Need someone to sell to?

I got a lot of responses to yesterday’s poll.

An overwhelming number of people responded that they have a product or service, but struggle to find more people to sell it to.

Let me see if I can help out.

My own email list is growing in 2 ways:

• Organic social media

• Paid referrals from other lists (Beehiiv Boosts)

In terms of subscriber quality, organic is better on average, but Boosts are much faster.

Here is my subscriber growth in the last 4 weeks:

Of the 248 new people who joined this newsletter, almost exactly 2/3 came from Boosts.

If you are not using Beehiiv, you may be able to get access to something similar using Sparkloop.

The trick is to only work with other lists who have built using a quality-first approach, and who have an audience of your ideal customers. Alignment is absolutely critical.

You can expect to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of ~$2 per subscriber using a service like this.

Another extremely effective way to increase email subscribers is to get promoted inside of other email newsletters or lists.

This works best when there is a specific thing being offered.

Telling people to go subscribe to someone else’s email list is rarely effective unless there is a strong incentive attached.

Ideally, the thing being offered should be valuable but deeply discounted (at least 50% off, the more the better.)

Digital downloads are perfect, just don’t call it an “eBook.”

Once you have something of value to offer at a discount, there are a number of ways to set up a promo with another audience owner:

1. Swap. Reach out to other businesses in your market, ideally with complimentary offerings. Run a promo for each other. Works best with similar list sizes.
   

2. PPC Promo. Reach out to an audience leader, offer to pay them for each lead they send (pay per click). Agree ahead of time how this will be tracked and reported.
   

3. Affiliate promo. Audience leader gets paid as a percentage of sales. This might be a difficult approach to take with low ticket items, because there is limited incentive for them.
   

4. Sponsorship. Pay a flat fee for them to run your promo. Lowest risk for the audience owner, highest risk for the offer owner.

However, ANY of these are SO MUCH MORE effective than buying a “shoutout” or post from a social media influencer.

You are engaging people inside of an email list, which has a much higher average conversion rate.

Another tip-

Look for audience leaders outside of your “bubble”. If you are Instagram-centric, go take a look at who’s on TikTok and YouTube.

And ask them about promos to their email list. They are probably undervaluing these placements relative to their social media placements.

Even better, find newsletter operators in your market and reach out to them.

The promos I just described ARE their business model. They are looking for people like you!

Google “your niche or market or customer avatar” + “newsletter.”

And finally, do not ignore the option of asking your current email subscribers to help you grow your audience. You can even bribe them with nice things, like this:

Is this helpful? Let me know. I can go deeper next week.

Greg