Before I jump into the article, I wanted to invite you to this free online training:

Free Live Workshop (Online)

4 Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List Without Spending All Your Time on Marketing
When: Thursday, April 7, 10:00 a.m. PST/1:00 p.m. EST

[Registration is Closed]

I’ve been working with a client over the last month or two, and he’s relatively new to the entrepreneur world. As I’ve written about before, there are SO MANY things any of us can be doing to market our business to generate leads. My report “10 Ways to Get Found Online” details out some of them, but if I were to boil it down to the critical few, where does one start? This client was in the same boat. What’s the actual process to generate leads in the simplest and quickest way?

We Wear So Many Hats: Simplify!

As entrepreneurs, we’re all so busy too. Let me put on my HR hat. Oh now I need my Finance hat. Then my Marketing hat. Yeesh.

So I boiled things down for my client so we could get him started on a path (the simplest path!), and at the core, this is really what all of us need to concentrate on. There are lots of other arms and legs and shiny tools we can attach, but at the core we have to do these three things:

1. Create a “Lead Magnet” or an “Ethical Bribe” to generate interest in our products or services
2. Offer that Lead Magnet for free in exchange for their email address
3. Nurture that lead through various touch-points, especially email

You can do social media, blog posts, press releases, YouTube channels, PPC ads, and so on. But it all has to lead back to your website, and ultimately into your email system. Even if you’re using a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Ontraport or Infusionsoft, these are really just fancier ways of managing your leads and customers, but at the core of all of it, is the simple email.

Why Email is So Important to Your Business

91% of us open our email at least once per day, and most of us have our cell phones next to us or near us or on the desk. Every time it beeps or buzzes, we check it to see if it’s something important. Statistics show that on average, we each check our cell phone 150 times a day!

The only way to get someone’s attention with that kind of immediacy and consistency is through email. Social media? Nope. Ads? Wrong again.

The problem? It’s hard to get people into your email system. Do you offer a free newsletter? Yay. Who wants yet-another-free-newsletter in their inbox that doesn’t get read? People aren’t giving up their email addresses easily.

Instead, you have to “bribe” them (it’s an ethical bribe – please, nothing illegal!) by giving them something cool for free. It can be simple like a checksheet, or even a video, a webinar, or something else that has some value. But you have to connect that “bribe” to your email system, no matter what platform it’s on.

Simple Tools Work Well

This is why I’m really excited for the opportunity to be co-hosting a free webinar in a couple weeks with Tim Paige from LeadPages. I’m a big fan of LeadPages as a simple tool to get people into your system. LeadPages allows you to:

  • Easily create an opt-in page for your lead magnet
  • Connect and inter-connect your other tools like Constant Contact (email), Goto Webinar, or any other system you’re using to generate leads
  • Drop a single registration into all systems without people having to fill out a form multiple times

We use it for our business, and that was one of the first things I set up for my client too, connecting it to his Constant Contact account and other systems. It’s so easy to use that the time savings alone of setting up one opt-in page will easily pay for itself.

During this webinar Tim Paige will show you:

  • How to Turn Any Business Site into a Lead-Generation Machine: He’ll show you four simple steps you can take right now to transform your site into a powerful lead-generation tool that you can use right now to grow your list and boost your sales.
  • The Highest-Converting Landing Page + Lead Magnet (or “Opt-in Bribe”): This simple landing page + lead magnet combination has out-converted every other landing page and lead magnet that LeadPages has tested — even though it only took 30 minutes to create.
  • The #1 Biggest Mistake that Even the Best Marketers in the World Make: If you make this mistake, you’ll continually ignore (or worse, abandon) your best, hottest leads. He’ll show you how to avoid this mistake and turn this missed opportunity into an entirely new sales channel for your business — in less than five minutes.

[Registration is Closed]

I’ve been to several of Tim’s webinars in the past, and they’re always packed with a ton of information and actionable steps you can take to put in place, so I hope you’ll join us! He talks fast, so be sure you have something to write with, and get ready to take it down.

Please share this post with your colleagues too! See you online!