How to Create an Email List for Free that Makes Money

This is the best form of communicating with your customers. Even though social media gets a lot of attention, the most valuable digital channel is building your email list for free, which makes you money.

Email ROI is $ 40 per $ 1 spent, that’s pretty good. When compared with all the other forms of online email marketing across all industries and niches, email wins the day. Always.

But how do you build a list? What if you’re starting from ground zero — no email list whatsoever?

The following ultimate guide will show you step-by-step how to build your email list for free.

Website or Blog to Create an Email List free

You need a place where your potential email list members will gather your website.

Creating a website can be a big scary step, so let me explain how to make this as easy as possible.

You don’t need a huge website to create an email list. All you need is a landing page — a single-page website that contains your email opt-in form.

Creating a Website/Blog Through BlueHost and WordPress:

Here’s how to create a WordPress website in five quick steps.

Step One: Getting Started and Choosing a Domain Name

Before you can begin building your website, choosing your domain name is one of the most important parts as this is how your audience will find you and identify with your brand. BlueHost is my # 1 rated web hosting service and it also comes with WordPress for your Blog for Free. Check out my in-depth BlueHost review Here

Your domain name is what people type into their browsers to get to your website. Though it’s tempting to choose something funny or flashy, pick a domain that both represents your brand and makes it easy for people to find you.

For example, “bobsmithwelding.com” is better than “bobdoesmetalwork.com” because searchers that are looking for Bob by name or for welding services are more likely to find him.

After you have picked your domain, you will need to buy your name and pick a hosting company that suits the needs of your website. Since you are building a website on WordPress, choosing a hosting provider that offers hosting specifically for WordPress sites is ideal. This way you can purchase your domain name and hosting service from the same provider. Luckily, Bluehost offers both and is recommended by WordPress!

Step Two: Choose Your Package and Set Up Your Hosting Account

Bluehost offers a couple of hosting packages from their standard WordPress plans to their fully managed WordPress hosting plans. Once you have established your domain name, you’ll need to create an account for your hosting plan.

Enter your personal information into each field and then scroll down to the package lists
Choose an option that fits your budget and service needs. Prices vary across hosting providers, but most offer add-ons, like extra security features, tools to boost search rankings, and site backup.

Check the appropriate boxes and scroll down to enter your billing information. Take a moment to read through the terms of service, cancellation policy, and privacy notices, then click the box to confirm that you agree with the policies.

Follow the on-screen instructions to create a password and, boom, you are ready for step three: choosing your WordPress theme.

Step Three: Choose a WordPress Theme

If you’ve chosen Bluehost as your web host, WordPress will be automatically be installed for you. All you have to do is click, ‘Login ‘ and choose a theme. if you aren’t sure which theme you want, don’t worry! You can go back and change it later. If you don’t like the generic themes, you can upgrade to one of the premium themes.

The next screen will ask if you are building your website for Personal or Business reasons. This will help them provide you with accurate recommendations to help with your website building journal.

Step Four: Learn Your WordPress Dashboard

Now that you are ready to start working, you should find yourself on the Dashboard, or the back-end, for your new website. This is the service area that allows you to control what your website visitors will see when they land on your pages. Spend some time learning the WordPress admin dashboard by reviewing features that you will use most often.

Step Five: Customize Themes and Pages

Let the fun begin! You are ready to start fine-tuning your site with your color choices, font styles, and special elements that will help you express your company culture or personality. You can dive right in and write your first post, but it’s beneficial to get to know the features and functionality of your site first.

On the left-hand sidebar, you’ll find navigation links that allow you to customize your site. The best way to get to know your way around is to click on each tab and explore the options.

Browse the themes; there are paid and free options available.
Customize your theme with colors, headers, and social media buttons.
Upload photos to inspire your site visitors and add clues about your values and services.
Create your first blog post and main page content.
Add a contact form

Don’t forget to set up Google Analytics to collect data on visitors coming to your site and link Google Search Console to make sure there are no errors.

These five steps will have you running a WordPress website for your small business in no time — okay, about 30 minutes. Ready to get started? Get your domain name and self-hosted service package at Bluehost today!

Email Marketing Service to Create an Email list Free

You will need to be able to communicate with your email list subscribers. There are various options for you to consider, but in my opinion, having tried most of them, I find that there are 2 that stand out.

GetResponse:

GetResponse is an email marketing platform. It enables you to create a valuable marketing list of prospects, partners, and clients, so you can develop relationships with them and build a responsive and profitable customer base. It has the deliverability rate of 99.5%, to make sure your messages reach destination inboxes.

Add Contacts

create contact lists to manage your contact database.
import an existing contact list
integrate your GetResponse account with other services to set up recurring imports
keep your contact lists growing and customer information up to date with landing pages, forms, and surveys
use social media tools that give you an easy way to tap into the list-building power of social referrals

Plan Email Marketing Campaigns and manage sales

use a drag-and-drop newsletter editor with ready-to-use templates. You can also design your template or use the HTML editor
to use autoresponders to follow up automatically with customers, providing info, offers, and all types of friendly communication.
use Conversion funnel to sell more products, manage and develop online sales. GetResponse Conversion funnel is an all-in-one tool that can help you promote and sell products online, find potential buyers, build your lists of contacts, retain your clients, and increase sales results.
create automation workflows to create a process that reflects your customers’ experience. This scalable tool allows your customers to receive messages based on their actions, and for you to reward their engagement.
test out your marketing strategies with A/B testing newsletters and landing pages.

Analyze results and plan new strategies

Search contacts and create unlimited segments based on specific demographic and customer behavior criteria to manage your contact list and design marketing strategies that match the expectations of your customers.
take advantage of analytics tools that enable you to create targeted offers to improve conversion rates

Creating a landing page with GetResponse is as simple as picking a template and just customizing it to meet your needs.

See my GetResponse Review Here:

pricing for GetResponse is as follows and with the basic, you have a free trial

Aweber:

AWeber is an email marketing service provider with over 100,000 small business clients worldwide. We help people keep in touch with the subscribers who have requested to be on their mailing list.

You may have landed on this page because you received a message from one of our customers, or signed up through a form created using our service. Regardless of industry or business size, AWeber helps our customers keep in touch with their subscribers, all while upholding email marketing best practices. Creating Landing pages in Aweber is similar to GetResponse.

pricing for Aweber is as follows and they also have a free trial:

Awesome Offer:

Whatever you’re offering, selling, building, creating, or asking, people need a reason to join your list.

Think about it. If you came across a landing page that asked for your email address, you wouldn’t want to do it unless you were going to get something in exchange.

What does your target audience want? Often, the best offers are your best resources, totally free. You can give them access to your software, a report, an ebook, or something else that gives real value.

Take a look at Neil Patel’s Landing page:

Problogger landing page:

Simple yet highly effective.

So the bottom line is don’t overthink the landing page, simple is quite effective as you can see from the examples. Plus as you dive into Affiliate Marketing you will test different landing pages and see which ones convert best.

Social Media:

Twitter:

Pick the right handle, profile photo, and header image

Your Twitter handle has to be recognizable, easy-to-remember, and short enough for people to easily tag you.

When someone tries to search your name, they will use your handle to find your page.

Keep your names consistent across all social media profiles. If you use a name that’s different from your brand or company name, you might confuse followers or make your page hard to find.

YouTube:

Did you know that YouTube is the third most visited site after Google and Facebook? There are 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month. If you aren’t getting a piece of that pie, you are missing out on a lot of email subscribers.

The very first thing you need to do is to create a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a valuable incentive that you offer to your YouTube viewers for free in exchange for their email address. Lead magnets usually offer a small but action-packed piece of downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, a report, eBook, whitepaper, a premium video, etc.

Instagram:

The concept of generating email sign-ups using Instagram can seem a bit confusing, so let’s briefly touch on the process.

Here are the steps we’re going to follow, to generate email sign-ups using Instagram.

Give people a reason to sign-up to the email list
Create/Find our ideal audience on Instagram
Place a link to the email list in the bio section of our Instagram account
Ask people to join our list.

Facebook Groups:

Facebook groups are communities of people who come together virtually to connect over a common topic.

And there are TONS of groups for business, online entrepreneurs, digital marketers, content creators, VA, bloggers, and more.

They are not only great for meeting other online business owners, but they often have great educational posts and videos, and you can grow your list like crazy!

So, you’ve found some Facebook groups with your ideal customer and they have discovered that you are an expert in what you do (because you’ve provided such incredible value.

Now it’s time to leverage the marketing power of Facebook groups and get people on your email list!

Look in the Facebook group guidelines for their Promo Day or Offer Day.

The host will typically have a prompt with a graphic that is called something like Freebie Friday or Offer Day or Share-It Wednesday. Post your lead magnet under that prompt.

Linkedin:

LinkedIn advertisements are a great way to get the message out about your products and services, but also about your email list. Tell people what you offer in your email list, and how it can help them and they will be more likely to sign up.
Building your email list using LinkedIn is a great way to get highly targeted individuals and business owners on your email list. Once they are on your email list you’ll be able to market to them more directly, increasing sales and building relationships while you’re at it.

Purchase Ads:

Facebook Ads:

1. Develop an email marketing plan.

Before you get to the point of using Facebook advertising to grow your list, you need to figure out what you’re going to do with your email list. There’s no point in working to gain subscribers if you’re not ready to follow that up with work to keep them.

Create a plan for the types of emails you’ll send out and the schedule you’ll send them out on. You may want to create an email newsletter that goes out every month or plan on sending a weekly update that includes links to the new content on your site.

You can send out more direct promotional emails as well, but don’t make that all you ever do. Promotional emails work best if the recipient is already familiar with your brand and has a reason to trust you. Your other emails will help build that trust.

2. Select “Lead Generation” as your campaign objective.

One of the first steps to creating an ad on Facebook is choosing your campaign objective. After you click the Create button, you’ll see a few options you can choose from in a dropdown menu. Since your primary goal is building an email list, select “Lead Generation.”

This ensures that the options Facebook provides as you go through the steps of creating your ads will match up with your goal of collecting email addresses from people in your target audience.

3. Clarify your target audience.

One of the next steps is to set up your audience targeting. Facebook allows advertisers to narrow down who will see your ads based on a wide variety of factors, including:

Geographic location
Age range
Gender
The language(s) they speak
Education level
Relationship status
The type of work they do
Their financial status
Whether they have kids or not
Their political preferences
Their interests
Their online behaviors
Whether they’ve interacted with you before

Think about what your ideal customer looks like. Use this step to clarify who you want to reach with your ads so you get the most bang for your buck.

4. Choose what information to collect.

You want to collect email addresses — that’s the main goal here, after all. But Facebook will let you choose additional information to ask for in your ads, such as:

First name
Last name
City
Phone number
Date of birth
Job title
Company name

On the one hand, the more information you ask for, the better you’ll be able to provide relevant emails to your new subscribers. On the other hand, adding more required fields for people to fill in before signing up may lose you some leads who decide it’s too much work.

Most businesses should be fine sticking with name and email address, only add the others if they’ll help you create more useful segmented lists.

5. Set your budget.

Figure out what you can afford. You can set a maximum daily budget, and select whether to bid manually on your ads or let Facebook do automatic bidding for you. Automatic bidding is generally the best choice for anyone that’s not already an expert in PPC advertising.

Keep in mind that the more you’re able to spend, the more people will see and interact with your ads. Try not to be too stingy here, while staying within a budget you can handle.

6. Create eye-catching images for your ads.

Now it’s time to create the ads themselves. Social media is a visual medium, so make sure you include an image (or several) in your ad that will attract your audience’s attention, while still being relevant to what you’re offering.

7. Write copy that emphasizes the benefits of subscribing.

An image can’t tell the whole story, so couple it with words that tell your audience what they’ll get out of subscribing to your email list.

Make sure you focus on the benefits to them. It may be accurate that signing up means learning more about your brand and products, but that won’t convince most people. What problems will your emails help them solve? How will you make their lives easier or better?

8. Include a clear call to action (CTA).

You want them to take any action, so tell them what to do. You can test out different language to use here, but be sure you explicitly ask people to “Sign up today” or “Subscribe now.”

Facebook will provide some options for you to choose from here.

9. Set up a relevant email drip campaign for new subscribers.

Every time someone subscribes, it’s a win! But it could quickly turn into a loss if you don’t manage to keep them. One of the best ways to convince new subscribers that you’re worth sticking with is to set up a series of welcome emails that automatically go out to new subscribers.

Use these initial emails to explain to your subscribers what they can expect from your email list, make the case for why it’s worth sticking around, and provide them a reward of some sort for joining (such as a discount offer or exclusive content).

Providing value right away while the decision to sign up is still fresh in their memory will give you the chance to establish the relationship and show them you’re worth their time.

10. Test and tweak.

You won’t know what will get results until you get started. Pay attention to your analytics — both for Facebook and your emails — to learn what’s working. Test out different images, copy, and CTAs to see what your audience responds to best.

Over time, you’ll learn more about your target audience — what they respond to and what they care about. That knowledge will enable you to run better ads, strengthen your email marketing campaigns, and provide better service to your customers.

Twitter Ads:

Twitter was created because people were writing lengthy posts on Facebook and users didn’t necessarily want to hear it all.

It is one of the earliest social media sites that restricted character counts and prompted users to voice what they thought and what they were doing as they were doing it with anyone who cared to listen.

Source: Wikipedia

Today, 66 million people use Twitter. It is a massive source of opinions, news, video, photos, and other interactions.

According to Pew Research Center, “63% of Twitter users admit that they use their Twitter accounts to follow the news and businesses.”

Your first steps to attempting to transform these 66 million people into personal email subscribers are to start using Twitter and start tweeting.

Using Adwords:

Customer Match in AdWords might be the greatest secret weapon for email marketers that Google has to offer. It allows you to target or exclude your existing customers on Google Search, Display, and YouTube by simply uploading your customer email list to AdWords. Think of it as another way to nurture your sales leads besides sending them more emails.

The best thing about Customer Match is that it’s not that difficult to get up and running. Here’s what you need to do to get started:

Click on the “wrench” icon in the top right corner of your AdWords Dashboard.
Click on “Audience Manager” under the Shared Library section.
Click on “Audience Lists” from the Page Menu on the left.
Click on the blue “+” button to create a new audience list.
Select “Customer List.”
Choose the option to upload a plain text data file or a hashed data file.
Choose your new file.
Check the box that says “This data was collected and is being shared with Google in compliance with Google’s policies.”
Set a membership duration (this should be determined by the types of customers that make up the list).
Click “Upload and Create List.”

Udimi Solo Ads:

Udimi has a solo ad range from $0.35 per click up to $0.95 per click.
Don’t be greedy and go too low. You might not get any clicks at low.

Adjust the bar according to your budget.

Udimi is very popular among affiliate marketers to build the list fast. I started experimenting and found success quickly.

Remember this is not for everyone, but it works for a certain niche well.

I started off using buying ads from the promoted seller which matched my niche. It wasn’t like I earned a million dollars in a month but I did more than expected by just using these solo ads.

Hope this guide was helpful

To Your Success

Juan Villar

Disclaimer: My posts may contain affiliate links! Moreover, if you buy something through one of my links, you won’t pay a penny more, but I will get a small commission, which helps keep the lights on, thanks

Create an Audience: