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How to Get Un-Stuck With Your Online Business Idea

By Primoz Bozic 2 Comments

You’re currently reading Chapter 4 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

In the previous chapters of this guide, I summarized how to find and validate your business idea and get your first 100 e-mail subscribers in a way that’s as simple as possible to understand and follow.

However, there’s so much more I have to say on this topic (and a lot of questions that you might have about this stage of building your e-mail list).

That’s why I created a chapter that will help you get un-stuck with finding and validating your online business idea.

Let’s dive in!

“Do I Need a Clear Target Audience For my Online Business Idea?”

The answer to this question is “it depends”.

A lot of experts say that you need an ultra-specific target audience or an “ideal client profile” in order to build a successful online business.

You need to know the gender of your audience, how old are they, where they live, what they do for a living, how much they earn, and how many pets they have.

But my personal experience and all the interviews I did for this guide tell a different story.

When I asked fellow entrepreneurs how they came up with their business ideas, very few of them talked about having an ultra-specific audience in mind. And even the ones that did didn’t really have clearly defined customer demographics.

Here are some examples of how specific the audiences were:

  • Nagina Abdullah: Ambitious, busy women who want to lose weight
  • Rusty Gray: People who want to animate for a living
  • Karen Dudek-Brannan: Speech pathologists
  • Gabriela Pereira: Writers who want to get better at writing without getting a degree
  • Sam Gavis-Hughson: People that want to have a coding interview coming up in the next few months
  • Danny Margulies: People that want to become a freelance copywriter  
  • Jenni Waldrop: People that want to grow their Etsy businesses
  • Will Darling: People that want to learn how to mix EDM music
  • Luke McIntosh: People that want to become better bassists
  • Ryan Hildebrandt: People that want to speak at TEDx events
  • Christina Rebuffet: Business people that want to speak fluent American English
  • Geraldine Lepere: English-speaking people who want to speak French

Of course these might be slightly oversimplified and they might have a clearer idea who their best clients are (something we’ll talk about further on in this guide), but in general, it wasn’t super-detailed demographics or ideal client profiles that would help them build e-mail lists of thousands of people.

Instead, what mattered a lot more was defining their target audience or the problem they are solving clearly and succinctly.

Learn how to speak at a TEDx event. Learn how to animate for a living. Learn how to speak fluent American English. Learn how to grow your Etsy business. Learn how to produce EDM music. Learn how to play bass guitar.

No fancy target audience, just a clear business idea – that’s what you need at this stage of starting your online business.

The exception here (and the reason why I said “it depends” in the beginning of my answer) is when you’re pursuing a business idea in a highly-competitive field. That’s when having a clear and specific audience is important.

Now that doesn’t mean that you need to have an endless list of customer demographics ready. Quite the opposite.

It does mean though that you shouldn’t just target “people”, you should target a specific audience that you can describe in a handful of words.

A great example for this is my friend Kim Nicol – she started her business by teaching mindfulness to lawyers (and later on moved to start-ups). That’s a lot more specific than teaching mindfulness to everyone.

Peter Nguyen is a stylist for guys who work at tech companies (not just a stylist for everyone).

And Sam Gavis-Hughson helps you ace your coding interview at top tech companies (not any job interview in any industry).

Having a specific audience in mind can definitely help you stand out in a crowded market, but you definitely don’t need to know how many pets your “ideal client” has, especially when you’re at this early of a stage of building an online business.

You won’t test your idea by saying “are there any 35-45 year old entrepreneurs with 2 kids who make $100-$150k/year and want to speak at a TEDx event out there?”.

Instead, you’ll ask “does anyone want to learn how to speak at TEDx events?”. Then you’ll see who responds. You’ll see who buys your products and services. You’ll see who your best clients are. THEN you’ll define clearer and clearer customer demographics.

“When do You Have a “Good Enough” Business Idea, When Should You Refine it More, and When Should You Move on to a New Idea?”

One of my readers, Stephanie, asked “when do I know that my business idea is a good idea, when does it need more refining, and when should I move on to a new idea?”.

The first answer is simple: Your idea is good enough when you see enough traction to build an e-mail list of 100+ e-mail subscribers within 1-2 weeks.

If you’re not even close to that, if you keep testing your idea and fail to see any moments of traction, then you should either tweak your business idea or move on to a new one.

The second part of this question is a bit trickier.

Personally, I’d give each of my business ideas a maximum of a month to see traction. If there’s no traction, I’d move on to a new idea.

During this month, I’d go all out on this idea, keep tweaking it and test different angles. But if I already ran tens of different List-Building Experiments and I just can’t seem to find traction, it’s unlikely that my idea will magically gain traction over-night. It’s a lot more likely that I’ll get stuck in the List-Building Rat Race.

If you’ve already spent months trying to make the same business idea work, I don’t believe that “making small tweaks” will make it a Profitable Business Idea overnight – I’ve just VERY rarely seen it happen, but I’ve seen people stuck on 14 e-mail subscribers for months because they were reluctant to try out different business ideas.

If your idea just isn’t picking up any traction, I suggest one of the following:

  • Simplify your idea. Make it so simple that people can understand it in a split second. “Do you want to learn how to speak at a TEDx event?”
  • Choose a more specific audience. “Do any lawyers want to learn how to be less stressed out or burned out?”
  • Choose a more specific problem. “Do you want to learn how to become an Early Riser?”

These are usually the best ways to pivot your idea, and you can cycle through different problems / audiences very quickly to see one that picks up traction.

Remember, when you see a Profitable Business Idea, you’ll know it.

Here’s a great example that happened this Thursday. I was coaching one of my clients, and she was frustrated that her idea wasn’t picking up any traction. I walked her through the framework from this chapter of the guide, and helped her brainstorm some new Profitable Business Ideas.

She off-handedly mentioned something about “designing e-books in Google Documents”, and another one of my clients interrupted the conversation and said “I’d buy that for my assistant in an instant. I’d happily pay $300 if you can teach her how to do it”.

As we started talking about the idea more and more, we helped her clarify it into “Teaching assistants of online entrepreneurs design beautiful e-books and worksheets in Google Docs”, and I got excited about the idea as well, and said “I want that for my assistant as well!”.

It was magical. My client went from an idea to 2 paying customers in a matter of minutes. That’s when you know you have a Profitable Business Idea.

“What if I can’t find a Profitable Business Idea after months of trying to grow my E-mail list”?

If you keep running List-Building Experiments on different business ideas and none of them seem to pick up traction, there’s a few things you can do:

  • Get good at a valuable skill: Instead of asking yourself “which existing skill can I build a business about”, you can learn new, valuable skills that you can then build a business around (for example, if I noticed that people want to learn how to create online course, I could get good at creating them, then try to build a business around it).
  • Find existing traction: You can go into online forums and communities and find questions that are ALREADY getting a lot of traction. For example, if you found a reddit thread that has 1,000+ comments, that might be a big problem that people have that could be worth solving.
  • Try something completely different: My friend Naveen Dittakavi from NextVacay started out with a business idea to import BMWs from Europe to the US, which never really took off. He then built a very profitable business around teaching software engineers how to build recurring revenue, and an even bigger business around finding flight deals (NextVacay).  

If your idea just doesn’t take off after months and months of work, trying something completely different will likely be better than doing what you’ve been doing before.

“Should I pick an idea that I’m more excited about, or an idea that there’s a lot of demand for?”

Whenever I work on a business idea, I make sure that it’s an idea that:

  • I’m an expert at
  • I can talk about for hours on end
  • There’s a lot of demand for

If I pick an idea that I’m not an expert at, I’ll experience a lot of imposter syndrome (“I’m not good enough”).

If I pick an idea that doesn’t excite me, I’ll get bored quickly and won’t work on it as hard as I would want to.

If I pick an idea that there isn’t enough demand for, I won’t get enough traction with my idea.

Now if I have two ideas that tick all of the above boxes and one of them is more exciting and the other one seems more profitable, I’ll personally pick an idea that’s more exciting to me (as having fun with my business is more important to me than making the most money possible).

Think about what’s more important to you – is it making money or having fun? And choose the option that suits you best.

If you’re just not sure, you can do a 1-month trial.  

Try working on an idea for a month, and go all out on it. If you love it and you see traction with it, keep going. If not, switch to a different idea.

“How Much Customer Research do I Need to do Before I Validate my Idea?”

Doing customer research is extremely important when you try to create new blog posts, e-books or online courses in your business.

But to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers, you don’t need to spend tens of hours on customer research. You don’t need to do a lot of research to ask “Would you like to learn about how to speak at a TEDx event?”.

You’d be better off testing different ideas to find traction, and then, ONCE you have 100 e-mail subscribers, simply do all the customer research with those 100 e-mail subscribers.

“What if I don’t have anything unique to offer?”

Watch this amazing video from Michael Ellsberg, it might spark some ideas:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2019-05-16-at-11.11.07.png

And if that’s not enough, try out my 9 ways to find a profitable online business idea – you’re bound to come up with some new ideas that you can validate!

“Can I get good at something and share my personal journey as my business idea?”

Here’s a question I got from one of my readers of this guide:

“Hi Primoz, I have been stuck with my business for more than 2 years for various reasons. I have tried blogging on a few different topics in the last 2+ years. 

My biggest challenge is that my 10+ years of experience has been with Oracle databases. But I somehow lost interest in pursuing the same career in database engineering, which brings me to my biggest challenge. 

I have tried blogging on topics like data science, fitness, and parenting.

Since I am not an expert in any of these topics, it is always in the back of my mind holding me back.  I am thinking “Okay, let me go through a personal transformation and share it on my blog first. And then use that as a starting point for my business.”

But I have failed miserably so far with this strategy. As you know, personal transformation is not easy. Otherwise everyone will do it. 

What am I doing wrongly here?”

It breaks my heart when I hear stories like these. I see so many people who keep trying and trying to build an online business for YEARS, without seeing any traction at all.

To avoid being in a scenario like this (or to get out of it), you should always validate your business ideas and try to see enough traction with your ideas in 1-2 weeks to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers.

Even if you tested 10 different business ideas that way, it would still take you only 10 weeks to test them, which is a lot less than 2 years.

The big mistake you can make here is to keep going with your idea even if there’s no traction, which will lead to a situation like this in 99% of the cases.

Ok, onwards to answer the question of “can I go through a personal transformation, share it on my blog, and then build a business around it?”

The answer is yes and no.

Let’s first look at the data. How many of the entrepreneurs that I interviewed for this guide followed this approach?

Zero.

Everyone that I interviewed was already fairly good / amazing at the topic they built an online business around, which makes sense to me (if you want to open a restaurant, you should be a good chef already).

While there MIGHT be entrepreneurs who followed that approach, they’re outliers, unicorns, and exceptions to the rule.

CAN that approach work? It can, but it’s a gamble.

The problem with that approach is that if you DON’T see any traction before you put years into getting good at something, your idea might never take off. And as my reader said, “getting good at something” isn’t necessarily easy either.

Sure, there are viral videos out there like this 10-year singing transformation.

But those videos usually become viral AFTER the 10 years of effort, and 99% of them might still never get noticed.

The bigger problem however is that if you try to get good at something JUST to build a business around it, that might not motivate you enough to actually do it.

The “personal transformation journeys” businesses usually don’t start out as business ideas. They’re stories of hobbies that people used to blog about, then someday took off. They were never intended to be businesses, the business/virality was usually accidental.

You probably won’t become a great singer in 2 years if you just want to build a business around it. You’ll become a great singer if you really want to learn how to sing.

Based on the data, I can’t recommend “going on a personal transformation and documenting your journey” as a solid strategy for building a business. The success stories for that strategy are few and far in-between, and the idea validation process is just way too stretched out.

So if that’s not a solid approach, what CAN you do if you are an expert in only one area that you don’t want to talk about any more?

My recommendation is to get good at something first, and THEN, MAYBE build a business around it.

If you can’t find a profitable business idea that:

  • You ARE an expert in already
  • You CAN talk about for hours on end
  • There IS demand for

Then take a break from building an online business. Instead, go and explore life. Get good at something BECAUSE you want to get good at it, not because you want to build a business around it.

If you want to blog about it, by all means do it (but know that chances of success are slim). Though perhaps it might be more fun not to worry about blogging at all.

Then, once you do, in a year or two, revisit the subject on building an online business, and see if there’s something there. Maybe you’ll see the online business world in a different way.

Or maybe, you’ll one day come up with an idea that you ARE an expert in, you CAN talk about for hours on end, and there IS demand for out of thin air, test it, and it will take off.

But at least you won’t spend another 2 years frustrated and spinning your wheels. You’ll spend the 2 years living your life and doing things you love.

Continue to Chapter 5: How to Find Problems Worth Solving

Your turn: What other questions do you have about finding or validating your online business idea, finding your first moments of traction or getting to your 100 e-mail subscribers? Let me know in the comments below!

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How to Rapidly Validate Your Online Business Idea

By Primoz Bozic 4 Comments

You’re currently reading Chapter 3 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

In the last chapter of this guide, we talked about how to find your Profitable Online Business Idea (and why having an incredible idea is the key to growing your e-mail list today).

But how do you validate your business ideas to know that they’re ideas worth pursuing (and how can you build your e-mail list to 100+ e-mail subscribers before even setting up a website)?

That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this chapter. You’ll learn about:

  • Moments of Traction: The quickest way to validate your online business idea and get your first 100 e-mail subscribers
  • Why you shouldn’t pursue business ideas that feel like an “uphill battle”
  • List-Building Experiments: How to create your Moments of Traction and quickly validate your online business idea
  • How to know when you’ve successfully validated your online business idea
  • The easy & hard ways to validate your online business idea (and which one to choose)
  • Exact business idea validation scripts and examples
  • How to collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers (even if you don’t have a website yet)
  • What to do if you don’t see any traction with your idea

This is a long chapter – but working through it will save you weeks or months pursuing an idea that won’t take off – so going through it will be well worth it for you :).

Business Idea Validation Masterclass

If you want to dive deep into the process of business idea validation, you can watch my Business Idea Validation Masterclass where I’ll show you the “mad scientist method” for validating your business ideas and show you how I would validate different business ideas myself (it’s a great supplement to this blog post):

Moments of Traction: The Quickest Way to Validate Your Online Business Idea And Get Your First 100 E-mail Subscribers

You can very easily predict how an online business will go based on how well it does in the first 3 months (with rare exceptions).

I see a lot of entrepreneurs fighting and living an uphill battle where they pursue business ideas for months or years, but their business never really takes off. Their email list is practically inexistent. They never find their first paying clients. They put in the work, but the results just aren’t there.

The culprit, in most cases, is either that:

  • They haven’t found a profitable online business idea
  • They haven’t taken the time to validate it properly

On the flip side, almost every established entrepreneur I ever talked to about how they started their online business had a big moment very early on that helped them validate their online business idea, told them “there was something there”, and gave them the momentum to go all out on their business idea.

I call these moments Moments of Traction.

What are Moments of Traction and How Can They Help You Validate Your Online Business Idea?

These Moments of Traction could be anything from asking people to hire you, to growing your e-mail list to hundreds of email subscribers practically overnight.

Here are some examples of Moments of Traction from entrepreneurs I interviewed for this guide:

  • “Working With You is a No-Brainer”
    • Christina Rebuffet: “I was getting a lot of positive feedback from the videos I was doing. First time someone contacted me for lessons online, my pricing was a lot more expensive than in the English learning centre, and someone paid almost instantly because they saw my videos and liked them.”
  • “Can I hire You?”
    • Matt Rosenblum: “I went to a meet up through meetup.com and talked to the host of the meet up. He then hired me on the spot.”
  • “Do More of This!”
    • Danny Margulies: “I published a blog post online, and a lot of people messaged me telling me to write more posts like this”
  • Inbox Full of Emails
    • Gabriela Pereira: “I asked a question on my blog that very few people read, “if there was a DIY approach to getting a MFA (writing degree), would you do it?” , and woke up to an inbox full of comments”
    • Sam Gavis-Hughson: “I Went into a few online groups, hackathon hackers interview prep group, posted on reddit, etc. – overnight, 50 people e-mailed me saying YES I want to learn about preparing for tech interviews.”
  • “You’re reading my mind!”
    • Karen Dudek-Brannan: “I wrote a blog post and shared it in a Facebook group in my industry, and got a lot of people emailing me and saying “wow you’re reading my mind”. This told me I’m pursuing the right idea.”
  • A Flood of Comments
    • Karen Dudek-Brannan: “I wrote a blog post and shared it in a FB group of 20k+ people. “Hey guys, I noticed a lot of people have this issue, I wrote a blog post on this topic, and hope it’s helpful”. I got 186 email subscribers in 2 days without an opt-in, and got a flood of comments. That was the green light for the niche and area within speech pathology.”
  • “I’ve been looking for this for years”
    • Geraldine Lepere: “When I started creating YouTube videos, people said things like “I’ve been looking for this for years”, and “I would have loved this a few years ago”, because I answered questions in a way they have never seen before.”

You get the idea. In a nutshell, your Moment of Traction will likely be

  • Instant Pay Validation: Someone trying to hire you
  • A Flood of Comments: A lot of people commenting or emailing you about your idea
  • A Strong Emotional Response: “you should do more of this!

The more Moments of Traction you’ll have in the earlier stages of your online business, the faster your email list will grow.

WARNING: Don’t Pursue Business Ideas That Feel Like “Fighting an Uphill Battle”

If you’ve spent more than a few months working on your online business, haven’t seen any real Moments of Traction and your business feels like “fighting an uphill battle”, I’d be very worried.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again.

Aspiring entrepreneurs fall in love with their ideas, and hope that “it will all work out if you keep plugging away”. But unfortunately, what usually happens is more of the same – more “plugging away”, but no traction.

It’s exactly what happened to me when I spent 6 months getting to 42 email subscribers. Had I pursued that business idea, I would have likely never build an online business.

If that’s the case, you might want to go back to the drawing board to find another business idea that DOES take off (when you DO find a Profitable Online Business Idea that DOES create traction, working on it will feel like night and day).

I know hearing this might be uncomfortable, but if I look at the cold, hard data, there’s just nobody saying “I spent a year working on this business idea and then it magically took off overnight”. It just never happens.

Now of course you might not be missing out on the Moments of Traction because your idea isn’t good – it might just be that you never tested it in real world, and couldn’t even encounter a Moment of Traction.

If that’s the case, you’ll know A LOT more about how good your business idea actually is over the next week, as you work through the steps in this guide.

And if things go well, you’ll validate your online business idea and sit on 100+ email subscribers in no time.

List-Building Experiments: How to Create Your Moments of Traction and Validate Your Online Business Idea

So how do you go and create your Moments of Traction to validate your online business idea and get your first 100 e-mail subscribers?

Through List-Building Experiments.

Here, I’d like to share a word of caution. There will be a slight disconnect between the overall strategy that I’ll share for building your e-mail list in this guide, and what the entrepreneurs I interviewed actually did to start building their email lists.

Let me explain.

In this guide, I don’t recommend you to create content, a lead magnet, or even a website before you have hundreds of email subscribers. I believe that’s the leanest approach to building your email list that requires the least time and resources.

But in reality, you CAN do all of those things to create your first Moments of Traction, and many entrepreneurs that I interviewed didn’t really have any business knowledge when they started their online business, and just did things they thought would make sense at the time.

For example, when I asked Luke McIntosh how he started out, he said “I thought to myself, let me just put a few videos out there and see what happens”. There was no strategy involved – only fun experiments.

In this section, I’ll share a few different ways to create your first Moments of Traction (that entrepreneurs I interviewed actually used). Some of these will require more time, others less. Some of these will require you to set up a website and read through the future sections of this guide, others won’t.

It’s up to you to choose an approach that YOU are the most excited about. I believe that doing things that you are excited about in your business will get you WAY better results than doing something you don’t want to do and you “should do” just because someone else told you to do it.

But let me warn you: there is a danger in skipping ahead in this guide.

If you move on to creating your website, your Lead Magnet and Remarkable Content, it’s very easy to put in weeks or months of work before you actually put your idea into the world. This means you could spend weeks or months working on an idea that will never take off (or, your idea could take off).

So regardless of which route you take, try to make sure that you run your first List Building Experiment and validate your online business idea within 1-2 weeks, so you can quickly build traction with ideas that work, and ditch the ideas that don’t. That’s the best way to avoid getting stuck in the List-Building Rat Race.

Another thing I will mention is that many entrepreneurs I interviewed didn’t actually start their business by focusing on growing their email list, which is why their Moments of Traction might be different (like getting their first few paying customers instead of hundreds of email subscribers).

Because this IS a guide on how to build your email list, I do suggest that you always think about how your Moments of Traction can help you build an email list, and capture the email addresses from people who are excited about your Profitable Online Business Idea, even if that means capturing them manually.

Ok, now that we set the context, let’s go back to List-Building Experiments.

What are List-Building Experiments?

List-Building Experiments are experiments you can run to validate your Profitable Online Business Idea and quickly build traction with your idea.

Ideally, you’ll want to run a few of these experiments over the course of 1-2 weeks.

I can’t tell you how many of these to run as there’s no exact number, but in the more ways you put your idea out there, the higher the chances are of finding your Moment of Traction (or seeing that the idea isn’t promising enough to pursue).

To make things more concrete, here’s an example of a List-Building Experiment from one of my clients, Michelle Rebosio:

“I asked people in a group about International Development if they would be interested in reading The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Job in International Development, and 500 people commented on the post saying they would read it”.

Here’s another example from Ryan Hildebrandt:

“I went into 20 Facebook and LinkedIn groups and asked people if they would be interested in learning how to speak at TEDx events, to see what the response would be like.”

Ok, you get the idea.

How to Know if You’ve Successfully Validated Your Online Business Idea: The 3 Levels of Traction

Once you run your List-Building Experiments, each of them will hit one of the 3 Levels of Traction:

  • No Traction: You’ll hear crickets, and practically nobody will attention to your idea
  • Some Traction: You’ll get some enthusiastic responses, but not hundreds
  • Massive Traction: You’ll get hundreds of responses to your idea

If we return to Michelle’s example of making a Facebook post about writing a Lead Magnet about finding a job in International Development, here’s what that could look like:

  • 0-20 comments/likes: No Traction
  • 30-50 comments/likes: Some Traction
  • 100+ comments/likes: Massive Traction

NOTE: These “levels” are a bit subjective, and if you’re ever in doubt, you should always use the LOWER level to measure the success of your List-Building Experiment.

This means that if you’re not sure if you’re seeing No Traction or Some Traction, you should err on the side of being cautious and count it as No Traction. So for example, If Michelle only got 10 comments from a group of 20,000 people, that would still count as No Traction.

There will also be some “gray area” situations, like getting 70 comments/likes. Is that Some Traction or Massive Traction? If there are a lot of enthusiastic comments, it’s Massive Traction. If it’s mostly likes and only a few short comments, it’s Some Traction.

Use your gut feeling, but don’t lie to yourself.

How Much Traction do You Need to Validate Your Online Business Idea?

The goal of running these List-Building Experiments is to get to 100 e-mail subscribers over the course of 1-2 weeks.

You could do this through one Moment of Massive Traction, like Karen Dudek-Brannan, who got 186 email subscribers through sharing one blog post in a Facebook group.

Or, it could be through multiple Moments of Some Traction, like Danny Margulies, who didn’t really have a Massive Moment of Traction, and instead saw multiple small wins that helped him build more and more momentum.

I’d be worried if after 1-2 weeks you’re at only 10 email subscribers (and all of those are your friends and family members).

But if you’re at 80 or 100 email subscribers and new subscribers keep trickling in, it means that there’s enough traction for you to move to the Momentum Stage.

The Easy and Hard Way to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Ok, so let’s look at the 2 main types of List-Building Experiments you can run to validate your Profitable Online Business Idea and get to your first 100 email subscribers.

The Quick And Easy Way can help you get you your first 100 e-mail subscribers in a few hours or days, while The Hard And Long Way can take longer, but can also bring more e-mail subscribers your way.

The Quick And Easy Way to Validate Your Online Business Idea

The simplest and quickest List-Building Experiment you can run is The Quick And Easy Way. You can literally run this experiment within a few minutes and see exactly where you stand with your Profitable Online Business Idea, and start building your email list.

You’ve already seen this one in action with examples from Michelle and Ryan that I shared earlier in this chapter.

All you need to do is ask your potential audience if they would like to learn about the topic you’d like to talk about.

Here are some examples

  • “Would you like to learn how to speak at a TEDx event?” (Ryan Hildebrandt)
  • “Would you like to learn how to find a job in International Development?” (Michelle Rebosio)
  • “Would you like to learn how to land jobs at top tech companies?” (Sam Gavis-Hughson)

You could ask this question

  • On your Facebook Wall
  • In Facebook Groups
  • In LInkedIn Groups
  • On Reddit
  • In Online Forums
  • …

To get enough data and make sure you actually build your email list, you should try to ask this question in 10-20 different places (the more the merrier).

You could ask your question through:

  • A short post: You could create a post with no context at all, and simply ask the question.
  • A long post: You could create a post that sets the context around your question

Here is an example of a long post that Rusty Gray could ask to test his idea of teaching animators how to get jobs as professional animators (I made this example up):

“Hey guys, this is Rusty.

I’ve worked in the animation industry for the past 20 years, and animated at companies like Disney, and worked on films like Toy Story 2.

I’m thinking of starting a blog about how to find a job as a professional animator.

I noticed that a lot of you had questions in this group how to find the right job, how much experience you should have, and specific animation techniques.

Would you be interested in reading a blog like that?”

I don’t have data on which approach is better, and have seen both approaches work – so pick the one you’re more comfortable with.

The Hard And Long Way to Validate Your Online Business Idea

The second type of an experiment is The Hard And Long Way.

This experiment will be more time consuming than The Quick And Easy Way and might require you to set up a website and knowledge on how to create Remarkable Content or a Lead Magnet (which we do cover in this guide), which can be a dangerous and time-consuming rabbit hole when you are trying to get to 100 email subscribers as quickly as possible.

The last thing you want to happen is to spend a month developing a website (rather than just going out into the world and testing your idea).

On the flip side, writing some extremely valuable content might feel better to you than just asking a question in a community you’ve just joined, so if this type of an experiment excites you, you should definitely go for it.

The idea behind this strategy is simple:

Write one or more pieces of Remarkable Content (or create a Lead Magnet) about a “Problem Worth Solving” and spread the word about it to see if people like it or not.

Your piece of content could be a blog post, a YouTube video, a post in a Facebook group, an e-book, or something else.

This is exactly what Karen Dudek-Brannan did to go from 0-186 email subscribers with one blog post. She found a topic that her audience kept complaining about, wrote a blog post about it, and shared it in a Facebook Group about speech pathology.

You can run this experiment in one of the following ways:

  • Contribute To The Community: You can go directly into a community (like Reddit, a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, an online forum…) and write a post there, without setting up a website
  • Create & Share: You can set up a simple website / YouTube channel, create content on your blog / YouTube, and share your content in online communities
  • Partner: You can do a partnership with another entrepreneur to get your first few email subscribers (a podcast interview, a joined webinar, a guest post…)
  • Build it And They Will Come: You can tap into an existing audience of a platform like YouTube, churn out a decent amount of content, and hope some of it takes off

Either of these approaches can work to generate traction.

The benefit of contributing to the community is that it might be easier to collect email subscribers, though it will take considerably more work to actually set up your website or YouTube channel. It might also be harder to share your content in communities that have strict guidelines around sharing your content.

The benefit of creating & sharing your content is that it’s less likely you’ll break any rules in online communities, and sharing your content will seem less “self-promotional”. The downside is that it might be a bit trickier to collect email addresses that way.

The benefit of doing a partnership is that you’ll be tapping into an existing audience. Especially if you’re already connected to other entrepreneurs in your niche, this can be a great way to start building your email list. The downside is that you will need some way of capturing your email subscribers, and that if you don’t have the connections built yet, making these connections and getting partnership opportunities might take a prohibitively long time.

The benefit of the “Building it And They Will Come” is that you can just focus on creating great content and not worry about anything else, and you can tap into an existing audience from a platform like YouTube. The downside is that it might take weeks of months until you start seeing traction (Luke McIntosh who built an audience of 25,000+ e-mail subscribers through YouTube said it took him 6-7 weeks of publishing weekly videos to see traction through YouTube).

As I mentioned earlier, this is an approach that a lot of the entrepreneurs I interviewed took.

Here are some examples:

  • After Gabriela Pereira asked her handful of blog readers if they were interested in learning about a “DIY writing degree”, she wrote a blog post every day for a month about that topic, and went from 12 to 400 blog followers.
  • Peter Nguyen, a stylist for men, wrote a guest post on a friend’s website and attracted 1,000+ e-mail subscribers from it
  • Rusty Gray wrote a guest post and got 400+ e-mail subscribers from it
  • Geraldine Lepere, Christina Rebuffet and Luke McIntosh all built their e-mail lists through YouTube videos
  • Sam Gavis-Hughson published an e-book that helped him double his e-mail list overnight, attracting 500+ e-mail subscribers
  • Olivia Angelescu created a resource (a list of websites that you can contribute to as a blogger and how to pitch them), asked if anyone wanted access to it in a Facebook group, and got 400+ e-mail subscribers

As you can see, these approaches are all different from each other, and there’s no one proven way you HAVE to follow to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers.

Still, what is obvious from all the data I collected is that you should either:

  • Ask people if they’re interested in learning what you have to teach
  • Create amazing content and put it into the world

If you want to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers and create the first Moment of Traction in your online business.

Should you Follow the Quick and Easy, or Long and Hard way to Validate Your Online Business Idea?

This is the part of the guide where the advice I’ll give you is different from what the majority of the entrepreneurs I interviewed did.

Instead of trying to reach the 100 e-mail subscribers the “Long and Hard Way” like they did, I recommend you to take the MUCH quicker and easier “Quick and Easy Way”. You’ll save yourself weeks, if not months of work, and get to 100+ e-mail subscribers a lot quicker.

You can easily go into 10-20 different online communities and ask people if they would want to learn more about a topic you’re amazing at in an afternoon. And the next day, you could already have 100+ e-mail subscribers.

In my eyes, that’s a much better approach than setting up a website, writing 5 blog post or an e-book, or shooting 10 YouTube videos.

If you come up with an amazing business idea, you won’t NEED content to generate the initial interest. You don’t need to create any content in order for people to raise their hands and say “yes, I’m interested. Tell me more!”.

How to collect your first 100 e-mail addresses

At this point, you might be wondering how you could even collect the 100 e-mail addresses if we didn’t talk about using any e-mail software yet.

The truth is that you don’t need an e-mail provider, landing page or a website when you’re trying to collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers. Your time and energy would be better spent actually running List-Building Experiments.

You just need to collect the 100 e-mail addresses that you can e-mail in the future.

You can save your first 100 e-mail addresses in one of the two ways

  • The “Quick and Dirty” approach: Save your e-mail addresses on a piece of paper, a Google Document or an Excel Spreadsheet
  • The “Still Simple Enough” approach: Get a Mailchimp account (a free e-mail provider for smaller e-mail lists), and manually enter the e-mail addresses into an email lis

And as far as how to actually collect the e-mail addresses, this is where some old-fashioned Manual Labour comes in.

This is how Olivia Angelescu got to her first 400 e-mail subscribers by creating and sharing an Epic Lead Magnet:

  • She created a resource for herself (a list of websites you can contribute to as a blogger and how to pitch them)
  • She thought others would benefit from this resource as well, so she asked people if they wanted to get access to this resource in an online community she was already a part of and active in
  • Overnight, she got over 520 empathic comments saying that they wanted to get the resource
  • She sent each person a private message and asked them if she can send them the resource via email and add them to an email list
  • This way, she collected over 400 e-mail subscribers

You could do the same thing to collect your first 100 e-mail addresses, whether you create a Lead Magnet or not.

Once you ask people if they’d be interested in learning more about the topic you want to teach, you can send the people who commented on or liked your post a private message and ask them if they’d like to be added to an email list where you’ll send them the articles you write.

For example, you could send them a message like this:

“Hey NAME, I noticed that you commented on my post in the [COMMUNITY] and that you’d love to learn more about how to become a professional animator.

I’m putting together a few articles related to this topic over the next few weeks, and if you’d like to, I can e-mail them to you once they’re ready through my email list.

If you’d like that, can you send me your e-mail address? I’ll send you the articles as soon as they’re ready.”

This is the general approach you can use to collect e-mail addresses without a website – and even if you don’t have an e-mail provider yet, you can just e-mail the articles to people manually through e-mail (make sure you bcc everyone if you send an e-mail to multiple people at once though).

Alternatively, if you already do have an e-mail provider, you could also set up a simple landing page like this from my friend Tim Hoffman (he created an email list for people who want to learn how to open a coffee shop):

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2019-05-13-at-09.47.09.png

You could then simply send the link to this landing page to the people who are interested in learning more about your business.

Last but not least, you could create a landing page like this with a Lead Magnet that you could link people to:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2019-05-13-at-09.48.23.png

If you’re not sure what a landing page or a Lead Magnet is, don’t worry – we’ll cover these in the next chapters of this guide:

  • How to Create an Epic Lead Magnet
  • How to Create a Landing Page

Finally, another approach that Michelle Rebosio used to get over 1,000 e-mail subscribers within a month of starting her website is to:

  • Create a post in an online community asking people if they would like to learn about a specific subject (in Michelle’s case, she asked people if they’d like to read a guide about finding a job in International Development)
  • Create the Lead Magnet, circle back to the post you’ve made earlier (that ideally got a massive response), and either leave a comment with the link to the Lead Magnet on the post, or individually message people with a link to the Lead Magnet so they can get access to it and sign up to your e-mail list

There’s no “wrong” way of going through these steps. Pick the approach that feels best for you, and go ahead and try it out!

What Should You do if You Don’t See Any Traction With Your Idea?

What if go and test your idea in 10-20 online communities, and get zero to no response? What if there’s no Massive Moment of Traction? What should you do then?

You have only two real options:

  • OPTION #1: “Kill Your Baby”, let go of your existing business idea, come up with a new one and run the List-Building Experiments until you experience your first Moments of Traction
  • OPTION #2: Keep working on your existing business idea and take the “Long and Hard Way” until you find your Moment of Traction

Based on everything I’ve seen working with 1,000+ online entrepreneurs and helping them set up their online businesses, option #2 ends in the exact same place 99% of the time: The List-Building Rat Race.

If you put your idea in front of hundreds of people and hear crickets, it’s unlikely that there’s something there. You can go ahead, set up a website and start creating content, hoping that “people will see that they need this”, but in reality, you’ll likely end up with 42 email subscribers and a lot of wasted time and energy after 6 months.

Or, you can let go of your existing idea, spent a few more weeks running List-Building Experiments, and within a few weeks you will likely find an idea that DOES create Moments of Traction, and speed well past 100 e-mail subscribers, feeling thankful that you didn’t spend more energy on an idea that felt like fighting an up-hill battle.

The choice is yours, and the fate of your online business is in your hands.

The same goes for trying the Long and Hard Way, and not seeing traction with your idea after you spent 1-2 weeks spreading the word about the content you wrote. If there’s no traction within the first few weeks, it’s unlikely that there will ever be.

Summary: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

In this chapter, you learned about Moments of Traction that help you quickly validate your online business ideas.

Moments of Traction could be:

  • Someone saying that “working with you is a no-brainer for them”
  • Someone hiring you on the spot as you share your idea with them
  • Someone enthusiastically telling you to write more articles around your idea
  • Waking up to an inbox full of e-mails asking to learn from you
  • Someone saying that you’re “reading their mind”
  • Receiving a flood of comments on an article or a post you publish online
  • Someone saying they’ve been “looking for this for years”

They will boil down to instant pay validation, receiving a flood of comments or a strong emotional response.

You learned that working on profitable online business ideas shouldn’t feel like an “uphill battle”, and that working on an idea that does take off will feel quite the opposite (you’ll know it when you see it).

You also learned about “list-building experiments” that you can run over the course 1-2 weeks to quickly validate your online business idea.

We talked about the “quick and easy” and “long and hard” ways to run these experiments:

  • The “quick and easy way” is to go into 10-20 online communities and ask the members if they’d like to learn about the topic you’d like to teach
  • The “long and hard way” is to go ahead and create a High-Converting Website, some Remarkable Content and/or an Epic Lead Magnet, and then spread the word about it

I recommended you to try the “quick and easy way”, as you can go through it in 1-2 days with zero downsides, and validate your online business idea a lot quicker than through the “long and hard way”.

You learned that you don’t need a website or an e-mail list to collect your first 100 e-mail addresses, and that you can simply collect them on a piece of paper or in an excel spreadsheet (to simplify your life).

Finally, we covered the 2 options you have when your business idea doesn’t take off after your validation process:

  • OPTION #1: “Kill your baby”, let go of your idea and pick a new one
  • OPTION #2: Keep trying to gain traction with your idea

I recommended OPTION #1 as examples of established entrepreneurs whose business idea miraculously took off overnight are few and far in-between, while there are far more examples of entrepreneurs whose ideas instantly saw traction.

In the next chapter of this guide, we’ll cover the 6 common questions you might have at this stage of starting your online business and getting to your first 100 e-mail subscribers:

  • “Do I need a clear audience for my business idea?”
  • “When is my idea “good enough”, when does it need more refinement, and when should I move on to a new idea?”
  • “What if I can’t find a profitable business idea after months of searching for one?”
  • “Should I choose an idea I’m more excited about, or that there’s more demand for?”
  • “How much customer research do I need to do before I validate my idea?”
  • “What if I don’t have anything unique to offer?”

Continue to Chapter 4: How to Get Un-Stuck With Finding Your Profitable Business Idea

Your Turn: What has your experience been with validating your Online Business Idea?

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

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How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

By Primoz Bozic 7 Comments

How to find a profitable online business idea

You’re currently reading Chapter 2 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

How to avoid the “List-Building Rat Race”

When I first started my website, I spent $500 on a custom design, wrote tens of blog posts, and worked hard on it for months.

And yet, in over the course of 6 months, I only managed to get a measly 42 e-mail subscribers, and never expected to turn it into an online business that I could live off.

I LIVED the “List-Building Rat Race”, and it’s no wonder I ended up deleting my website after spending hundreds of hours and dollars on it.

Why did I struggle with growing my e-mail list?

Well, I probably broke every single rule in my Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List (oops):

  • I didn’t test my business idea or experience any Moments of Traction (TRACTION stage)
  • I didn’t create an Epic Lead Magnet that would turn my website visitors into e-mail subscribers (MOMENTUM stage)
  • I definitely didn’t create and promote any Remarkable Content (GROWTH stage)

Instead, I built a blog, started sharing my ideas, and hoped that I would somehow magically build an online business. It didn’t work.

The good news is that you don’t have to repeat my mistakes and spend 6 months grinding to 42 e-mail subscribers.

And the best way to start is to find a Profitable Online Business Idea.

Finding Your Profitable Business Idea might not be something that you think of as a crucial step to growing your e-mail list.

However, it can be THE thing that makes the difference between a business that grows exponentially and a business that stays stuck in the List-Building Rat Race forever.

In this post, we’ll talk about:

  • Why you need a Profitable Online Business Idea to grow your e-mail list in 2019
  • What is a Profitable Online Business Idea
  • 12 Examples of Profitable Online Business Ideas
  • 9 Ways to come up with a Profitable Online Business Idea
  • Why you shouldn’t spend hours and hours brainstorming ideas (and what to do instead)

Let’s dive in!

To Grow Your Email List in 2019, You Need a Profitable Online Business Idea

Back in 2006-2007, you didn’t have to have a particularly unique business idea to build a successful blog.

Since this was before blogging exploded and it was way harder to get into it (you couldn’t just buy a blog template for $50 and start blogging), there was far less competition.

You could simply start writing, and people in your social circle would read what you write. Facebook posts would get hundreds of likes and shares. Your content would automatically be found on Google, since there was little competition in most industries.

But in 2019, just writing a blog is not enough.

Today, there are over 40x more blog posts written than back in 2006-2007. This means that you likely have 40x more competitors than you did back than, if not more (if you’re trying to enter a very saturated niche like fitness, that number might be a lot higher).

That’s why today, to grow your email list and build a successful online business, it’s more important than ever to have a Profitable Online Business Idea.

The Business Idea Masterclass

Because finding a profitable business idea is such an important topic, I recorded a 65-minute masterclass about it that goes into way more depth – you can watch it here as a supplement to this blog post:

What is a Profitable Online Business Idea?

Today, with thousands of online businesses out there, your should come up with a business idea that is unique in some way to stand out and get noticed.

By a Proftitable Online Business Idea, I mean that you should try to:

  • Solve a problem nobody else is solving yet
  • Help an audience that nobody else is helping yet
  • Help an audience with a problem in a better or different way than anyone else

This will give you the highest chances of finding an online business idea that your potential customers will be happy to pay for.

You can find a Profitable Business Idea in a number of ways:

  • You could come up with a completely new problem that nobody is solving yet (teach people how to learn a new programming language)
  • You could take existing knowledge and tailor it to a specific audience that nobody is helping yet (teaching accountants how to get more clients)
  • You could enter a saturated market with a new angle (lose weight through spices)

As you choose your business idea, you should pick an idea that:

  • You are excited about, and could talk about for hours on end
  • You know a lot about, and you could confidently give advice about
  • There is enough demand for, and people are willing to pay for

I assume you already have some kind of a business idea in mind as you’re reading this guide, and that’s awesome.

But if you tried creating content or publishing an Epic Resource and you just didn’t get an amazing response (or you struggle with getting your first 100 e-mail subscribers), then your business idea is the first piece of the puzzle you should revisit.

12 Examples of Profitable Business Ideas

To get a feel for what makes a Profitable Business Idea, let’s look at some of the ideas from established entrepreneurs I interviewed for this guide.

Every single one of these entrepreneurs has an e-mail list of thousands of e-mail subscribers, successfully sold online courses or coaching programs, and the majority of them earn more than $100,000/year with their online businesses.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

  • Nagina Abdullah: Helping ambitious women lose weight with spices
  • Rusty Gray: How to become a professional animator
  • Karen Dudek-Brannan: How to become better at speech pathology
  • Gabriela Pereira: How to get better at writing without getting a degree
  • Sam Gavis-Hughson: How to master coding interviews at top tech companies
  • Danny Margulies: How to become a freelance copywriter  
  • Jenni Waldrop: How to grow your Etsy business
  • Will Darling: How to mix EDM music
  • Luke McIntosh: How to become a bassist
  • Ryan Hildebrandt: How to speak at TEDx events
  • Christina Rebuffet: How to speak fluent American English
  • Geraldine Lepere: How to speak French

Notice how the majority of these ideas are unique / specific in their own ways (and interestingly enough, the majority of them are not in the health / money making niches).

Some people say that “you don’t need to be an expert to build an online business”, and that you don’t need a unique business idea to succeed, but the data seems to say otherwise.

If you want to live of an online business today, it’s more likely you’ll be able to do it if you come up with a unique business idea than if you try to pursue an idea that has already been done before.

9 Ways to Come up With a Profitable Online Business Idea

When I asked these entrepreneurs how they came up with their business ideas, they shared a few key strategies that you can use to come up with your own Profitable Business Idea.

These are the actual “strategies” that worked for them and helped them build 5-6 figure online businesses.

Strategy #1: Find the Common Complaints

Matt Rosenblum came up with his Profitable ONline Business Idea (marketing for life coaches) by reading Facebook groups related to his industry. He noticed that his audience complained about getting clients ALL the time, and that marketing their business and making it sustainable was a big challenge for them. Since he had a strong background in marketing, he felt like that was a challenge he could solve for them.

Just like Matt, you can pay attention to things people constantly complain about, whether it’s in-person or online. When you find a Common Complaint you can solve, you have a Profitable Online Business Idea worth exploring.

Strategy #2: Find a Game You Can Win

Danny Margulies knew that he wanted to help his clients with Freelancing, as that was something he was good at. Initially, he decided to focus purely on Freelancing through Upwork, and later on he focused on “Freelance Copywriting”, rather than the more competitive fields of just Freelancing or just Copywriting. That’s how he found a game he could win.

As you’re coming up with your Profitable Online Business Idea, ask yourself “What’s a game I can win?”, and try to find a specific audience (Freelance Copywriters) or a specific platform (Upwork) that you feel like is big enough for you to build a business around, but still small enough to be “Winnable”.

Strategy #3: Answer the Unanswered Questions

When Sara Kirsch started her online business, she joined a lot of Facebook groups in her industry and paid attention to questions that kept getting unanswered, or that didn’t get great answers. That’s how she found problems that nobody else was solving for her audience.

As you’re doing research around your Profitable Online Business Idea, try to spot the “Unanswered Questions”, and see if you can find a pattern. You can then use that pattern to form your Profitable Online Business Idea.

Strategy #4: Use Your Unused Research

Karen Dudek-Brannan started her online business by talking about speech pathology, a field she has worked in for 12 years. As she picked her online business idea, she wanted to pick an idea she already knew a lot about, and coincidentally, she had a “pile of research” she wasn’t using from her PhD that she could talk about in her business, which she used to build her online business.

If you have a collection of research / experiments you’ve done in the past that you never shared with anyone, this might be a great opportunity to build a business around.

Strategy #5: Share Your Personal Transformation

Nagina Abdullah saw her online business take off when she shared her personal transformation with the world. As a mom of two kids, she managed to lose over 40lbs and keep the weight off for over a year, and a lot of people were asking her questions about how she did it.

If you have an incredible personal transformation that people keep asking you questions about, this can be a great springboard for your online business.

Strategy #6: Find an Ultra-Specific Audience

Since the health industry was already pretty saturated when Nagina started building her email list, she also decided to focus on a very specific audience as she pursued her idea. She focused on helping busy ambitious women lose weight that didn’t have the time to think about what to do or where to start.

By having a specific audience in mind, she could say things to them that nobody else was saying (about losing weight when you have kids, about walking into a boardroom being consumed with how you look rather than sharing a message with your employees…).

If there’s a specific audience you can relate to or would love working with (and nobody else is serving well), you can try to reach that audience (instead of trying to compete with everyone in your industry).

Strategy #7: Answer Questions People Ask You ALL The Time

Vickie Gould wrote a lot of books, and people around her constantly asked her how she did it. She turned that into an online business where she helps people write and publish best-selling books.

If there’s a topic people ask you questions about all the time, it might be something worth exploring for your Profitable ONline Business Idea.

Strategy #8: “Someone Should Create This”

I recently talked to a friend about how he started his online business, and he said he’s had an idea for YEARS and constantly said to himself “someone should do this”, but nobody ever did. Eventually, he had enough of it and did it himself, and built an extremely profitable online business that helps millions of people all over the world.

If you have a feeling that “someone should create this” about a topic (but nobody ever does), then you could step in and do it yourself, and build a successful business around it.

Strategy #9: “I Could do This For a Different Topic / Audience”

Will Darling who helps people produce EDM music online had a friend who built an online business around helping people learn how to play guitar. He thought to himself “I could do the same thing, but for EDM music”, and it worked.

If you ever see someone building a business and think to yourself “I could do the same thing but for a different topic/audience”, you should definitely try it out.

Why You Shouldn’t Spend Hours and Hours Brainstorming Profitable Online Business Ideas (And What to do Instead)

Something that surprised me as I talked to entrepreneurs about how they came up with their Profitable Online Business Ideas was that almost nobody said “I sat down for 3 hours and brainstormed different business ideas, then came up with this amazing idea” when I asked them how they came up with their ideas.

Sure, some of them might have done a bit of brainstorming, but the actual ideas didn’t come from that. They came from something they were amazing at, that they’ve been doing for years (and just made sense, like with Rusty Gray, who helps animators get jobs as professional animators).

Or, it was that they randomly got an idea as they were browsing through Facebook groups online (like Matt Rosenblum and Sara Kirsch).

You can’t really brainstorm a Profitable Online Business Idea. It will come to you when you least expect it, whether you’re going for a walk, taking a shower, laying in bed in the evening or having a conversation with a friend.

Brainstorming is something that will merely help you START thinking about business ideas, and allow your brain to think of more ideas on the go.

What’s important is that WHEN the idea comes, you don’t dismiss it and say “it will never work” before you actually test it, but to go out into the world and see if there’s something there.

So take some time and brainstorm some ideas – then go out and test them in the world using the next chapter of this guide.

Summary: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

In this chapter, you learned that you need a Profitable Online Business idea to escape the List-Building Rat Race and successfully build an e-mail list in 2019.

Without a great idea, your list-building efforts will bring you disappointing results and feel like an “uphill battle”. With a great idea, building an e-mail list will feel easier than you think

We covered that your idea should:

  • Solve a problem nobody else is solving yet
  • Help an audience that nobody else is helping yet
  • Help an audience with a problem in a better or different way than anyone else

You can find a Profitable Business Idea by:

  • Coming up with a completely new problem that nobody is solving yet
  • Taking existing knowledge and tailor it to a specific audience that nobody is helping yet
  • Enter a saturated market with a new angle

And that you should pick an idea that:

  • You are excited about, and could talk about for hours on end
  • You know a lot about, and you could confidently give advice about
  • There is enough demand for, and people are willing to pay for

We looked at 12 examples of Profitable Online Business Ideas and went over a 9 different strategies for coming up with your own idea:

  • Strategy #1: Find Common Complaints
  • Strategy #2: Find a Game You Can Win
  • Strategy #3: Answer the Unanswered Questions
  • Strategy #4: Use Your Unused Research
  • Strategy #5: Share Your Personal Transformation
  • Strategy #6: Find an Ultra-Specific Audience
  • Strategy #7: Answer Questions People Ask You ALL The Time
  • Strategy #8: “Someone Should Create This”
  • Strategy #9: “I Could Do This for a Different Topic / Audience”

And finally, I argued why you shouldn’t spend hours and hours brainstorming your ideas, and recommended you to test them in the real world instead.

In the next chapter of this guide, we’ll talk about how you can validate your Profitable Business Ideas in under a week and get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers without getting stuck in research.

Continue to Chapter 3: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Your Turn. Which Profitable Online Business Idea(s) did you come up with? Share them with us in the comments below!

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

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Your Roadmap to 10,000+ E-mail Subscribers

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

You’re currently reading Chapter 1 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

How do you get your first 10,000 e-mail subscribers from scratch?

I interviewed 20 online entrepreneurs with e-mail lists of 1,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers to answer that exact question.

To get to your first 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond, you’ll have to go through 4 different stages of e-mail list growth:

  • STAGE 1: TRACTION (Your First 100 Email Subscribers)
  • STAGE 2: MOMENTUM (Getting to 500-1,000 Email Subscribers)
  • STAGE 3: GROWTH (Growing to 5,000-10,000 Email Subscribers)
  • STAGE 4: SCALE (Scaling Beyond 20,000-40,000 Email Subscribers)

In this post, I’ll give you a high-level overview of how you can go from 0 to 10,000+ e-mail subscribers and beyond, and guide you to other chapters of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List that will give you specific strategies and tactics for moving through each of these stages.

You can use this as a high-level guide and refer to it whenever you’re in doubt what you should be doing to grow your e-mail list to the next stage.

Note that these stages aren’t set in stone.

  • You might find that you can use the strategies from the TRACTION stage to go to well over 500 e-mail subscribers.
  • You might find that you can use the strategies from the MOMENTUM stage to go to over 2,000 e-mail subscribers.
  • Or, you might find that you’ll have to move to the SCALE stage earlier than expected, at 5,000 e-mail subscribers.

These are general benchmarks that I created based on the common patterns I noticed among the entrepreneurs I interviewed, but will differ from industry to industry.

STAGE 1: TRACTION (Your First 100 Email Subscribers)

When you’re just starting an online business, the first big benchmark that you’ll pursue is getting to your first 100 e-mail subscribers.

Finding this initial traction will tell you that “there’s something there”, and you’ll want to hit this benchmark within 1-2 weeks of choosing a new business idea.

This stage doesn’t require you to set up a website, write any major content, or put a lot of effort into growing your email list.

It’s a much more experimental stage where you’re dipping your toes in the water and figuring out if your business idea is a good idea to pursue, and finding your first few potential customers for your new business.

The most important thing at this stage is to see one or more Moments of Traction – signs that there is a lot of demand for this idea.

Throughout this stage, you will:

  • Come up With a Profitable Online Business Idea
  • Run List Building Experiments to Validate Your Idea
  • Experience Your First Moments of Traction
  • Collect Your First 100+ Email Addresses

You won’t need a website or to write a ton of content at this stage. You won’t need to spend months in this stage either.

By running List Building Experiments and experiencing your first Moments of Traction, you’ll be able to collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers in a matter of days or weeks.

You can read the chapters of the TRACTION stage to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 2: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

Chapter 3: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Chapter 4: How to Get Un-Stuck With Your Online Business Idea

STAGE 2: MOMENTUM (Getting to 500-1,000 Email Subscribers)

Once you’ve got to your first 100-ish e-mail subscribers and successfully validated your Unique Business Idea, you’ll have your first 100 potential customers that you can talk to and better understand how you can help them.

You’ll also have your first 100 Raving Fans that will give you feedback on your first few pieces of content, help you spread the word about it, and maybe even become your first paying customers.

You’ll then create (and spread the word about) an Epic Lead Magnet that will solve a major problem of your audience and help you attract more Raving Fans to your business.

Creating and spreading the word about this resource will help you make a name out of yourself and make a big entrance in your industry, as well as grow your e-mail list to 500+ e-mail subscribers.

You’ll also create a High-Converting Website with all the essential elements that will help you convert your website visitors into e-mail subscribers.

Throughout this stage, you will:

  • Find Problems Worth Solving
  • Create Your Lead Magnet
  • Learn How to Write Mouthwatering Opt-in Copy
  • Set Up Your Email List
  • Get Over Your Fear of Putting Yourself Out There
  • Promote Your Lead Magnet
  • Create Your High-Converting Website

If you squeezed the lemon out of the TRACTION stage, you will be able to go through this stage over a couple of weeks.

After you complete this stage, you’ll be able to create your first online course or get your first few coaching clients or to continue to the MOMENTUM stage to grow your e-mail list to thousands of e-mail subscribers.

You can read the chapters of the MOMENTUM stage to build your e-mail list to 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 5: How to Find Problems Worth Solving

Chapter 6: How to Create an EPIC Lead Magnet

Chapter 7: How to Write Mouthwatering Opt-in Copy

Chapter 8: How to Set Up Your E-mail List (Plus my 3 Favorite E-mail Providers)

Chapter 9: How to Get Over Your Fear of Putting Yourself Out There

Chapter 10: How to Promote Your Content

Chapter 11: How to Create a High-Converting Website

STAGE 3: GROWTH (Growing to 5,000-10,000 Email Subscribers)

By the time you reach the GROWTH stage, you’ll feel like your business idea is turning into a real business.

You’ll have an e-mail list of 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers, and you’ll likely already have your first few paying clients through coaching or online courses you created.

You’ll also have a High-Converting Website with an Epic Lead Magnet that will convert your website visitors into e-mail subscribers.

At this point, the real work will begin.

You’ll spend the next few months consistently creating Remarkable Content, which will become a core driver for adding new streams of e­mail subscribers to your business.

There’s no “one size fits all” strategy here in terms of choosing the right Content Platform for your business, though the vast majority of established entrepreneurs either use blog content, or YouTube to get to their first 5,000­-10,000 e­mail subscribers.

What more or less everyone has in common though is that they:

  • Stick with ONE Content Platform that suits their industry and their strengths well
  • Consistently create World-Class Content to keep growing their e-mail list
  • Don’t worry about pursuing multiple platforms (like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook Ads,…) at the same time

The focus on mastering ONE List-Building Strategy, consistently creating World-Class Content that your readers love and building a Bulletproof List Building System will help you go from 1,000 to 5,000 or even 10,000 e-mail subscribers.

Throughout this stage, you will:

  • Choose Your Ideal Content Platform
  • Learn How to Consistently Create Remarkable Content
  • Develop Your Long-Term Content Strategy

This stage will take longer than the previous two stages, in most cases anywhere between 6-12 months.

The key in this stage is staying focused on your one core List-Building Strategy and consistently building and growing your Content Base so you can continue to attract new, fresh potential customers to your business every day.

The less you get stuck in random List-Building Strategies, the more steadily your e-mail list will grow.

Throughout this stage you might want to take a “break” from list-building to create and launch online products and services (which is a big reason why your list growth might slow down), which will help you bring in the revenue to your online business.

At this stage, you’ll likely be able to make anywhere between $10-$50k/year with your online business (or in some cases even over $100k/year), which might be enough to run your online business part time or even full time.

You can read the chapters of the GROWTH stage to grow your e-mail list to 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 12: How to Break The Magical 1,000 Subscriber Mark (and 7 Mistakes to Avoid)

Chapter 13: How to Create Remarkable Content

Chapter 14: How to Consistently Create New Content Every Week

Chapter 15: Your Long-Term Content Strategy

STAGE 4: SCALE (Scaling Beyond 20,000-40,000 Email Subscribers)

Once you get to roughly 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers, your steady growth of your e-mail list might slow down, especially if you frequently launch online products or services and clean up your e-mail list.

Just doing “more of what works” won’t be enough to break the plateau, and even though your email list will grow, you’ll want to grow it faster.

To break this plateau, you’ll want to:

  • Streamline your Remarkable Content Creation through automation, systematization and delegation
  • Layer one or more new List-Building Strategies on top of your existing strategies to create additional streams of e-mail subscribers

Streamlining your existing system will help you create the time and space to master and layer on a new strategy, so you can reach new audiences and diversify where you get your traffic from.

For example, if YouTube is your main List-Building Strategy but you feel like you’re hitting a ceiling with it, you might want to start blogging, learning about SEO or using Pinterest to add a new, fresh stream of traffic to help you grow your e-mail list.

Doing this might take longer than you’d want it to (as adding each layer could take 6-12 months), but it’s what will ultimately help you keep growing your e-mail list to 10,000-40,000 email subscribers and beyond.

You can read the final chapter of the SCALE stage to scale your e-mail list to 20,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond below:

Chapter 16: Advanced List-Building Strategies

WARNING: Don’t skip the earlier stages!

The #1 reason why most entrepreneurs fail with growing their e-mail list (that nobody talks about) is that they skip one of the earlier stages of growing your e-mail list.

For example, you could create an incredible lead magnet (MOMENTUM stage) and write all the content in the world (GROWTH stage), but if you haven’t got the initial traction with your Unique Business Idea, chances are you’ll hear crickets as you try to attract people to your website.

Each of the foundations you create is the foundation for the next stage:

  • Going through the TRACTION stage helps you validate your business idea, so you can invest more time and energy into pursuing it (and helps you attract your first 100 Raving Fans)
  • Going through the MOMENTUM stage helps you make a name out of yourself in your industry, turn new visitors into Raving Fans, and convert traffic into e-mail subscribers.
  • Going through the GROWTH stage helps you create a repeatable system for growing your e-mail list, that will make sure your e-mail list keeps growing every day.
  • Going through the SCALE stage helps you streamline your existing list building system and add additional layers of list building systems to your business

If you skip (or half-ass) any of the stages, you’ll sooner or later hit a plateau as you try to speed through the remaining stages.

Instead of breezing through the stages, focus on squeezing the lemon and getting everything you can out of every stage.

I’ve seen entrepreneurs attract 500+ e-mail subscribers in TRACTION stage within a few weeks, and well over 2,000 e-mail subscribers from the MOMENTUM stage within a few months, with far less work than if they quickly moved to the next stages.

Too simple to be true?

This high-level breakdown might sound super simple, perhaps even too simple.

Notice I didn’t talk about e-mail list segmentation, 5-day challenges, giveaways, chat bots or other List-Building Tactics many people like to talk about.

That’s because almost every entrepreneur I talked to didn’t rely on those tactics to grow their e-mail list to thousands of e-mail subscribers, at least not in the long run.

90% of entrepreneurs I talked to used a system very similar to this one and agreed that the other List-Building Tactics were mostly distractions and shiny objects that slowed down their list growth.

In essence, going from 0 to 10,000+ e-mail subscribers IS simple:

  • Find a Unique Business Idea, test it and collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers
  • Create and spread the word about an Epic Resource and create a High-Converting Website to get to 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers
  • Create a lot of World-Class Content through a core List-Building Strategy that works for you to get to 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers
  • Streamline your initial List-Building Strategy and layer on additional strategies one by one to beyond 20,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers

But of course, just because list building is simple, it doesn’t mean it’s easy.

There are a lot of details that go into each of these stages, a lot of mistakes you could make along the way, and a lot of distractions that could slow down your progress.

The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List will help you navigate each stage in A LOT more detail, and help you build your e-mail list of tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers throughout the next chapters.

Continue to Chapter 2: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

Your Turn: Which stage of E-mail List Growth are you in right now? TRACTION, MOMENTUM, GROWTH or SCALE? Let us know in the comments below!

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

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The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Email List

By Primoz Bozic 32 Comments

You’re here because you want to build an email list.

You already know that building your email list is one of the most valuable assets when growing an online business, and you either:

  • Want to get to your first 500-1,000 email subscribers with your online business
  • Already have some traction and a few hundred (or thousand) email subscribers, and want to get 5,000-10,000 email subscribers as your next big benchmark
  • Already have a proven system for growing your e-mail list and thousands of e-mail subscribers, but want to learn how to scale up to 10,000-20,000 email subscribers (and beyond)

If any of the above describes you, you’ll love this guide.

It will help you get from 0 to your first 1,000 e-mail subscribers…

All the way to getting hundreds of new e-mail subscribers every month:

I interviewed 20 established online entrepreneurs with e-mail lists of 1,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers to ask them how they did it, and compiled my data, insights and countless real-world examples in this insanely detailed guide.

In this guide, you’ll find everything possible tool you need to grow your e-mail list to 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond – from the “big picture” strategy to specific strategies you can use through different stages of growing your e-mail list, to a step-by-step walkthrough to building your e-mail list.

There’s nothing like this guide out there, and I’m so excited to share it with you!

Table of Contents

Here’s a quick preview of everything that’s included in this 93,253-word step-by-step guide to building your e-mail list.

PART 0: Introduction & Overview

Here, you can read a quick overview of why I wrote this guide, who it’s for, and how it can help you. You can also go through a high-level roadmap that will guide you through going from 0-10,000+ e-mail subscribers.

Chapter 0: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Email List: The Introduction

Chapter 1: Your List-Building Roadmap to 10,000 E-mail Subscribers (And Beyond)

PART 1: How to Get Your First 100 E-mail Subscribers

Finding and validating a Profitable Online Business Idea is the first (and most important) step of growing your e-mail list that most entrepreneurs skip.

Through the strategies outlined in the first few chapters of this guide, you’ll learn how to find and validate your Profitable Online Business and build an e-mail list of your first 100+ e-mail subscribers in less than a week (without setting up your website or writing any content).

Chapter 2: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

Chapter 3: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Chapter 4: How to Get Un-Stuck With Your Online Business Idea

PART 2: How to Get to 500-1,000 E-mail Subscribers

In the second part of this guide, you’ll learn how to set up a simple High-Converting Website, create an EPIC Lead Magnet and go through the exact steps to collect your first 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers.

By the time you finish these chapters, you’ll already have enough e-mail subscribers to sell a coaching program or an online course to your e-mail list (if you choose to do so).

Chapter 5: How to Find Problems Worth Solving

Chapter 6: How to Create an EPIC Lead Magnet

Chapter 7: How to Write Mouthwatering Opt-in Copy

Chapter 8: How to Set up Your E-mail List (Plus my 3 Favorite E-mail Providers)

Chapter 9: How to Get Over Your Fear of Putting Yourself Out There

Chapter 10: How to Promote Your Content

Chapter 11: How to Create a High-Converting Website

PART 3: How to Grow to 5,000-10,000 E-mail Subscribers

In the third part of this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into the world of Content Creation – a key strategy that every entrepreneur I interviewed to grow their e-mail list.

Through the steps in the following chapters, you’ll be able to create your own Bulletproof Content System and grow your e-mail list to 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers.

Chapter 12: How to Grow Past The Magical 1,000 E-mail Subscribers Mark (Plus 7 Mistakes to Avoid Along The Way)

Chapter 13: How to Create Remarkable Content

Chapter 14: How to Consistently Create New Content Every Week

Chapter 15: Your Long-Term Content Strategy

PART 4: How to Scale to 20,000-40,000 E-mail Subscribers (and Beyond)

In the final part of this guide, we’ll talk about a few advanced list-building strategies that you can use to grow your e-mail list beyond 10,000 e-mail subscribers to 20,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond.

Chapter 16: Advanced List-Building Strategies

[no_toc]

Download The 393-Page PDF Version of This Guide!

As you can see, this guide is MASSIVE – with 17 detailed chapters, it makes up for a 393-page PDF.

You can download the FULL PDF version of this guide by entering your name and e-mail below, save it on your computer, print it out, and read it with your favorite cup of coffee.

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

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The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Email List: The Introduction

This Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Email List is the most detailed and comprehensive piece of content online on building your email list. There’s nothing else like it out there.

I interviewed 20 online entrepreneurs with established, profitable online business that have e-mail lists of at least 1,000 (and as many as 40,000) e-mail subscribers about how they built their e-mail lists to their first 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond.

Then, I spent hundreds of hours working through hundreds of pages of interview notes, and organizing them into a complete guide for growing your e-mail list to 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond.

In this guide, you’ll find:

  • A complete, step-by-step system for getting your first 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 e-mail subscribers (and beyond)
  • The best proven tactics and strategies that established entrepreneurs have used to grow their email lists (that you can use to grow your e-mail list as well)
  • The biggest myths and mistakes you should avoid when growing your e-mail list to prevent it from plateauing

You’ll also find hundreds of real life examples to support every tactic, strategy and principle that we talk about, so you can take what you’ve learned from the guide an apply it to growing your e-mail list for your online business.

About Me

Hi, I’m Primoz!

Over the past few years, I went from earning $7/h as a programmer in Slovenia to consistently earning over 6-figures/year with my online business (you can read my full story here).

During this time, I was mentored by and worked with some of the top online entrepreneurs like Derek Halpern, Ramit Sethi and Selena Soo, and coached 1,000+ entrepreneurs on how to start and grow their own online businesses.

I also spoke at conferences of 500+ entrepreneurs like Forefront and was featured in places like Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, Entrepreneur on Fire and GrowthLab.

I love doing two things more than anything:

  1. Coaching 5-6 figure entrepreneurs on how to explosively grow their online businesses
  2. Writing insanely long and detailed Ultimate Guides like this one

But most of all, I love helping ambitious entrepreneurs like you who are willing to read these ultra-long guides, implement them in your business, and make magic happen.

I’m so excited you’re here, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading this guide as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Why I Wrote This Guide

For online entrepreneurs, e-mail list is the life and blood of your business.

If your e-mail list keeps growing and you keep attracting new potential customers to your business every day, your business will keep growing. You’ll be able to get more clients for your coaching services and online courses, and help more people.

But if your e-mail list tanks, it’s only a matter of time until you “burn out” your e-mail list and your revenue tanks as well. No matter how many new products and services you create, you’ll feel like your online business is a ship that’s bound to sink.

But even though there are hundreds of resources out there on growing your e-mail list, I still talk to entrepreneurs every day that have hit a plateau with their e-mail lists and would love to get more e-mail subscribers.

It seems like even though there are so many resources out there already, there seems to be something missing. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this guide.

I wrote this guide (and am giving it away to you for free) because I never want you to worry about growing your e-mail list again.

How This Guide Is Different From All Other Free Resources on Growing Your Email List

The truth is that there’s no one proven, complete guide out there for growing your e-mail list.

Sure, there are plenty of articles along the lines of “50 ways to grow your e-mail list”, but you don’t want 50 different ways of growing your e-mail list with one-paragraph explanation on how to do it. “Just set up a Pinterest account!”. As if it were that easy.

Sure, there are plenty of articles that tell you to “create a free e-book or a lead magnet” and give it away for free. But what should you create it about? How can you spread the word about it? And how can you grow your e-mail list after you already have a lead magnet?

There are even plenty of so-called “ultimate guides” about growing your e-mail list out there, although sadly, there is very little “ultimate” about them. I’m sorry, a 3,000-word article (possibly written by a “professional blogger” who never actually ran an online business) isn’t a definitive guide about such a broad subject as growing your e-mail list.

There’s no resource that dives DEEP into the different stages for growing your e-mail list, that breaks down what you should do at each stage, and what you shouldn’t worry about. There’s no resource out there that uses enough data points from real, established entrepreneurs that would tell you how they actually build their e-mail lists over time.

I know why there isn’t a guide like this out there yet. It’s an INSANE amount of work.

Even before I wrote the first word of this guide, I spent hundreds of hours surveying my readers about their challenges with growing their e-mail lists, interviewing established entrepreneurs about how they grew their e-mail lists, and organizing their strategies and insights into a system for growing your e-mail list that would be easy to understand and implement.

I created a spreadsheet with 452 different insights on growing your e-mail list. I turned that spreadsheet into a 50-page Google Document with the outline for this guide. I then turned that outline into 4 giant paper mind maps to make it flow as best as possible and create a step-by-step system that is easy to follow.

I spent countless hours banging my head against the wall on how to write this guide in the best way possible and organize this enormous information in a guide that made sense for you. Then, I spent over 6 weeks writing the guide, day after day, until it was done.

After going through this process, I can understand why there’s no guide like this out there yet.

And it’s exactly why I’m super excited to write it and share it with you.

A Word of Caution: This is a LONG Guide

When I set off to write this guide, I knew it would be an enormous guide (though I din’t expect to essentially write a book).

To truly write the ULTIMATE guide to growing your e-mail list and cover all the different tactics and strategies that you can grow your e-mail list would mean that I’d have to cover information that will guide you in growing your e-mail list for years to come.

It would mean that I would have to find countless real-life examples that would show you how to put the principles, tactics and strategies from this guide into action.

Plus, I love writing long, detailed and comprehensive content (I’m not a guy that would write 500-word blog posts).

If you’re looking for a “quick guide”, this guide isn’t for you. If your “attention span” is short and you aren’t willing to read a 90,000+ word guide, this guide isn’t for you. If you aren’t willing to work hard to grow your e-mail list, this guide isn’t for you.

But if you want to read the most comprehensive and detailed piece of content online on growing your e-mail list, this guide is perfect for you.

Who This Guide is For

“Can I benefit from this guide if I have 0, 564 or 13,231 e-mail subscribers?”

The answer is YES, YES, YES.

Because I’ve interviewed 20 established entrepreneurs with profitable online businesses about how they built their e-mail lists to write this guide, I’ll take you through all the different stages of growing your e-mail list your first 100, 500, 5000, 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond.

You can simply jump to the section of this guide that’s the most relevant to you (or binge-read the full guide).

You’ll benefit from this guide if:

  • You are looking for a complete, proven system for building your e-mail list
  • You’re looking for new and innovative tactics and strategies for building your e-mail list
  • You want to attract more paying customers to your online courses and coaching programs
  • You’re willing to work hard to grow your e-mail list
  • You want to grow your e-mail list “organically”, without spending a single dollar on paid advertising

However, since I couldn’t possibly write a guide that would serve everyone, there are also a few situations where this guide isn’t the best fit for you:

  • If you’re looking to grow your e-mail list “quickly” or “fast”, this guide isn’t for you, as the long-term strategies for growing your e-mail list all take time and require a considerable amount of effort
  • If you’re looking to grow your e-mail list with paid advertising, this guide isn’t for you, as very few of the people I interviewed used paid advertising as the main method to grow their e-mail lists
  • If you’re looking for a guide that goes into a ton of detail into specific tactics like growing your e-mail list through Instagram or Pinterest, this guide might not be the best for you as we’ll focus more on the high-level principles and strategies in this guide

Acknowledgments

Before I dive into this guide, I’d like to thank and acknowledge everyone who I interviewed for this guide (plus a few individuals who contributed to the guide but preferred to stay anonymous).

The advice, the knowledge and the wisdom you shared helped me write this guide better than I ever would without your help, and for that I am deeply grateful. Thank you (in no particular order):

  • Geraldine Lepere from Comme un Francaise
  • Christina Rebuffet from Speak English With Christina
  • Ryan Hildebrandt from Viral Message Lab
  • Jesse Gernigin from Live Gold Rich
  • Vickie Gould from vickiegould.com
  • Peter Nguyen from The Essential Man
  • Luke McIntosh from Become a Bassist
  • Matt Rosenblum from mattrosenblum.net
  • Will Darling from EDMTips
  • Jenni Waldrop from Fuzzy and Birch
  • Danny Margulies from Freelance to Win
  • Sara Kirsch from Marketing is Not Selling
  • Sam Gavis-Hughson from Byte by Byte
  • Olivia Angelescu from oliviaangelescu.com
  • Gabriela Pereira from diyMFA
  • Karen Dudek-Brannan from Dr. Karen Speech and Language
  • Nagina Abdullah from Masala Body
  • Rusty Gray from Rusty Animator

I’d also like to thank my mentors Ramit Sethi, Derek Halpern and Selena Soo for showing me what excellence looks like, my friends Marc Aarons and Diana Tower for supporting me through the rough times, and my girlfriend for always being there for me.

Thank you.  

Get Started With Reading The First Chapter of This Guide!

What are you waiting for? Get started with reading the first chapter of this guide (or download the PDF through the box below)!

Continue to Chapter 1: Your Step-by-Step Roadmap to 10,000+ E-mail Subscribers.

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

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