Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Building a responsive email list should be one of your top priorities as an online marketer. So I’m going to explain exactly how you can build a responsive email list by feeding your subscribers with great content. Feeding your list is essentially relationship building. I just thought it sounded cooler. Anyway, email marketing is all about building rapport with your subscribers. In order to do that, you have to feed them with really good information. You have what Frank Kern calls “good will”.
Before you can sell something to your subscribers, you have to add to your bank of good will. You do that by sending them great content, teaching them new things and genuinely helping them. Once you have enough good will you’re able to sell anything. It’s very important that you don’t tip the balance of good will or you’ll be pretty much ruined.
Your subscribers will hate you and dismiss you as another idiot who tries to sell them stuff. You have to remember that if you want to be a successful email marketer, you need to connect with your list on a personal level. You should imagine your list as your fan base. They are people who have signed up to hear from YOU. If you go and send them a dozen sales emails they’re going to write you off as an idiot who tried to sell them stuff. PERIOD…
Here are 4 ways to feed your subscribers and build a responsive list:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Tutorials
- Free Reports
Those 4 “species” of content are exactly what you can use to build a solid relationship with your entire list. They are free to create and share, most importantly people love them. So let’s go through them:
In this guide
1. Blog posts
Using blog posts to feed your list is really easy. I honestly think videos are the best way to feed your list, but I tend to use blog posts more often. Obviously you’ll need an actual blog to do this. All you have to do is create an amazing piece of content. Once created, you just have to share it with your subscribers.
What you need to do is write a killer blog post that teaches something valuable, and then send it to your list with no strings attached. No strings attached meaning no sales pitch. Saying that, you can use your blog posts to sell just about anything, but around 90% of the time I don’t include any kind of promotion in my posts. You just have to send blog posts to your list for the sake of building trust.
2. Videos
Videos really are the best way to interact with your list and build real relationships. People love videos, it’s effortless for them. Your subscribers will watch videos because there is no effort required on their part. What should you create videos about? Well anything that’s relevant and or new. Whenever something big happens in your industry, create a video expressing your opinion on the subject. When Facebook changed their Fan page code type, people freaked out.
So I recorded a video of myself talking about the new change and how my subscribers could fix their fan pages. It’s not rocket science; building good will is all about sharing free content that genuinely helps your subscribers. Videos are the best way to interact with people online. They show the real you, your voice is powerful! It lets people know you’re a real person. I always host my videos privately and put them on a dedicated page that I send to my subscribers.
The other option I use is combining blog posts with videos. Adding a few paragraphs of text to your video and publishing it as a blog post. It all depends on what you’re doing with your video. You can use videos to go on major rants about your industry. Or you can teach something cool or try to get a concept across to your subscribers that will genuinely help them build their business or whatever else. The key is to provide great value and be yourself.
3. Tutorials
The third species of content as I like to call it is tutorials. Text, audio or video tutorials teaching your subscribers how to do something very specific. People love tutorials and they can’t resist them. Most people on your list won’t know much about your niche, whether it’s Internet Marketing or something generic like weight loss.
If they join your list, they’ll think you’re some expert on your niche. So teach them step by step how to do something and they’ll love you for it. I usually do my tutorials via blog posts or videos. Audio is a tad difficult. You could teach your subscribers how to set up a WordPress blog, how to market on Facebook or how to build backlinks. Anything like that works.
4. Free Reports
Something I do from time to time is create a short report for my subscribers. People love free downloads, especially when they’re in PDF format. Once every few months, try creating a 15-page PDF teaching your subscribers something interesting that will help them achieve their goals. Trust me – you’ll get a ridiculous amount of positive feedback from your subscribers whenever you send them a free report.
In Prosperity,
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
David Wood
P.S. If you want more cool email marketing tips, tricks, and secrets, put your name and email in the form on the right. Also, leave me your thoughts and comments below, let me know what you think. 
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Donna K Guyett, November 18, 2011, 18:48
All of the above makes perfect sense. However, being brand new, my big question is WHERE do you start in developing an email list of people to try to help train. Where do you get your initial leads. I have watched hours and hours of videos of how to help, how to build, how to grow, but nowhere does it give any clue as to where to start in finding the people initially.
Robin, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Simple but effective way to get more responsiveness from your list. If you don’t mind I’d like to add another one Dave… email regularly… Thanks for these tips!
Kimberly Flores, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Great stuff David, and it does work. I have incorporated this concept and have seen an increase in list size. This particular post seems to fit right in there! Thanks for sharing.
Julia Ramirez, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Fantastic System David!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
First thing I looked for was whether any of this can be templated and there’s a clear answer: yes for the free report cadence, no for video. Built a rotation — blog post, then tutorial, then report every few months — in a spreadsheet with reminders. The video one still has to be me on camera each time, no shortcut there, which is the one I skip most.
Trina, tried the rotation approach too, four years in. Reports are the one that actually moved things for me — sent one 12-page PDF in month three and it’s still the highest reply rate I’ve gotten on anything I’ve sent. Video’s the one I dropped. Recorded eight, published two, the other six are still sitting on a drive somewhere.
We were calling this “building rapport before you pitch” back in the nineties, just with newsletters instead of blog posts. The mechanism hasn’t changed in thirty years: give before you ask, don’t ask too often. What’s changed is the format, not the principle, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who tells you a new format made the old rule obsolete.
Gus, in plain English: don’t sell to people until you’ve been useful to them first, and even then don’t sell too often. That’s the whole post. “Good will” is just a fancier word for “don’t be a nuisance,” which my mother could have told this blog for free.