really well by the way. That's why to this day, I'm still building lists, right? We sold out our photography sessions months in advance because we had an email list of people, but we did it the old fashioned way. Write it down, we'll then key it in and we'll put it in there for you.

06:49 Um, but our first email capture online form and collecting, and then doing autoresponder was using a Webber. Okay. A Weber was amazing and it's still a great tool. They kind of, they didn't stay up with the times, uh, as quick as they should have, in my opinion, we had to, in order to do tagging and to do even just more segmentation, you had to like use a third party app in order to do it. It was a pain in the butt. I did it. And, uh, I had a Weber for probably seven, eight years actually still have an account, but I don't really use it. I just have it. Cause I have, you know, just old lists that I had in there that I didn't want to get rid of. And I'm paying like 29 bucks a month. Um, just in case I want it.

07:38 I might actually, you know, export that and then just call it a day. I just haven't done it. But I was on a plan that was like two, $300 a month. Cause I had a bigger list on that. But then we pulled it. Long story short is a Weber is a good tool. It's just, it's not as good as ConvertKit in my opinion, as far as ease of use. If you compare the two night, night and day, like you convert kit is so visually like easy, like automations or like drag and you put this, uh, you know, this one trigger over here to connect here. It's just so, so easy. Not that you even have to do that right now, but when you're ready to graduate, it's there. The other cool thing is, is they have a landing page builder now, right? So you don't even have to have your own landing page software.

08:24 You don't need lead pages. You don't need convert or I'm sorry, click funnels. You don't need, um, you, you could even just build it on their server if you want to quick and easy. And they just rolled out their commerce, which now they have a, uh, a way for you to build a little sales page and collect money. It's not open a hundred percent to the public, but it's coming. Um, so they're always thinking of how to make it easier for you to have this one simple tool and the keyword there is simple. All right. So again, I'm a big believer in, I moved everything. So just to kind of take you through my little journey here, I started with a Weber, even the podcast, I was collecting emails when the podcast was first out five and a half years ago with a Weber. And then once I think we had a list of about 10,000 and then that's when I exported, I said, we've got to do something different here.

09:15 We export that. And I think my first infusion soft, so we went to infusion soft was the next move. Okay. We export the list, we put it into infusion soft. We can do all this fancy tagging, but it was really like visually not pleasing. Like it was just really, really hard to, and they call it like Confusionsoft for a reason, because it's really, really confusing. Right. But at the time I had someone doing that. So it was like, okay, that's what you want to use. Okay, fine. And then we started seeing like, you know what, let's just move everything into ClickFunnels. Cause we were using ClickFunnels at the time. So ClickFunnels had their own email, but it was connected to this tool called SendGrid. So now ClickFunnels said, we're not going to do email, um, that way anymore. You're going to basically have to just go through SendGrid.

10:04 So now we had to move everything to SendGrid. And then once we got into SendGrid, we're like, we don't really care for this because we're, you know, we're not seeing like the same automation that we can do. All of these things that we were doing before, it's harder, let's move to active campaign. So then we go to active campaign and we did that for about a year and a half. And then I said, you know what? I've been using convert kit over here on our other brands, in the eCommerce space. Why am I not just taking everything and putting it in ConvertKit I love ConvertKit. It's easy when I'm writing emails in there for other brands, it's super easy. I can, I can send to my cold subscribers with one click of a button I can send to unopens one click of a button. I can tag one click of a button.

10:42 So if you're thinking to yourself, you're starting from ground zero. I'm like, listen, convert kit. And that's where I would start. Whether you go through my affiliate link or not convert yet. Okay. You know? Yes. If you go through my link, I will earn a cup of coffee. And that would be awesome. But I am not saying this. So you go there. So you go through my affiliate, like not at all. I'm just saying, if you and I are sitting down, we're having a cup of coffee, which we are right now. Sorry, audio podcast, people that was a sip of coffee.

11:14 I would be saying right now, don't mess around with all the other tools because you think you can give better deal. Don't do it. If there's one thing to not try to cut corners on, it's going to be your email list, place that you're storing them. Right. You do not want, you want that to be solid. Right. And you don't want to have to move it. So that's why I'm a big, a big promoter as far as like I'm saying, like, if it's my friend, if it's my family member, I'm like convert kit. Right. That also the nice thing about it is if you're watching this or listening to this and you are in brink Raiders Academy, let's just say all of the stuff that we're teaching in there is based around ConvertKit. So it's easier to follow along. That's another positive, right? The other positive thing is we're going to be doing a workshop coming up here pretty soon.

12:07 Uh, actually haven't set the date officially, but it's going to be called the email list. Building fast track workshop. It's literally going to be a two to a three hour workshop where I'm going to show you exactly how to build your first list to 500 subscribers within 30 days or less. If you're interested in that, by the way, I should probably throw that out there. Um, just leave a comment in here and say I'm in. Uh, and I will go ahead and I will send you a direct link to that. I'm not even putting a public link out there yet. Um, I'm really doing it through private messages for people. And the first hundred people are going to get a discount. This is going to be something I'm going to experiment with for these little mini micro workshops. But if you're interested, uh, definitely let me know.

12:49 You can even direct message me or whatever, and I'll send you the link. I'm going to start sending them out today. I've got about, I don't know, 65 or 70 people already that said they want the link. So I'm going to be sending those out here shortly. But what we're doing is we're teaching using convert kit. Now I had someone ask the other day, Scott, I want to go through your workshop, but I I'm not using convert kit. Does this still apply? Yes. Convert. Kit's just a tool, right? It's just a tool. That's all. It is. The lead magnet that we're going to create is really important to have a quality list. So I don't care if you want to use that Weber, go use a Weber. It's still going to work, right? If you want to use active campaign, use ActiveCampaign MailChimp, use it.

13:30 I don't care. It's just, if I'm showing you something, I'm going to be showing you in convert kit. Okay. So for teaching wise, um, or it would just be like set up your followup sequence, right? Write five emails and put them into your sequence, dripping them out every two to three days. Right. And I would show you how I'm doing it and then you'd have to just figure out how to do it in a Weber. It's basically just a tool. Right? So understand the tool. Yes. It makes your life easier, but it doesn't mean that that's going to make your email list better. Right? Could your performance be better? Yes, it can be. Because what people don't realize is when you're first starting on an email provider, they're kind of like having you on a probation. So they don't want to put you on everyone.

14:19 Else's servers that have already, uh, that have already proved themselves as you know, not spammy. Right. And the minute that you start getting flagged or you start getting complaints, they're going to shift you over to a, not so good server. Right. And then you're going to get, you know, you're not going to get as good of a deliverability opens and clicks. You're not going to get any of that. So there is something to be said about the platform. I would not go for one that you haven't heard of before. Right. So if I was going to say, if you said to me, Scott, I I've already had an, a Weber account for the past year and I've already got a list on there of, you know, a thousand people. What should I do? I would say, just stay there then, you know, unless you're like Scott, you know what I know eventually I'm going to want to go to ConvertKit.

15:05 So I'm just going to make the move. Now that's fine. If you said Scott, I'm using active campaign right now, nothing wrong with it. We used it for a year and a half. It works. It's fine. It's harder to learn. It's a, it's got a steeper learning curve. Um, so there's that, you know, so I would not say you're not going to be successful if you don't use this tool. What I'm saying is it's going to make your life easier. That's all like, I literally was on a call yesterday with our new owner of the e-commerce brand that we sold. And I was going through the emails with him and I was like, you know, we send three a week. Here's the cadence, you know, then we send to the unopeneds and uh, he had never used convert kit. So I showed him how to do it.

15:48 And he was just blown away. He was just like, Oh wow, like that's simple. I'm like, yeah. It's literally like for me to send to the unopens, it's going to take me longer to think about what I want to change my subtitle to, or my title to than it is to click send to unopens like, it's literally that easy. And for me, usually it's, it's changing one little thing in the subject line and then going and say, hitting send to unopens and then I'm gone. It's like a minute and a half, like maybe right. So ease of use is all about that. I mean, let's face it like time is like our most valuable asset, right? Like our time. So if we can save time, not having to learn things right. And being able to actually implement things and actually get a result. I mean, why not?

16:31 Right. Like, why not go down that route? So guys, that's what I got for you as far as the tool. And that's my opinion, my experience, I'm just sharing it with you. You can do whatever you want, but I'm just telling you if you're starting from ground zero, I would really, really strongly advise and recommend convert kit. And if you want to go through my link brand creators.com forward slash convert kit, and you can go there, you'll sign up through there. You're not going to pay anything extra. They're just going to give me a little bit of a, a commission because I sent you. They're like, that's it. Um, so anyway, if you guys have any questions on that, let me know. Um, but that's the tool that I would use. So let's go ahead and open it up for some questions. Let me go ahead and scroll here.

17:20 Wow. We got a bunch. All right, cool. Uh, let's see. Wow. I'm scrolling like crazy here. Alright, cool. Alright. Uh, Bradley first off says, got to love the flannel. Yeah, I do love that flannel. Uh, let's see here. Uh, is it Metesh um, is Amazon FBA still worth going into, well, there'd be some questions there. I would have to ask you, what are you, what is your goal, right? Is it your goal to just go and sell on Amazon and sell three products on Amazon and have Amazon fulfill Bo's. If that was your, your focus and your goal? I would say it's probably not worth going into that's what I would say. Um, and the only reason why I'm saying that is because I need to hear the entire brand that you're building. I need to hear the other channels that you'll be selling on.

18:06 I need to hear the other streams of, of, uh, not just revenue but traffic, right? Because to just go there and launch products on Amazon and think that you're going to have a sustainable business over the long haul, anyone will tell you, anyone will tell you that has any experience in this. That is going to be a really, really hard road to go down. So I would say, I need to hear all of the other things that you're going to be doing. Now, if you're going to launch a brand and you want to use FBA as a channel. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Then I would say a hundred percent. Uh, Karen says congrats on selling how exciting. Yes. And Karen, I will be giving some behind the scenes stuff inside of BCA. So stay tuned for that. Uh, let's see here. Uh, what's up Debbie?

18:52 Good morning to you. Uh, Oh, okay. Uh, so Christian asks a similar question is, uh, if FBA is still worth it, um, then why have you backed off? Um, well, I didn't back off, up until just yesterday, because that's when we handed the keys over. Um, so is it still worth it if you built a brand, like if I'm starting a brand, I'm not thinking to myself, where does Amazon FBA fit into this business? That's not how I'm thinking of it. What I'm thinking of is, okay, here's the market, here's the niche that I'm serving. Here's the traffic sources. Here's the, here's the offers that I can provide, whether they're my products, someone else's products as an affiliate or digital products, or maybe ads that are running on the site. That's what I'm looking at. So it's still worth it. If you have the brand to back it.

19:43 Okay. If you have an email list, even if all you had was the email list, it'd be, it'd be better than just going in there and going, I'm going to launch a product on Amazon and I'm just going to use pay-per-click right. That, that that's my strategy. Right? So it's still worth it. If your brand is selling physical products or if you want to sell physical products, but I wouldn't start there. Um, so hopefully that's clear. Uh, okay. So geo says, Christian, I noticed the most of the sellers for one product I sell are from China. And there are also manufacturers who, um, which explain why their prices are 10 to 20% lower than most of us sellers. Exactly. That's what you're up against. It's up Derrick, Derrick in the house. Karen what's up. Uh, Oh, cool. So this here's his Facebook users. I don't know who it is if you want to put your name in there, but just send me an email.

20:32 If you signed up for ConvertKit through my link and I will send you those goodiesScott@brandcreators.com, Jennifer, what's up. Uh, what day will the email list building workshops start? Well, we are still kind of on the fence because, um, I'm actually gonna have some company coming into town here. My, my daughter and my son are all going to be coming and visiting. Um, but it's going to be early October. I say early, probably within the first week at the latest, the second week. Um, and we're probably going to do two different days. So this way here, if you can't make the first one, you can make the second one and we are going to be recording everything. Um, so that's, um, that's what I got for you so far, but Derek, I will be sending out a as soon as you grab your spot for the workshop, I'll be sending out more information probably in the next, I would say three to four days.

21:26 Um, we're going to have it nailed down here. Uh, let's see here. Oh, geo comes back in. Um, so he's having a conversation, but I want to read it. Cause I think it's important. Uh, Christian, um, at least 90% of the top 16 sellers were from China and at least nine of them were also subsidiaries of manufacturers. Jungle scout is a good start to trace and link sellers and manufacturers. Uh, there are, uh, constant contact has automation integrated with website. I'm still on the fence whether to change, to convert kit. If you're using constant contact, how many emails do you have in there right now, Derek? That would be the question that I would have for you. Uh, let's see here. Oh, Debbie, is anyone using the free version of convert kit? Uh, so if anybody is put that in there, but I do know Debbie inside of the Academy, we do have a few members, I believe that are on the free plan.

22:13 Uh, I'll try the tool I requested or requested it as well. Awesome. Bradley, uh, Aaron I'm in. Awesome. Well, Aaron, what I'll do is I'm going to go back to these comments too. We also have a, I have like three other con other posts that have comments on it. And then collectively, right now we're at about 65 or 70 people that raised their hand, um, that want to be a part of this, of the first hundred people that come into this, um, this workshop. So again, I will be sending that out. Uh, Bradley says I'm in, all right, Bradley. I will send you now guys, what I'm going to do is I'm going to send a direct message to your Facebook profile, or if you're on YouTube Bradley, you can send me an emailScott@brandcreators.com and just say, I'm in, in the subject line. And then I will send you that link.

22:59 Uh, let's see here, Anthony. I like the way convert kit does the mailing address at the bottom also I'm using MailChimp and the interface feels clunky. I think you just gave me some homework to switch. Yeah, Anthony, it just depends how big your email list is. But again, we had an email list at one point that was touching a hundred thousand. We switched, I think we had 80,000 at the time after we cleaned it, that we, we moved over to, I believe at that time it was active campaign and it was a giant pain in the butt, but it was definitely worth it. Um, so it just depends on what you're after. If you're going to be going down that I think ConvertKit's going to be here a long time. And I think they're very, very dialed in, on catering to what we're doing, which is really we're content creators.

23:47 We're selling products and they're making it easy for us to also build landing pages. We don't have to buy another tool for that. They're also making it easy to sell a digital product if you have one. So there's a lot of upside, um, for the same price. Uh, Oh, Salma says I'm in. Alright cool. And, uh, again, if you guys already commented on the other post, doesn't matter, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to private message you guys. Uh GeoSyn. Oh, and I should also say if you're in brand creators Academy, you're automatically in, um, you're automatically going to be getting this workshop. You're also going to be able to be there live if you choose to. That's also another perk of being one of our Academy.

24:27 Uh, have you heard of the, uh,

24:30 Quietly email automation tool? I have not

24:32 That I have not.

24:34 Karen, if you're in BCA, how does it work? Yeah, I just said that. So basically Karen, your guys are gonna have the same invite. If you want to come, you can, you're going to get the recordings regardless. Um, so you'll have access to any, any of these micro workshops that we're doing, which are really a condensed version like of our email marketing accelerator program that you have access to all Academy members have access to, which is a full fledged course. We're going to be really just teaching like part one of that like phase one, which is really how do identify your lead magnet, how to create your lead magnet, how to set up your landing page. So you can start collecting emails, how to connect it to a tool like convert kit and then how to drive your first little bit of traffic. Um, and then from there sending your first followup mean email. So our goal is to get you up and running as quick as possible and get to 500 subscribers within 30 days or less

25:22 The goal of this workshop. Um, okay.

25:27 Okay. Uh, let's see, Derek, I'm going to try the free version of Kirka and we'll consider, uh, gravitate to convert kit and transfer all emails.

25:33 Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Uh, how do you

25:36 Plan out your workshops? It's a great question. And also, I just want to say there's going to be another workshop coming probably in another four to, I'm going to say four weeks, six weeks tops, um, on how to create your digital product. What I'm doing here with this micro workshop is really creating a digital product live. Okay. So how do you do it? Uh, you have to map out what those steps are. So my goal, you have to figure out what is that goal that you're going to teach someone or you're going to share with someone, right? It doesn't matter if it's how to build an email list or if it's how to catch more bass. It doesn't matter. What are the steps that you would teach someone if they're sitting right here next to you? So the very first thing is, is I'm like, okay, so you want to build an email list of 500 subscribers. Uh, what's the,

26:22 We gotta identify your lead magnet. Okay.

26:25 I need to find that a lead magnet that is going to be something that people are going to raise their hand for. Okay. Then from there, we need to create it. Then from there, we need to put it somewhere so people can actually see it, right. We can drive traffic to it. We also need to connect an auto responder to it so we can send a message to deliver the asset. And then we want to send one email, five things, really? So that workshop is going to consist of all of those. Now, each one is going to be a section. There's your, there's your training, right? There's your workshop? Right? So what I just did there was I condensed everything down, but all we're going to do is go through that stuff. So at the end, you have a clear vision and an outline and a plan to execute that, right?

27:08 And then get your list built to 500 subscribers. My other reason, and doing this guys to be totally transparent with you hundred percent, I want to get testimonials from this first group so I can share it with other people later and say, Hey, you should come on in and join this workshop. Now this will be really the only time that I do this one live, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to record it. And then I'm going to turn it into an evergreen digital product. That's going to bring people in that need help building a list. And then guess what? After they get done building a list, they can either take one of my other little micro workshops or they can possibly join brand creators Academy. See, see how it's all connected. That's all we're doing here. We're just teaching small portions of where they're at and how to get them a little bit further.

27:56 And then eventually, maybe they weren't, they're going to want to come into the Academy, or maybe they're just going to want to grab the next training. Because if you have an email list, you can probably sell a digital product. So what's the next workshop going to be? How to create a digital product. Right? See how it all goes to you. I'm not going to teach you the digital product yet until you have the list. Because if you have the list, it's going to be easier to identify what that product should be. But then also if you can sell it before you even create it, which is pretty cool. All right, let's see here. A lot of questions today. I may have already asked this, but what do you think about email going to my name@xyzcompany.com versus info at, uh, I would say your name. I think everyone likes to see a name, not info info feels too businessy.

28:41 I want it to say derek@xyzcompany.com I'm, I'm talking to Derek, right. Or whoever your spokesperson is for the brand, whoever your maybe customer support person is. It's it? Maybe it's it's Lisa, maybe it's, uh, maybe it's Dan. It doesn't matter. I would start with a first name. Uh, what's included in the upcoming workshop. Lead magnet creation. Yes. That's part of it. That'll be one section. Yes. So we are going to be doing that. Uh, I'm going to try and work, get free. Okay. And that's Derek again at Derek, uh, responses for me, I think it's because my personal, uh, more personal. Yes, I agreed. Uh, Dean, my email list is growing slowly, only about 10 a day with ads on Google and Facebook. What do I do different. Okay. So Dean, I think, well, there's, there's a lot. We would have to unpack there, but, uh, the first thing I would say is, okay, you're you're uh, using Google.

29:35 So Google, I don't know is a hundred percent. It could be, but it might not be the traffic source. Now again, it could be, I think a better source is getting really hyper focused and targeted targeting is huge. Right? So if you're targeting the right people on Facebook and it's a lead magnet that they actually want, that will help them, um, then you have, then you have something to look at and compare. So what I would look at is like, what is your conversion rate? Right? So if you're only getting 10 a day, how many visitors are you getting? Cause if you're only getting 25 visitors a day and you're converting 10 of them, I mean, that's a pretty good conversion rate, right. So I would need to know what's the conversion rate app. And then if it's above 20%, then I would say, let's just get more traffic.

30:22 Right. Um, so it doesn't mean they have to do anything different. We have to kind of look at the different points of the funnel, if you will. Uh, it is starting to get cool weather in Atlanta. It's going to be early winter. Okay. That's Derrick. Yeah. It's still nice out right now, but it's raining here. Uh, what's a reasonable goal to set for subscribers within 90 days if post content once a week. Okay. So posting content once a week is not necessarily going to be the fastest way to build your list with the content posting. Once a week is going to do is it's going to start planting seeds that, that Google will start to index and then you'll have traffic coming in organically. So that's the upside of that right now. The other thing that the content does is it allows you to have things to send your email list, right?

31:09 So if you post something once a week, there's your email, right? But I would say a reasonable goal within 30 days, even if you just spent five bucks a day or 10 bucks a day on a Facebook ad, you can get to 500 email subscribers in 30 days, I believe. Okay. Now results are going to vary. Depends on the market, how much it's going to cost per lead, all of that stuff. But if you already have traffic coming to a website, like we've got someone right now in the Academy, he bought a website for $30,000. It's getting about 65,000 page views, 45,000 unique visitors. He's not going to drive any paid traffic yet. He's going to take a lead magnet and put it in front of that audience and see how it converts. Right? So it just depends on how much traffic you've got coming to your site.

31:54 But if you're just posting content once a week and you're waiting for Google to index you, it's going to take longer. Of course. So what I would do is I would pay for some ads, right? Even if you spent, I don't know, a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, and you said, I'm going to do 10 bucks a day or five bucks a day. And I'm going to, I'm going to build that list over time. That's also going to help you with your content because now you're gonna, you're gonna spike your content views, which is also going to be a signal to Google that your content is being read and consumed and it can be shared. And all of those things, uh, let's see, will your trainings be with convert kit? Yes, they will. A hundred percent. Um, we are definitely going to be using convert kit. That's all we use currently right now.

32:37 Uh, okay. So Debbie said,

32:40 Or I'm sorry. Karen said Debbie, I switched to the paid convert kit version because I needed the automation tools available. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they do hold back on the automation tools, which automation is basically, if someone signs up, you automatically send an email and then three days later you send another email and then three days later you send another email. That's your auto, uh, your auto responder sequence. Um, so yeah. Uh, let's see where you save all your digital products to go out, including your lead magnets and said your, Oh, where do you save them all? Well, the cool thing is I think convert kit, it allows you to attach one, um, as a, as a lead magnet, it has to be under a certain file size, but you can always just use a free drop box account and then just link it to there.

33:22 That's all just use a free Dropbox. Uh, what are you doing to drive traffic to your site other than advertising? Uh, okay. So right now and, and Karen, I know that you're at about 10,000 views a month, I think is what you said. Um, so you have traffic there to put your lead magnet, which you've already done. Um, you're also doing the organic side, which you're doing Facebook groups, which I think is great, which we're going to have to talk about that. I think I want to get you as a little bonus in the workshop and record it and have you explain what you've been doing there. Um, but other than that, it's really whatever organic traffic is coming, that we're capitalizing on that. And then we are going to run paid ads to build it up to a certain amount. Now, if you don't have something to sell them on the backend, I would probably say build the email list to 500 people, maybe a thousand people.

34:14 And then you can back off until you have something to sell them. Because if you're running ads, we want to, eventually we want to recoup that money, right? We want to recoup that ad spend. And the way that you do that is to have a digital product on the backend or a physical product, but a digital product works really well. And then you can recoup some of that ad cost. Um, so that's really it again, Karen, we're keeping it simple, right. Dial in that, right. Um, as far as to get free traffic doing the, the, uh, the outreach to, uh, Facebook groups, things like that, I think is a great strategy. And I think you're already doing that. So I would do more of that if you didn't want to spend money on ads, uh, should your email always identify your website or your brand, do you mean in the subject line, Derek?

35:03 Because I don't necessarily think it has to, uh, it can, so it could be like Scott and then it could say brand creators, right? Mine doesn't mind just comes through as Scott Voelker, because I want people to know it's from me. And I think as you build that relationship, they're going to see who it's from. And then that's, what's going to tell them to open it or not. So it actually helps with opens. Um, you know, when you have your, your name there, uh, don't have an email list, but want to build one, where do you recommend? I start? I say, you come to the workshop, it's very affordable. It's going to be the, the least expensive thing I've ever offered at this level. Um, and I'm doing it because I want to help people build a list because I know that if I help you build a list, I can help you with email marketing.

35:47 I can help you build a digital product. I can help you with everything else in between, but you got to start there. So I would say Robert, if you are interested in joining our workshop, I mentioned earlier, maybe you jumped on late. Um, you can just, uh, put in the comments, uh I'm in, and then I can either direct message you. I think you're on YouTube. So you'd have to go to our Facebook group and do it there, or just email meScott@brandcreators.com and just say, I'm in. And then I'll send you a direct link to that workshop. And we're not sure on the date yet, but it's going to be early October. And if you can't make it, we're going to record it and you'll have access to it. But we're also gonna have two days that we're going to do it. We're going to do two different dates.

36:27 Uh, are you teaching Facebook ads in your workshop? Well, a little bit. It's going, we're not going to go too deep into that. That's a whole nother workshop because I don't want to overwhelm you, but I do want to show you a very basic strategy that will allow you to get traffic to your lead magnet for like five bucks a day. And that is using Facebook's or Facebook ads. So yes, there will be enough training to get traffic to your lead magnet to answer your question. How many subs should you have before creating a digital product? Well, I shared this before I had a, I had a list of a thousand people way back in the day and I did my first launch and did $12,500. Um, through that list, I did a lot of, I did a lot of nurturing in that list. I did a lot of creating Goodwill in that list.

37:16 Um, but I would say, I mean, 500 to a thousand, you know, I think would be, but again, the quality of the list is so important and that's why one of the big things we're going to be focusing on in part one of the workshop is really lead magnet generation. Like how to create an amazing lead magnet or actually how to create too, so you can test them. Right? Uh, let's see, Debbie, do you need an automation in the beginning or can you do it manually? Well, you can do it manually. The problem that's going to happen here, Debbie is, if you can't send a thank you email, which I'm not sure you might want to ask Karen on this, but they might have something that if you deliver a digital download that they'll allow you to send one message. I don't know that because I'm not in the free account.

38:03 Um, that would probably be cool if they wouldn't do that because they want, you want to get, you want to be able to give people the deliverable, right? But I would say you don't want to have to every day email people directly. Right? The great thing about the automation is as soon as they opt in, they immediately get an email. And if they check their email six hours later, it's going to be there for them. So if they, if they went to the thank you page and then they exed off and they can't get back to the thank you page, you want them to be able to get their download. So you might want to look into that. Alright, well, I hope that you, that Friday jam session, and like I said, in the beginning, if you want to attend one of our live Friday jam sessions, all you need to do is head on over to take action crew.com. That is where we show up every Friday, 10:00 AM, Eastern time, and you can join us. You can ask a question and then, uh, I can answer it and we can go ahead and also publish it here on the podcast. So once again, I just want to say, thank you so much for listening. This is always one of the highlights of my week. And until next time, remember, I'm here for you. I believe in you and I am rooting for you, but you have to, you have to come on, say it with me,

39:13 Say it loud, say it. Proud. Take action.

39:16 Have an awesome, amazing day. And I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now go rock your brand.