Blog Contest Week 6 - How To Build Your Mailing LIst

This week's entry in the CyberPR Blog Contest finds us in newsletter land. Back when I was doing the band thing, I used to send out a newsletter to our email list. But since I made the switch from gigging artist to film/TV composer I just never thought about sending a newsletter. Well, that mindset is gone and I'll be sending out my first newsletter next week. I'm going to try and coordinate them around the first week of the month.

In this chapter Ariel makes the comparison that the size of one's email list is directly proportionate to the size of their income. And while I can't speak about that from the perspective of someone with an email list in the tens of thousands, unfortunately, I can however verify the other end of the spectrum of that statement. But hopefully with Ariel's help (no pressure!) that's all going to change.

She encourages you to set aside a scheduled time once a week of about 60-90 minutes to focus solely on building your email list. So tonight that's what I did. I think I went over the 90 minutes but I figured, what the heck, I'm already behind, time to start getting caught up!

She provides you with five tips on getting more fans onto your list, such as adding friends & family, creating a location to store potential email addresses, offering a bribe, list trading with other bands, and going mobile. I decided to focus on the first three methods mentioned.

For tonight, I focused on adding friends and family, as well as offering a bribe. The past two November's I've had a chance to go to the TAXI Road Rally in LA and make some great connections. In doing so, I've exchanged business cards with quite a few people. So the first thing I did was go through that stack of cards to find some potential list members. I ended up emailing 25 people tonight, using the template that Ariel provided. So far I've had 5 people respond back that I could add them. I think that's a good start!

Also tonight, I went through my followers on my Twitter account and sent a direct message to the 40 most recent followers and told them that they if they signed up for my monthly newsletter, they would get a free mp3. No response on that one yet, but it's not helping matters that about an hour after I did that, the ReverbNation site went down for maintenance.

Earlier in the week I started keeping a folder in my e-mail client with potential leads in it. I'm going to continue to do that and start making that a weekly habit as well. I'm going to grow this list. Oh yes! It will grow!

At the end of the chapter Ariel lists 7 steps to help jump-start your email list. Let's see how many of those I did tonight!

1. Make dates with yourself for the next 3-6 months to focus on your list? Check!
2. Create a list of bands/artists you play with? Nope. Might re-visit this one later on when list is bigger.
3. Draft a "form" email? Check!
4. Mobile fan club management? Nope, not for me at this time.
5. Add a bribe to your home page? Check! Though technically, it was already there thanks to an earlier chapter in this book.
   
6. Use ReverbNation sign-up widget? Same as #5
   
7. Go through MySpace friends and ask for email? Nope. I don't have much of a MySpace presence at this point.

I'll be back soon with the next installment as this contest is coming to an end in the next couple of weeks.

Until next time...

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adrianclarkmbbs/ / CC BY-ND 2.0