270 – How We’ve Collected Over 5,000 Emails Creativity Excitement Emotion

Are you looking to grow your email list and attract your 1,000 true fans? What if you could grow your email list well beyond 1,000 subscribers?

That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast.
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Podcast Highlights:

00:26 – 1,000 true fans
01:18 – Laying the groundwork to grow your email list
02:24 – Creating an irresistible lead magnet
02:59 – The best type of lead magnet: Content upgrade
04:13 – Which pages do you create content upgrades for?
06:02 – You'll need to adjust and optimize your strategy
07:37 – Episode summary
09:05 – Setting up your OTR website

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

086 – How to Work Less & Make More as a Music Entrepreneur
10XPro
ConvertKit
Music Money Machine
PDF Vault

Transcription:
Hey, it’s David Andrew Wiebe.

Now, the title of this episode is How We Collected Over 5,000 Emails, but in the grand scheme of things, 5,000 emails is nothing.

There are plenty of bloggers and businesses out there that have collected over 10,000, 100,000, even one million plus subscribers over the years.

But we’ve all heard about 1,000 true fans, the idea that you could have a perfectly sustainable, even thriving artistic career if you had a minimum of 1,000 people who bought everything you made.

And a small, engaged audience, is better than a huge database of subscribers who don’t open your emails.

A small, engaged audience is better than a huge database of subscribers who don’t open your emails.Click To Tweet

Anyway, getting to the point of finding your 1,000 true fans is likely going to take collecting more than 1,000 emails, but if you could get 5,000 people on your email list, do you think you’d have a pretty good chance at living out the independent music career of your dreams?

Keep listening to find out how we did it…
Setting the Foundation
If you don’t lay the groundwork, you can’t collect emails. That’s the bottom line.

If you don’t lay the groundwork, you can’t collect emails.Click To Tweet

There are many methodologies out there, and you can experiment with all of them to see what works best for you.

But for Music Entrepreneur HQ and practically any other site we’ve established, there’s only been one reliable way of growing our email list. We haven’t gotten results with putting up a signup form on our website and waiting for people to sign up. I guess that works for some people…

We follow a methodology created by James Schramko of SuperFastBusiness called Own the Racecourse or OTR. By the way, I had an excellent conversation with him in episode 86 of the podcast.

People often think the key to OTR is publishing great content, when really the most critical aspect of it is setting up a platform you own. It’s one of the reasons we believe so strongly in that. In the long run, though, you do want to establish a platform that’s full of content your audience will love. But you can and should start collecting emails from day one.

Once you’ve bought your domain, paid for hosting, and have established your website, that’s the time to start collecting emails. That’s your foundation.
Create Lead Magnet(s)
The next step is to create your lead magnet. That’s a fancy term to describe something free and irresistible your audience will want and will happily give you their email address to receive from you.

Many artists hold back and try to give their prospects and fans something they aren’t all that interested in, or couldn’t possibly care about, like a basement demo they recorded on a cassette player when they were 12 years old. No wonder your email list isn’t growing.

You want to give away an EP, a recording of a radio interview that went particularly well, or some high quality behind-the-scenes videos. Brainstorm and you’re sure to come up with some ideas of your own.
Content Upgrades
We’ve found the best way to get people to sig