So I’ve been writing quite a bit about building an email list on your Blog lately.

The reason I keep writing about it is because I think it’s extremely important.

Here’s the bottom line… Let me brutally honest with you like I am with my mentoring clients.

If you’ve got a Blog, but you’re not building an email list, you’re being an idiot.  Sorry, but it’s the truth.

Better you hear it now than waste another 3 years of your life Blogging and getting no results.

If you’ve got a Blog and you’ve got AWeber setup, but you’re not giving away some sort of “ethical bribe” to entice people to sign up to your list – you’re being an idiot as well.

Now, let’s say you’ve got both of those things setup.

What next?

Well, you need to find ways to start getting some initial seed traffic to your site.

In my opinion, the best way to do this is to focus on developing free traffic by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

In December I wrote a post about a company called RankPay that I have been using to do SEO optimization on my sites.  It’s been a few months so I want to show you guys how I’m using the RankPay SEO service to build a new list in a totally different niche.

My RankPay Case Study

Firstly, let me tell you a little about how I decided to test them out.

I chose a pretty competitive keyword that gets a lot of searches in the magnitude of several hundred thousand searches per month.  I then created a simple page with about half a page of content.  Nothing fancy, no graphics or anything like that.  The page has a Page Rank of 0 on Google and it was created shortly before hiring RankPay to SEO optimize it.

So it’s not like I pointed them to a pre-established page with Page Rank and existing incoming links etc.  It’s a brand new page that any of you could create today in about 15 minutes.

Then, I just let RankPay do it’s thing.  I turned on the service and totally ignored the page from that point forward.  I have literally done ZERO work on improving this page or building links to it or anything like that.

Here are the results they have been able to produce so far:

It’s a bit hard to see from the size of the graphical chart, but you can see that I started this project with them around the end of August.  The table only shows stats from November onwards.  They update their reports every week.

From the graphical chart, you can see that for the first 2-3 months there is very little results activity showing on this chart.  This is typical of SEO – IT TAKES TIME!

Because SEO takes time, most people give up long before they get the benefits of it.  This is why I really like RankPay’s pricing model – because you pay nothing until you see results. Meaning, for those first three months of SEO work they were doing for me – I paid nothing!

I have never seen any SEO company offer anything like this.  They all charge you up-front fees and in most cases you don’t see any results for 3-4 months minimum.

Now, the chart doesn’t entirely document the entire results because they only plot the graph when you get into the TOP 35 in the search engines.  I track my stats more accurately using Rank Tracker so I actually started seeing results in the Top 500 a lot sooner than the 3 months.

Also, even though the rankings for that one keyword took a few months to get in the TOP 30 on Google, Yahoo and Bing, I was ranking in the Top 10 on Google for other more long-tail keywords so I was starting to get traffic to that page.

Meaning, I was getting free traffic from the search engines for other long-tail keywords as a result of their work before they ever charged me a penny.

From SEO to Email List

Next what I did is I wrote up a short report to give away to anyone who lands on that page.  The report took me about 2 hours to write from start to finish.

I just wrote it in MS World and saved it as a PDF file.

I then setup an AWeber opt-in form on that page and offered to give anyone who signed up a free copy of the report.

Trust me, this report is nothing super special.  It’s basically the length of a few Blog posts, but in PDF format.

So what kind of results have I had with that?

Well take a look…

This is my monthly subscriber report for that email list from AWeber.  As you can see I’m getting anywhere from 5 – 15 new subscribers each month on autopilot.  The list is currently sitting at around 80 subscribers.

You can also see that the majority of the subscribers don’t unsubscribe after downloading the report!

Meaning, even though it’s not the most amazing thing I’ve ever written, it was still valuable enough for them to sign up and stay signed up.

Of course compared to my Blog here, where I’m getting between 500 – 1,000 new email subscribers per month – these numbers may not seem like much.  However, keep in mind that this was all done with a single page of content, a report that only took me a few hours to write, and SEO work done by RankPay.

My total time investment into this from start to finish was less than 5 hours total and the rest of the work was done by RankPay.

I’ve heard so many people ask me – “How do you build your first 100 subscribers?  It’s so hard!”

Well, there you go, I just showed you exactly how to do it!

With just a few hours of work and a small SEO budget I’ve now got this highly targeted niche email list building that I can start building content for and monetizing.  Or I can just start promoting affiliate offers to the list if I wanted a more short-term approach to monetization.

I wish I knew about RankPay in 2007 when I first started this Blog.  It would have been so much easier to build my initial email list of readers / subscribers.

Keep in mind that once you start to build a small list, every time you write a Blog post you can get AWeber to do a Blog Broadcast to that list, which will then result in even more traffic to your site because each one of those people on the email list might also link to your site, share the link on their Facebook page etc.

The growth from there can happen quite exponentially.

Ok, so I’ve given away the farm.  I’ve given you a way to build your initial email list and to keep building it up virtually on auto-pilot.

I’m curious.  Will you implement this strategy?

If not, why not?

What else is stopping you guys?  I’m curious.

To learn more about how RankPay works, check out my previous post where I detail that or visit their site by clicking here.