How to get 10,000 email subscribers (and beyond)

Write mouthwatering copy that gets people to join your email list

The #1 lever for getting people to join your email list is an irresistible opt-in offer. Something that makes them feel they just have to sign up to get whatever you’re offering. We’ve recorded a free video on how to do this. Just enter your email address below, and we’ll send it right away. ↓

Today’s question is:

“How do you get your first thousand email subscribers, 5,000 email subscribers, and 10,000 email subscribers?”

I remember when I had zero email subscribers. I thought a thousand was impossible to get. Now we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Today I’d like to tell you how we got those first 10,000.

Subscribers are gold. Email is one of the best ways you can grow your business. It’s one of the fastest and most effective ways to grow your revenue.

Let everyone else talk about how Instagram works for them. I’ll focus on email marketing, which has the highest ROI. That means when you send out emails, you generate more revenue than you can from any other marketing activity.

2 strategies for getting your first 10,000 email subscribers

There are two main strategies you need to know about email marketing.

When you get these right, you will have a direct connection to your subscribers.

I can wake up in the morning, come up with an idea, type something, click send, and it goes out to hundreds of thousands of people within minutes.

That’s amazing!

And the best part is, you can actually automate these things so that they work while you are sleeping.

Here are the two steps — the only two steps — that you need to focus on right now.

1. Write one great piece of highly-targeted material in a guest post
Landing a guest post on a big website is a huge opportunity. If you write this correctly, you can get tons of traffic.

Paradoxically, you can get a lot more benefit from posting on a smaller website than on the front page of the New York Times. A national newspaper is just that — a cross-section of readers who may or may not care about your topic. Conversely, a website read only by fans of one topic (say, online business) will have fewer readers, but send you more signups or sales.

I did this when I guest posted on Tim Ferriss’s site.

He had a much larger blog than I did at the time, and I wrote a post on my personal finance system. It took me over 20 hours to write. It was well-researched with lots of graphics.

That post sent over a ton of traffic.

You know the crazy part? That post continues to send me traffic years and years later.

2. Create a mouthwatering lead magnet
A lead magnet (or “carrot,” as we call them at IWT) is something free that people need to enter their email address to get. It could be a PDF or a short video.

It turns out if you add a lead magnet to the bottom of your guest blog posts, you will dramatically grow the number of people who will want to subscribe to your email lists.

Do this over and over, every time you guest post.

At the bottom of your awesome post, you simply say, “Hey, if you’d like to learn more, I put together a little blank, blank, blank. Click over here, I’ll be happy to send it to you.”

One more thing: If nobody’s accepting your proposal for a guest post, you probably messed up somewhere. I put together a guide on how to make a great pitch proposal. Read it and fix your pitch.

Trust me, people want to hear from you. They want to post your material on their site because it saves them from having to write a post.

Worst case though, if nobody accepts it, go ahead and post it on your own site. You’ll still get traffic from it over the long-term.

Write mouthwatering copy that gets people to join your email list

The #1 lever for getting people to join your email list is an irresistible offer for a lead magnet. Something that makes them feel they just have to sign up to get whatever you’re offering.