Lead Generation and List Building: My Latest Obsession WPCP: 142

Thanks to my podcast sponsor, Liquid Web, for sponsoring The WPChick Podcast!   I know that lead generation and list building are nothing new but hang in there with me. We're going to go in a little different direction with this and a lot of it might be new to you (or you might be aware of it but haven't implemented it... yet). My goal with this episode is to get you to look at lead generation and list building from a different perspective, not just something that internet marketers push because "the money is in the list"... because let's face it, in this case, quantity doesn't count as much as quality. I was recently reading a post by Matthew Woodward where he deleted over 40k subscribers from his mailing list. FORTY THOUSAND! (if you want to read the full post, click through to Matthew's blog here) First of all, kudos to him for doing that. My last purge was over 1000 people, and that was painful. I can't imagine deleting 42k subscribers. However, he just saved himself a ton of money by getting rid of people who were not responsive. Anyone who hasn't opened your email in the past 6 months probably needs to go. Plain and simple.   Let's start with the missing piece of the puzzle to all of this. There is a correct way to build a list and an incorrect way to build a list. The problem is that you don't know it's incorrect until after the fact (at least I didn't). And let me say that doing something is always going to be better than doing nothing. I will confess that I haven't ever purchased a list building course (at least not to my recollection... 9 years in it's quite possible there is something sitting on a hard drive somewhere that promised me wealth through list building). Not because there weren't plenty of opportunities, but quite frankly, none of them seemed all that appealing to me. Most seemed to focus on the basics: I know that's probably over-simplifying it a bit, but you get the picture. I'm sure there are courses or people out there who get much deeper into this stuff, but for the most part, it seems like so much of this stuff is assumed. Marketers assume you know how to do this or are already doing it. Take ClickFunnels as an example. As a ClickFunnels customer, you can share funnels and import other people's funnels. All great. But if you don't have the foundation set up to manage your new subscribers it's a lot of energy for nothing. Because the magic starts happening in the background with automation. Some of the things that have to be set up in the background are things like: Correct lists and segmentation Tagging framework (if your autoresponder company uses this) Tracking code on your website Follow up sequence UTM links for tracking (any links in your follow up sequence) Offer at the end And none of this includes how you choose to communicate and email your subscribers once they've gone through whatever initial email sequence they signed up for.   Where I Started Aweber was one of the first email marketing companies I used and it was great for what I was doing at the time. Aweber didn't have tagging options when I was with them (as of this writing they still don't have options for tagging. There is the ability to create segments but I don't know enough about that to talk about it here). For a long time, I stuck with simply using lists to segment even after I left Aweber. Once I moved to another platform (probably one of my first times with Infusionsoft), I started tagging people as well (even though I wasn't doing much with the tags). My first task was to go into Active Campaign and clean up my lists and then tags. Like I do with everything else, I started with the end in mind. I mapped out the monetization model for WPChick. From there, I had to take a look at my lists (and any corresponding follow-up sequences) and see if they made sense.