For me, the best way to manage your life is to try and avoid extremism with respect to just about everything. Finances, work, fitness, food, relationships… Everything seems to work best when you inject moderation into it.
Some people struggle with moderation. Everything either becomes all-consuming or entirely invisible – there’s no middle ground.
I actively seek out the middle ground with everything I do. If I notice that I’m becoming a bit “obsessed” with something, I make a considered effort to pull back a little bit and conversely, if I’m entirely ignoring something I enjoy, I take the time to engage with it a bit so that I rekindle that interest.
But some people really struggle with finding the sensible middle ground.
I’ve been involved in a conversation recently in a Facebook Group with some people who actively build out authority sites as part of their business model. The group ranges from people who are technophobes just starting out to people like me that have been doing this kind of thing for a long time.
In this particular community though, there’s a single piece of advice around collecting email addresses that keeps getting doled out by almost everyone that is just stupid and wrong.
Within closed groups and communities, the leaders have a very strong influence on the conversation of the “tribe”. This is a great business lesson you should make a note of – if you build a thriving community, as the leader, your voice and influence will carry far more weight, even if you’re wrong.
One of the leaders in this community says that people just starting out building their sites shouldn’t bother collecting emails because it’s distracting – that they should be focusing on creating content and generating traffic.
I’m going to stop right there and say that I think this person’s perspective (which now gets regurgitated ad nauseam in that group) was taken out of context subtly. What I think he was saying was that people just starting out often get distracted by building these elaborate email sequences and automations, but their list is tiny and not growing because they don’t have traffic, so they should focus MORE on getting traffic.
That’s a far cry from ignoring collecting email addresses entirely.
Here’s my take, which as the leader of this little email community is the only one that really should matter to you…
You should, from Day One, set up an optin form in your sidebar or something and wire it up to an email provider like Aweber, MailChimp, Drip or my preferred option, ActiveCampaign to start building your email list.
This whole process shouldn’t take you more than 15 – 30 minutes to do.
I’m not suggesting anything fancy here, just an optin box that says something like, “Sign Up To Get Our Latest Updates” or whatever.
That’s it.
No lead magnets, no crazy autoresponder sequences, nothing. Just a simple box where people can give you their email address so you can send them info.
Then, depending on your publishing schedule, maybe once every week or every other week, send them an email and say, “Hey, here are links to the latest content we posted on our site, you said you wanted to be kept up to date, so please enjoy.”
Guaranteed traffic, no distractions.
Here’s the thing – when you’re just starting out building your authority site, you do need to focus on generating high-quality content and establishing your site as a trusted source in your market. You will start generating drips and drops of traffic from Google or wherever before too long and that little sidebar optin box with the humble offer will get a 1-2% optin rate just by default – if your content is better, it may be higher, even with a weak optin offer.
So run the numbers… Say you get 100 visitors in your first month, that’s a couple email subscribers. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.
Imagine you get 1000 organic visitors in a month, you could end up with 15 new subscribers.
On and on it goes – growing in a compound fashion.
The thing is, whenever you send them an email, 20% at least will open the email and some of those people will click your links and go look at your content.
The people who clicked those links will start to build an affinity for what you’re offering and they’ll start to trust you. Now you’re building an audience.
Having an email list is traffic’s version of recurring revenue – you can go out and go get your own traffic without relying on Google, Facebook, Pinterest or whatever.
And it is incredibly low impact UNLESS you allow yourself to get distracted initially.
The idea that you should “wait” until you have a “decent” traffic base before you start collecting email addresses is absurd – think of all the lost opportunity. Often time the same people who talk about this will tell you to put AdSense in your sidebar – so it’s ok to do all that work to attract the traffic and then send them away for pennies but attempting to collect their email address, that’s distracting.
Becoming an authority and building out a strong authority site in a market is a combination of knowledge, skills, strategy and tactics. That’s the whole thought process that I’ve gone through in planning out and creating Authority Matrix.
My objective is to teach you how to think about the problem and then help you develop the skills to solve it – in simple terms, I want you to be able to identify the starving crowd and then know how to feed.
One question you get when you launch a new program like this is, “Is this for me and in my situation?”
I could easily reply back to everyone with, “Yes, please give me your interwebz monies!”
The reality is more nuanced.
This program is for you if you want to learn how to go into a market and build out a site that gives you the opportunity to be considered a “trusted source” by the people looking for information in that niche.
You’ll learn skills and capabilities that you can use over and over again – I’m serious when I say that many of the things that I’m teaching are exactly the same things I’ve been doing online for nearly a decade, they’re not tricks or hacks, these are strategies that withstand the test of time.
But that’s not for everyone. Some people want quick wins and hacks. There are tons of resources out there for you.
Authority Matrix is for people who want to know how to approach a market, dissect it, establish their home base of operations and then expand outward from there to build their online authority. It’s about taking control of the things you can influence, putting forward the effort and giving yourself every opportunity to succeed.
If you want to join, I look forward to having you onboard, just click here to be taken to the right page where you can sign-up.
Remember, this offer is closing in less than three days.